The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  18 Or, to go further back, the story of King Arthur’s battle with the giant of Mont St. Michel, retold by both Geoffrey of Monmouth and Malory – or, further still, the story of Odysseus outwitting the cyclops. Whether called ogres, trolls, cyclopes, or giants, cannibalistic giant-folk loom large in the folklore of Europe.

  19 For a detailed comparison of Tolkien’s 1911 journey and its possible influences on The Hobbit, see Marie Barnfield’s piece ‘The Roots of Rivendell’, published in the specialist Tolkien biography journal Þe Lyfe ant þe Auncestrye [1996], as well as Tolkien’s letter to his son Michael (Letters pp. 391–3).

  20 The first of these is realistic but inconsequential; the second blends enchanted dream with waking delusion; the third actually refers to a direction the plot was to have taken which was subsequently abandoned – cf. p. 507 and commentary page 519.

  21 Gordon’s edition, with some contributions by Tolkien, was completely redone by his widow, Ida Gordon, and eventually appeared from Oxford University Press in 1953. Tolkien’s intimacy with the poem is further indicated by the fact that he not only translated and helped edit it but also wrote poetry in the extremely difficult stanza used by the Pearl-poet, which combines both rhyme and alliteration, merging the continental tradition of rhyming verse with the older English tradition of alliteration.† Tolkien’s poem using the Pearl meter, ‘The Nameless Land’, was written in 1924. It originally appeared in 1927 in Realities: An Anthology of Verse, ed. G. S. Tancred and is reprinted in The Lost Road (HME V.98ff); Christopher Tolkien quotes there from a note of his father’s that it was ‘inspired by reading Pearl for examination purposes’.

  † See Tolkien’s discussion of the meter in his letter to Jane Neave, 18th July 1962; Letters p. 317.

  22 Tolkien recited the first of these from memory in the original Middle English at the 1938 Oxford ‘Summer Diversions’ organized by his friend and fellow Inkling Nevill Coghill (who later translated all of The Canterbury Tales into modern English) and Poet Laureate John Masefield, while he both translated Sir Orfeo into modern English and prepared a critical text that was released as a pamphlet by Oxford University in 1944; the latter, edited by Carl Hostetter, was published in Tolkien Studies (volume I [2004], pages 85–123).

  23 It’s easy to forget that Tolkien began his academic career as a classicist and only transferred his major to medieval studies in his second year at Oxford; the influence of classical literature on his work has been sadly neglected by Tolkien studies. For a notable exception, see Kenneth Reckford’s excellent article ‘There and Back Again: Odysseus and Bilbo Baggins’ in Mythlore LIII [Spring 1988], pages 5–9.

  As for The Dream of Scipio, Tolkien would not have had to rely upon hazy memories of undergraduate days for his knowledge of the work, since his friend and fellow Inkling C. S. Lewis discusses it at length in The Discarded Image,† pages 23–8, granting it great prominence for influencing the whole genre of medieval dream-vision.

  † This book did not appear until 1964, the year after Lewis’s death, but the lecture-series upon which it was based was in existence by 1934 (see Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. W. H. Lewis [and Christopher Derrick]; rev. ed. 1988 ed. Fr. Walter Hooper, page 309, and also The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper, volume II [2004], page 141). Tolkien had sounded out Allen & Unwin about its publication as early as 1936 and they expressed an interest, although in the event Lewis demurred, apparently feeling it would reduce the appeal of his lectures if the material was readily available in print (Susan Dagnall to JRRT, letter of 10th December, 1936; Allen & Unwin Archives).

  24 ‘Leaf by Niggle’, that enigmatic little tale, might also have originated in a dream, as Tolkien says he ‘woke one morning with it in my head’ (JRRT to Jane Neave, 8–9th Sept 1962; Letters p. 320); he uses virtually identical language in the preface to Tree and Leaf and in a 1945 letter to Stanley Unwin (Letters p. 113).

  Chapter V Gollum

  1 In its final, revised form it has been reprinted several times independently of the book (for example, in Boyer and Zahorski’s 1977 anthology The Fantastic Imagination); see Hammond, Descriptive Bibliography, page 23, and Åke Jönsson, En Tolkienbibliografi 1911–1980; Verk av och om J. R. R. Tolkien [1984], pages 15–16.

