A broad crescent would indicate that moon was approaching First Quarter therefore New Moon would be about June 26 (say) in Shire Calendar. Five [added: calendar] months later it would bring New Moon about Oct 19. This fits well enough with such time indicators as there are. They had been in Lake Town a week (+ 2 or 3 days?) when Bilbo had his cold – from LR we know that
As for
__________________________
FQ. FM. LQ.| |NM
|NM7 FQ7 O7 LQ|TN3
The final lines of these notes just begin to explore the calculations which Tolkien developed further in section (v); see below. This little chart provided Tolkien with two months’ worth of moon-phases for him to work out the problem bedeviling him, and in fact nicely demonstrates that the period between the Last Quarter moon and New Moon, during which Bilbo met the trolls almost a week’s journey away from Rivendell, could not be followed three weeks later by a moon that had advanced only about a week in its cycle (that is, now being somewhere between the NM and FQ on the second line). Tolkien’s earlier solution (in New Chapter II and ‘Distances and Itinerary’) to move their arrival in Rivendell back from early June (circa June 7th in the original conception) to at least two weeks earlier (May 24th) also pushes ‘midsummer’ from around June 21st (modern calendar) to two days after June 30th (Shire Calendar).TN4 This does give the moons in their right phases but forces the company to stay a full month in Elrond’s House and fails to address the compatibility problem with The Lord of the Rings of why Bilbo got from the river to the trolls so quickly when Strider, the best hunter and tracker of his time, took so long. It also ignores the problem that a moon between last quarter and new cannot be seen in the early evening hours (as specified in the troll-encounter) but would only rise long after midnight.
TEXT NOTES
1 For the banquet where Bilbo had the cold (from his soaking in the Forest River while barrel-riding), see DAA.252. There is no mention in The Hobbit that this was Bilbo’s birthday; that detail, and the date (22nd September) both come from the opening chapter of The Lord of the Rings (LotR.42). Tolkien’s statement in these notes that this banquet came seven to ten days after their arrival in Lake Town (repeated from section ii above) is contradicted by Bilbo in his Farewell Speech, where Mr. Baggins is explicit that both his arrival in Esgaroth and that banquet took place on the same day, his fifty-first birthday. Even without this, circumstantial evidence from within The Hobbit itself would place the banquet much earlier than halfway through their stay: Bilbo was already sneezing in the early morning hours before their arrival in Esgaroth (DAA.242), so the ‘three days’ that his ‘shocking cold’ lasted are presumably the first three he spent in Lake Town (DAA.252); if these three days included his birthday then by that reckoning alone their arrival could have come no earlier than 19th September and the banquet no later than 25th September.
2 That is, Tolkien here intends for Durin’s Day to fall on 19th October. This avoids the cramming together of too much incident in the last weeks of the year (see page 481) and could be achieved with the change of a single word on page 64 in the second edition (cf. DAA.96), although had he carried out a thorough revision Tolkien would also have had to deal with the various comments about the rapid approach of winter in Chapters X, XI, & XIII. I have found no explicit statement from Tolkien about any decision regarding shifting Durin’s Day. As with the two competing Thror-Thrain/Thrain-Thror genealogies, Tolkien may have become confused by a single divergent passage in the text – in this case, one near the beginning of Chapter IV that still (until its post-authorial correction in the fourth edition of 1995) referred to Durin’s Day as occurring in the first month of autumn. But it seems extraordinary that he would have been guided by this passing remark, which he nowhere draws attention to in the Fifth Phase (1960) material, and not by the statement on a page he repeatedly cites from the end of Chapter III, literally divided from the other in the second edition only by a turn of the page.
3 These abbreviations stand, in proper sequence, for New Moon (NM), First Quarter (FQ), Full Moon (FM or the symbol O), and Last Quarter (LQ). The superscripts represent Tolkien’s notation of the number of days to allot for each phase of the moon in its twenty-eight day monthly cycle. The significance of the vertical lines (|) seems to be to mark off the phase he wishes to highlight (i.e., the period of the waning moon between last quarter and new moon).
4 Tolkien noted that astronomically the Shire Calendar was about ten days off from our modern calendar – that is, that a date given as Mid-summer in the Shire Calendar, the actual solstice, would correspond to about 21st or 22nd June in our Gregorian calendar (LotR.1144).
