The History of the Hobbit
Page 119
Briefly, the original version of the story runs thusly: Tinwelint [Thingol] the elvenking hires dwarves to work the treasure of Mîm (brought to his hall by Úrin [Húrin], and thus doubly cursed) into jewelry, agreeing to let them name their own ‘small’ reward when the work is done. He sends them half the gold, taking a hostage to ensure their good behavior. When they deliver the first shipment, he is delighted at the results of their craft and promptly takes all the dwarven smiths prisoner, forcing them to complete the work at his halls rather than risk letting any of the gold out of his sight again. They grudgingly finish the assigned task, and then demand a princely reward for the insult – including, among much gold, an elf-bride apiece. The king pays them a pittance (from which he extracts the cost of their food and board during the time of their captivity) and has them beaten for their insolence, driving them from his land. They return home, gather an army, and return to sack the elven kingdom and kill the elvenking. On the return march, they are ambushed by an elven force under the command of Beren; many dwarves are slain, the rest put to flight, and the treasure lost, except for the Nauglafring bearing the Silmaril, which Beren takes and gives to Lúthien.
This abbreviated account leaves out many betrayals and much treachery by elf against elf and dwarf against dwarf.
27 The narrator’s importance to the story is usually slighted by critics who would prefer The Hobbit to conform to and resemble its sequel in every possible detail. In later years Tolkien came to regard the tone of the intrusive narrator’s remarks as condescending, feeling that it marked the book as targeted for children, and said over and over again in letters that he regretted this, considering it an error on his part and a severe flaw in the book. Taking their cue from Tolkien’s afterthoughts, critics writing on The Hobbit have almost universally condemned the narrative interpolations, contenting themselves with pointing out how inappropriate the narrative voice in The Hobbit would be if used in The Lord of the Rings, rather than asking what role the narrator was originally designed to play in what was, after all, conceived as a stand-alone work (and did in fact stand alone for seventeen years). Taken on its own terms, the voice of the narrator is one of the most important elements in the success of the story. For a notable exception, and an insightful examination of the function of the intrusive narrator in The Hobbit, see Paul Thomas’s essay ‘Some of Tolkien’s Narrators’ in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, ed. Verlyn Flieger & Carl F. Hostetter [2000], pp. 161–81.
28 One of Dunsany’s most important innovations was the creation of his own pantheon of gods – the first modern writer to ever do so – in The Gods of Pegana (1905); both Tolkien’s Valar and H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos were directly inspired by this thin little book. This is not the place to enter into a full-scale description of the elder fantasist’s impact, or to catalogue all Tolkien’s references to Dunsany’s work, but we should note that when Clyde Kilby arrived in Oxford in 1966 to offer his advice on The Silmarillion, Tolkien handed him a copy of Dunsany’s The Book of Wonder [1912] and told him to read it in preparation for his task (C. S. Kilby, unpublished lecture, Marquette Tolkien Conference, September 1983).
For more on Dunsany, and his influence on early Tolkien, see Beyond the Fields We Know: The Short Stories of Lord Dunsany by John D. Rateliff, Ph.D. dissertation, December 1990, Marquette University.
29 In a letter to L. Sprague de Camp of 30th August 1964, Tolkien specifically criticized Dunsany for doing exactly the same thing – i.e., deliberately pricking his own illusion ‘for the sake of a joke’ – in the story ‘The Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller’; cf. de Camp, Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers [1976], p. 243.
30 The relevant passage from Allen & Unwin’s blurb read ‘The birth of The Hobbit recalls very strongly that of Alice in Wonderland. Here again a professor of an abstruse subject is at play.’ Tolkien objected that he did not consider Old English and Icelandic literature ‘abstruse’ (‘Some folk may think so, but I do not like encouraging them’) and pointed out that Dodgson never reached the rank of professor. He also expressed his doubts as to the validity of the comparison, maintaining that ‘this stuff of mine is really more comparable to Dodgson’s amateur photography’ and the poem ‘Hiawatha’s Photographing’,† although he speculated that ‘the presence of “conundrums” in Alice’ might be ‘a parallel to echoes of Northern myth in The Hobbit.’ He concluded that ‘If you think it good, and fair (the compliment to The Hobbit is rather high) to maintain the comparison – Looking-glass ought to be mentioned. It is much closer in every way’ (JRRT to A&U, letter of 31st August 1937, Letters pp. 21–2).
