The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  there had been no king for nearly a thousand years . . . Yet the Hobbits still said of wild folk and wicked things (such as trolls) that they had not heard of the king. For they attributed to the king of old all their essential laws . . . The Rules (as they said), both ancient and just.

  —LotR.21–2.

  There is an irony in this mention of the king here, when with hindsight from The Lord of the Rings’ Appendices A and B we realize that within a few days they will be arriving in Rivendell, where ten-year-old Aragorn, the rightful king of Arnor and Gondor, is living under the name of Estel (‘Hope’) in Elrond’s household.

  26 Bombur’s expectation is amusing, given that Gandalf at his reappearance indeed ‘stepped from behind a great tree’; see DAA.80 and Tolkien’s correction for page 52 line 18 on page 799.

  27 Note that the rephrasing here eliminates the direct address to the reader of all the published editions at this point: ‘though I don’t suppose you or I would have noticed anything . . . I don’t suppose even a weasel would have stirred a whisker’ (DAA.70); the formerly intrusive narrator ceases to be a character in the story, which now lacks a storyteller.

  28 Originally, ‘trolls of that sort’. In a 1954 letter, Tolkien described the trolls appearing in The Hobbit as ‘Stone-trolls’ (JRRT to Peter Hastings, Letters p.191). The ‘other kinds’ mentioned in the following sentences include the cave-troll that almost forces its way into Balin’s burial chamber in Moria (LotR.342–3) and the Olog-hai (LotR.1166), described in the rumors circulating in the Shire in ‘The Shadow of the Past’: ‘Trolls were abroad, no longer dull-witted, but cunning and armed with dreadful weapons’ (LotR.57).

  29 This entry is a late addition, written in the left margin.

  30 That is, in place of the original passage that read ‘. . . after waiting for some time for Bilbo to come back, or to hoot like an owl, they started off one by one’, the text should now read ‘. . . hoot like an owl, they left Bombur to mind the ponies. . .’

  31 This sentence is bracketed in pencil but not deleted. Presumably what called it into question was the new scene earlier in this same chapter where they had in fact left behind one of their number (the overlooked hobbit) on the far bank of the swollen river.

  32 The sequence in which the dwarves arrived at the troll’s campfire is altered from the original, which mimicked the order in which they arrived on Bilbo’s doorstep (and included the surprising information that Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur were the Heir of Durin’s ‘attendants’ – i.e. either courtiers or an honor-guard). Now the surprisingly good account the last two captured gave of themselves is transferred from the unlikely Bifur and Bombur (not elsewhere distinguished for their valour) to the more active and effective Fili and Kili.

  33 This page is not literally blank but it does lack any text, being devoted to the black-and-white picture ‘The Trolls’ (cf. DAA.74).

  34 Originally ‘set a stone over them with dwarf runes’.

  35 Originally Tolkien typed ‘there are more trolls about’ before changing it to the less specific and more evocative ‘other wicked things abroad’.

  36 Gandalf’s final statement, absent from earlier editions, is curious, since nothing added here indicates that Bilbo played any part in saving them from the cannibal feast.

  37 The unchanged skipped text that bridges the gap between this revision and the next is ‘and their horses had more to eat than they had; for there was plenty of grass, but there was not much in their bags, even with what they had got from the trolls.’ This actually misses an opportunity to correct an error going all the way back to the first edition, since ‘horses’ should in fact read ponies here. The original book had switched back and forth between ‘horse’ and ‘pony’, especially in the Lonely Mountain chapters (see page 479), as if the two were interchangeable, but the dichotomy between the dwarves’ ponies and the wizard’s horse has been stressed throughout New Chapter II.

  38 Written in the left margin alongside this: ‘May 22’. See Itinerary, page 819.

  39 Written in the left margin alongside this: ‘May 23’. See Itinerary, page 819.

  40 The shift from first person plural (‘We must not . . . we shall be . . . We need’) in the published editions (cf. DAA.88) to second person (‘You must not . . . the end of you . . . You need’) here has the effect of exempting the wizard himself, suggesting that whatever dire peril they may find themselves in he at least will come through unscathed. This is in keeping with his enhanced stature in The Lord of the Rings, but again it leaves him detached, not really a part of the group struggling to survive the adventure he arranged.

