The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  6 Compare, for example, Dunsany’s ‘The Bird of the Difficult Eye’ [The Last Book of Wonder, 1916], where Neepy Thang buys a special ticket at a London train station to the End of the World.

  7 The only possible exception I have found comes in William Morris’s The Roots of the Mountains, where at one point a character who believes in the existence of ‘trolls and wood-wights’ in the deep forest observes that ‘trolls would not come out of the waste into the sunlight of the Dale’ but does not specify why [1889; Newcastle Forgotten Fantasy re-issue, 1979, p. 175].

  8 This occurs both in Dasent’s title story and also in another story in his collection, ‘Boots and the Troll’, though not in a third, ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff.’ In more recent times, Poul Anderson, in Three Hearts and Three Lions [1953], borrows the troll-turned-to-stone-by-daylight motif for a scene in his retelling of the story of Ogier the Dane. Terry Pratchett incorporated the idea into one of the early novels from his Discworld series, with the difference that his trolls come back to life again when the sun sets; cf. The Light Fantastic [1986] p. 98.

  9 In her entry on trow, a variety of trolls found in the Shetlands, Briggs notes ‘The gigantic trolls, it will be remembered, could not live in the light of the sun, but turned into stone. This trait has been made familiar to many readers by its introduction into J. R. R. TOLKIEN’s The Hobbit. The Shetland trows also found the light of the sun dangerous, but not fatal. A trow who is above-ground at sunrise is earthbound and cannot return to its underground dwelling until sunset’ (Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and other supernatural creatures. [1976; Penguin edition 1977], p. 413; emphasis mine).

  10 Thompson cites several nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works on Norse mythology as his authorities for what he calls motif F531.6.12.2, ‘Sunlight turns giant or troll to stone’, as well as for motif F455.8.1, ‘Trolls turn to stone at sunrise’. Grimm also cites, in his supplementary volume, ‘Many Swed[ish] tales of giants whom the first beam of the sunrise turns into stone’ (Teutonic Mythology vol. IV [1888], p. 1446).

  11 These dates are established by two indicators. First, the rendezvous point given in the facsimile is ‘the Green Dragon Inn, Bywater’, a reading which replaced ‘the Great Mill across The Water’ in the marked page proofs Tolkien returned to Allen & Unwin shortly before 18th February 1937. Thus, the facsimile which incorporates this revision must postdate the page proofs. Second, the piece was in existence by February of 1938, since Tolkien refers to it in his letter to The Observer, in which he states that ‘a facsimile of the original letter left on the mantelpiece can be supplied’ (see Appendix II).

  12 Brian Alderson, in the little booklet Blackwell Bookshops of Oxford issued commemorating the 50th anniversary of The Hobbit in 1987, was the first to note the close similarity of this picture to one by children’s illustrator Jennie Harbour that had appeared in the 1921 collection My Book of Favourite Fairy Tales by Edric Vredenburg; Harbour’s picture illustrates the Grimms’ ‘Hansel and Gretel’. Hammond & Scull print Harbour’s and Tolkien’s pictures on facing pages (H-S#101 & 102), as does Douglas Anderson in The Annotated Hobbit; Anderson also gives some background information on Harbour’s career and states that Tolkien knew of Harbour’s illustration through The Fairy Tale Book [1934].

  † A possible source for this motif may come from Grettir’s Saga, where Grettir fights a troll-woman in a scene parallel to Beowulf’s encounters with Grendel and his Dam. After describing the she-troll’s death, the saga then remarkably enough also gives an alternate version: ‘Grettir said that the she-troll dived down into the gorge when she received the wound, but the men of Bardardale claim that the day dawned upon her as they were wrestling, and that she died when he cut off her arm – and she still stands there on the cliff, turned into stone’ (Grettir’s Saga, Chapter 65; tr. Denton Fox and Hermann Pálsson [1974; rpt 2005], page 138; emphasis mine). I am grateful to Marjorie Burns for drawing this passage to my attention.

  A more proximate source probably lies in the work of Helen Buckhurst, a student and colleague of Tolkien’s, and one of the people to whom he presented a signed copy of The Hobbit upon its first publication (see Appendix V). In a 1926 lecture on ‘Icelandic Folklore’ (later reprinted in Saga-Book of the Viking Society, Vol. X pages 216–263), Buckhurst retells several stories about ‘Night-Trolls’, who turn to stone at dawn – e.g.

