p. 32/18. ‘Bless me!’ said Thorin. ‘Haven’t you looked at the map? And didn’t you hear our song? And haven’t we been talking about all this for hours?’
‘All the same, I should like it plain and clear’, said Bilbo obstinately, trying to appear prudent and professional. ‘Also I should like to know about...’ By which he meant: ‘What chance is there of my coming back alive? and what am I going to get out of it, if I do?’
‘O very well’, said Thorin. ‘Many years ago, in my great-grandfather’s days, our family was driven out of the far North.TN31 Some went east to the Iron Hills. But Thror my grandfather returned with most of our kin to this Mountain on the map, where Thrain the OldTN32 his ancestor had lived for a while, once upon a time. There they mined and they tunnelled, and they made deeper halls and greater workshops;TN33 and they found a wealth of gold and many gems. They grew rich and famous, and Thror became King under the Mountain, and was treated with great reverence by the Men who lived further south, and were spreading up the Running River. In those days they built the merry town of Dale in the valley over-shadowed by the Mountain. Their lords used to send for our smiths, and reward even the least skilful most richly. Fathers would beg us to take their sons as apprentices, and paid us handsomely. It was always for food and wine that we asked, so that we had no need to grow it or get it for ourselves. The land was fat and fruitful in those days [> then]. Those were good years for us, and the least of us had gold to spend and to lend, and leisure to make beautiful things for our delight. The young dwarves made marvellous and cunning toys, the like of which are not to be found in the world today. So the halls of Thror were filled with armour and harps and drinking-horns and cups and things carven and hammered and inlaid, and with jewels like stars; and the toy-market of Dale was one of the wonders of the North.
Alas! that brought the dragon upon us! Greed has long ears.TN34 Dragons, as no doubt a treasure-hunter will know, steal gold and jewels from elves and dwarves and men, wherever they can find them; and they guard their plunder as long as they live, a thousand yearsTN35 maybe, unless they are killed, though they never enjoy one small ring of it. They cannot use it, and they do not know good work from bad; but they remember the least thing that they have ever possessed, and woe to anyone who tries to set a finger on it! Curse them!
There were still many dragons in the North in those days,TN36 and treasure was becoming so scarce that they fell to fighting among themselves, and the waste and destruction that dragons make was going from bad to worse. There was beyond the Grey Mountains a most greedy, strong, and wicked worm called Smaug. One day he flew up in the air and came south
p. 34/ bottom. After that, when we had set our curse on the dragon, we went away; and we
p. 35/2 as low as coalmining, or even road-mending...TN37
/6. ‘I still mean to get it back, and to bring my curse home to Smaug – if I can’.
/9, 10. had a secret Side-door
/14 ‘I did not get hold of it, it was given to me’, said the wizard with a flash of his eyes. ‘Thror, your grandfather was murdered in the mines of Moria by Azog the Goblin – ’TN38
‘Yes, curse Azog!’ said Thorin.
‘And Thrain, your father, went away on the twenty-first of April, a hundred years ago last Thursday, and has never been seen by you since –’
‘Too true, alas!’ said Thorin.
‘Well your father gave me this map,TN39 ninety one years ago, and I have guarded it ever since’.
‘Ninety one years!’ cried Thorin. ‘For ninety one years you have kept my property?’
‘Thorin’, said Gandalf quietly, ‘though your fame had reached me, I first met you only a few weeks ago.TN40 Until then the use and meaning of this map was quite unknown to me; and I did not know who it belonged to. [added in margin: Your father could not remember his own name, nor yours, when he gave me the parchment.] If I have chosen my own time for restoring it, you have no right to be angry: I came by it only at the peril of my life, for which I think you owe me some thanks. I give it to you now’, he said, handing the map to Thorin with a bow.
‘I thank you’ said Thorin. ‘I would thank you more, maybe, if your words were not dark. I do not understand them at all!’ Bilbo felt that he would like to say the same; but he wisely said nothing.