  2 According to Hammond (pp. 4, 15, 16, 18, 21, and 26), the first printing (September 1937) was only 1500 copies, followed three months later by a second of 2300 copies (423 of which were destroyed in a warehouse fire during the Blitz) and a third of 1500 printed simultaneously with a Children’s Book Club edition of 3000 more (both late 1942/early 1943). The fourth printing (1946–7), the last to use the original text, was of 4000 copies. Finally, the first American edition of March 1938 accounts for another 5000 copies, for a grand total of 17,300, less the 423 destroyed before distribution, for an actual total of 16,877 books – a mere fraction compared with the 35,000 copies of the first paperback edition (Puffin, 1961), not to mention the vast numbers of the Ballantine, Allen & Unwin, Houghton Mifflin, and HarperCollins editions sold in the last forty years.

  3 Printed in A Tolkien Compass, ed. Jared C. Lobdell [1975], pages 9–28; this article is excerpted from Chapter III (‘The Descendant of Cain’) of Christensen’s dissertation, Beowulf and The Hobbit: Elegy into Fantasy in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Creative Technique (Univ. of Southern California, 1969).

  4 See Tolkien’s letters to Allen & Unwin and Sir Stanley Unwin of 1st August, 10th September, and 14th September 1950 (Letters pp. 141 – 142), and the section of commentary titled ‘The Fortunate Misunderstanding’ beginning on p. 761.

  5 On the face of it, the former seems more probable, especially since the first typescript adds a phrase to the line about the original owners to the effect that they ‘were still there in odd corners, slinking and nosing about’ – a description that seems very aptly to fit Gollum, silent throttler of any solitary goblins he catches ‘while he was prowling about’. On the other hand, Gollum’s ‘memories of long before when he lived with his grandmother in a hole in a bank by a river’ seems to hint that he belongs in the later category of post-goblin intruder. The matter is made still murkier by uncertainty over how long it has been since the goblins came into these mountains – certainly within Medwed-Beorn’s lifetime, since he bitterly resents his expulsion (cf. pp. 231–2), but we cannot rule out the possibility of his being unusually long-lived (on the analogy of the eldest of the Cave-bears in the 1932 Father Christmas letter, whom Father Christmas ‘had not seen for centuries’; cf. the commentary to Chapter VII). In short, the narrator’s words seem to sum up the original Gollum best: we don’t know ‘who or what he was’.

  6 This detail is actually a bit of archaic science: Euclid and Ptolemy believed that light rays emanate from the eyes, and it was not until well into the Middle Ages that Ibn al-Haitham (c.965–1039, known in the West as ‘Alhazen’), an Arabic scientist who specialized in optics, proved that we see by means of light reaching our eyes from luminous objects (The Key to ‘The Name of the Rose’ by Haft, White, & White [1987], page 40). Janice Coulter (private communication) raises the question of how could Gollum sneak up on prey when his ‘lamp-like’ eyes shone in the dark; the answer must be that the ring hid this projected light as well.

  7 Engels sent a large (26? inches wide by 21 inches tall) illustrated letter to Tolkien on 1st November 1946; his Gollum-in-the-boat is huge, bloated, almost troll-sized (literally, since the other scene in the letter is of Bilbo and the trolls). Eventually a German translation, with illustrations by Engels, did appear in 1957; once again he depicted Gollum as large and rubbery, many times Bilbo’s size, with beams radiating from his eyes. Engels’ illustrations were removed from the revised 1971 German translation, but the original poster-sized letter can be seen on display in the Marquette Archives and is reproduced in The Annotated Hobbit as Plate Six (bottom).

  8 The best description of Gollum as he appears in The Lord of the Rings comes in an unpublished commentary Tolkien made regarding Pauline Baynes’ depiction of vari
ous characters from The Lord of the Rings in the headpiece and tailpiece to her 1970 ‘Map of Middle-earth’. While Tolkien’s fondness for Baynes’ earlier work on Farmer Giles of Ham [1949] had resulted in her being chosen to illustrate both The Adventures of Tom Bombadil [1962] and Smith of Wootton Major [1967], as well as providing the covers for The Tolkien Reader [1966] and the first paper-back edition of The Hobbit (the Puffin edition of 1961, notorious for its ‘correction’ of dwarves to dwarfs, although elves remained), he disliked this piece so much that he wrote an essay critiquing her attempt in which he describes each member of the Fellowship of the Ring as he pictured them – an invaluable aid to any future illustrator of his work. In this he dismissed her Gollum as reminiscent of ‘the Michelin tyre man’ and included the following description of Gollum as he ultimately came to envision him:

  Gollum was according to Gandalf one of a riverside hobbit people – and therefore in origin a member of a small variety of the human race, although he had become deformed during his long inhabiting of the dark lake. His long hands are therefore more or less right.* [*Not his feet. They are exaggerated. They are described as webby (Hobbit 88), like a swan’s (I. 398), but had prehensile toes (II 219).] But he was very thin – in The L.R. emaciated, not plump and rubbery; he had for his size a large head and a long thin neck, very large eyes (protuberant), and thin lank hair . . . He is often said to be dark or black (II 219, 220 where he was in moonlight).

