The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  /–12 for annoyed read angry

  /–8 twice over, and still Thorin was not satisfied.

  ‘Silly time to go practising your pocket-picking!’ he said. ‘What we wanted was fire and food’.

  ‘And you wouldn’t have got that from trolls without a struggle, in any case’, said Gandalf. ‘It might have turned out a great deal worse. Anyhow...

  p. 53/14 for grabbed read seized

  /19 plunder, of all sorts from buttons and rusty brooches to pots of gold coins standing in a corner. There were lots of clothes, too, hanging on the walls – all that was left of many poor wood-men and shepherds who had still lived here and there in the wild lands near-by. But hidden behind the door they found a number of swords and knives of various sizes and strange shapes. Two caught their eyes, because of their beautiful scabbards and their jewelled hilts that seemed to shine in the shadows.

  Gandalf took one, and presented the other to Thorin. To Bilbo he gave a knife with a silver pommel. ‘A gift for a good hobbit!’ he said with a bow, which pleased Bilbo very much, though he did not himself feel that he had earned any praise. He looked at the knife: it had a sheath of black figured leather, and when he drew it, he saw that the blade was bright and unstained. It was long enough to serve a hobbit as a sword.

  ‘These look like good blades too’, said the wizard, half drawing the swords and examining them closely. ‘They were not made by any troll, nor by any smith among Men of these days. But there’s black blood on them, goblin-blood. When they are cleaned and the runes on them can be read, we shall know more about them’. end of page. p.54/ after l. 8 insert:

  ‘Now you had better look for Bombur’, said Gandalf: ‘and we shall need the ponies, if you can find them’.

  Bifur and Bofur went off, and soon came back with the old fat dwarf. He looked rather glum. Not that he minded at all having missed the affair of the sacks, but they had found him fast asleep, and no sign of the ponies. Thorin was not pleased.

  Gandalf laughed. ‘Never mind!’ he said. ‘Let’s have breakfast! You were fools to bring them across the road. I wonder you got them so far. No one could have held them when all the noise started. But they’ll be all right: my Rohald is looking after them’.

  So they all set to, and had a great breakfast, or a feast as it seemed; and after that they slept (even Bombur), for their night had been disturbed. They did not make a move until the afternoon. Then Gandalf got up and went down the hill, and soon he came back leading his white horse, and all the ponies coming meekly behind.

  Then the dwarves packed up all the food that was left fit to eat, and other things that might prove useful, and they carried away the pots of gold. These they buried very secretly in a thicket not far from the road, and set many spells on them, and a stone cut with dwarf-runes to mark the place,TN34 in case they ever had the chance to come back and recover them. When that was done, they all mounted once more and jogged along again on the road to the East.

  ‘Where did you go to without a word, if I may ask?’ said Thorin to Gandalf as they rode along.

  ‘To look ahead’, said he.

  ‘And what brought you back in the nick of time?’

  ‘Looking behind’, said he.

  ‘No doubt’, said Thorin, ‘but would you mind saying a little more!’

  ‘Well, I hurried on ahead, to find some friends, if I could. The broken bridge was a bad sign; and there was not enough food to see you through the next few days. As I hoped, before long I met some folk from Rivendell’.

  ‘Where’s that?’ asked Bilbo, who was keeping as close to the wizard as he could.

  ‘Don’t interrupt!’ said Gandalf. ‘You’ll get there in a few days now, if we’re lucky, and then you’ll find out all about it. As I was saying, Elrond had heard of the trouble. The Rangers were out, and he had sent two of his own people to report. They told me that trolls had come down from the North, and they feared that three had settled in the woods not far above the road. Men had fled away south, and they were waylaying strangers.

  ‘“Back you go then, and quick’’, I said to myself. Looking behind I saw a fire in the distance, and I came as fast as Rohald could carry me. I found all your ponies huddled on the road with their heads down and their tails to the north. The rest you can guess. But please be more careful, or we shall never get anywhere. My friends had no food to spare, for they are hunting: there are other wicked things abroad.TN35 The trolls’ larder is a piece of luck that you hardly deserve. But for Mr. Baggins you might have been lying among the bones on the floor!’TN36

  ‘Pray don’t mention it!’ said Thorin.

