† The Inklings seem to have coalesced as a group during 1933–4; Dr. ‘Humphrey’ Havard, who along with Tolkien, Lewis, and Warnie Lewis formed one of the four core members, told me he was invited to join upon his moving to Oxford and making Lewis’s acquaintance in 1934. It was certainly in existence by 1936, when Lewis mentions the group by name in his first letter to Charles Williams.
9 This meeting took place on 27th October, not 15th November as Carpenter states in Letters p. 25. They met again on Monday 15th November, when Tolkien turned over copies of ‘The Lay of Leithian’, the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion, and The Lost Road, and perhaps also Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet as well. Unwin had already requested, as a result of their earlier meeting, that Tolkien go ahead and ‘put together the volume of short fairy stories’ (SU to JRRT, 28th October 1937; A&U archives) of which Farmer Giles, which had already been read and approved but felt to be too short for publication by itself (e.g., A&U to JRRT 16th November 1937; A&U archives), would have been one, but in the brief time between their meetings Tolkien had not yet done so (having no doubt been kept busy preparing the other submissions). Mr Bliss had also already been read and provisionally accepted, provided that Tolkien could re-draw its many illustrations into a simpler style that would be easier (and cheaper) to reproduce. In the event, discouraging reader reports of The Lost Road (by Susan Dagnall, who admired the work but thought it unlikely to be a commercial success) and ‘The Lay of Leithian’ (by outside reader Edward Crankshaw, who much preferred the prose Quenta Silmarillion) led Unwin to urge Tolkien to attempt ‘another book about THE HOBBIT’ or, failing that, assemble ‘a volume of stories like FARMER GILES’ (SU to JRRT, 15th December 1937). At some point between the 16th and 19th, Tolkien wrote the first chapter of what would become The Lord of the Rings (or ‘The New Hobbit’, as he and his friends long referred to it), as Unwin was ‘thrilled to learn’ (SU to JRRT, 20th December 1937; A&U archives), stating that ‘another book . . . on the lines of THE HOBBIT is now assured of success’. How right he was.
Unwin’s memo, drawn up immediately following the 27th October meeting, is itself of great interest, and I therefore quote it here in full:
Professor Tolkien.
1. He has a volume of short fairy stories in various styles practically ready for publication.
2. He has the typescript of a History of the Gnomes, and stories arising from it.
3. MR. BLISS.
4. THE LOST ROAD, a partly written novel of which we could see the opening chapters.
5. A great deal of verse of one kind and another which would probably be worth looking at.
6. BEOWOLF
He spoke enthusoastically
S.U. October, 1937
– unpublished memo; Allen & Unwin archives.
† This is a reference to the revision of the Clark Hall prose translation upon which Tolkien and Elaine Griffiths had been working the year before; it was eventually published in 1940 after Griffiths had been replaced by Tolkien’s fellow Inkling Charles Wrenn. See pp. 693–4 for more on how this project seems to have first sparked contact between JRRT and Allen & Unwin and initiated the relationship that proved so beneficial to both.
10 For another example, in his Introductory Note to Tree and Leaf [1964]† Tolkien stated that his essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’ had been delivered as a lecture in 1938, and footnoted this ‘Not 1940 as incorrectly stated in 1947’ (e.g., by Tolkien himself in the first sentence of the version of the essay printed in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, p. 38). However, as Christopher Tolkien notes in his Preface to the revised edition of Tree and Leaf [1988], the lecture actually took place on 8th March 1939. Although the error is minor, once again we see Tolkien, on later consideration, characteristically pushes back a date.
For a final and perhaps extreme example, Clyde Kilby stated, in his memoir of Tolkien included in his book Tolkien and The Silmarillion [1976], that during the summer of 1966 Tolkien told him that ‘he was writing some of The Silmarillion . . . about 1910’ and also claims that ‘[Tolkien] told one of his closest friends that he had the whole of his mythic world in his mind as early as 1906’; unfortunately he does not identify his source for his statement. In fact, we know through Christopher Tolkien’s work in the History of Middle-earth series that the earliest prose tales date to about 1916–17, while the earliest Middle-earth poetry, the Eärendel poems, date to 1914. In addition, Kilby says that ‘Tolkien told me that some of the poems in Tom Bombadil [e.g., The Adventures of Tom Bombadil] had been written by him “as a boy”’ (Tolkien and The Silmarillion, pp. 47–8). Even if we assume that by ‘as a boy’ Tolkien meant not childhood but undergraduate days, none of the Bombadil poems are known to predate the 1920s, when Tolkien was in his thirties, and most of the rest were written in the 1930s.