  41 The idea that dwarves were not particularly welcome at Rivendell is a new and somewhat disconcerting idea, apparently imported back into The Hobbit to match the initially chilly relations between Gimli’s people and the elves of Lórien in The Lord of the Rings. The version of this passage Tolkien originally drafted, ‘no dwarf has’, was even more uncompromising (i.e., ‘though no dwarf has [ever seen it]). It is also out of keeping with their extended stay there, which in the 1960 Hobbit is expanded from the two weeks (‘a fortnight’) of the published book to at least five (see Itinerary, page 823).

  42 The passage being altered reads ‘Gandalf, who seemed to know his way about pretty well’, which would now become ‘Gandalf, who seemed to know his way.’

  43 whin, like heather, is a tough prickly shrub, more commonly known as furze, that grows in European wastelands.

  44 This sentence was followed by several lines of drafting:

  Suddenly he came to the brink of a steep fall in the ground, so sharp that [he] nearly slipped headlong down it. ‘Steady!’ said Gandalf. ‘You have better come last.’

  Although cancelled, this passage shows us that the ‘he’ who hurried forward in the next sentence is Bilbo, not Gandalf or his horse.

  Queries and Reminders

  Nothing in the nature of Plot Notes exists for New Chapters I, II, & III – naturally enough, given that Tolkien had already long since completed the story and instead was now trying to bring it into accord with its sequel, and his own revised opinions about how such a story should be told. However, a single page of notes [Ad.Ms.H.11] does exist, clearly meant to serve as reminders to Tolkien of points he had not yet addressed in this revision, and I give those here:

  Hobbit

  There is no mention in The Hobbit of Gandalf’s horse after Rivendell. What did he ride on?

  What happened to the musical instruments used by the Dwarves at Bag-end?

  Why did they bring them to B-End?

  Since the Fifth Phase was abandoned at this point, ultimately none of these points was resolved. The fate of Rohald is suggested by Tolkien’s note at the end of New Chapter III (see page 803 above); since the horse was from Rivendell, Gandalf presumably left him there when Thorin & Company departed and headed up into the mountains. The musical instruments are a thornier issue, since these notes indicate Tolkien’s dissatisfaction with the text as it stands but give no hint of how he might have resolved the problem. Given his attempt throughout the 1960 Hobbit to reduce the whimsy and comic touches of the original, however, it seems likely that in the end this bit of dwarven exuberance would have been sacrificed to probability and all but the most portable instruments deleted.

  The End of the Fifth Phase

  The goal of this chapter’s revision was not so much to flesh out the rather sketchy account of Bilbo and the dwarves’ journey from Bag-end to Rivendell, although it does do that, as to make it fit with the later, more detailed description of travelling over some of that same territory (between Bree and the Last Homely House) in The Lord of the Rings. As the late Karen Wynn Fonstad observed in The Atlas of Middle-earth [1981]:

  The Troll’s fire was so close to the river that it could be seen ‘some way off,’ and it probably took the Dwarves no more than an hour to reach; whereas Strider led the Hobbits north of the road, where they lost their way and spent almost six days reaching the clearing where they f
ound the Stone-trolls. Lost or not, it seems almost impossible that the time-pressed ranger would have spent six days reaching a point the Dwarves found in an hour . . . the two stories seemed irreconcilable.

  —Fonstad, page 97.

  As the ‘Timelines and Itinerary’ show, Tolkien was well aware of this problem, and Christopher Tolkien discusses in The Return of the Shadow (HME VI.203–4) how the 1960 Hobbit revisions would have redressed this dilemma. The fact that the 1966 third edition changes failed to do so is, I think, a persuasive bit of evidence that Carpenter is correct in stating that Tolkien did not have the 1960 material before him when he made those final changes to the text. Instead, he was almost certainly working from his memory of this material: the third edition introduces the stone bridge found in The Lord of the Rings, but since it is intact in this final authorized edition of The Hobbit (DAA.66) its presence only exacerbates the problem of the discrepancy in the time their respective journeys took.