(v)
Phases of the Moon
This single sheet of paper [Ad.Ms.H.15–16], the final piece of manuscript associated with the Fifth Phase or 1960 Hobbit, is covered with rough notes on both sides. The page has been folded in half and rotated ninety degrees so that it forms four half-pages: .15a (left), .15b (right), .16a (verso left), and .16b (verso right). The first half-page is written in red ball-point ink; the remaining three half-pages are in pencil, which unfortunately in some places has become illegible through the speed of the writing and its faintness after more than four and a half decades. As before I replace illegible words and passages by ellipses ( . . . ) and expand contractions where necessary to avoid confusion but have let stand the following authorial contractions: ‘L.R.’ or ‘LR’ stands for The Lord of the Rings, ‘SR’ for Shire Reckoning, and ‘SC’ for Shire Calendar.
June 8. 2 before LQ.
June 15. 3 before NMTN1
NM June 28
LQ June 21
FM June 14
FQ June 7
NM May 30
1
. . . to F. Inn.
lose way in the Marshes <?Hay> ran <?low>
. . .
This marks the end of the ink text at the bottom of half-page Ad.Ms.H.15a. The top of the right-hand portion of the same page, Ad.Ms.H.15b, begins a new section or sub-section with its own header. From here on out the text is written in pencil, which is difficult to read throughout and becomes wholly illegible towards the end.
Hobbit [added:] Time table of journey will not work out?
• Time indications in text.
It was Wednesday when dwarves came to Bag End.
p. 35. Thrain went away 100 years last Thursday on 21st April. Since week-day relative to date did not change in Shire Calendar, 21st April was a Thursday in 2941 (= 1341 SR) the year of the Visit of the Dwarves. Therefore the U.P. occurred on 27 April (Wed.) 1341 SR. The journey to Erebor started on Thursday 28th April.TN3
p. 41 Bilbo says it is June 1st tomorrow at tea time on the [day >] before the adventure with the Trolls. *It would be better to make this correct if possible (rather than assume B. was out of his reckoning) . . . . that in Shire Calendar [they >] The Company had now been 32 days on the road (April 29, 30) 2; (May 1–30) 30. They had still a long way to go before Rivendell. They set out on the afternoon of June 1. After that the following time/distance
p. 42 a waning moon was in the sky on the evening of May 30. On the eve of Midsummer (= Lithe June 30 + 1) and the eve of their departure from Rivendell, there was a broad silver crescent
p. 56 No singing first day = afternoon to night
of June 1. nor next day June 2, nor day after June 3. 3 1/2 days journey. ‘One afternoon’ – gap of time
Alter p. 56 One afternoon to One fine morning [p. 57 they rode slowly on >]TN6 and adjust narrative to . . . long day lasting on into early night.
At p. 58/11 They went on until moonless twilight overtook them, and they lay that night under the bright stars. The next day was failing But
p. 62 They stay in Rivendell at least 14 days. Therefore if they left on SC Midsummer = June 30 + 2 they arrived not earlier
If the Moon was waning sc. at least a day or two past full on May 30 it would be approx. same . . . on June 28. But if it were
FQ= half moon [7 days] =
LQ [7 days] = TN9 We must start from p. 63TN10 which fits (by chance!) fairly well . . . the New Moon would appear about Oct 19th. (SC)
The moon is a broad silver crescent therefore about halfway to FQ,
Or we must shorten the time of the journey from the Trollshaw to Rivendell. LQ on night of the Troll-adventure NM. [June 28 Therefore LQ. >] Waning moon = only just going off
If N.Moon was on June 27. [LQ was on June 20. The F.M. >] FM was June 12/13
They arrived Rivendell on June 16
But they
<?Just> say
In this final section of the 1960 Hobbit material, we see Tolkien returning once again to the time indicators in the published text to see if setting them out would suggest a solution to the tangle. Highly significant, therefore, is the lightly pencilled message written alongside the title – Time table of journey will not work out? – signaling as it does his realization that the ends he wanted to achieve could only come at the cost of an even more radical revision and recasting than he had already drafted for New Chapters I and II, and that New Chapter II would itself need to be re-done. And even with this, he had still not addressed the problem of matching the dwarves’ relatively swift trip from river to trolls (a matter of hours) with Strider’s urgent journey over the same ground (taking the better part of a week).
TEXT NOTES
1 This line is cancelled; I retain it here because it continues and clarifies the sequence of the two preceding lines.
2 The final line on this half-page, roughly three words following ‘(by Trolls)’, is illegible.
3 Tolkien is correct that days of the week are fixed to specific days of the month in the Shire Calendar year after year, but here he still has not noticed that since April (Astron) always begins on a Saturday, the 21st and 28th can never fall on a Thursday. U.P. = Unexpected Party.
4 This partially illegible sentence originally read ‘As they were walking (evidently
5 This is because Frodo, our point of view character for this section of the story, is unconscious when he travels that distance in The Lord of the Rings; Book I ends with his collapse at the Ford and Book II begins with him awakening already safe in Rivendell some days later. He of course covers this ground again on his return journey, but compression in the denouement of a very long story prevents the inclusion of much detail of that trip other than a few vivid encounters along the way.