  Gollum was never naked. He had a pocket . . . He evidently had black garments in II 219 & eagle passage II 253: like ‘the famished skeleton of some child of Men, its ragged garment still clinging to it, its long arms and legs almost bone-white and bone-thin.’

  His skin was white, no doubt with a pallor increased by dwelling long in the dark, and later by hunger. He remained a human being, not an animal or a mere bogey, even if deformed in mind and body: an object of disgust, but also of pity – to the deep-sighted, such as Frodo had become. There is no need to wonder how he came by clothes or replaced them: any consideration of the tale will show that he had plenty of opportunities by theft, or charity (as of the Wood-elves), throughout his life.

  —Bodleian, Department of Western Manuscripts,

  Tolkien Papers, A61 fols 1–31.

  9 Most of these additions occur in the first typescript – i.e., the next stage of composition. Thus, the ‘eggs’ of the draft becomes ‘eggses’, ‘just one more question to guess, yes, yes’ becomes ‘Jusst one more quesstion to guess, yes, yess’, and the first mention of ‘precious’ is strung out to ‘preciousss’. Other details were added to the printer’s proofs (‘It’s got to ask uss a quesstion, my precious, yes, yess, yesss.’). With very few exceptions, the text achieved in the proofs has remained unchanged, at least so far as Gollum’s conversational peculiarities are concerned, ever since.

  10 I.e., two of Gollum’s references to Bilbo as ‘he’ rather than ‘it’ (‘What iss he, my precious?’ and ‘What’s he got in his handses?’ – cf. DAA.120) and Gollum’s reference to himself as ‘ye’ rather than ‘we’ (‘Praps ye sits here and chats with it a bitsy, my preciouss.’). This latter was unfortunately changed in the fifth edition of 1995 from ‘ye’ to ‘we’ in the interests of consistency, despite the lack of manuscript authority; the two references to Bilbo as ‘he’, however, remain.

  11 This extremely effective and rather impressive performance of the revised text, made at George Sayer’s home in 1952 on an early home tape-recorder, was released by Caedmon Records in 1975 as J. R. R. Tolkien reads and sings his The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring (Caedmon TC 1477) and is currently available from Harper Audio as part of the ‘J. R. R. Tolkien Audio Collection’.

  12 Anderson’s date derives from Tolkien himself having written ‘1928’ on one of the typescripts of another of the Bimble poems, which Carpenter seems to have misread as ‘1920’.

  13 This interview on Radio Blackburn was broadcast in December 1975. I am grateful to Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull for drawing this recording to my attention and playing a tape of it for me, and to Gary Hunnewell for helping me locate a transcription.

  14 My attention was drawn to Vafthrúthnismál and its probable influence on this chapter, as well as to a possible parallel in the Kalevala, by Dr. Tim Machan’s presentation at the 1987 Marquette Tolkien Conference, ‘Vafthrúthnismal, the Kalevala and “Riddles in the Dark”’. I am grateful to Dr. Machan for providing me with a copy of his unpublished paper. For more on the wisdom-challenge genre, see the introduction to his edition of Vafthrúthnismal (Durham Medieval Texts, Number 6 [1988]), especially pages 23–6.

  15 So called to distinguish it from a shorter, unrelated, poem on the same subject. Both the original Old English text and a Modern English translation can be found in T. A. Shippey’s Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English [1976], pages 86–103. See also Shippey’s brief discussion of this work in The Road to Middle-earth [1982], page 112; rev. ed [2003], page 133. Note however that the Old English poem is less a ‘riddle-contest’ than a justification, via questions and answers, of God’s wisdom in ordering the world as it is; it ends with Saturn (portrayed here as a Chaldean wizard rather than a Grecian Titan) laughing with delight at his defeat – a startling contrast to the grim endings of most of the other contests discussed in this section.

  16 For an excellent discussion of this scene, and its affinities to other Norse lore, see the section entitled ‘The Riddles of Gestumblindi’ in Christopher Tolkien’s introduction to his edition and translation of The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise [1960], pages xviii–xxi. The scene itself occupies pages 31–44 of the same edition, with additional riddles from one of the manuscripts given in an Appendix (pages 80–82).