  This marks the end of New Chapter II, in the middle of the page [Ad.Ms.H.32]. The brief fragment of New Chapter III follows immediately on the same page after only a gap of a few skipped lines, albeit with a new pagination (‘III 1’); see page 802.

  New Chapter III

  Arrival in Rivendell

  p. 56/3 They felt that danger was lurking on both sides of their road. They camped where they could, and set watches; and theirTN37

  /7 trolls. On the fourth day from the BridgeTN38 they passed the shadow of the dark hills. Gandalf laughed and pointed ahead; and still far off they saw another river before them, gleaming in the morning [> evening] sunshine, but all the lands beyond were shrouded in mist.

  In the afternoon of the next dayTN39 they came to the river, and found a great ford over wide shallows, and there was a causeway of huge stepping-stones against which the stream gurgled and foamed; but on the far side the path wound steeply up a high frowning bank. When they had climbed to the top, leading their horses, they saw that the great mountains had marched down to meet them. The day was hot and clear and there was no mist, and it seemed only a day’s easy journey now to the feet of the nearest.

  p. 57/3 ‘You must not miss the path, or that will be the end of you’,TN40 he said. ‘You need food, for one thing, and rest in safety for a while, and advice. None of you have ever tried the north passes, I think. Their perils are always changing, and you must consult one who knows, if you are to make the right choice. Those who take the wrong way in the Misty Mountains never come back to try again!’

  /10 ‘You have come to the last fences of the Westland. Ahead of us [> Over there] lies hidden the fair valley of Rivendell, of which no doubt some of you have heard tell, though few dwarves have ever seen it.TN41 There Master Elrond lives in the Last Homely House. I sent a message by my friends, and we are expected’.

  That sounded comforting; but they had not got there yet, and it was not easy to find the way to the secret valley and the Last Homely House west of the Mountains

  p. 58/ 10 Delete about pretty well.TN42

  /11 They went on until moonless night [> twilight] overtook them, and they lay that night under the bright stars. The next day was failing, and they were still following Gandalf, whose head and beard wagged this way and that as he searched for the white stones in the dusk. White [> Pale] moths were fluttering in the whinsTN43 and long heather, and twilight deepened like a mist about the horses’ feet. ‘Supper-time and past it!’ thought Bilbo, who had not eaten since midday. His tired pony began to stumble over roots and stones.TN44 Then just ahead Rohald neighed, and he hurried forward, and came to [a] steep fall in the ground so suddenly that he nearly slipped headlong down it.

  ‘Here it is at last!’ cried Gandalf, as the dwarves came up and stared over the edge

  At this point, the Fifth Phase typescript comes to an end, leaving about two-thirds of the final page [Ad.Ms.H.33] blank. On the blank space, Tolkien wrote a note regarding the projected contents of the rest of this chapter, had he continued beyond this point:

  Ch. III should make clear

  Elrond’s care for roads etc. from

  Greyflood to

  Also insert the white horse

  Róhald belonged to Rivendell, & had

  been lent by Elrond to Gandalf.

  This final point should perhaps be taken to indicate that Ro
hald would be left behind in Rivendell when Thorin & Company set out again to attempt the mountain-passes. Certainly it is disquieting enough to think of all the ponies being eaten by the goblins in Chapter IV, now that they have been given a sort of corporate personality and even pseudo dialogue (cf. pages 793–94), much less an elven horse such as Rohald. See also ‘Queries and Reminders’ below.

  TEXT NOTES

  1 This last sentence is bracketed for removal.

  2 Gandalf’s white horse dates all the way back to the earliest pages of the Second Phase manuscript, but he only now gains a name: Rohald. Again I have found no authorized gloss, but the name is clearly Sindarin, with the ro- element meaning ‘horse’; cf. Aragorn’s horse, Roheryn (LotR.809), which means ‘horse of the lady’ (roch + heru; so named from being Arwen’s gift – cf. Silm.363), and Rochallor, High King Fingolfin’s great horse (Silm.153). Salo’s A Gateway to Sindarin lists no hald in its Sindarin-English Glossary, but it does have hall, which can mean either ‘exalted, high’ or ‘veiled, hidden, shadowed, shady’ (Salo, page 263).

  In any case, the line adding the name of Gandalf’s white horse was not part of the original typescript here but was added later; Rohald’s name does not appear as originally typed until page 796 (see Text Notes 13 & 16).

