The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  34 See the account of the choosing of the Istari, a text probably written in the late 1950s, in Unfinished Tales (UT.393), and also Christopher Tolkien’s explanation of the name (UT.401 Note 6).

  By contrast, Rhosgobel, the name of Radagast’s home, is unambiguously Noldorin/Sindarin: rhosc (‘brown’) + gobel (‘fenced homestead’), translated by Tolkien as ‘Brownhay’ (with ‘hay’ here meaning a hedged enclosure). But this name dates from the middle stage of Tolkien’s work on The Lord of the Rings in the early 1940s, at least a decade after Radagast himself was named. See HME VII.149, 164, & 172–3, as well as ‘The Etymologies’ (HME V.385 & 380) and Salo’s Gateway pp. 390, 284, & 258.

  35 The word raba (‘dog’) does occur in one rough draft passage of Lowdham’s Report giving noun declensions, showing that at least the rada- part of the name has a parallel structure in Adûnaic, but this is far too slender to build upon and the whole name remains strikingly unlike any attested Adûnaic form in sound and orthography.

  36 One of the Celtic languages, such as Welsh or pre-invasion British, would seem a possibility because of the presence in this same chapter of Carrock, which as we have seen derives from a lost Celtic original (see p. 262). But this assimilated form seems a solitary exception; Tolkien used Celtic languages in The Lord of the Rings for the languages of non-Edainic folk such as the Bree-Men and the Dunlendings, making them inappropriate as a source for place-names and personal names from Rhovanion (Wilderland) according to his thinking at the time he wrote the sequel. There is no way to know if this rather unusual departure from the Atani/Indo-European parallels already existed in his mind when he was writing The Hobbit. It may be that he avoided using Celtic in the earlier book simply because Welsh had been such a great influence on Noldorin/Sindarin (particularly its sound-system), which he did make use of in The Hobbit.

  Old Norse is not an option here, despite the presence of Gandalf as a wizard-name in the published book, because (a) Old Norse had already been assigned to the area north-east of Mirkwood from whence the dwarves came and (b) the Bladorthin > Gandalf change postdates the creation of the name Radagast.

  37 Gast is also an alternate spelling for giest (the ancestor of modern English guest), meaning ‘stranger’. Rœd (OE: ‘counsel’) is sometimes cited as a possible element in Radagast’s name, but Tolkien’s usage elsewhere (‘Rede oft is found at the rising of the Sun’ – LotR.449) shows that had this been the case he would probably have spelled the name Redegast. But this error, if it is one, is ancient; see p. 280 for evidence that Alfred the Great identified the first element in the name as Ræd rather than Rad.

  38 The Slavic affinities of the name were first noted by Jim Allan as far back as 1978 (An Introduction to Elvish, p. 175). The only other Slavic origin for one of Tolkien’s names suggested there is variag (the Variags of Khand; LotR.879), the Russian name for the Varangian Guard, the Viking bodyguards of the Emperor of Constantinople (An Introduction to Elvish, pp. 174–5).

  I am grateful to Carl Hostetter for drawing my attention both to Grimm’s work on this topic (personal communication, Hostetter to Rateliff, 23rd February 2000) and also to a long, learned, informative, and inconclusive on-line discussion about the possible Slavic antecedents of the name (TolkLang list, July 1996).

  39 Some have seen Radagast’s acting as a messenger as evidence that Tolkien accepted Grimm’s identification of Radegast with Mercury, the messenger of the gods. However, against this must be set Gandalf’s assertion that ‘you were never a traveller’ (LotR.274), which would seem to discount the identification.

  40 This statue was created by sculptor Albin Polasek in Prague in 1929; an image of it can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Radegastgod.jpg. In style it was no doubt inspired by the multifaced statues unearthed by antiquarians and archeologists (e.g., cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:SwiatowidZbrucz.jpg). Rev. H. H. Milman, in his notes to an 1845 annotated edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, mentions the discovery of one such statue, identified as ‘[a] statue of Radegast’, between 1760 and 1770 ‘on the supposed site of Rhetra’.

  Another modern use of the name in an unusual context, for the hapless teacher in Mr. Radagast Makes an Unexpected Journey, a children’s book by Sharon Nastick (Thomas Y. Crowell: Weekly Reader Books, 1981), clearly derives not from Slavic lore but borrows the name from Tolkien, although it does not resemble Tolkien’s work in any other respect.

