The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  5 This is less true of the elves as he developed them in The Lord of the Rings or the later revisions of the Silmarillion material; for this reason, he came to prefer ‘Eldar’ over ‘Elves’ in his very late material.

  6 For the argument that Tolkien’s Valar were directly inspired by Dun sany’s Gods of Pegana, see my dissertation, Beyond the Fields We Know: The Short Stories of Lord Dunsany (Ph.D. diss., Marquette University, [1990]).

  7 Briggs, page [7]. Her other reason for the title is the persistent legend of the elves’ withdrawal from mortal lands, or at least from contact with humans, something not at all evident in The Hobbit but very much a key feature of The Book of Lost Tales and a major background element of The Lord of the Rings.

  8 Tolkien does use the motif of the fairy dance elsewhere, in Smith of Wootton Major [written circa 1964, published 1967]:

  [H]e heard elven voices singing, and on a lawn beside a river . . . he came upon many maidens dancing. The speed and the grace and the ever-changing modes of their movements enchanted him, and he stepped forward towards their ring. Then suddenly they stood still, and a young maiden with flowing hair and kilted skirt came out to meet him . . . ‘Come! Now that you are here you shall dance with me’; and she took his hand and led him into the ring.

  There they danced together, and for a while he knew what it was to have the swiftness and the power and the joy to accompany her. For a while. But soon as it seemed they halted again . . . ‘Farewell now!’ she said. ‘Maybe we shall meet again . . .’

  —SWM, pages 31–3.

  Note the careful use of words with significant associations in fairy-lore: the sight of them enchanted him, she led him into the [faery] ring, and ‘soon as it seemed’ their dance was over, all of which the reader is free to read as much or as little significance into as he or she pleases, in accordance with Tolkien’s championing of ‘applicability’ rather than allegory (cf. his Foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings).

  9 See also Tolkien’s treatment of the enchanted forest of Lothlórien; when the Fellowship leave, they cannot agree on whether more time has passed than they thought or less (LotR.408). The best informed among those present, Legolas and Aragorn, argue that the difference was one of perception only, and this is borne out by the detailed calendar of events in Appendix B: ‘The Tale of Years’. But Tolkien’s rough drafts had reached a different conclusion, and one more in keeping with traditional folklore: ‘Whether we were in the past or the future or in a time that does not pass, I cannot say: but not I think till Silverlode bore us back to Anduin did we return to the stream of time that flows through mortal lands to the Great Sea’ (HME VII.355). See also page 286 (ibid.) for the conception of the elvenwood as a land outside of time, where travellers leave to find no time has passed in the outside world however long they remained within Lórien itself. For much more on time in Lórien, see ‘Over a Bridge of Time’, Chapter 4 in Verlyn Flieger’s A Question of Time: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie [1997].

  10 The Middle English equivalent of the phrase Tolkien translates as ‘by magic’ is ‘with fairie’ – that is, by means of faerie or elven arts. Later in the poem he translates the same phrase as ‘by fairy magic’ (line 404).

  As Douglas Anderson points out in The Annotated Hobbit (DAA. 199–200), Tolkien knew Sir Orfeo very well, having prepared his own text of the original Middle English poem [1944] and also translated the poem into modern English [before 1945, published 1975]. All my citations come from Tolkien’s translation. For a critical edition of Tolkien’s Middle English text, and a discussion of the changes Tolkien made to the original manuscript, see ‘Sir Orfeo: A Middle English Version by J. R. R. Tolkien’ by Carl Hostetter, in Tolkien Studies, Volume 1 [2004], pages 85–123.

  11 It will be noted that all of these sources are, to some degree, ‘Celtic’ – that is, while some are written in (Old) French or (Middle) English, they all derive from Breton and Welsh legend. Tom Shippey has argued, in ‘Tolkien and Iceland: The Philology of Envy’,† that in creating his Mythology for England Tolkien ‘wanted English myths, and English legends, and English fairy-stories, and these did not exist. He refused to borrow from Celtic tradition, which he regarded as alien.’ This, I think, rather overstates the case. Certainly Tolkien did not choose Celtic legends for the core of his new myth, for reasons explained in his ‘Letter to Waldman’ (Letters p. 144), but he did explicitly state that he wanted it to possess ‘the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things)’ and it could be said that any English mythology worthy of the name would have to take into account the sense of vanished peoples and the lingering remnants of the former inhabitants of the land that is so much an element of England’s history. It is true enough that one of the most fundamental core elements in Tolkien’s imagined history of the elves derives from Norse tradition as recorded in the Eddas (see ‘The Three Kindreds of the Elves’ on p. 405), yet it is also true that those elves in Middle-earth speak a language (known at various points in its history as Gnomish, Noldorin, and finally Sindarin) that drew its inspiration and soundvalues from Welsh and that Tolkien’s warrior-elves resemble not the Icelanders of the sagas but the Tuatha dé Danaan of Irish myth more closely than any other literary antecedent; the elven and human immigrations and invasions of Beleriand can even be loosely paralleled to the Irish Leber Gabála Érenn (‘The Book of Invasions’ [cmp. eleventh century]) and Cath Maige Tuired (‘The Battle of Mag Tuired’; ninth/tenth century). As Verlyn Flieger says of The Book of Lost Tales, ‘It doesn’t take much to see in Tolkien’s Fairies (soon to be developed into Elves) a near-direct replication of the Irish Sidh, the fairy folk of the Celtic Otherworld’ (Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology [2005], page 136). See also Marjorie Burns’ Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth [2005] for a balanced argument on how Tolkien incorporated both Norse and Celtic elements into his mythology.

  † This excellent and informative lecture, delivered at Icelandic National University [the Sigurður Nordal Institute] in September 2002, has not yet been published but is available online at http://www.nordals.hi.is/shippey.html.

  12 Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium (‘A Courtier’s Trifles’) [c. 1181–1193 AD], edited by M. R. James [1914] and ‘Englished’ (translated) by Frederick Tupper and Marbury Bladen Ogle as Master Walter Map’s Book [1924]. While much of Map’s miscellany is made up of gossip about kings and tirades about monastic orders he disliked, among the stories he records is that of King Herla, a British king who rode on a visit to Faerie and, returning to his own land the next day, found that more than two hundred years had passed and his realm had long since been conquered by the Anglo-Saxons. When one of his men dismounted, he crumbled into dust; for centuries afterwards Herla and his rout rode unceasingly up and down the land until the apparition suddenly ceased a few decades before Map’s time (Map, pages 17–18).

  Even more striking is the story of the woman who died whose husband later discovered her dancing in the woods with the Fair Folk and managed to rescue her and carry her back home again, a story Map likes so much he tells it twice (pages 97–8 & 218). The reunited couple resume their interrupted lives together, and Map notes that the descendants of her children born after her rescue were known to his day as ‘sons of the dead woman’. The parallels to Sir Orfeo on the one hand, where Orfeo sees both the dead and the fairies together once he enters the elf-hill and reaches the fairy king’s castle:

  Then he began to gaze about,

  and saw within the walls a rout

  of folk that were thither drawn below,

  and mourned as dead, but were not so.

  — Sir Orfeo, lines 387–390

  and the Bridget Cleary case on the other (see Note 2 above), are striking, considering that a century or more separates Map and Sir Orfeo, and another six centuries separates Orfeo from the Clearys, not to mention the geographical distance between Brittany, the setting of Map’s s
tory and source of the Breton lay from which Sir Orfeo derives, and rural Ireland where the Clearys lived.

  13 In addition to the hunters, Orfeo also sometimes sees dancing (lines 297–302) and sometimes warriors riding by:

  At other times he would descry

  a mighty host, it seemed, go by,

  ten hundred knights all fair arrayed

  with many a banner proud displayed.

  Each face and mien was fierce and bold,

  each knight a drawn sword there did hold,

  and all were armed in harness fair

  and marching on he knew not where.

  — Sir Orfeo, lines 289–296.

  This latter passage may have helped inspire the marshalling of the elven army that occurs near the end of The Hobbit, first for the siege of the Lonely Mountain and then for the Battle of Five Armies. It also may account for the elusive scene in Smith of Wootton Major where Smith sees a host of elven mariners march past, while Smith himself later joins in just such a dancing scene as the Middle English poem describes when he dances with the Queen of Faery herself (see Note 8 above).

  14 In the typescript interpolation, this passage is expanded somewhat:

  Then they heard the disquieting laughter. Sometimes there was singing in the distance too. The laughter was the laughter of fair voices not of goblins, and the singing was beautiful, but it sounded eerie and strange, and they were not comforted, rather they hurried on from those parts with what strength they had left.