  3 Originally Tolkien intended the replacement text that follows to take the place of the passage beginning on line 5 of page 41 in the second edition (‘. . . rode forward all day, except of course when they stopped for meals . . .’) and continuing through line 22, ending with ‘the weather which had often been as good as May can be, even in tales and legends, took a nasty turn’. Much of this passage would in fact be replaced by Tolkien in the 1966 Hobbit (see DAA.65–6), although in briefer form than the text given here. When Tolkien came to actually write the replacement text, it flowed so fluently that by the time he stopped rather than sixteen lines later on page 41 he had reached the fifth line on page 46 (‘. . . crept behind a tree just behind William’). I have added the underlinings here and throughout this chapter, matching Tolkien’s own practice in New Chapter I, to help distinguish between Tolkien’s instructions and the words to which they apply. As with New Chapter I, ellipses without spaces separating the periods (e.g. .....) are Tolkien’s own.

  4 A pencilled notation in the left margin along these lines seeks to establish a timeline of their trip. The first few words are too faint to read, but the rest of the note reads ‘. . . 2½ days’ journey arriving at evening on May 2.’ This corresponds to the entry in the Itinerary, which has them crossing the Brandywine Bridge early on 30th April and arriving at Bree on 2nd May; see page 818.

  5 The word almost is cancelled in pencil and replaced by a passage in light pencil in the right margin, but I cannot make out any of this marginalia.

  6 In the left margin along this line is written ‘16 days’, which is then changed to ‘15 days’. See entries 7 and 8 in the timeline (page 818), which between them equal fifteen days.

  7 In the original story, some of these hills had castles on them, of which ‘many looked as if they had not been built for any good purpose’. In the more developed history of The Lord of the Rings, this area had now come to be the territory of the fallen evil kingdom of Rhudaur (one of the inheritor-kingdoms of fractured Arnor), which had been destroyed more than a millennium before. Accordingly, the slightly sinister castles become evil-looking ruins in the 1960 Hobbit, a change carried over (though not in the same words) into the 1966 Hobbit (the published third edition); cf. DAA.66.

  8 See Itinerary, page 819.

  9 Originally ‘The deep track’.

  10 Originally this sentence read ‘This country was unknown to the dwarves’, obviously altered because it has already been established that Thorin’s people traded and travelled up and down the Great East Road. In addition, Thorin’s people could not have passed through Moria on their flight west after Smaug destroyed the Kingdom under the Mountain, nor is it likely that they came by way of the goblin-haunted Mount Gram, or took the extreme long away around through the Gap of Rohan. Instead, they almost certainly came by way of the Forest Road to the same passes Thorin and Company will attempt in Chapter IV and hence westward down the same East-West road they are now travelling all the way to the Blue Mountains west of the Shire. Furthermore, it seems extremely unlikely that Thorin’s dwarf-colony in Harlindon has no contact at all with Dain’s people in the Iron Hills, which would also imply east-west travel along this route.

  11 The area in question is marked the ‘Ettenmoors’ on the Lord of the Rings map, etten (ettin) being an old word for ‘giants’ (descended from the Old English eoten, ent) that remained in use up until the early 1600s. Strider, in ‘Flight to the Ford’, glosses the term as ‘the troll-fells’ (LotR.216), troll being a mid-nineteenth-century borrowing from the Scandinavian which supplemented but did not replace giant (itself Anglo-Norman in origin). Also on the LotR map, the area in which Bilbo and the dwarves encounter the trolls is called the ‘Trollshaws’, shaw being an archaic word for woods or thicket; cf. the thick woods in all three of Tolkien’s pictures of the troll-episode, most notably ‘Trolls’ Hill’ (Plate IV [bottom]) and the black and white drawing ‘The Trolls’ (DAA.74).

  12 Originally this passage read ‘no way to pass the great mountains, which still lie ahead’. Significantly, not even Balin (who, as The Lord of the Rings reveals, did later dare to enter Moria) takes Gandalf up on his taunt about trying the Mines of Moria as an alternate route past the mountains. Nonetheless its mention helps tie the geography of the two books (and the two journeys, of Bilbo and the Ring-bearer) together; like the earlier mention of the Prancing Pony at Bree, it emphasizes to those who have read The Lord of the Rings before (this version of) The Hobbit that both take place in the same world and, in this passage at least, traverse the same territory.

