The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  37 For my commentary on the probable origins of the name ‘Balin’, see pp. 23–4.

  38 Two of the most famous invisible characters contemporary with The Hobbit slightly predate Tolkien’s tale but did not become popular until after the manuscript of Mr. Baggins’ adventures had been completed, so it seems unlikely that they contributed anything to Tolkien’s portrayal of Gollum nor to Bilbo’s behavior when invisible, although they do show how the idea was in the air and could take any of a number of forms. The first of these was Thorne Smith’s Topper [1926], a story about playful ghosts whose invisible antics cause a staid, Bilbo-like character to gradually abandon his quiet dull life for a more enjoyable but less respectable existence. Smith’s work was very popular in the 1930s, but Topper only gained wide renown when it was made into a film in 1937 (starring a young Cary Grant as one of the ghosts), so successfully as to inspire a number of sequels and eventually a television series (1953ff, starring Leo G. Carroll as Mr. Topper). The closest parallel between the ghosts’ antics and Tolkien’s work is in Bingo’s pranks at Farmer Maggot’s in draft versions of The Lord of the Rings (HME VI.96–7, 290–3, & 297).

  The most famous invisible character of the 1930s, however, was The Shadow, the crimefighter who ‘had the power to cloud men’s minds, so that they could not see him’. The conjunction of invisibility and a shadow is suggestive, given the limitation of Bilbo’s ring in hiding everything but his shadow, but while The Shadow’s adventures as a pulp fiction hero began in 1929, it was not until 1937 that he gained his own radio series celebrating his exploits (with Orson Welles as Lamont Cranston, a.k.a. The Shadow, and Agnes Moorhead as his girl friday Margo Lane), so it seems unlikely that this icon of the old radio serials contributed anything to Tolkien’s work.

  Chapter VI Wargs and Eagles

  1 This Russian folktale inspired a famous musical work of the same name by Prokofiev that appeared in the same year that Tolkien submitted The Hobbit for publication [1936]; it is probably best known today through the Disney cartoon adaptation [1946].

  2 Cather has a Russian immigrant describe a scene where a sledgeful of people chased by starving wolves were saved by tossing a baby overboard, a traditional scene that has often been the subject of melodramatic paintings and prints.

  3 This historical figure, more accurately known as Gilles de Retz, was one of Joan of Arc’s lieutenants who later became notorious as one of history’s first recorded serial killers, being executed for sorcery, heresy, and the murder of children in 1440. De Retz, who may or may not have been guilty of the charges, is generally held to have been the original of the Bluebeard legend.

  4 Crockett’s La Meffraye (whose wolf-form is named Astarte) is reminiscent of the wolf-woman in MacDonald’s ‘Nycteris and Photogen’ [1882] (a story also known as ‘The Day Boy and the Night Girl’); MacDonald’s tale probably inspired Crockett’s characterization of the wolf-woman. MacDonald also wrote another story about a female werewolf, ‘The Gray Wolf’ [1871]; probably his single best short story, it depicts not an evil witch but a wistful, forlorn young woman cut off from love and normal human contact by her lycanthropy.

  5 By contrast, the wolf-attack in ‘A Journey in the Dark’ (LOTR.314–17) is much closer to Crockett’s in conception and detail. Forced by terrain to fight on the ground, the Company of the Ring see the wolves massing in a great circle beyond their defensive ring, with ‘a great dark wolf-shape . . . summoning his pack to the assault’; we get the same sudden grey wall of attackers, the desperate thrusts and stabs by the defenders (in this case, Aragorn, Boromir, Gimli, and Legolas), and the withdrawal of the wolves before dawn. Also, it is made clear that these are no ordinary wolves, as their bodies melt away with the dawn (Crockett’s ‘were-wolves’, while enchanted, left their bodies behind when killed, as did the wargs of The Hobbit).† The chief difference between the scene in The Lord of the Rings and that in The Black Douglas is in the presence of Gandalf and his use once again of magical fire to turn the tide in the heroes’ favour.

  † Otherwise Medwed could not skin one, as he does in the next chapter (cf. p. 241).

  6 As noted above (Text Note 21), Tolkien originally wrote the word as ‘weorg’ on its first occurrence on manuscript page 69, then overwrote it as ‘warg’, the form used thereafter. It is possible that I have misread the ligatures and that the original word underneath the alteration was ‘wearg’ but I do not think so; both Taum Santoski and I independently read the second vowel as ‘o’.