† This Introductory Note was written in October 1963 according to Hammond, Descriptive Bibliography, pages 183–4.
11 This solitary exception is manuscript page 155, near the end of the Second Phase. The front of this sheet bears the scene from Chapter XIII describing the death of Smaug, while the back has several lines from a student’s attempt at Old English describing a meeting in Winchester between King Edward the Confessor and Godwin of Wessex, the father of Harold Godwinson.
A small amount of other extraneous material (not student essays) can be found on the versos of some pages. One of the outlines (Plot Notes F) is written on the back of a fragment from an unsent letter, but these were after all merely notes to himself and never part of the main manuscript. Similarly, some Lord of the Rings-era drafting for changes to the Gollum chapter (1/1/21:1–2) are on a page with the letterhead of The Catenian Association, the Oxford chapter of which Tolkien was the Vice-President at the time, while most of Tolkien’s 1944 draft for the replacement Gollum chapter (The Fourth Phase) was written on the back of old handouts Tolkien had prepared for classes; see p. 740 (Text Note 1).
12 A snippet from an otherwise unpublished letter quoted by Carpenter reveals that Tolkien was already hard at work preparing the text for submission to the publisher before 10th August 1936: ‘The Hobbit is now nearly finished, and the publishers clamouring for it’ (Tolkien: A Biography, p. 180).
13 Thus, in the sequence of Hobbit manuscripts at Marquette, this second typescript appears before the First Typescript in the filing system. For example, the manuscript of Chapter V is 1/1/5, the First Typescript of Chapter V is 1/1/55, and the Second Typescript of Chapter V is 1/1/36.
14 Presumably it was this injury, which would have kept young Michael from normal summer activities, that caused his father to ask him to undertake this task at all.
15 These consist of two copies of the First Page Proofs (Marq. 1/2/1 and 1/2/2) and one copy of the Second Page Proofs (Marq. 1/2/3). Of these, Marq. 1/2/1 represents the copy that Tolkien originally read through and marked up, while Marq. 1/2/2 is an exact duplicate from the printer onto which he then carefully wrote all those corrections as neatly as possible and returned to the publisher, keeping 1/2/1 for his own reference. The Second Proofs, Marq. 1/2/3, incorporate those changes and give Tolkien a last chance to correct mistakes made by the printer, fix hereto undetected errors surviving from the Typescript for Printers, and make any last-minute changes he felt absolutely necessary.
Chapter I(a) The Pryftan Fragment
1 Long afterwards, Tolkien scribbled the following note in pencil in the left margin on the front of the third sheet of this fragment:
Only page preserved
of the first scrawled copy of
The Hobbit which did not
reach beyond the first chapter
In a letter to W. H. Auden written in 1955 recounting the origins of the book, Tolkien recalled that ‘. . . for some year
s I got no further than the production of Thror’s Map’ (JRRT to WHA, 7th June 1955; Letters p. 215). Tolkien might well have meant this quite literally, since the earliest draft of the map takes up slightly more than half of this same page (the next to last of the fragment).
2 For the full story of this manuscript, whose present whereabouts are unknown, see Douglas A. Anderson’s article ‘R. W. Chambers and The Hobbit’, in Tolkien Studies, vol. III [2006], pp. 139 & 144.
3 Interview with the late Joy Hill; Battersea, London, May 1987.
4 Douglas A. Anderson notes in The Annotated Hobbit (1988; revised edition 2002, page [29]; hereafter DAA) that the opening passage of the book has become so much a part of our cultural heritage that it has even found its way into Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations [1980 & ff].
5 This fragment of draft, and the associated outline (Plot Notes E: ‘Little Bird’), are reproduced below on pp. 620–621 & 626 of Part 2 of this book.
6 This would account for his habit of going back and transcribing later changes onto earlier copies of texts, thus ensuring that the revisions would survive if the latest fair copy or final typescript were accidentally destroyed or lost in the post – a serious and all-too-real concern in those days before the advent of easy access to photocopiers.