In addition to the evidence of this letter, Christopher Tolkien testifies to his father’s fondness for, and familiarity with, Carroll’s work: in a gloss on a quote from Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno [1889] in Tolkien’s The Notion Club Papers, Christopher says ‘my father knew the work from which it comes well, and its verses formed part of his large repertoire of occasional recitation’ (HME IX.x; see also p. 214 and Note 22 pp. 214 & 660). Another of Carroll’s poems, ‘What Tottles Meant’, from Sylvie and Bruno Concluded [1893], seems to be echoed in the phrase ‘“Good morning” said Bilbo, and he meant it’ (p. 30). One of Carroll’s most famous poems, ‘Jabberwocky’ (from Through the Looking Glass), influenced Tolkien’s vocabulary at one point when he is describing Smaug (see Text Note 9, p. 368), and another from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,†† ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’, was used by Tolkien to provide the text for an inscription in his invented ‘Rúmilian’ script, which predates the more familiar tengwar or ‘Fëanorian’ script; Arden Smith dates this inscription from the early 1930s (Parma Eldalamberon vol. XIII [2001], pages 82 & 84).
Finally, although this took place long after The Hobbit was finished, we should note that one of Tolkien’s students, Roger Lancelyn Green (whose thesis Tolkien directed at Oxford), became a noted Carroll scholar and the editor of his diaries.
† This piece, written in the Kalevala meter, was collected in Phantasmagoria and Other Poems [1869]; Tolkien’s knowledge of it reflects that his acquaintance with Carroll’s work was more than casual, and extended well beyond the Alice books or even Sylvie and Bruno/Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.
†† Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland [1865] and Through the Looking-Glass [1871] together make up the composite volume Alice in Wonderland.
31 W. H. Auden picked up on this point in his tribute to Tolkien, the poem ‘A Short Ode to a Philologist’, a meditation on words such as Good-morning and their uses and abuses that he contributed to Tolkien’s festschrift, English and Medieval Studies Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Norman Davis & C. L. Wrenn [1962], which ends
a lot of us are grateful for
What J. R. R. Tolkien has done
As bard to Anglo-Saxon.
Tolkien returned the favor five years later with ‘For W. H. A.’, a dual-text poem in both Old English and Modern English, published in the journal Shenandoah’s tribute issue in honor of Auden’s sixtieth birthday [Winter 1967].
32 Published in 1936, but most of whose contents dated back to Tolkien’s time at Leeds [1920–25].
33 Thus Christopher Tolkien recalls ‘I have a faint dim feeling that for some of them, at any rate, like “far over the misty mountains”, he used some sort of recitative’ (CT to JDR, November 1993).
Chapter I(c) The Adventure Continues
1 In essence, ‘The Unexpected Party’ (to give Chapter I its eventual title) combines within its two halves parallels to both of the first two chapters in The Lord of the Rings (‘A Long-Expected Party’ and ‘The Shadow of the Past’, the latter originally named ‘Ancient History’), with the light-hearted gathering immediately followed by a revelation of the somewhat sinister history underlying the quest that is about to begin.
2 Thus, they are included under the rubric Úvanimor, who are defined in ‘The Coming of the Valar’ as ‘Úvanimor (who are
monsters, giants, and ogres)’ (BLT I.75); compare uvanimo in the Qenya Lexicon, which is glossed as ‘monster’ (Parma Eldalamberon XII.98). An outline for the ‘Story of the Nauglafring or the Necklace of the Dwarves’ mentions how Linwë/Tinwelint, the figure who became Thingol Greycloak in later versions of the story, took a golden hoard ‘and he had a great necklace made by certain Úvanimor (Nautar or Nauglath)’ – i.e., dwarves (BLT II.136). Similarly, an outline for ‘Gilfanon’s Tale’ tells how Úvanimor (goblins and dwarves) fought together under the command of Melko’s servant, variously called Fangli, Fankil, and Fúkil, against men and elves at the Battle of Palisor (?Eden); see p. 82 and BLT I.236–7. For more on dwarves as part of what we might call the Children of Morgoth (that is, those forces allied with Melko/Melkor in the early stages of the mythology), see also BLT II.247.