  13 Again ‘Rohald’ is added later, replacing his white horse in the original.

  14 This was originally followed by a cancelled line, ‘Last of all came the pack ponies’.

  15 In this passage, Bilbo becomes the first of three hobbits who at one point or another ride with Gandalf on a great pale horse, the other two being Pippin in the ride from Rohan to Minas Tirith (The Lord of the Rings, last chapter of Book III and first chapter of Book V) and Odo, the latter in the rejected storyline from early drafts of The Lord of the Rings where Gandalf rescued him from the Black Riders at Crickhollow (HME VI.304) and Odo accompanied the wizard as far as Weathertop (HME VI.352, 355–6); none of the Odo material made it into the published book.

  16 This marks the first time that Rohald has appeared in the text as first typed; on previous occasions the name had been added in later as replacement text.

  17 This was initially followed by the cancelled line ‘The rain too had almost stopped.’

  18 Originally this passage read ‘But before they halted for midday, having covered several miles, they were under the shadow of the dark hills’.

  19 Originally this sentence read ‘Far behind in the West there was a brief stab of red, as the sun sank’.

  20 Originally this passage read ‘when it was nearly night’, which was altered first to ‘the dark’ (i.e., ‘when the dark . . .’) and then to ‘when the tree-shadowed road was dark’, before finally reaching the form given in the text.

  21 In fact, ‘The Quest of Erebor’ makes this explicit. When Thorin reluctantly agrees in the wee hours of the morning following the Unexpected Party to take Bilbo, at Gandalf’s urging (and threats), Thorin makes it a condition that Gandalf shall then accompany them as well:

  ‘Very well,’ Thorin said at last after a silence. ‘He shall set out with my company, if he dares (which I doubt). But if you insist on burdening me with him, you must come too and look after your darling.’

  ‘Good!’ I answered. ‘I will come, and stay with you as long as I can: at least until you have discovered his worth.’ It proved well in the end, but at the time I was troubled, for I had the urgent matter of the White Council
on my hands.

  —Unfinished Tales, pp. 325–6.

  This account finally makes clear therefore that Gandalf does indeed have ‘pressing business’ of his own (DAA.187) and must leave Thorin & Company as soon as he decently can to deal with a different crisis elsewhere: marshalling the Wizards and the Wise – that is, Radagast and the Elven-princes – to join him in overruling Saruman and attacking the Necromancer before the latter can destroy Rivendell or Lórien (UT.321–2, 326; see also 350–51).

  22 Mould here means not ‘mold’ in the sense of mildew or fungus (its most common usage today) but dirt rich with organic decay (in this case, from generations of fallen leaves).

  23 The penultimate paragraph of Chapter VI observes that ‘Dwarves have never taken to matches even yet’ (DAA.159). Whether this line, and the relatively modern touch of Bilbo’s pocket-matches in Chapter V (DAA.116), would have survived in the 1960 Hobbit, had the Fifth Phase reached so far, is an unanswerable question; at any rate, they survived unchanged through the third edition changes of 1966.

  24 Originally Balin describes this area as ‘Noman’s land’, a phrase Tolkien used several times in The Lord of the Rings for the area better known as the Brown Lands (LotR.394 & 657). The addition of these lines of dialogue by Balin and Gloin, like Fili and Kili’s promptly springing into action after Thorin’s decision at the fallen bridge and Bombur’s fumbling and grumbling, all help characterize the dwarves – for example, Balin’s distrust of the woods north of the road helps establish his good judgment, since it is soon revealed that trolls are lurking there. Had Tolkien continued the 1960 Hobbit all the way to the end he would no doubt have added similar bits of action or dialogue for the less differentiated members of Thorin & Company; i.e., Nori, Oin, Bofur, Bifur, and Ori.

  25 Bilbo originally referred to ‘the kings’ (plural) here, but this may be no more than a typing error, which in any case was quickly corrected to ‘king’. This referent replaced the ‘They have seldom even heard of the king round here’ of the first and second (and ultimately third) editions. In the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien explain that this was an allusion to the fallen Dúnedain kingdoms of Arnor, in words he is clearly echoing here in the 1960 Hobbit: