The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  For a discussion of black (melanic) animals in Tolkien’s writings, see the essay ‘Melanism and Middle-earth’ by Henry Gee, posted online at http://greenbooks.theonering.net/guest/files/081104_01.html.

  19 Once again I am grateful to Andrew Middleton for this information. Mr. Middleton writes: ‘[A] spider of ordinary size or its web would probably not be able to take [a butterfly the size and strength of a Purple Emperor] . . . It would be hard to imagine how anything but a very special spider could secure an emperor around the tops of the oaks’ (e-mail, Middleton to Rateliff, 19th November 2004).

  20 Traditionally, Theseus is considered to have lived a generation or two before the Trojan War [circa 1200 BC]. Like Hercules and Jason, he was the hero of many tales, of which his adventure with the minotaur is only the most famous. No epic or coherent whole dealing with his exploits survives from Grecian times, but his story can be reconstructed from references in other tales, scenes on pottery and wall-friezes, and the like. Our main sources for the Theseus story are twofold. First, the Roman poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses [circa 8 AD] strings together vignettes drawn from myths and legends that were already old in his time, several of which feature Theseus. Second, the Roman biographer Plutarch (d. 120) wrote a biography of Theseus as one of his Parallel Lives, partnering him with Romulus (the legendary founder of Rome); this is much the longest surviving account but unfortunately also the least mythical, since Plutarch attempts to explain away or rationalize most of the fantastic elements.

  For another indication of Tolkien’s familiarity with the Theseus legend, it is perhaps significant that he once stated the piece of fan mail that had pleased him most was a note from Mary Renault, author of two historical novels that retold the Theseus story in light of what modern archeology knew of Minoan (Cretan) and Mycenaean (Greek) cultures: The King Must Die [1958] and its sequel The Bull from the Sea [1962]. Both Tolkien and Lewis greatly admired her books, especially these two; cf. JRRT to Charlotte & Denis Plimmer, 8th February 1967, where he reports being ‘deeply engaged’ in her books, ‘especially the two about Theseus’ (Letters p. 377). Similarly, in James Dundas-Grant’s memoir of Lewis, this fellow Inkling recalls visiting CSL in the nursing home shortly before his death and listening to Lewis talk about Theseus from his hospital bed, recommending Renault’s work (C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, ed. James T. Como [1979], page 232).

  We should also not forget that the Labyrinth was very much in the public eye in the early decades of the twentieth century, especially for those like Tolkien interested in the connections between myth, prehistory, and archeology, through Sir Arthur Evans’ excavations at Knossos in Crete [1900–1940], where he claimed to have discovered the palace of King Minos and the actual passageways that inspired the Labyrinth legend. Evans brought back artifacts from these digs to Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum (of which he was the curator), which is just down the street from the Eagle and Child, the Inklings’ favorite pub.

  21 The story ends in tragedy, however: Theseus abandoned Ariadne on the first island they came to, and his father, Aegeus, killed himself when he saw the ships returning. According to the legend, Theseus had promised before leaving home to switch the ships’ black sails for white sails if he was still alive but in the event forgot to do so. Mistakenly seeing their black sails as a sign that his son had died, in his grief Aegeus leapt into the sea, which has ever since been called the Aegean.

  Theseus’s tragic homecoming is echoed in The Lord of the Rings Book V, Chapter VII: ‘The Pyre of Denethor’, where the combination of his son’s impending death and the sight in the palantír of ships with black sails coming up the Anduin spark Denethor’s suicide, just as very similar signs had King Aegeus’s in the old tale. And just as in the myth, those ships bear the new ruler, Aragorn, who will shortly be crowned the new king of the city.

  22 It is possible that Macaulay’s work was a possible source for one scene in The Hobbit; compare Macaulay’s retelling of Horatius’ heroic deed holding a bridge alone against an oncoming army, with Bard the Bowman’s final solitary stand against the dragon in Chapter XIII, including the last desperate swim after the structure each defends collapses into the water.

  23 That is, among those who appear on the scene in the present day, as opposed to now-dead figures from the past like ‘poor Belladonna’.