3 For more on the theme of the cursed hoard, see pages 595–600 and also Tolkien’s poem ‘The Hoard’ (ATB poem #14, pp. 53–6), which he himself explicitly ties back to ‘the heroic days at the end of the First Age’ (ATB, Preface, p. 8).
4 This saga is also the source of one of Gollum’s riddles (see p. 173) and one of the sources for Dwalin’s and Durin’s names (see p. 42).
5 Elsewhere in the Lost Tales, Tolkien uses ‘nauglath’ in a less restrictive sense, to mean the whole of the dwarven race; cf. BLT II.223–4 and CT’s commentary on p. 247.
Tolkien later commented to Stanley Unwin, apropos of the ‘dwarfs/dwarves’ issue, that dwarf and gnome ‘are only translations into approximate equivalents of creatures with different names and rather different functions in their own world’; hence dwarf perhaps ‘may be allowed a peculiar plural’ (‘Dwarrows’ letter, JRRT to SU, 15th October 1937; Letters p. 23). Here he was no doubt referring to the use of the term dwarf rather than nauglath or indrafang.
6 This change came very late in the evolution of the legend(s), circa 1959–60. Cf. the essay ‘Quendi and Eldar’ in HME XI.
7 In the 1930 Quenta it is said ‘There they [the elves] made war upon the Dwarves of Nogrod and Belegost; but they did not discover whence that strange race came, nor have any since. They are not friend of Valar or of Eldar or of Men, nor do they serve Morgoth; though they are in many things more like his people, and little did they love the Gnomes . . .’ (HME IV.103–4); later ‘made war upon’ was changed to ‘had converse with’ (ibid.108). The ‘Annals of Beleriand’, composed slightly later, preserves the same idea in other words: ‘in those mountains they met the Dwarves, and there was yet no enmity between them and nonetheless little love. For it is not known whence the Dwarves came, save that they are not of Elf-kin or mortal kind or of Morgoth’s breed’ (HME IV.331). See pp. 721–2 for more on dwarven origin myths.
8 Tolkien may have derived the name from Mimir, the Norse god of wisdom, but more likely this represents one of his very few borrowings from Wagner, who gave the name ‘Mime’ to the dwarven smith who counselled Siegfried how to slay the giant Fafnir (a role filled by Regin in the Eddas and Völsunga Saga).
9 The first reference to this analogue I have found is in Tolkien’s 1947 ‘Thrym Thistlebeard’ letter (see p. 757). More specifically, Tolkien says in the 1965 interview:
The Dwarves of course are quite obviously a – wouldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? All their words are Semitic, obviously; constructed to be Semitic. There’s a tremendous love of the artefact. And of course the immense warlike passion of the Jews too, which we tend to forget nowadays.
—JRRT to Denys Gueroult, 1965 BBC interview.
10 The first sign of this motif that I am aware of occurs in Tolkien’s February 1938 letter to The Observer:
These dwarves are not quite the dwarfs of better known lore. They have been given Scandinavian names, it is true; but that is an editorial concession. Too many names in the tongues proper to the period might have been alarming. Dwarvish was both complicated and cacophonous. Even early elvish philologists avoided it, and the dwarves were obliged to use other languages, except for entirely private conversations.
—Letters p. 31; see Appendix II.
11 Tolkien’s own attitude towards anti-Semitism was eloquently expressed in 1938 when he was asked by a German publisher to confirm his arisch (Aryan) ancestry. To his own publisher he wrote ‘I should object strongly to any such declaration appearing in print. I do not regard the (probable) absence of all Jewish blood as necessarily honourable; and I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.’ To the German publishers, he retorted ‘if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people’ (Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, 25th July 1938, p. 37).
12 For Tolkien’s eventual distinction between the good dwarves of Belegost and the less virtuous, more easily angered dwarves of Nogrod, see pp. 431–2.