  41 Indeed, Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology, which pulls together all that could be recovered of pre-medieval Germanic folklore and beliefs, is precisely the kind of thing Tolkien wished had been possible for the English, as he explained in his Letter to Waldman (Letters p. 143ff). Unfortunately the English folklorists started too late; his subcreated legendarium was a replacement for what had been forever lost. See Tolkien’s little poem in a late [1969] letter comically claiming to be Grimm’s heir:

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  had a cat called Grimalkin:

  once a familiar of Herr Grimm,

  now he spoke the law to him.

  —JRRT to Amy Ronald, 2nd. January 1969; Letters p. 398.

  For a serious and convincing argument that Tolkien, for his achievements in fairy-tale/fantasy, (reconstructed) mythology, and language, indeed deserves more than any other to be considered Jacob Grimm’s modern-day successor, see Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth.

  42 For example, J. S. Cardale’s 1829 translation into modern English of Alfred the Great’s Old English version of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy [King Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon Version of Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae] opens with the following:

  At the time when the Goths of the country of Scythia made war against the empire of the Romans, and, with their kings, who were called Rhadagast and Alaric, sacked the Roman city, and reduced to subjection all the kingdom of Italy . . .

  This passage does not appear in Boethius’s original Latin text. The form ‘Rhadagast’ also appears in a note in Chapter XXX of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [1776–1788], which connects the name to the Slavic Radegast:

  The name of Rhadagast was that of a local deity of the Obotrites† (in Mecklenburg). A hero might naturally assume the appellation of his tutelar god; but it is not probable that the Barbarians should worship an unsuccessful hero. See Mascou, Hist. of the Germans, viii.14.

  † [Editor’s Note: The Obotrites were one of the Slavic peoples known as the Wends.]

  Gibbon’s source was Johann Jakob Mascov’s Geschichte der Teutschen bis zu Anfang der Franckischen Monarchie, translated into English by Thomas Lediard as History of the Ancient Germans [1737]. Mascov’s sources were no doubt the original chronicles by Adam of Bremen and Helmold, but I have been unable to confirm whether Mascov was the first to make the Radagaisus/Radegast connection or if some still earlier scholar had anticipated him in this.

  I am grateful to David Salo for drawing my attention to Radagast’s Gothic antecedents, for providing me with a photocopy of the relevant passage from Cardale’s text, and for demonstrating how the intrusive ‘h’ in Rhadagast is an eighteenth-/nineteenth-century error – albeit one repeated by as august an authority as the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, which uses the form Rhadgast under its entry for Gota [Goth]; 1898 edition p. 486 (personal communication, Salo to Rateliff, 10th December 1998).

  43 It is reprinted, with a translation, in Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth; Rhona Beare’s earlier excellent translation unfortunately remains unpublished. Shippey points out that this is ‘[t]he only extant Gothic poem’ (ibid., rev. ed. [2003] p. 26), but this is not quite true, since Songs for the Philologists also includes a Gothic translation by E. V. Gordon of the drinking ditty ‘When I’m Dead’ (Songs for the Philologists p. 26), dissatisfaction with which prompted Tolkien to create his own version (still unpublished). See also Arden Smith’s essay ‘Tolkienian Gothic’ in the Blackwelder festschrift (The Lord of the Rings 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelde
r, ed. Hammond & Scull [2006]), pages 267–81.

  44 See the examples cited in Sandra Ballif Straubhaar’s ‘Myth, Late Roman History, and Multiculturalism in Tolkien’s Middle-earth’, esp. pages 104–5 & 108–9, in Tolkien and the Invention of Myth, ed. Jane Chance [2004].

  45 For a historical account less highly coloured than Isidore’s or Gibbon’s, see Herwig Wolfram’s History of the Goths, tr. Th. J. Dunlap [1988], especially pages 168–70. Unlike the pagan Radagaisus, the somewhat more successful Visigoth leader Alaric was Christian; by ‘heretic’ Isidore simply means that Alaric was an Arian (like most Goths) rather than a Trinitarian.

  46 Fortinbras is familiar with all readers of Hamlet as one of the few characters actually still alive at the end of the play, the Norwegian prince who succeeds to the throne of Denmark after Hamlet’s death. Odovacar (also known as Odoacer) is the Germanic chieftain who deposed the last emperor of Rome in 476 AD, marking the official end of the Roman Empire in the west. Sigismond (Sigismund, d. 523) was one of the last kings of the Burgundians, whose line plays such a large role in the Sigurd story, before their kingdom was destroyed by the Merovingians.