  ‘Dawn now hath caught thee, a stone shalt thou be,

  And no man henceforth shall be harméd by thee’

  —‘The Night Troll’ (Saga-Book, page 230)

  and again in a story of two trolls (‘old man’ and ‘old woman’) moving an island:

  they were caught by the daylight, and the island came to rest there, where it remains to this day . . . And at that same moment the old man and old woman were turned to rocks . . . he is tall and thin, just as he was in life . . .

  —‘Old Man and Old Woman’ (ibid., page 231).

  She also briefly summarizes a third such tale, based on a different rock formation, in which the island itself is ‘a troll cow’ flanked by its petrified troll owners (pages 231–232). For more on Buckhurst’s work, including a compete reprint of ‘The Night Troll’, see DAA.80–82. I am grateful to Doug Anderson for drawing Buckhurst’s work, and its importance, to my attention.

  Chapter III Rivendell

  1 The name ‘Rivendell’ does not appear at all in the first draft, but it does occur in the first typescript of Chapter XIX (Marq. 1/1/69) and in replacement pages slipped into the first typescript of Chapters II and III (Marq. 1/1/53), and thus made its way into the first edition.

  2 This tradition, which Tolkien deplored, was forever immortalized in the Cottingley fairy photographs authenticated and popularized by Conan Doyle (see Pictures of Fairies: The Cottingley Photographs by Edward L. Gardner [1966]† ), more recently parodied by Terry Jones and Brian Froud in Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book [1994].

  † This book, Gardner’s attempt to perpetuate the fraud by arguing that the photographs are genuine, was first published in 1945 under the title The Cottingley Photographs and Their Sequel.

  3 The legends of the Tuatha de Danaan are most readily found in Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men [1904]. The final expression of elves as doughty human-sized warriors and knights in mainstream literature is Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene [1590]; the hero of the first book, the Redcrosse Knight, is assumed throughout to be an elf and only revealed as a human foundling at the very end; the hero of the second book, Sir Guyon (Guy) is an elf.

  4 Tolkien himself expressed a wish that ‘the unhappy little thing, representing all that I came (so soon after) to fervently dislike, could be buried for ever’ (HME I.32).

  5 Along with poems by Tolkien’s friends G. B. Smith and T. W. Earp, and future luminaries like Naomi M. Haldane (the future Naomi Mitchison), A. L. (Aldous) Huxley, and Dorothy L. Sayers.

  6 This book of children’s poetry fortuitously played a role in inspiring ‘Bilbo’s First Song’; see p. 725.

  7 The Snow-elves were joined the next year by Snow-men (see the letter for 1930). The latter did not make it into The Hobbit, but they did make it into The Lord of the Rings as the Snowmen of Forochel, also known as the Lossoth or the Forodwaith (LotR Appendix A, pp. 1078–9).

  8 See the section of commentary on ‘Switzerland’ beginning on p. 145, as well as Letters pp. 308–9 (letter of 4th November 1961 to Joyce Reeves) & pp. 391–3 (letter of 1967/1968 to Michael Tolkien).

  9 For Anglo-Saxon references, see The Exeter Book; for nineteenth-century lore, see The Denham Tracts.

  10 A possible exception is the green elves’ behavior in ‘The Nauglafring’ when they laugh at and mock the desperate dwarves attempting to flee their ambush at the fords of Aros (BLT II.237).

  11 In the first typescript (Marq. 1/1/53:5) the phrase ‘as kind as Christmas’ has been replaced by ‘as kind as summer’, the reading adopted in the published book – doubtless with an eye t
o Tolkien’s everpresent concern with decorum and the avoidance of blatant anachronisms (there is no ‘Christmas’ yet because we are in a prehistoric world before the Christian era).

  12 Originally, Elrond was Eärendel’s only son (‘Sketch of the Mythology’, HME IV.38), and this was still the case in the 1930 Quenta as first written (HME IV.150) and also in the replacement text of this passage (Quenta II; HME IV.151). His brother Elros was only added in revisions to this replacement text; see HME IV.155, Notes 4, 9, & 10 and Christopher Tolkien’s commentary on HME IV.196. Thus this passage in The Hobbit probably predates the creation of Elros.

  13 In the earlier versions of the story, it is Maidros rather than Maglor who rescues young Elrond; contrast HME IV.38 (‘Sketch’) and HME IV.150 & 153 (1930 Quenta & Quenta II, respectively), both of which assign this role to Maidros the eldest brother, with HME IV.155 (revisions to Quenta II) and subsequent texts (e.g., Silm.247), which credit the deed to Maglor instead.