  24 There is one more reference to the ball of spider’s thread in the First Typescript. The last four pages of this chapter were removed and replaced with new pages at some point before the creation of the Second Typescript; the rejected sheets now make up Marq. 1/1/30:2–5 while the replacement pages complete the composite chapter 1/1/58. The rejected pages represent an intermediate stage between the manuscript text and the published version; the only section that concerns us here is a slightly rewritten account of Bilbo’s regaining the thread after freeing his companions:

  . . . and hundreds of angry spiders were goggling at them all round and about and above. But some of them [> the dwarves] had knives, and some had sticks, and all of them could get at stones; and Bilbo had his elvish dagger. So the battle began, and the spiders were held off. Indeed they soon saw that it was going to take a long time to recapture their prey.

  That was all very well, but how were the dwarves going to escape? That is just what worried Bilbo, especially when he saw that the spiders were beginning to weave their webs from tree to tree all round them again. In the end he could think of no plan except to let the dwarves into the secret of his ring, though he was rather sorry about it. As quickly as he could, in between the shouts and the whacking of sticks and the throwing of stones, he explained it all to them; and when he had got them to understand, he told them to stay where they were and keep the spiders off, while he went to look for the ball of thread, which he had laid by a tree some distance off. Then he slipped on his ring and, to the great astonishment of the dwarves, he disappeared.

  Very soon they heard the sound of ‘Lazy Lob’ and ‘Attercop!’ from among the trees. That upset the spiders very much, and helped the dwarves to press forward and attack them. In this way they drew slowly to the edge of the colony. Suddenly Bilbo reappeared again. He was carrying his ball of thread, ‘Follow me!’ he called, and off they all went after him, as fast as they could, though that was not much more than a hobble and a wobble.

  The spiders followed too, of course; but the hobbit tired himself out dashing backwards and forwards slashing at their threads, hacking at their legs and stabbing at their heads and bodies if they came too near, so that although they swelled with rage and spluttered and frothed like mad they did not succeed in stopping the dwarves from moving steadily away. It was a terrible business and seemed to take hours, but in the end following the thread Bilbo got them all back to the tree where he had his first battle with the spider in the dark. There suddenly the last of the following spiders fell back and returned disappointed to their dark colony. They did not seem to like the place where the dwarves and Bilbo had come to. Perhaps some good magic still lingered there, for of course it was at the very edge of one of the rings where the strange feasting of the elvish people had been held.

  They had escaped the spiders, but where were they, and where was their path, and where was there any food? They asked all these questions of course over and over again, as they lay miserably on the ground, too ill and exhausted to go any further . . .

  This account eliminates the comic scene of Bilbo running all around trying to back-track the random zig-zags he made while taunting the spiders and substitutes a grim battle for freedom against desperate odds. In this version, once the retreat begins Bilbo does not leave the dwarves; his vanishment is only to find the thread, which here leads them back only as far as the spot where Bilbo defeated the first spider, the scene where he regained the path on his own having vanished. A few other details, such as the spiders who sit cursing in the trees after they have escaped, have also disappeared from the story, while an important new idea has entered it: that the areas where the elves had feaste
d retain some residue of ‘good magic’, a motif that in itself helps ennoble the elves and counteract some of the sinister connotations from the Plot Notes and manuscript draft.

  25 However, it is possible that even had they reached the eastern end of the forest, further disaster still lay in wait for them; see ‘Visiting the Mewlips’ in the commentary following Plot Notes B (p. 370).

  26 It has given some readers pause that the Necromancer (Sauron) could have missed the map or, in the published book, both the map and the magic key that accompanied it, but this is no more implausible than that the elves also failed to discover the secret map Gandalf was carrying.

  27 Here I am referring to the story as it appeared in the first edition, where Bilbo uses the blade more as a light source than a weapon, rather than the recast version of the scene Tolkien sent to Allen & Unwin in 1947 which ends with Bilbo’s internal struggle over whether or not to ambush and kill Gollum in order to escape. See Part Four of this book, beginning on p. 729.