  In addition to more diminishment of Bilbo’s character – the hapless hobbit now cannot even keep track of what month it is – the new revisions firmly place Bilbo in Frodo’s world: to mentions of the Shire and Hobbiton and Moria in New Chapter I are now added another mention of Moria and references to the Prancing Pony at Bree and to the Rangers operating in the area around Rivendell (in fact, hunting down monsters like the trolls). The bridge across the Mitheithel (Hoarwell) upon which Glorfindel leaves a token for Strider (LotR.217) now appears in The Hobbit, but broken by trolls; clearly Elrond must have restored it sometime in the intervening years (see Tolkien’s note on Elrond’s maintenance of the road at the end of the New Chapter III fragment, on page 803).1

  Small wonder, in the face of such specificity, that statements by the narrator such as ‘I don’t know what river it was’ (second edition page 42) vanish in the 1960 revision. In fact, all first person references by the narrator are excised from the text, along with all direct (second person) addresses by the narrator to the reader; Tolkien had come to feel that these were a stylistic flaw and removed them throughout.

  What is surprising is that, even with all these changes, large sections of the story remained intact and indeed unaltered. For example, Tolkien had stated in 1954 that ‘I might not (if The Hobbit had been more carefully written, and my world so much thought about 20 years ago) have used the expression “poor little blighter”,2 just as I should not have called the troll William’ (JRRT to Peter Hastings, Sept 1954; Letters p. 191), yet aside from some additions at the beginning of the encounter the troll’s dialogue survived virtually untouched in this extensive 1960 recasting of the chapter, and the now-inappropriate names William (or Bill), Bert, and Tom were all retained.

  One other long-standing point is resolved in this revision: the vexing question of why Elrond could read the writing on the swords but Gandalf could not. Now we are told that the runes are obscured by old dried goblin-blood; not until they are cleaned can the letters be seen. Presumably their hosts perform this task for them during their stay, and the scene of Elrond’s viewing the swords in Chapter III would probably have been slightly recast to incorporate a presentation of their newly polished swords.

  We cannot know what else Tolkien would have added to the story, had the 1960 Hobbit or Fifth Phase continued beyond this point. Bilbo could not have met Arwen at Rivendell, for we know she was at that time in the middle of a decades-long visit to her grandparents, Galadriel and Celeborn, in Lórien. But did Bilbo’s lifelong friendship with Aragorn (then a ten-year-old living in Rivendell with his mother and being raised by Elrond) begin during his visit there, either on the outgoing or the return trip? Did Legolas Greenleaf fight in the Battle of Five Armies? Would more light have been cast upon the storm-giants of the Misty Mountains, or the source of Beorn’s enchantment, or would we have learned a little more about the elusive Radagast? Would the Spiders of Mirkwood have been made more horrific, à la Shelob, and the wood-elves absolved of all blame in their treatment of the dwarves? Would Balin’s visit in the Epilogue include some mention of his plans for Moria? And most importantly, would the Ring have been presented in more sinister terms throughout, with hints of its corruptive influence even on one such as Bilbo?

  We will never know the answers to any of these questions. According to Christopher Tolkien, when his father had reached this point in the recasting he loaned the material to a friend to get an outside opinion on it. We do not know this person’s identity, but apparently her response was something along the lines of ‘this is wonderful, but it’s not The Hobbit’. She must have been someone whose judgment Tolkien respected, for he abandoned the work and decided to let The Hobbit retain its own autonomy and voice rather than completely incorporate it into The Lord of the Rings as a lesser ‘prelude’ to the greater work. When he briefly returned to it in 1965 for the third edition revisions, he restricted himself in the main to the correction of errors and egregious departures from Middle-earth as it had developed (e.g., the policemen of Chapter II; DAA.69) and left matters of style and tone alone. Thus the work begun in a flash of inspiration thirty-five years before – ‘in a hole in the ground lived a hobbit’ – saw periodic revisioning through several distinct phases over a period of thirty years (1930 to 1960), until in the last decade of its author’s life it reached the final form we know and love today.