  7 Tolkien himself goes on to note that the word warg seemed to have caught on’ and cited its use in a science fiction story. This was Gene Wolfe’s ‘Trip, Trap’, which appeared in the hardcover anthology Orbit 2: The Best New Science Fiction of the Year, ed. Damon Knight [1967], pages 110–44. The relevant passage occurs in a conversation between an archeologist and an alien:

  . . . I got a lesson in the zoology of the planet here, for the natives had been hunting and were returning with their butchered victims. Several of their specimens looked like creatures a wise young scholar would not want to study any other way, however much one might regret their demise. I particularly remember a naked-looking animal like a saber-toothed lemur. The natives called it Gonoth-hag – the Hunting-devil. There was also what looked like a very big wild dog or wolf, a Warg, formidable looking, but not beside the Gonoth-hag.

  I am grateful to Richard West and Douglas Anderson for tracking down this reference for me.

  Tolkien’s wargs have since been disseminated to a wide audience through the medium of the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons and its hundreds of associated novels and adventures, under the variant spelling ‘worg’ (defined in the Monster Manual as evil, intelligent wolves with their own language who sometime serve as goblin-mounts). This is only one of a number of Tolkienisms in the game, joining races like elves, half-elves, dwarves (so spelled), half-orcs, and halflings (divided into three types: ‘Tallfellows’ [= Fallohides], ‘Hairfoots’ [= Harfoots], & ‘Stouts’ [= Stoors]); monsters like wraiths, wights, orcs, goblins, ‘treants’ (tree-ents), and of course dragons, and treasures such as rings of invisibility and ‘mithral’ mail.

  8 A good example is the change in the Lord of the Rings drafts from the Kingdom of Ond to Ondor to Gondor.

  9 J. R. R. Tolkien, letter to Gene Wolfe, 7th November, 1966; reproduced in Vector, the Journal of the British SF Association, #67/68, Spring 1974, page 9. I am grateful to Douglas Anderson and Richard West for helping me confirm the exact quote.

  10 Ibid. Tolkien may also have been influenced here by the bestiary tradition, which portrayed the wolf as an emblem of the devil; cf. this passage from a twelfth-century bestiary: ‘The devil bears the similitude of a wolf: he who is always looking over the human race with his evil eye, and darkly prowling round the sheepfolds of the faithful so that he may afflict and ruin their souls’ (Cambridge University Library Ms. II.4.26, edited [1928] by M. R. James and translated [1954] by T. H. White as The Book of Beasts, p. 59).

  11 Cf. BLT II.33 and HME III.290–1 (lines 3754–3789). This feature is absent from the 1930 Quenta (HME IV.112–13), perhaps due to compression rather than deliberate alteration, but it appears obliquely in the published 1977 Silmarillion:

  ‘Carcharoth . . . was filled with doubt . . . Therefore . . . he denied them entry, and bade them stand . . .’

  —Silm.180; italics mine.

  12 This bit of pseudohistory was picked up by fantasy author Terry Pratchett and woven into the climax of his Discworld novel Small Gods [1992].

  13 JRRT to Amy Ronald, letter of 2nd January 1969, Letters p. 397; see also Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings [1978], page 51. The four gospel writers were commonly depicted together as a man (Matthew), a lion (Mark), a bull (Luke), and an eagle (John).

  14 Geoffrey Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. John H. Fisher [2nd edition, 1989]. All references are drawn from this excellent edition.

  15 T. H. White, The Book
of Beasts, page 107. White points out in a footnote that eagles can in fact look at the sun without blinking due to a nictitating membrane or inner eyelid (ibid.).

  16 One example is the legend of the Watching of the Hawk; if a knight can stay awake beside the bird for a set period (usually seven days and nights, but sometimes three, and in one case a single night), a lady (a fay) will appear at the end of that time and grant him whatever he wishes. Sometimes, overwhelmed by her beauty, he asks for the lady’s favors – she grants them, but such encounters always bring future disaster; the wiser ask for prosperity, a magic purse, or some other more worldly reward. This motif appears in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville [written before 1366] (Chapter 16), in William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise [1865] (‘July’ section), and in E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros [1922] (Chapter X). I am indebted to Paul Thomas’s endnotes to the 1991 edition of Eddison’s work for drawing my attention to Mandeville.

  17 ‘. . . upon Taniquetil was a great abode raised up for Manwë and a watchtower set. Thence did he speed his darting hawks and receive them on his return, and thither fared often in later days Sorontur King of Eagles whom Manwë gave much might and wisdom’ (‘The Coming of the Valar’, BLT I.73).