6 The text of the first and second editions read ‘The afternoon sun shone down; but in all the silent waste there was no sign of any dwelling. They rode on for a while, and they soon saw that the house might be hidden almost anywhere between them and the mountains’. This passage was recast for the third edition to address the concerns raised in the 1960 Hobbit, although not in the same words: ‘Morning passed, afternoon came; but in all the silent waste there was no sign of any dwelling. They were growing anxious, for they saw now that the house might be hidden . . .’ (DAA.88 & 90).
7 Only a single short word, starting with a capital ‘T’, follows ‘too’, but I cannot make out what it might be.
8 The last word following ‘after’ is illegible and probably unfinished, but the gist of the sentence is clear: a new crescent would set shortly after sunset, leaving the night dark.
9 Here I think Tolkien is reminding himself of the rather confusing terminology whereby ‘quarter’ is applied to a half-moon (because it is a quarter of the way through its twenty-eight day cycle), and also which way the crescent faces when the moon is waxing and waning, for purposes of description.
10 The allusion is to the line ‘The moon was shining in a broad silver crescent’ on midsummer eve – cf. DAA.95.
11 I cannot make out anything in the last two lines following this point except the words ‘June 15’ and the final phrase ‘ – not . . . waning’.
See also section (iii) above for Tolkien’s decision to simplify his problem by replacing ‘waning’ with ‘wandering’, a change he carried out in the 1966 third edition.
(vi)
The Wandering Moon
In all these notes and compilations on distances, dates, and moons, we see Tolkien attempting to take The Hobbit, a story written out of one storytelling tradition of long ago and far away, where details are only included when dramatically relevant or aesthetically effective and things work according to their own narrative logic,1 and make it into a story like The Lord of the Rings, which is written in a very different tradition, where each mile of each day of each character’s journey can be followed on a map and plotted on a timetable. Tolkien himself is largely responsible for creating the latter,2 and making it the standard by which modern fantasies are judged, but he also excelled at writing the former, a traditional mode going all the way back to the Middle Ages and beyond. There is a qualitative difference between the narrator’s admission that ‘I don’t know what river it was’ (DAA.67) or ‘I don’t know where he came from, nor who or what he was’ (DAA.118) and Gandalf’s well-informed speculation about the whereabouts of the lost palantíri (LotR.621), or his partial knowledge about ‘older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world’ (LotR.327).
The Hobbit harkens back to an older tradition, where forests seem endless, a period of captivity is a weary long time rather than twenty-one days (August 9th–30th), dragons and goblins destroyed Gondolin ‘many ages ago’ (rather than exactly 6,472 years before to the very day),3 and it is the passing of seasons rather than the counting of days that mark the passage of time. Bilbo’s is a world where the moon only just past new can rise after the sun sets (an astronomical impossibility) rather than becoming visible in th
e west just after the sun goes down (DAA.307–8, 312),4 because that’s how Tolkien envisions the scene, and the chill moonlight falling on the now-quieting scene of devastation sets just the right note to follow the noise and flames and flashes of light and sudden violence of the immediately preceding pages.
If The Lord of the Rings is, as some have claimed, the ‘Book of the Century’, then The Hobbit is more than the book that made it all possible. A major contribution to the Golden Age of children’s literature, it is a rare example of a work that transcends age boundaries in its readership, like Grahame’s The Golden Age, Carroll’s two Alice books, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and very few others. It is, like Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in relation to his Ulysses, or Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark in relation to Alice in Wonderland, a case of a masterpiece overshadowed by another masterpiece on a grander scale from the same author. Had Tolkien never completed The Lord of the Rings, he would still be remembered as one of the great fantasy authors. The achievement of the sequel has eclipsed the accomplishment of writing The Hobbit itself, but we should not deny the distinct appeal and charm of the original book. In the end, I think it was more than just the intractable nature of the problems facing him in recasting the book that caused Tolkien to abandon the 1960 Hobbit. Rather, he decided to trust his friend’s judgment that what he was doing was ‘wonderful, but not The Hobbit’. That is, he came to recognize that The Hobbit was more than The Lord of the Rings writ small, more than a ‘charming prelude’: indeed, a work deserving to stand on its own merits.
And with that realization, aside from the ‘Sixth Phase’ of 1965/66 forced upon him by his publishers – which he took as the opportunity for correction of some errors and the incorporation of some fixes he had settled upon during his work on the 1960 Hobbit – Tolkien’s decades-long work on The Hobbit finally came to an end.
The History of the Hobbit Page 103