  — ‘The Enchanted Stream’, page [4]; emphasis mine.

  15 Indeed, Marjorie Burns goes so far as to assert that ‘the inevitable water crossing . . . divides the rest of Middle-earth from the inner core of every Elven realm’ – Perilous Realms, page 61.

  16 ‘Lord Nann and the Fairy’ (‘Aotrou Nann Hag ar Gorrigan’), Ballads and Songs of Brittany by Tom Taylor [1865], pages [8]–14; translated from Barsaz Breiz by Vicomte Hersart de la Villemarque [1846].† An alternate translation, apparently the first into English, appears in Thomas Keightley’s The Fairy Mythology, Illustrative of the Romance and Superstition of Various Countries [revised and expanded 1850 edition] as ‘Lord Nann and the Korrigan’, pages 433–436.

  † Verlyn Flieger notes that Tolkien owned a copy of the original 1846 edition of Barsaz Breiz, with his name and the date ‘1922’ inscribed in it; this two-volume set is now in the English Faculty Library at Oxford (Interrupted Music, page 154).

  17 In the original Breton lay, it is Lord Nann’s drinking of the water from her fountain that puts him in the Korrigan’s power. In Tolkien’s more complex and subtle version, Aotrou has already visited her before and gotten a magic potion from her to give his wife; she now demands repayment for that earlier draught. In a possible parallel to the enchanted stream scene in The Hobbit, it may be significant that Aotrou does not see the Korrigan until after he has dismounted and ‘laved his face in water cool’ from ‘the fountain of the fay’ (lines 288 and 284), just as the dwarves do not hear the elven hunt until after Bombur has fallen into the enchanted stream.

  18 For more on identification of the Fair Folk with the ancient dead, see Briggs, The Vanishing People, pages 31 and 37. This is only one of the many competing theories of fairy origins, both among folklore scholars and within the tales themselves (see Briggs, ‘The Origins of Fairy Beliefs and Beliefs about Fairy Origins’, Chapter 2 in The Vanishing People). Other suggestions advanced at various times are that they are gods reduced in stature after their former worshippers converted to Christianity (e.g., the Tuatha dé Danaan and the major characters in the Four Branches of the Mabinogi such as Manawydan, Aranrhod, and Rhiannon); that they are fallen angels, those who supported neither God nor Satan during Lucifer’s rebellion and so were thrown out of Heaven but not driven into Hell; that they were a folk-memory of Neanderthals or other defeated peoples, earlier inhabitants of the land living on the margins of habitable lands (cf. Tolkien’s Drúedain or woodwoses); that they are a cursed offshoot of the human race, either the children of Cain (Beowulf) or ‘the hidden children of Eve’ (Briggs, pages 30–31), &c.

  19 I base this translation upon a full rhyming translation of the poem made by Dr. Rhona Beare (unpublished), modified by comparison with Shippey’s prose translation (The Road to Middle-earth, expanded edition [2003], page 358) and my own consultation with Clark Hall’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary; any errors thus introduced are of course my own responsibility.

  20 This feature can clearly be seen in two of Tolkien’s drawings for the Elvenking’s Halls in The Hobbit, one of which he chose to include for publication in the book; see DAA.224 (the top and bottommost drawings) or H-S#120, 121 (the lintel-gate shows up particularly well in the Artist & Illustrator reproductions). Interestingly enough, this same feature can also be seen in one of his drawings for the entrance to the underground elven city of Nargothrond (H-S#57); see my commentary on pp. 408–9 on the links between the wood-elves’ dwelling and Nargothrond.

  For the intimate link between the elves and the dead, both of whom live in an ‘other’ world that is in some ways strikingly like our own and in others just as strikingly unlike, and both of whom can be perilous to deal with, see Note 18 above.

  21 The Green Children. In this, the very first tale in the section on England in Keightley’s The Fairy Mythology (pages 281–3), he recounts the story by Ralph of Coggeshall (died c. 1227) and also by William of Newbridge (died c. 1198) of two children with green skin who accidentally wandered out of their underground world into the sunlight realm of Suffolk in the time of King Stephen (reigned 1135–54). Overcome by the glaring light of the sun, they could not find their way back to their own world. For more on this unusual story, a rare case of elves intruding into and becoming trapped within the mortal world, see Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies, pages 200–201.