  Like Zeus, Manwë is both a sky-god and the king of the gods; both reign from atop a holy mountaintop (Olympus and Taniquetil, respectively) over a sometimes fractious family of gods, using great eagles as their messengers. The resemblance between the Valar and the Olympians was much greater in the earliest versions of the stories (e.g., The Book of Lost Tales), where the Valar were actually called ‘gods’ and their family relationships – e.g., who were the siblings, spouses, and children of whom – were much stronger. Later revisions made the Valar less ‘human’ and more remote, less like gods and more like angels – particularly Manwë, who is transformed from the well-intentioned but ineffectual figure of the early tales, much given to hand-wringing and lamentation, to the remote but wise viceroy of Ilúvatar in Arda.

  18 The complete Zimmerman script, with Tolkien’s annotations, is now in the Tolkien Collection at Marquette.

  19 The exception is Thorondor’s delivery of the message of banishment to Melkor, which dropped out of the story after The Book of Lost Tales; no mention is made of this episode in ‘The Sketch of the Mythology’ (cf. HME IV.16) or later texts.

  20 Christopher Tolkien notes that this detail is a later addition to the manuscript; cf. HME IV.115, note 11.

  21 This painting is included in the American 40th and 50th anniversary editions (the green and gold slipcased sets, respectively); it is also reproduced, with information of Tolkien’s art sources for the piece, in The Annotated Hobbit (plate two [top]) and in Artist & Illustrator (H-S#113).

  Chapter VII Medwed

  1 From the available evidence, one would assume this to have included romance, flirtation, and ‘girl stuff’.

  2 This is borne out in a passage appearing in the revised and extended edition of the Father Christmas Letters, where in the letter for 1928 Father Christmas says that he let the North Polar Bear pick out 11-year-old John’s present this year: ‘Polar Bear chose them; he says he knows what John likes because John likes bears’ (Letters from Father Christmas [1999], p. 40).

  3 This information comes from a letter by Joan Tolkien, Michael Tolkien’s wife, published in The Sunday Times on 10th October 1982 under the heading ‘Origin of a Tolkien Tale’. She asserts that ‘the three bears are based on the teddy bears owned by the three boys. Archie was my husband’s bear and survived until 1933.’ However, we should also note that Priscilla in turn was very fond of teddy bears as a child; the later Father Christmas letters contain several references to ‘the Bingos’, her (vast) toy bear collection, numbering at least 60 bears by 1938 – cf. the letters for 1935 (Letters from Father Christmas, p. 104), 1937 (ibid. p. 120), 1938 (p. 124), and 1939 (p. 134) – but apparently reduced to a single favorite bear later on; cf. the letters for 1941 (p. 145), 1942 (p. 150), and 1943 (the last letter, p. 154); he even receives his own message from NPB one year (‘Messige to Billy Bear from Polar Bear[.] Sorry I could not send you a really good bomb . . .’) – 1942 letter (p. 151).

  4 Note that, according to the code of conduct present in the medieval (and ancient) works to which so much of The Hobbit harkens back, Medwed’s feeding of the wanderers establishes a host/guest relationship between them; this is a point of cultural etiquette as strong as the ‘no cheating’ rule that similarly governs the Riddle-game: ‘sacred and of immense antiquity’. From that point on they are safe from the werebear, despite Bilbo’s distrust continuing for a while longer.

  5 The teddy bear is a twentieth-century phenomenon, said to have acquired its name from the nickname of the U.S. president at the time, Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt (1901–9).

  6 C. S. Lewis, ‘On Stories’, Essays Presented to Charles Williams, ed. C. S. Lewis [1947; 2nd edition, 1966], page 104. This piece is reprinted in the collection On Stories and Other Essays on Literature, ed. Walter Hooper [1982], page 18.

  Heimsókn: an attack on a home or hall, as in the murder of Gunnar Hamundarson, who held out alone defending his home against forty men and very nearly prevailed (Njal’s Saga, chapters 76–7), or the death of Njal himself, burned alive with his wife, sons, and grandson after a force of a hundred men could not overcome his sons’ defense of the family hall (Njal’s Saga chapters 127–30). The Freswœl, or Fight at Finnesburg, to which Tolkien devoted an entire lecture-series (published posthumously as Finn and Hengest [1982]), can also be seen as a heimsókn of sorts. As T.A. Shippey points out (Tolkien Studies V [2008], p. 220–21), the term survives into the modern day in Scottish legal jargon as hamesucken, ‘[t]he crime of assaulting a person in his own house or dwelling-place’ (Concise OED vol. II, p. 1246–47), and as such finds its way into John Buchan’s Castle Gay [1930]. I am grateful to Richard West and Prof. Shippey for clarifying Lewis’s terminology for me.