  14 Actually, as Christopher Tolkien points out (HME IV.39), Húrin is Elrond’s great-great-uncle.

  15 ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ was written circa 1916–17 (BLT II.146) but not published until the appearance of volume two of The Book of Lost Tales [1984]). That Tolkien thought highly of the story is shown by the fact that this was the only Silmarillion story he ever read aloud at a public performance (to Exeter College’s Essay Club, in 1920); cf. Nevill Coghill’s account in Ann Bonsor’s 1974 BBC Radio Oxford program and also Carpenter’s brief mention (Tolkien: A Biography p. 102).

  16 This custom continued up to the early eighteenth century; unwary scholars are sometimes tripped up by the fact that, for example, 24th March 1714 was followed the next day by 25th March 1715. The practice was phased out as the eighteenth century wore on, with the traditional usage often marked ‘O.S.’ (i.e., ‘Old Style’); in modern editions of letters from the time the dates are often adjusted to reflect current practices. The change to our current system was not made in England and its colonies (including what became the United States) until 1752.

  Chapter IV Goblins

  1 Note that the trolls, when exposed to sunlight, ‘go back to the stuff of the mountains they are made of’ (see p. 96). Similarly, Treebeard claims that Ents are ‘made of the bones of the earth’ (i.e., stone† – cf. LotR.507), and we are told in The Silmarillion of the elvish belief that upon death dwarves ‘returned to the earth and the stone of which they were made’ (Silm.44). Thus, even if Melkor did form the first goblins from ‘subterranean heats and slime’, this would not in itself prevent them from being sentient; the Old Testament itself tells (Genesis 2.7) how ‘the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground’, and the very word ‘Adam’ simply means ‘earth’ or ‘clay’ in Hebrew (thus the burial service: ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’).

  † This is at variance with the creation myth recounted in The Silmarillion, where Yavanna tells Manwë ‘. . . it was in the Song . . . For while thou wert in the heavens and with Ulmo built the clouds and poured out the rains, I lifted up the branches of great trees to receive them, and some sang to Ilúvatar amid the wind and the rain’ (‘Of Aule and Yavanna’, Silm.45–6). Here it is clear that the Ents are trees ensouled by Ilúvatar: ‘the hand of Ilúvatar . . . entered in, and from it came forth many wonders . . . the thought of Yavanna will awake . . . and it will summon spirits from afar, and they will go among . . . the olvar [plant life], and some will dwell therein’ (ibid., p. 46).

  2 Note Ilúvatar’s rebuke to Aulë when he first makes the dwarves: ‘the creatures of thy hand and mind can live only by that being, moving when thou thinkest to move them, and if thy thought be elsewhere, standing idle’ (Silm.43). When Sauron is finally destroyed at the climax of The Lord of the Rings ‘the creatures of Sauron, orc or troll or beast spell-enslaved, ran hither and thither mindless; and some slew themselves, or cast themselves in pits, or fled wailing back to hide in holes and dark lightless places far from hope’ (LotR.985).

  3 In a footnote to one of these mini-essays, Tolkien proposed the name Boldog for these Maiar-orcs, almost a kind of lesser balrog (HME X.418). According to this theory, presumably the Great Goblin of the Misty Mountains, Azog, and Bolg were either creatures of this type or descended from them.

  4 According to this theory, the idea was Morgoth’s but the actual execution was left to Sauron, who ‘was often able to achieve things, first conceived by Melkor, which his master did not or could not complete in the furious haste of his malice’ (HME X.420).

  5 The slave-labor industry of Morgoth and his minions goes all the way back to The Book of Lost Tales. For example, in ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’ Beren is captured by Orcs, who ‘thought that Melko might perchance be pleasured if he was brought before him and might set him to some heavy thrall-work in his mines or in his smithies’ (BLT II.14–15), although in the event Beren winds up a kitchen-slave of Tevildo, Prince of Cats. Similarly, in ‘Turambar and the Foalókë, we see in Flinding, the escaped prisoner from ‘the mines of Melko’, the effects of such servitude.

  6 Ms. Tolkien 14, folio 19, verso. This draft is now in the Department of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library in Oxford; I am grateful to Christina Scull for drawing this reference to my attention and providing me with a transcription.