‘You are slow’, said Gandalf tartly [> sharply]. ‘Until I heard your tale, I did not know how Thror and Thrain escaped from the Mountain. Thrain was dying when I found him. I guess that your grandfather gave this map to him for safety before he himself went to the mines of Moria. Then later Thrain, your father, went away, as you have told, though you did not know why. I think he took the map and went to [spy on >] try his luck in the Mountain. But he had no luck; he was caught in dark perils, and never came in sight of his home. How he came there, I cannot tell; but I found him a prisoner in the dungeons of the Necromancer’.TN41
‘Whatever were you doing there!’ said Thorin with a shudder, going pale, and the dwarves hid their faces.
‘Do not ask! Not at night.’ said Gandalf. ‘I will not speak of it.TN42 But it was my task to search in the shadows, and a dark and dangerous quest it was. Even I, Gandalf, hardly escaped. I tried to save your father, though he was a nameless dwarf to me, alone, in misery. It was too late. He was witless and wandering, and had forgotten almost all that he had known, except a map, and a key’.
Thorin ground his teeth. ‘Thror was avenged: we paid the goblins in Moria long ago. We must give a thought to this Necromancer!’
‘Hush!’ said Gandalf. ‘Grief has robbed you of your wits. HeTN43 is an enemy far beyond the powers of all the dwarves in the world, if they could all be gathered again from the four corners of Earth, even from their tombs. The one thing that your father wished was that you should read the map and use the key. Give them to my sonTN44 were his last words, though he did not speak your name. They are burden enough. The Dragon of the Mountain is as big a task as you can manage; too big, maybe’.
‘Hear, hear!’ said Bilbo to himself, but he said it aloud.
‘Hear what?’ they all said, turning suddenly towards him; and he was so flustered that he answered: ‘hear what I have got to say!’
‘What’s that?’ they asked.
‘Well, I should say that you must go east, which will take several days,TN45 no doubt – ’. Gandalf smiled, and Thorin snorted. ‘Well, then you must have a quiet look round. After all, there is the Side-door, and dragons must sleep sometimes, I suppose. If you sit on the door-step long enough, I daresay you will think of some plan, or something will turn up. And well, don’t you know, I think we have talked long enough for one night, if you see what I mean. What about bed, and an early start, and all that? You can have a good breakfast before you go.’
‘Before we go, I suppose you mean’, said Thorin. ‘Aren’t you the burglar? And what about stealth? Isn’t sitting on the door-step your job, not to speak of getting inside? But I agree about bed and breakfast. I like six eggs with my ham, when starting on a journey: fried not poached, and mind you don’t break ’em’.
p. 37/14 ..., and he was not at all sure now
As will readily be seen, much of the wording of the original book remains, yet the tone is greatly altered. In particular, the voice of the narrator is muted and editorial asides omitted. Word-play is greatly reduced – for example, ‘confusticate and bebother’ becomes simply ‘confound and bother’, and ‘bewildered and bewuthered’ becomes instead ‘bothered and bewildered’ – and in general the playfulness of the original gives way to a more stately style. Perhaps more significantly, characterization is also changed: Gandalf, for example, now speaks with more authority. He could no longer be mistaken for ‘a little old man’ in a pointed hat, but this enhanced dignity does come with a price: he is also more remote, less a figure the reader is likely to sympathize with.
The change in Thorin is greater. In keeping with his portrayal in ‘The Quest of Erebor’, the dwarven leader has become much more abrupt and brusque,
and he shows an unhealthy concern over property that anticipates his later fall in the Lonely Mountain chapters. In the original book his succumbing to the dragon-sickness had been a sudden and surprising departure from his usual self, a distortion of his fundamentally admirable personality and a frightening lesson in the corrupting power of dragon-haunted gold; here an obsession with his property and grievance over his rights has simply become part of his character, an innate flaw. Like the anticipations of Saruman’s fall Tolkien inserted into some of his later writings, these have the effect of hinting that the character was corrupt from the beginning, which was very much not the case in the original book.