  7 Hrólfs Saga Kraka (Hrolf Kraki’s Saga) was written in the latter half of the fourteenth-century and is thus contemporary with the Gawain-poet and Chaucer, but the work survives only in seventeenth-century paper copies. The Bothvar Bjarki story derives from the lost Bjarkamál, which influenced not only Hrolf Kraki’s Saga but also the Bjarkarimur (a fifteenth-century Icelandic saga, now lost) and Skjödunga Saga (also lost, but not before Snorri Sturluson used two brief bits from it in his Prose Edda and a Latin summary of it had been made by Arngrím Jónsson in 1594). Some form of the story was also known to Saxo Grammaticus, who uses it in his late twelfth-century Gesta Danorum (better known as the source of the Hamlet story). And, of course, the Beowulf-poet (writing most probably in the eighth century but possibly later – the traditional dating of Beowulf having recently been challenged) knew either Bothvar’s story or (more likely) some analogue thereto.

  In short, as a once well-known tale now buried and partially lost, glimpsed today only through later versions and tantalizing references to lost manuscripts, the Bjarkamál is exactly the type of ‘asterisk-tale’ that most attracted Tolkien. And, appropriately, just as we shall never be able to read the Bjarkamál, so too we never get Medwed’s full story but must reconstruct it from such glimpses into his history as we can get.

  8 ‘Sellic Spell’ has never been published, although Tolkien did submit it for publication and have it accepted; the magazine, The Welsh Review, ceased publication before the issue that was to contain the story saw print and the editor, Tolkien’s friend Gwyn Jones (translator of both The Mabinogion and Hrolf Kraki’s Saga), who had already published Tolkien’s Breton lay (‘The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun’) in the same magazine in 1945, regretfully returned the tale to Tolkien. The manuscript of the story is now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

  For more on the Bear’s Son story, see Klaeber, Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg, third edition, pages xiiiff.

  9 Hrolf Kraki, or ‘Rolf the Beanpole’, makes an appearance in Beowulf as Hrothulf, King Hrothgar’s nephew; both Hrothgar and Hrolf K
raki belong to the Danish royal line, the Skjoldungs or Scyldingas, descendants of Scyld Scefing (‘Shield Sheafing’). Tolkien was deeply interested in the legends surrounding this royal house, and planned to devote a chapter of The Lost Road to ‘The Legend of King Sheave’. Of all the unwritten chapters, this is one of the few that actually got partially drafted, as a prose text of a few hundred words retelling the story of the infant found on a ship who becomes a great king, returning to the sea again in the end. (The same story is told of Audoin the Lombard, from whom Tolkien took the name of one of the major characters in The Lost Road.) Tolkien also recast the legend as a poem, ‘King Sheave’, which he intended to insert in the Anglo-Saxon (Ælfwine) chapter of The Lost Road; Christopher Tolkien prints the poem in HME V.87–91.

  Note that whereas in the English tradition as represented by Beowulf old King Hrothgar is remembered as the wise monarch overthrown by his treacherous nephew, in Danish tradition it is the nephew who overthrew the elderly tyrant and ushered in an all-too-brief golden age. For more on the tangled traditions concerning these historical figures, see Klaeber pp. xxxi–xxxv.

  10 The doomed couple’s names are significant: the cursed prince is Bjorn (‘Bear’) and the yeoman’s daughter Bera (‘She-Bear’); Bjarki means ‘Little Bear’ (bear-cub). Modern scholarship leans toward the theory that Bothvar Bjarki’s given name is Bjarki, with ‘Bothvar’ (‘Battle’) being a nickname given for his prowess in combat. Also, as several Tolkien scholars have pointed out, beorn (bear) is a common substitution in Old English poetry for ‘warrior’, just as wearg (wolf) is for ‘outlaw’; these probably had similar force to such usages today as referring to a woman as ‘a fox’ or a man as ‘a weasel’. That usage in poetic diction should not disguise the fact that ‘Beorn’ is simply the Old English equivalent of Bjorn, still a common Swedish name, and that ‘Bear’ has continued in use as a nickname in America at least down to as recently as the middle of the twentieth century.