  7 Tolkien retained his good opinion of MacDonald right up until September of 1964, when he agreed to write a preface to a new edition of The Golden Key (JRRT to Mr. di Capua of Pantheon Books, 7th Sept 1964; Letters p. 351) – a task C. S. Lewis would no doubt have been asked to perform had he not died the year before. Unfortunately, actually rereading MacDonald again, probably for the first time in thirty years, filled Tolkien with dismay (cf. Carpenter page 242); the result was his writing ‘an anti-G[eorge]. M[acDonald]. tract’, the little story known as Smith of Wootton Major [1967] (SWM extended edition, ed. Verlyn Flieger [2005], pages 69–70).

  8 MacDonald claims that goblins are not cruel for cruelty’s sake, but the general tone of the text does not support this.

  9 For more on hobbit footware, see p. 784 and Letters p. 35.

  10 Similarly, in The Lord of the Rings, when Shagrat and Gorbag reminisce fondly about ‘old times’ when they could maraud freely before the ‘Big Bosses’ came back (LotR.765); they seem to be referring to the period before Sauron’s return to Mordor almost seventy years before, suggesting a lifespan longer than a human’s or hobbit’s.†

  † However, Gorbag’s allusion to ‘the Great Siege’ later in the same conversation (LotR.767) – that is, to the events of the Last Alliance just over three thousand years before – need not be from personal experience.

  11 That Tolkien should have picked a specific year is typical of his comic precision (‘100 years ago last Tuesday’), but it’s not clear why he should have picked 1453, a year notorious in European history for two events: the fall of Constantinople and the end of the Hundred Years’ War. The one event marked the final end of the Roman Empire and defeat of Christendom by Islam, while the other put an end to centuries of English attempts to gain territory on the European mainland. Both are seminal in the transition from the so-called ‘Middle Ages’ to modern times, and the disappearance of nonhuman monsters such as goblins might plausibly be thought of as another feature of modern times, but this is speculation.

  12 Another cave-painting accompanying the 1932 letter is clearly based on the great Neolithic paintings of Altamira (discovered in 1879; those at Lascaux and Chauvet were not discovered until 1940 and 1994, respectively, too late to influence the Father Christmas Letters). In addition to drawings of bears, bison, horse, stags, boar, and mammoths, the page is littered with goblin graffiti. Just above the lower left corner are two figures, hand in hand – the one clearly meant to represent a goblin from its inky blackness and pointy head, but the other is red and has a flat head shaped rather like an inverted triangle. This may be a representational drawing of a female goblin; if so, it is the only one Tolkien drew known to me.

  13 Eruman is a dark shady land borde
ring on Valinor; the name essentially means ‘outside’ (see Christopher Tolkien’s discussion of both name and place, BLT I.252). For Gilim, see Parma Eldalamberon XI.38. Nan’s name may be linked to the Qenya [early Quenya] word for woods or forest; cf. the Qenya Lexicon’s nan(d) woodland, nandin dryad (Parma Eldalamberon XII.64).

  14 The connection with the ents is strengthened by Sam’s comment when he introduces the subject: ‘what about these Tree-men, these giants, as you might call them?’ (LotR.57).

  15 This portrayal of an apparently friendly yet actually evil giant may owe something to Golithos, the most interesting character in Wyke-Smith’s The Marvellous Land of Snergs. Formerly an ogre (the French equivalent of the Norse ‘troll’, and like it a term of wide applicability), he has taken the pledge and no longer eats people, but a visit from two tender young children proves too much for him after years of a strict vegetarian diet, and he attempts to revert to his former cannibalistic ways.

  16 In his review of The Fellowship of the Ring, C. S. Lewis singled out ‘the unforgettable Ents’ for special praise – no doubt to the puzzlement of his original readers, since the ents do not enter the story until the second volume, The Two Towers, published several months later. Similarly, Edmund Wilson, in his famous diatribe ‘Oo, Those Awful Orcs’, grudgingly admitted that the ents ‘showed signs of imagination’.

  17 As Doug Anderson points out (personal communication), the stone giants probably derive from the legend of the rübezahl, a German storm-spirit who, in the words of Andrew Lang, ‘amused himself by rolling great rocks down into the desolate valleys, to hear the thunder of their fall echoing among the hills’ (The Brown Fairy Book [1904] p. 283). Tolkien is not the only modern fantasist inspired by the legend; the game of nine-pins played by the strange little men in Washington Irving’s ‘Rip Van Winkle’ [1819] was probably also inspired by the same German folk-lore.