  Mirkwood Reconsidered

  1 This new emphasis on Bombur certainly makes him a more memorable character, but at the cost of making him considerably more petty; he essentially replaces Bilbo as the party’s grumbler from this point on. In the original story he could hardly have contributed anything to the spider-battle, battered and debilitated as he was after mishandling by the spiders, not to mention being on the verge of starvation (remember that Bombur has had nothing to eat or drink at this point since falling into the enchanted stream seven days before). Then too his reluctance at the Lonely Mountain to climb narrow paths high in the air is not particularly unreasonable.

  2 For more on the white deer and the invisible hunt, see ‘The Vanishing People’ in the commentary following Chapter IX.

  3 For the proverb ‘Third time pays for all’, see Text Note 3 following Chapter XII.

  4 This was clearly not an elven rope; compare the preternatural durability of Sam’s rope, a gift of the elves of Lothlórien, in Book IV of The Lord of the Rings.

  Plot Notes B

  1 Originally published in 1937 under the title ‘Knocking at the Door’. The date of composition of this poem is not known, but given the examples of two other poems Tolkien published in the same magazine that year (‘The Dragon’s Visit’ [late 1920s?] and ‘Iumonna Gold Galdre Bewunden’ [1923 or earlier]) it could have been written years before this appearance in The Oxford Magazine. This is made more probable by the fact that the poem was clearly inspired by Dunsany’s ‘The Hoard of the Gibbelins’, with perhaps some elements from ‘How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles’ as well (both in The Book of Wonder [1912]), and Dunsany’s influence on Tolkien waned after the Book of Lost Tales period. Finally, Douglas Anderson points out that on the typescript of an earlier version of the poem which seems to belong to the ‘Bimble Bay’ period (late 1920s), Tolkien long afterwards wrote ‘Ox. 1927? rev. 1937’ (DAA to JDR personal communication, 29th October 2006), thus confirming that the poem’s likeliest period of composition dates from just before Tolkien started The Hobbit.

  2 This detail does not appear in the brief accounts of Glorund’s death in the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’, the 1930 Quenta, or the ‘Annals of Beleriand’; the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion did not reach this point in the story.

  3 The name ‘Girion’ might derive from Gnomish (Sindarin) gîrin, meaning ‘bygone. old, belonging to former days. olden. former. ancient.’ (Gnomish Lexicon, Parma Eldalamberon vol. XI.38 & 39). King Long-ago would be a good-enough placeholder name for the Gem’s former owner, which in the event Tolkien wound up keeping into the published book.

  4 For example, the Arabian Nights tale of Aladdin, who removes a single precious item from a vast underground hoard that is worth more than the rest of the treasure all together.

  5 The Arkenstone thus entirely reverses its significance in the course of the story’s development, from its creation here as a handy portable share of treasure the dwarves intend to give Bilbo to carry home with him as payment for fulfilling his contract, to ultimately being the one piece of treasure in all the horde that the dwarves would never willingly part with.

  The problem of how is Bilbo to get a fair share of this vast treasure home again seems to have first occurred to Tolkien in the last paragraph of page 1 of Plot Notes B, with the parenthetical exclamation about ‘how to get the stuff back . . . !’, inspired by the practical concerns of the dwarves acquiring wagons for carrying food and supplies to the Mountain. The problem no sooner arises than it is solved, for the time being at least, by the creation of the Jem of Girion on page 4 of these same Plot Notes.

  6 In specific, the description of how Bilbo, after his return to his home, ‘Puts Gem in a safe but looks at it every day’ sounds remarkably like Gollum and his ring on his little island. See Plot Notes C, p. 496, for more on the Gem’s allure.

  7 For unbowdlerized texts of these two folk tales, the best known to derive from native English tradition and not foreign sources such as Perrault, Andersen, or Grimm, see Iona & Peter Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales [1974], pages 47–65 and 162–74. Tolkien’s reference in his Letter to Waldman grieving that all that had survived of the native English mythology was ‘impoverished chap-book stuff’ (Letters p. 144) is probably a direct reference to these two stories, the oldest surviving versions of which appeared in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century chapbooks.

  8 Note that Tolkien developed this idea at greater length in the 1947 Hobbit, where Bilbo, even in immediate peril of his life, concludes it would be wrong to stab his enemy from ambush; see p. 738.