  47 A more famous example of a non-German name of the era preserved only in a Germanic language is Attila, which is Gothic for ‘Little Father’ (i.e., ‘Daddy’); the great Hun leader’s original (probably similar) name in his own language is lost. For the appeal of such chance historical survivals to Tolkien, see Letters pp. 264 & 447.

  48 Again I am grateful to David Salo for the probable Gothic form of Radagaisus’ name.

  Chapter VIII Mirkwood

  1 This would occur about five years later, in The Lost Road and ‘The Fall of Númenor’ [both circa 1936].

  2 For another example, compare Gandalf the Grey’s statement that

  There are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world. (LotR.327)

  and also Gandalf the White’s eyewitness account regarding the Things that lurk below the Mines of Moria:

  Far, far below the deepest delvings of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he. (LotR.523)

  3 Compare ‘The Theft of Melko and the Darkening of Valinor’ [circa 1919?], BLT I, especially pages 151–4; the narrative poem fragment ‘The Flight of the Noldoli from Valinor’ [mid-1920s], HME III.132; the ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ [1926], HME IV.16–17; the 1930 Quenta, HME IV.91–3; the ‘(Earliest) Annals of Valinor’ [early 1930s], HME IV.265–6; the ‘(Later) Annals of Valinor’ [mid/late-1930s], HME V.114; the Quenta Silmarillion [1937], HME V.230–33; ‘The Annals of Aman’ [?1951], HME X.97–101 & 108–9; and the Later Quenta Silmarillion [late 1950s], HME X.190, 284–9, & 295–7.

  For the ‘definitive’ version, see Chapter 8: ‘Of the Darkening of Valinor’ and the beginning of Chapter 9: ‘Of the Flight of the Noldor’, pages 73–7 and 80–81 of the published Silmarillion [1977].

  4 fairy: that is, elf. See the passage in The Bladorthin Typescript about how ‘one of the Tooks took a fairy wife’ and my commentary, p. 59.

  5 Perhaps significantly, spiders are absent from ‘Goblin Feet’, despite the presence there of bats (‘flittermice’), beetles, glow-worms, and ‘golden honey-flies’ (which I take to be bees rather than butterflies), not to mention leprechauns, gnomes, fairies, goblins, and coney-rabbits. Cf. Oxford Poetry 1915 pp. 64–5.

  6 Elsewhere another prophecy is given stating that Melko will destroy the Door of Night while the Sunship is Outside, Urwendi will be lost beyond recall, and Fionwë, the son of Manwë and Varda (the figure who later evolved into Ëonwë, Manwe’s herald) destroys Melko to avenge the Sunmaiden. (‘The Hiding of Valinor’; BLT I.219 & 222.)

  7 The four lines I have indented here were cancelled in the original (HME VII.108 Note 18); I include them because they help flesh out this, the only blow-by-blow account we have of an epic battle in which one of Tolkien’s most elusive characters slays one of his most powerful villains.

  8 For an additional appearance outside the mythos, see Tolkien’s children’s story Roverandom [written circa 1927, published 1998]. Among Rover’s adventures are a lengthy stay with the Man-in-the-Moon, during which he discovers that the light side of the moon is populated with fifty-seven varieties of spiders (along with other remarkable fauna), who are more or less under the Man-in-the-Moon’s control, some of them ‘great grey spiders’ that spin webs from mountain to mountain and are easily large enough to catch and eat a dog. The Dark Side of the Moon, for its part, is home to a multitude of poisonous black spiders that even the pale spiders of the other side are afraid of, very like the Mirkwood Spiders (who are also large, poisonous, and sinister).

  9 There is no mention of Beren’s struggles with the spiders before his appearance in Doriath in ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’ (BLT II.11), for example, nor in the ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ (HME IV.24) or the 1930 Quenta (HME IV.109).

  10 It is perhaps noteworthy that this entire passage was praised by CSL in his commentary on ‘The Lay of Leithian’ as ‘truly worthy of the Geste’ (HME III.322).

  11 The 1937 Quenta Silmarillion text(s) for this chapter were used by Christopher Tolkien as the basis for the corresponding chapter in The Silmarillion [1977], so he did not reprint the material in the relevant History of Middle-earth volume; hence this quotation comes from the 1977 book.