7 Tolkien’s agreement with Marquette specified that he should retain any illustrative material among the manuscripts (with the obvious exception of Mr. Bliss), although due to the intermingling of the two in the event some illustrations came to Marquette and some text was retained by Tolkien. Tolkien kept no clear tally of exactly what he had sent to Marquette; when he was revising the text of The Lord of the Rings for the second edition, he wrote to the Archivist asking if Marquette had a particular piece of Ms. to which he needed to refer – a piece which we now know Tolkien had in fact retained (letter, JRRT to ‘The Librarian’ [Wm A. Fitzgerald], Marquette University, 3rd August 1965). And clearly when he came across this solitary sheet with Thror’s Map, probably sometime in the mid-1960s, he had forgotten about the existence of the other two sheets (see Note 1 above).
8 It was this facsimile publication in the 50th anniversary edition that enabled the late Taum Santoski to recognize that the solitary leaf retained by Tolkien and marked by him as the sole surviving sheet was in fact cognate with the two sheets that had come to Marquette thirty years before. As a result of his insight, we can now reunite all three, thus re-creating roughly half of the original opening chapter of The Hobbit as it stood in the First Phase manuscript (see below).
9 This correspondence is now at Marquette.
10 Adding to the confusion was the fact that at the time of the transfer some of Tolkien’s papers were at his house on Sandfield Road (into which he had only moved a few years before) and some were at his office at Merton College (Tolkien to [Fitzgerald], 3rd August 1965), which he was at that time beginning to clean out in anticipation of his upcoming retirement.
11 Along with several miscellaneous items, these include the 1947 Hobbit (see ‘The Fourth Phase’, beginning on p. 729) and the 1960 Hobbit (the ‘Fifth Phase’), the latter of which was of course not yet in existence at the time of Tolkien’s sale of the original draft, typescripts, and galleys to Marquette. I have given all these items the designator ‘Ad.Ms.H.’ [Additional Manuscript Hobbit] to distinguish them from the materials at Marquette (‘Marq.’) – e.g., Ad.Ms.H.6–7, Marq. 1/1/22:1–4, &c.
1 For example, Bifur, Bofur, Oin, Ori, and Nori, whose combined dialogue would hardly fill a single page of this book.
2 For more on the Dvergatal, an interpolation into the Völuspá, the first poem in the Elder Edda, see Appendix III.
The sole exception is Balin, whose name is a bit of a mystery; why should his be the only dwarf-name among the party not to come from the list in the Edda? Moreover, in his letter to the Observer (Appendix II), Tolkien is explicit that ‘the dwarf-names, and the wizard’s [i.e., “Gandalf”], are from the Elder Edda.’ In the absence of any statement to the contrary, this seems to imply that all the dwarf-names should be found in this list, making Balin’s conspicuous absence all the more puzzling. Perhaps Tolkien felt that the dwarf-name usually rendered Vali (or sometimes Nali) should more properly be spelt Bali or Balin. Or he might have taken the name from Bláin, an obscure figure described in the line of the Völuspá immediately preceding the dwarf-list proper, said to be a giant from whose legs or bones the dwarves were made. More probably, he borrowed the name from Arthurian legend: Sir Balin was one of the best-known, most tragic, and most unlikable of the early heroes of the Round Table. He is the anti-hero of part two of Malory’s The Tale of King Arthur (Book I of the work generally known as Le Morte D’Arthur); among his more notable achievements are the murder of the Lady of the Lake before the whole court of Camelot, the maiming of the Fisher-King (an act which creates The Waste Land and eventually requires the Grail quest to set right), and the killing of his own brother, Sir Balan, in a duel wherein each takes a mortal wound. If Malory’s work is indeed the source from whence Tolkien borrowed the name, he took none of the knight’s personality with it, as Balin the dwarf is easily the kindliest of Bilbo’s companions.
3 Hávamál, strophe 103: fimbulfambi heitir, saer fatt kann segja: ‘a fimbul-fambi he is called, who can say little’ – i.e., a mighty fool or great idiot. The fimbul- element is most famous through its appearance in Fimbulvter, the Great Winter whose coming signals the end of the world in Norse tradition. I am grateful to Christopher Tolkien for identifying the source and providing the translation.