Finally, Bilbo is made more foolish – someone who ‘loved maps’ and had his favorite walks all marked out on the neighborhood map (made by himself) would know that the dragon-haunted mountain they speak of is more than a day or two, or even a few days’ walk away; maps made in the Shire might tend to end at its borders (LotR.56), but he would certainly know that Thror’s kingdom and Smaug’s lair must lie outside those borders. And this naivety is extended beyond the end of the book. We are told that ‘He got caught up in great events, which he never understood; and he became enormously important, though he never realized it’, but this contradicts The Lord of the Rings, where Bilbo took part in the Council of Elrond and learned (if he did not know already from Gandalf) that his ring was the One Ring, who its maker and master was, and what would happen if He regained it. He even volunteered to undertake the Quest of Mount Doom himself, which is not so quixotic as it sounds, given that the quest was to rely on luck and stealth, not martial prowess. More importantly, it contradicts the closing lines of The Hobbit itself, where Gandalf, who serves as Tolkien’s spokesman more than any other character, assures Bilbo that he played only a small role in all these events. This diminishment of Bilbo, a central feature of ‘The Quest of Erebor’, becomes even more pronounced in the next chapter.
TEXT NOTES
1 originally: ‘Though inclined to grow rather fat, they did not hurry unnecessarily’.
Several small variants from the published text in the section describing hobbits are interesting to note: most significantly, the shift from present tense (all published editions) to past tense (1960 Hobbit); e.g., ‘hobbits are (or were) a small people’ becomes simply ‘hobbits were a small people’. The sentence about how hobbits are half our height, introduced into print in the third edition (cf. DAA.30 & 31), makes its first appearance here, but the 1960 text has ‘half our height or less’; this is a direct link to halflings, the generic name for hobbits among other peoples in The Lord of the Rings. Finally, the allusion to their ‘seldom’ wearing shoes or boots seems to refer back to an idea Tolkien had mentioned in a 1938 letter to Houghton Mifflin but never managed to incorporate into any text:
There is in the text no mention of [Bilbo’s] acquiring of boots. There should be! It has dropped out somehow or other in the various revisions – the bootings occurred at Rivendell; and he was again bootless after leaving Rivendell on the way home. But since leathery soles, and well-brushed furry feet are a feature of essential hobbitness, he ought really to appear unbooted, except in special illustrations of episodes.
—JRRT to HM, March/April 1938; Letters p. 35.
This comment seems to have arisen from comparison between the various pictures and drawings of Bilbo in the book: he is clearly barefoot in ‘The Hall at Bag-End’ (DAA.363; H-S#139) but just as clearly booted in the eagle picture (DAA plate two [top]; H-S#113). He seems barefooted in the Barrel-Rider sketch (plate VIII [top]) but clearly has some sort of footwear in both of the finished versions of that scene (DAA.238–9 & plate two [bottom]; H-S#122 & 124) and in ‘Conversation with Smaug’ (plate XI [top]).
Tolkien is in error in saying that text mentioning Bilbo’s boots ‘dropped out’; in fact, what seems to have occurred is that he must have thought of adding such text at some point but failed to write it down (at least in any form that survives) and so forgot to implement the change.
2 The words ‘that is important, for’ were bracketed but not cancelled.
3 Immediately after the sentence about the Old Took originally came the sentence ‘There was something queer about the Tooks, something not quite hobbitlike. It was whispered that they had some fairy blood from long ago’; the replacement sentence that followed originally ran ‘It was often said (in other families) that the Tooks must have some elvish blood in them: or some outlandish strain, which was of course absurd; but there was undoubtedly some thing queer about them, something not quite hobbitlike . . .’
4 The phrase ‘its long peace’ was changed to ‘its peace’, possibly to avoid what had presumably been the deliberate reiteration in ‘long ago’ ‘long peace’ ‘long wooden pipe’ all in the same sentence.
5 This was originally followed by ‘a long wooden pipe that reached nearly down to his well-brushed toes’; the latter phrase was bracketed, apparently for omission as a too-whimsical touch.
6 An entire sentence was cancelled here: ‘Gandalf! If you had heard a quarter of what even the hobbits had heard about him, and that was not a hundredth part of all that there was to hear, you would be prepared for any sort of remarkable tale’. The sentence that followed originally read ‘will prick up their ears expecting remarkable things to happen . . .’
7 The phrase ‘on business of his own’ is bracketed as if for removal, but then the brackets were scratched out and the words retained.