  12 For a technical explanation of why spiders cannot grow significantly larger than the largest known specimen, see ‘Giant Spiders and “Mammoth” Oliphaunts’ in Henry Gee’s The Science of Middle-earth [2004] especially page 177; it’s basically a matter of biomechanics (or hydraulics). The largest real world spider is a South American tarantula, whose body is only a few (3½) inches across, although its legs fan out to add several more inches to that (a maximum of about 11 inches). While this is certainly big for a spider, it’s still tiny, smaller than all but the smallest birds and mammals, and would pose little threat to Tolkien’s dwarves or even a hobbit. The largest spider known is generally thought to have been the fossil Megarachne (‘large spider’) of the Carboniferous Period, some 345 million years ago, but recently the theory has been advanced that this may actually not be a spider at all but a sea scorpion; I am indebted to Dr. Gee for the latter information (e-mail, Rateliff to Gee and Gee to Rateliff, 17th November 2004).

  13 It might be thought that by making his spiders congregate and cooperate together Tolkien is departing from the reality, since most spiders are solitary hunters, but in point of fact communal spiders, while an exception to the norm, do exist. He is also correct in having his spiders subdue and hang up their prey: since spiders cannot eat solid food, they tend to let prey decompose a bit then drink its juices. Some of the larger spiders can indeed make a hissing noise (stridulation); cf. the ‘sort of low creaking hissing sound’ Tolkien ascribed to his creations. And although he never mentions it in his text he gets the most important fact of all right in all of his illustrations with spiders in them: eight legs (rather than an insect’s six). This level of accurate detail is not surprising, given Tolkien’s lifelong love of nature: someone who met him shortly before his death told me the conversation turned at one point to wasps, about which he proceeded to tell her an amazing amount of detailed information.

  For an example of another author’s inadvertent misdescription of spiders, see Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret [written circa 1858ff], which at one point describes the Doctor’s pet ‘great giant spider’, with its ‘six sprawling legs’ – Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret, ed. Edward H. Davidson [1954], page 52. Hawthorne also describes the spider as ‘an insect’, but in this he is correct in the usage of the time, the term arachnid not being coined by Huxley until 1869, five years after Hawthorne’s death.

  14 Note that Humphrey Carpenter, in retelling this episode in Tolkien: A Biography [1976], was careful to change ‘stung’ to ‘bit’: ‘when Ronald was beginning to walk, he stumbled on a tarantula. It bit him, and he ran in terror across the garden until the
nurse snatched him up and sucked out the poison. When he grew up he could remember a hot day and running in fear through long, dead grass, but the memory of the tarantula itself faded, and he said that the incident left him with no especial dislike of spiders. Nevertheless, in his stories he wrote more than once of monstrous spiders with venomous bites’ (Carpenter, pages 13–14).

  15 It can be argued that the Witch-King’s mount is an ‘asterisk creature’, a modern reconstruction from bits and pieces of available evidence, very much corresponding to the ‘asterisk words’ that Tolkien drew such inspiration from in his philology, or the manuscript cruxes and lacunae that seem to have been the part of medieval stories that especially sparked his imagination.

  16 I have since learned that the baboon spiders of South Africa (subfamily Harpactirince) are sometimes called ‘tarantulas’, and they do indeed closely resemble the tarantulas of South America in appearance and habits, being fellow members of the family Theraphosidae. I have been unable to confirm whether their range includes the area around Bloemfontein, or would have at the time Tolkien was living there (1892–1895).

  17 Then, to complicate matters, Tolkien’s halftone was redrawn by some anonymous American artist and this careful line drawing replaced his original in the first printing of the American edition (contrast Tolkien’s original on DAA.192 with the redrawn version on DAA.193). Finally, late in life Tolkien wrote a new title, ‘Fangorn Forest’, on his 1928 painting of Taur-na-Fuin so that it could appear in the 1974 Tolkien calendar as an illustration of Merry and Pippin in Fangorn. He did not, however, change the picture itself.

  18 I am indebted for information about the purple emperor’s dark variant to Andrew Middleton (e-mail, Rateliff to Middleton, 18th November 2004; Middleton to Rateliff, 19th November 2004), who along with Elizabeth Goodyear heads up a purple emperor conservation project: see the website www.btinternet.com/Ãmichael.goodyear/BCHM/species_files/purple_emp.htm.