4 For the probable meaning of Bladorthin’s name, see ‘The Name “Bladorthin”,’ on pp. 52–3.
5 For more on the name ‘Bilbo’, see pp. 47–8.
6 The story of Fingolfin, like so much else in the mythology, emerged gradually as the many-layered legends evolved. First in the Lost Tales we have Golfinweg, the Gnomish name for Finwë lord of the Gnomes (BLT I.115 & 132). Then in a prose fragment (probably written soon after 1920) recounting the arrival of the Elven host from Valinor in ‘the Great Lands’ (i.e., Middle-earth) we find the name Golfin given to one of the most prominent characters, the eldest of the three sons and captains of Gelmir, the king of the Gnomes (or Noldor). The fragment ends before we are told much about Golfin’s deeds, but it is Christopher Tolkien’s conclusion that Gelmir should be identified with Finwë and that ‘It is certainly clear that Golfin here is the first appearance of Fingolfin’ (HME IV.6–8).
The earliest use of the actual name ‘Fingolfin’ seems to be in the unfinished poem ‘The Lay of the Fall of Gondolin’ written shortly after the Lost Tales period (that is, sometime in the early 1920s). Here we are told of
. . . Fingolfin, Gelmir’s mighty heir.
’Twas the bent blades of the Glamhoth that drank Fingolfin’s life
as he stood alone by Fëanor . . .
—HME III.146.
In the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’, Fingolfin is the eldest son of Finn (= Finwë) and the older brother of Fëanor; in revisions he became Finn’s second son, as he thereafter remained right through to the published Silmarillion. A reluctant participant in the rebellion of the Noldoli, this Fingolfin returns to Valinor after the Shipburning. In revisions to the ‘Sketch’, however, he leads the rest of the Host by foot over the Grinding Ice and is slain when Morgoth breaks the ‘leaguer of Angband’; here his death takes place quite independently of Fëanor’s, who had already been killed by a balrog before Fingolfin’s host reached Middle-earth (see HME IV.14–15, 18–19, 22, 24). In a passage of ‘The Lay of Leithian’ written on 27th and 28th September 1930 (i.e., within a few months of the composition of the Pryftan Fragment), Tolkien describes Fingolfin’s duel with Morgoth in epic terms (HME III.284–6, 292) that make the contemporaneous application of the name to a goblin king famous only for his spectacular decapitation all the more remarkable; the only thing the two have in common is the dramatic nature of their deaths.
7 For more on the importance of the real world as a se
tting underlying Tolkien’s imagined prehistory, see my article ‘“And All the Days of Her Life Are Forgotten”: The Lord of the Rings as Mythic Prehistory’ in the Blackwelder Festschrift (The Lord of the Rings, 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, ed. Wayne G. Hammond & Christina Scull [2006], pages 67–100).
8 ‘like the Mercury of Eddison’ – i.e., the setting of E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros [1922], a book Tolkien greatly admired and from which he borrowed some elements for The Lord of the Rings; Eddison himself was twice a guest at the Inklings. Eddison states that his fantasy lands – Demonland, Witchland, Zimiamvia, and the rest – are on the planet Mercury, to which his narrator travels in a dream at the start of the story, but this detail plays no importance to the story and is soon dropped; they are much more like the backdrops to an Elizabethan or Jacobean drama than science fictional.
9 ‘I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned . . .’ – JRRT, quoted in Carpenter, page 189; italics mine.
10 ‘The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme. They owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains’ (JRRT to Professor L. W. Forster, 31st December 1960; Letters p. 303). Much earlier, Tolkien described his earliest surviving attempt at prose fiction by saying that ‘I am trying to turn one of the stories [of the Kalevala] . . . into a short story somewhat on the lines of Morris’ romances with chunks of poetry in between’ (JRRT to Edith Bratt, October 1914; Letters p. 7). The resulting tale, ‘The Story of Kullervo’, was the direct inspiration for Tolkien’s own tale of Túrin, one of the major component pieces that makes up The Book of Lost Tales (cf. Verlyn Flieger, Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology [2005], pages 28–9), and The Book of Lost Tales itself strongly resembles the narrative framework of Morris’s early masterpiece The Earthly Paradise [1865], in which a group of wanderers reach a far land where they exchange stories with their hosts, retelling Norse and Classical legends respectively. If Tolkien is the father of modern fantasy, then Morris and Dunsany are its grandfathers, the chief influences on Tolkien himself.
The History of the Hobbit Page 117