  17 This was almost certainly An Inheritance of Poetry, collected and arranged by Gladys L. Adshead and Annis Duff (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948); cf. Åke Jönsson, En Tolkienbibliografi, see p. 185, pages 15 & 14.

  18 Quite aside from the riddles, Tolkien was much influenced by nursery rhymes. While at Leeds he translated ‘Who Killed Cock Robin’ and ‘I Love Sixpence’ into Old English (as ‘Ruddoc Hana’ and ‘Syx Mynet’, respectively) and wrote new lyrics set to the tunes of several more well-known nursery rhymes: ‘From One to Five’ (to the tune of ‘Three Wise Men of Gotham’), ‘The Root of the Boot’ (better known today as the troll song – see p. 101 – to ‘The Fox Went Out’), ‘“Lit” and “Lang”’ (to ‘Polly Put the Kettle On’), and ‘Éadig Béo þu!’ (to ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’). All these were published years later in A. H. Smith’s edition of Songs for the Philologists (University College London, 1936). Much earlier, as far back as March 1915 (cf. Christopher Tolkien’s commentary in BLT I.202), Tolkien had expanded the little nursery rhyme ‘The Man in the Moon’ (The man in the moon/Came tumbling down/And ask’d his way to Norwich./He went by the south,/And burnt his mouth,/With supping cold plum porridge’† ) into an 80-line piece (reprinted in BLT I.204–6) later revised into a 96-line version for The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (ATB poem #6, pages 34–[38]). Similarly, he took ‘Hey Diddle, Diddle,/The Cat and the Fiddle,/The Cow jump’d over the Moon;/The little Dog laughed/To see such Craft,†† /And the Dish ran away with the Spoon.’ – called by the Opies ‘Probably the best-known nonsense verse in the language’; they go on to note that ‘a considerable amount of nonsense has been written about it’ – and created a 60-line poem around it that encompassed and incorporated the existing poem and ‘explained’ all its curious references. In fact, Tolkien’s original title for his version was ‘The Cat and the Fiddle, or A Nursery Rhyme Undone and its Scandalous Secret Unlocked’ (HME VI.145–7). First published in 1923, this poem was later revised and incorporated in The Lord of the Rings (Chapter IX, ‘At the Sign of the Prancing Pony’; LotR.174–6) and reprinted in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (ATB poem #5, pages 31–3). Both of his man-in-the-moon poems start from familiar nursery rhyme lore and create a new poem based on it which paradoxically becomes, in the reader’s mind, the ‘los
t original’ of the nursery rhyme.

  Finally, Tolkien rewrote one seemingly innocuous little nursery rhyme to chilling effect: ‘Merrily sang the monks of Ely,/As King Canute came rowing by./“Row to the shore, knights,” said the king/“And let us hear these churchmen sing.”’††† Tolkien’s version appears at the very end of The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son [1953] as ‘Sadly they sing, the monks of Ely isle!/Row, men, row! Let us listen here a while!’, transformed from a cheerful little bit of doggerel into a funereal dirge.

  † The second line was later changed to ‘Came down too soon’ and the last line to ‘supping hot pease porridge’ – cf. Baring-Gould #79 (pp. 82–4) and Opies p. 294.

  †† Later ‘To see such sport’ or ‘To see such fun’. Cf. Baring-Gould #45, pp. 55–8.

  ††† Baring-Gould #203, p. 138. Tolkien quotes the Middle-English original of this rhyme at the end of part one of The Homecoming: ‘Merie sungen ðe muneches binnen Ely,/ða Cnut ching reu ðerby./“Roweð, cnites, noer the land/and here we ther muneches saeng.”’

  19 The following chart of the ten riddles is provided for ease of comparison:

  1st: mountain (Gollum).

  2nd: teeth (Bilbo).

  3rd: wind (Gollum).

  4th: daisy (Bilbo).

  5th: dark (Gollum).

  6th: egg (Bilbo).

  7th: fish (Gollum).

  8th: no-legs (Bilbo).

  9th: time (Gollum).

  10th: ring (Bilbo).

  20 ‘What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?’ The answer, as Sophocles knew, is a man, who crawls as an infant, walks upright as an adult, and hobbles along with a cane in old age. Note that, in keeping with the tradition of dangerous riddles, the Sphinx slays all who cannot answer her and, when foiled by Oedipus, kills herself (cf. Oedipus Rex).