  9 For more on Tolkien’s evolving ideas regarding this great battle, and just which armies would take part in it, see the commentary on ‘The Battle of Five Armies’ on p. 713ff following the Third Phase text.

  Chapter IX In the Halls of the Elvenking

  1 While a few of the other Tales start from non-elven (human) perspectives, they quickly shift to elven settings early in the story; see, for example, ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ and ‘Turambar and the Foalókë’ in The Book of Lost Tales (I do not use the example of ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’, which would otherwise fit this pattern, since in the earliest surviving version of this story, in The Book of Lost Tales, Beren is an elf). In The Lays of Beleriand, the same pattern holds: in ‘The Children of Húrin’ Túrin reaches Doriath by the middle of the first canto, while ‘The Lay of Leithian’ devotes its first canto to Thingol the elvenking, the second to Beren and Barahir the human outlaws, and the third to bringing the human and elven halves of the story together.

  2 To give one famous example, in 1895, when Tolkien was three years old, a woman was burned to death by her husband in the belief she was a changeling and that, by abusing the substitute, he could force the fairies to bring back his real wife. After burying the corpse he spent the next several nights waiting at the crossroads for the fairies to ride by, hoping to seize and reclaim his wife from among them. His behavior, which horrified the nation and led to a famous murder trial in which a number of members of his wife’s family were sent to jail for aiding and abetting in his faux-exorcism, was clearly in accordance with old beliefs regarding humans carried off by the elves reflected in stories recounted by Walter Scott, W. B. Yeats, and others, going at least as far back as the Tam Lin story [sixteenth century], if not Thomas Rhymer [thirteenth/fourteenth century] and Walter Map [twelfth century]; Briggs devotes an entire chapter to stories about humans carried off by the elves (‘Captives in Fairyland’), some of whom are rescued and some lost forever, in her book The Vanishing People [1978]. For more on the historical episode, see The Burning of Bridget Cleary by Angela Bourke [2000].

  Tolkien was probably aware of this episode, since it is alluded to in Roger Lancelyn Green’s biography of Andrew Lang (Andrew Lang: A Critical Biography [1946], page 98), which had originated as Green’s B. Litt. dissertation directed by Tolkien himself.

  3 ‘. . . I am a reader and lover of fairy-stories, but not a student of them, as Andrew Lang was.
I have not the learning, nor the still more necessary wisdom, which the subject demands.’ – OFS, Essays Presented to Charles Williams [1947], page [38]. In the revised form of the essay that appeared in Tree and Leaf [1964], this passage is changed to read ‘. . . for though I have been a lover of fairy-stories since I learned to read, and have at times thought about them, I have not studied them professionally. I have been hardly more than a wandering explorer (or trespasser) in the land, full of wonder but not of information’ (Tree and Leaf, expanded edition [1988], page [9]).

  Note that Tolkien is here comparing himself against one of the world’s top experts on fairy-stories, in a lecture-series named after that expert and intended to commemorate his achievements. Had Tolkien not already been considered something of an expert on fairy-stories himself, it seems unlikely he would have been asked to give the lecture, especially so shortly after The Hobbit’s first publication. The lecture was delivered in March 1939, but Tolkien seems to have already been at work on it as early as January–February 1938, since he promised to read ‘a paper “on” fairy stories’ to the Lovelace Society of Worcester College, Oxford at that time but since it was unfinished wound up reading them ‘The Lord of Thame’ (i.e., Farmer Giles of Ham) instead (FGH, expanded edition, page vi). This seems to indicate that he must have already received the invitation to deliver the lecture and selected its topic within months of The Hobbit’s publication, which had occurred only the preceding September [September 1937].

  4 It may be significant that Mary Wright, the wife of his tutor and mentor, Joseph Wright, published a book in 1913 – that is, during the period of the Wrights’ closest connection with JRRT, when he was visiting their home on a regular basis for his tutorials and socializing (cf. Carpenter, pages 55–6) – called Rustic Speech and Folk-lore which devoted a chapter to the survival of belief in fairy creatures such as hobs and fairies as reflected in rural dialects into modern times.