13 Or, to give it its full title, ‘The GEST of BEREN son of BARAHIR and LUTHIEN the FAY called TINUVIEL the NIGHTINGALE or the LAY OF LEITHIAN Release from Bondage’ (HME III.153). Tolkien began this major work in the summer of 1925 and continued to work on it up through September 1931, so that it both precedes and is contemporaneous with his work on The Hobbit, particularly the First Phase (summer 1930) and the bulk of the Second Phase.
Chapter II Trolls
1 The 1936 text can be found in HME VI.143.
2 This final version (LotR.223–4) was reprinted in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil as ‘The Stone Troll’ (ATB poem #7, pp. 39–40); a recording of Tolkien singing the song to the tune of the old folk-song ‘The Fox Went Out’ appeared on the 1967 Caedmon record Poems and Songs of Middle Earth.
3 This poem underwent a great deal of revision and substitution even as it was being written: ‘uncle’ in the second stanza was changed to ‘nuncle’; the entire fifth stanza was replaced by ‘But still I don’t see what is that to thee,/Wi’ me kith and me kin a-makin’ free/So get to Hell and ax leave o’ he/Afore thou gnaws me uncle’. The third and fourth lines of the sixth stanza were changed to ‘hath a more stony [> stonier] seat than its stony face’ and ‘and he [> Tom] rued that root on the rumpo/lumpo/bumpo’. Finally, the last lines of the poem seem to have given Tolkien special trouble: first he changed them to ‘But troll’s old seat is much the same/And the bone he boned from its owner/Donor/Boner’ – the reading he adopted in Songs for the Philologists. But on the manuscript he follows this at once with ‘That it was once in the boot of a burglar/Jurgler/
‘For a couple o’ pins,’ says Troll, and grins,
‘I’ll eat thee too, and gnaw thy shins.
A bit o’ fresh meat will go down sweet!
I’ll try my teeth on thee now.
Hee now! See now!
I’m tired o’ gnawing old bones and skins;
I’ve a mind to dine on thee now.’
The new stanza is interesting because here we can see the chain of revisions come full circle. The depiction of William, Bert, and Tom in The Hobbit clearly derives from the old poem, but their characterization in the story in turn requires a rewriting of the poem to accommodate the changing conception, changing the Lonely Troll from a scavenger of carrion to a cannibalistic murderer. William’s touches of good-nature are perfectly in keeping with the original troll of ‘Pero & Podex’, a theme Tolkien also developed in the poem ‘Perry-the-Winkle’ (ATB poem #8, pp. 41–4). La
ter, when Tolkien had decided that trolls were creations of Morgoth (cf. LotR.507† ), he revised this scene accordingly to remove the last traces of ‘humanity’: see pp. 799–800.
† ‘Maybe you have heard of Trolls? They are mighty strong. But Trolls are only counterfeits, made by the Enemy in the Great Darkness, in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves. We are stronger than Trolls. We are made of the bones of the earth.’ – Treebeard the Ent.
4 ‘Oddsteeth’ (i.e., ‘by God’s teeth’) is not attested by the OED, but many similar constructions are listed there, such as Ods blood, Ods bodikins, and Ods wounds (more frequently condensed still further to ‘zounds!’). A fair number of examples occur in Shakespeare, and Chaucer mentions the practice of swearing by bits of God’s body in ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’:
With oaths so damnable in blasphemy
That it’s a grisly thing to hear them swear
Our dear Lord’s body they will rend and tear
—The Canterbury Tales, tr. Nevill Coghill
[1962], p. 263
By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the practice had ceased to be considered a strong blasphemy and become instead a mild way of swearing, eventually drifting into parody, as in this example by Tolkien.
5 Tolkien was professionally interested in dialects; his mentor when an undergraduate, Joseph Wright, was the editor and compiler of the massive English Dialect Dictionary [six volumes, 1898–1905], and Tolkien himself wrote the introduction to Haigh’s A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District [1928]. The leading expert of his time on the medieval dialect of the West Midlands, he also ranged further afield. Thus, in 1931 Tolkien delivered a major paper published three years later as ‘Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale’, in which he examines Chaucer’s spelling and word choice minutely through a number of manuscripts and concludes that in this Canterbury Tale Chaucer deliberately used dialect for comic effect. While giving Chaucer high marks for accuracy, he notes some lapses but judges them unimportant, so long as the general effect is conveyed to the intended audience.