  22 Tolkien reveals extensive knowledge of the legends concerning the Tuatha dé Danaan and Welsh legends of the Fair Folk appearing in the Mabinogion and elsewhere in his short essay ‘The Name “Nodens”’, which appeared as a philological appendix to the archeological report published by R. E. M. Wheeler describing excavations at the Temple of Nodens in Gloucestershire [1932].

  For more on the Tuatha dé Danaan, perhaps the best account is Lady Gregory’s retelling of Cath Maige Tuired (‘The Battle of Mag Tuired’) in her book Gods and Fighting Men [1904], giving a vivid account of Nuada of the Silver Hand and Lug of the Long Arm and their battles against the Fir Bolg and Fomorians.

  23 Faerie could also be reached by sailing across the sea: cf. The Voyage of Bran [Irish, eighth century], and Tolkien’s own poems ‘Ides Ælfscýne’, ‘Imram’, and ‘The Sea-Bell’. The voyages of Eärendel the Mariner in the earliest Middle-earth poems, Eriol in The Book of Lost Tales, and the unfinished ‘Ælfwine of England’ story [circa 1920] all draw on Tolkien’s conception of an overseas Elvenhome reachable only by a chosen few.

  24 On the face of it, the Elvenking’s statement that none can escape back out through his gates seems to be contradicted by the fact that Bilbo can slip in and out undetected, but we should note that the hobbit was not ‘brought’ inside as were the dwarves but entered on his own volition. The literal truth or otherwise of his words goes untested, since the dwarves do not in the end escape through those gates but by another exit (the trapdoor over the river).

  25 This is all the more remarkable because of Tolkien’s earlier use of an enchanted drink motif (à la Rip Van Winkle) when Bombur is cast into a magical sleep after falling into (and presumably inadvertently drinking from) the dark waters of the enchanted stream. The motif of a stream bringing forgetfulness or drowsiness seems to derive more from classical mythology (the river Lethe) than folklore, but Douglas Anderson points out (DAA.198) that it also occurs in the St. Brendan legend, which Tolkien recast as ‘Imram’. In the original saint’s life, one of the many marvels Brendan and his companions encounter comes when they land on an island with a clear well. Those who drink from it fall asleep for a full day and night for
each cup of water they drank. Although this episode is not one of those Tolkien included in ‘Imram’ (which represents an extremely abbreviated version of the legend, with incidents selected for maximum effect), he would certainly have been aware of it. See ‘The Soporific Well’, part 13 in John J. O’Meara’s translation of Navigatio Sancti Brendani (‘The Voyage of St. Brendan’ [1976; rpt. 1991]), pages 32–4.

  26 The idea of hiding in barrels or crates is of course an ancient one (cf. the story of Ali Baba) that needs no specific source; even today newspapers occasionally carry the story of someone who has attempted to ship himself cross-country in a box. I have heard second-hand of one such story, a sixteenth-century account of an English traveller said to have escaped from a Turkish prison through means similar to those Bilbo employs in The Hobbit and which therefore might have inspired or influenced the episode in Tolkien’s story, but I have been unable to confirm the existence of such a story in Hakluyt’s Voyages or similar sources.

  27 For a detailed look at the rather tangled matter of light-elves, dark-elves, and black-elves in the Eddas, and how they might interrelate with the wood-elves (wudu-ælfen) known from Old English sources, see Tom Shippey’s ‘Light-elves, Dark-elves, and Others’, the lead article in Tolkien Studies Volume I [2004], pages 1–15. Tolkien has clearly taken a confused and contradictory tradition known to us only through fragmentary survivals and imposed a coherent (and, to millions of readers, wholly satisfactory) pattern of his own upon it.

  28 This passage was further revised for the replacement ending to this Ts. (1/1/58:16). In addition to many minor changes in wording, the phrase ‘different from other elves’ was replaced by ‘different from the high elves of the West, more dangerous and less wise’; ‘as well as the few elves that live in hills and mountains’ became ‘(together with their scattered relations in the hills and mountains)’; ‘to the great Fairyland of the West’ became ‘to Faerie in the West’; and finally a new sentence is added to the end of the paragraph: ‘Still elves they were and remain, and that is Good People’.