8 ‘a pipe of tobacco’: it is mildly surprising that Tolkien has retained the apparent anachronism of ‘tobacco’ here, given the circumlocution of the more ambiguous ‘pipe-weed’† used in The Lord of the Rings. But even there he had specified that this was ‘a variety . . . of Nicotiana . . . not native to our part of the world, but . . . brought over Sea by the Men of [Númenor]’ (‘Concerning Pipe-weed’, LotR.20–21). Since Nicotiana is a class of New World plants, including tobacco, its presence in Middle-earth is presented not as an anachronism but a piece of lost history.
† The original Carib word (rendered by Spanish explorers as tabaca) is generally thought to have meant the pipe, not the plant smoked in it, but the OED notes that the point is disputed: Tolkien’s ‘pipe-weed’ nicely bridges the ambiguity by embracing both.
9 This is an oblique reference to a passage from The Two Towers, where Faramir reports Gandalf as once saying ‘Many are my names in many countries . . . Mithrandir among the Elves, Tharkûn to the Dwarves; Olórin I was in my youth in the West that is forgotten, in the South Incánus, in the North Gandalf; to the East I go not’ (LotR.697).
10 Added, but then omitted: ‘to sail in their ships’. The passage in the next sentence about Bilbo’s wistfully thinking of sailing ‘away to the Other Shore’ (here significantly capitalized to make it clear that Elvenhome is meant) is of course a foreshadowing, in this first encounter, of his eventual fate in the final chapter of The Lord of the Rings.
11 Originally this sentence read ‘Indeed I am pleased, as you wished . . .’
12 The words ‘he stammered’ were bracketed, then removed.
13 Originally they called ‘for bread and butter’; this cancellation probably was made at the same time as the toast was removed from the following paragraph (see Text Note 14).
14 Originally ‘busy making rounds of buttered toast’; this pencilled change would have been made at the same time as that noted in Text Note 13.
15 This sentence is typed in the left margin and marked for insertion at this point; the bag contains their musical instruments. See the Draftings section at the end of this chapter.
16 A liripipe is a long narrow extension at the point of a hood; the word is of unknown (fourteenth-century) origin but seems to have originally been applied to academic costume (a graduate’s hood). In Pauline Baynes’ illustrations to Tolkien’s Smith of Wootton Major [1967], Alf the Master Cook wears a liripipe (SWM, expanded edition, page [42]).
17 Originally the other dwarves are in the sitting room rather than
the parlour; this change seems to have been made right away in the course of typing, before Tolkien moved on to the next line (Ad.Ms.H.71).
18 In the first and second editions, Bifur asked for ‘raspberry jam and apple-tart’, Bofur for ‘mince-pies [plural] and cheese’, Bombur for ‘pork-pie and salad’, the other dwarves for ‘more cakes, and ale, and coffee’, and Gandalf reminded Bilbo to ‘bring out the cold chicken and tomatoes’.
Tolkien incorporated one of the changes that first appeared here into the third edition of 1966 (DAA.41), where tomatoes did indeed become pickles. This change has been the subject of much debate; see, for example, Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth (expanded edition, page 69), Anderson’s Annotated Hobbit (DAA.41), et al. The general consensus has been that ‘tomato’ was removed as foreign to the time and place, though this did not prevent Tolkien’s including tobacco earlier in this same chapter, or potatoes in Bilbo’s garden in The Lord of the Rings (LotR.34), or, for that matter, coffee in the same sentence.† More likely, Tolkien (a keen gardener) thought it too early in the year for tomatoes and simply decided that preserved goods like pickles were more likely to be found in Bilbo’s larder that early in the year.
† Although an Old World plant (being native to Africa), coffee as a drink dates from early modern times and was unknown in Europe before the sixteenth century, first appearing in England in 1652, about the same time (circa 1650) that tea arrived in England, having made its way westward from Asia.
19 The replacement of the first and second editions’ larder by larders (plural) is another 1960 Hobbit revision taken up into the third edition of 1966; cf. DAA.41, annotation #27. This change was probably made to match the pantries (plural) of the book’s second paragraph.
20 That is, from the bottom line on (second edition) page 22 through the top line on page 23.
21 Tolkien actually wrote ‘Bombur produced a drum from the [> his] bag in the hall; Bifur and Bombur went out too’, but it is clear that Bofur, the reading in all published editions, is meant for the second occurrence (for one thing, ‘bombur’ means drum in Old Norse).
The History of the Hobbit Page 96