  Timelines and Itinerary

  The final group of texts associated with the 1960 Hobbit are concerned with distances and dates, particularly as they relate to time of travel between various points and to the phases of the moon. Primarily, Tolkien was concerned with four main points: (1) the date of Thorin & Company’s departure from Bag-End, (2) the date and place of their encounter with the trolls (with its associated phase of the moon), (3) the time of their stay in Rivendell (with its associated moon-phase on the eve of their departure), and (4) the timing of Durin’s Day. Through the changes incorporated into New Chapter I and New Chapter II, he had managed to bring some of these points into sufficient harmony to satisfy himself; the itinerary below beautifully lays out the specifics, along with many interesting hitherto unknown details about their journey. However, reconciling all of these points, and others that arose as a result of his revisions, ultimately proved impossible without even more radical alterations than he had already carried out, for reasons that will become evident in the material that follows.

  (i)

  Distances and Itinerary

  These two sheets of single-spaced typescript, or three and a half pages of text [Ad.Ms.H.21–4], lay out with admirable clarity the day-by-day details of Bilbo’s first journey, from his rendezvous with the dwarves outside the inn in Bywater to their arrival in Rivendell. This document is later than New Chapter I and New Chapter II as they were originally typed, since the latter text is quoted from within it, but before some of the alterations and revisions to those documents.

  The Hobbit.

  Distances and itinerary of the journey from Bywater Inn to Rivendell. This has been altered to fit the more precise geography of the ‘Lord of the Rings’, the first Book of which covers the same ground. Also to make more credible and explicable Gandalf’s disappearance before the Troll-episode.

  The maps in the L.R.TN1 have been taken as more or less correct and to scale. The scale of the large map is 1 centimetre to 50 miles. That of the Shire-map is not stated, but is approximately 9 times as large (1 millimetre to 5/9 of a mile). But note** in this map Bywater and its pool is somewhat too far east. There should be no houses of Hobbiton on the south side of ‘The Water’. Or rather none at the time of The Hobbit. At time of L.R. (‘Scouring of the Shire’) there should be a small block of ‘new houses’ to the right of the road-junction, ‘a mile beyond Bywater’; but none to the left.TN2 It was not more than a mile and a quarter from the footbridge just south of the Mill to the first houses of Bywater, among which was the ‘Green Dragon’ Inn.

  The episode of the broken bridge (The Bridge of Mitheithel in L.R.) is inserted, to fit geography, which does not
allow for any part of the East Road running beside a river. It also suggests, though this is not explained (unless perhaps in Ch. III)TN3 that Elrond exercised some supervision over the road and the territory between the Grey-flood and the Mountains. This makes it more credible that Gandalf should go in search of help, and should actually meet people from Rivendell. The Rangers are just mentioned, as a link with L.R. but not further explained.

  As for the journey, before that point (the troll-meeting), the text of The Hobbit, Ch.II, obviously cannot be equated with the L.R., not even if based on the confused memories of Bilbo (who covered the road twice, to and fro).TN4 But fair speed of narrative is still needed, and even apart from competing with the L.R., no such detail as is given in the later book should be given. It is however impossible that Bilbo would have forgotten Bree, or that he should not have heard of it before:TN5 it was well-known in hobbit-history. Though he may not have heard the name of the Inn (which in the L.R. is evidently only known to and visited by people from Buckland and the neighbourhood of the Brandywine Bridge).

  Bree is therefore just mentioned as a last stopping place before the real wilds began. The Last Inn (by the time of the L.R. called the Forsaken Inn: L.R. I 200)TN6 a day’s journey east of Bree is brought in to emphasize the growing desolation between Bree and the Grey-flood. But Weathertop is not mentioned; nor are the rivers Greyflood and Loudwater named.

  Distances.

  1. SHIRE. Junction of the Hill Road in Hobbiton and the main East Road to Brandywine Bridge: about 50 miles.