21 The pasteover in Chapter XII (1/1/62:11) occurred before the creation of the Second Typescript, which faithfully reproduces the replacement text. I have been unable to read the original text beneath the pasteover.
22 The manuscript version of this passage had read simply:
and Thorin bade them eagerly to look for the Arkenstone of Thrain. ‘For that’ he said ‘is worth more than a river of gold in itself and to me yet more’ (new Ms. page 13; 1/1/17:7).
Chapter XI The Lonely Mountain
1 A heath is a wilderness of open, uncultivated, treeless, uninhabited land, typically covered by tough dwarf shrubs such as heather (which gets its name from the fact it grows on heaths) and gorse. By contrast, a similar tract of marshy land is called a moor. It may be significant that most heaths are the result of deforestation and, left to themselves, regrow as forests over time – that is, the very word contains a suggestion of a land that was not always so barren as it now appears but was reduced to its current state by an outside agency (in this case, the dragons themselves).
2 Modern translations prefer ‘great leviathan’ or ‘whale’ or even ‘crocodile’ for the Biblical creatures haunting the wilderness and the deeps, but these were understood to be dragons in Medieval tradition – cf. Leslie Kordecki’s Tradition and Development of the Medieval English Dragon (dissertation, Univ. of Toronto, 1980).
3 A scene which Tolkien twice illustrated; cf. H-S#50 & 51, both titled ‘Wudu Wyrtum Faest’, or ‘trees firm by the roots’ (taken from line 1364a). For the poet’s description of the moor, see in particular lines 1357 through 1376a.
4 See OFS, page 40: ‘. . . best of all the nameless North of Sigurd of the Völsungs, and the prince of all dragons’, i.e. Fafnir. For more on the influence of Fafnir on Tolkien’s depiction of Smaug, see the commentary following Chapter XII.
5 Although described as a ‘heath’ where ‘no man dared go near’, the Red Fairy Book version of the area surrounding Fafnir’s lair apparently includes trees, since we are told the dying dragon ‘lashed with his tail till stones broke and trees crashed about him’ (Red Fairy Book, page 360). We should probably not put too much weight on this, since Lang seems more concerned with striking images than narrative consistency. Although Lang claimed his version was ‘condensed by the Editor [i.e., Lang] from Mr. William Morris’s prose version of the “Volsunga Saga”’ (Preface, Red Fairy Book, page [vi]) – i.e., the Morris/Magnússon translation – in fact Lang draws as much from Morris’s narrative poem, Sigurd the Volsung, as the saga account; his reticence to admit this may be due to the fact that Morris was still alive at the time (not dying until six years later, in 1896) and might have objected to liberties being taken with his own poem, which fleshed out the sparse saga story in his own inimitable fashion.
Carpenter claims that Tolkien as a child thought ‘The Story of Sigurd’ ‘the best story he had ever read’ (Tolkien: A Biography, page 22), which seems to be Carpenter’s extrapolation from Tolkien’s remark in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ ranking the story (or, more accurately, the setting of the story in ‘the nameless North’) of Sigurd and Fafnir above Lewis Carroll or pirate stories, above tales of ‘Red Indians’ and their great forests, and even above stories about Merlin and Arthur (OFS.39–40, emphasis mine). See also Note 4 above.
6 A fell is any rocky or barren heights or wasteland – in short, a heath or moor at a high elevation.
7 Morris, who loved archaic English and made much use of it in his narrative poems and pseudomedieval fantasy romances, is probably using ‘desert’ here in its older sense of a deserted or depopulated region, but with echoes of its more modern application of an arid, barren countryside incapable of supporting life no doubt also present.
8 There are of course many other wastelands in Tolkien’s works, lands once fertile that have been destroyed by Morgoth’s or Sauron’s evil – not surprising, perhaps, in a man who had after all witnessed first-hand not just the scourges brought by industrialization and urbanization (‘the country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten’ – Foreword to The Lord of the Rings, page 12) but also had spent several months living next to the largest man-made desert in Europe, better known as No Man’s Land,† parts of which were still treeless and not yet arable more than fifty years later. The Lord of the Rings alone has the Brown Lands (once the Gardens of the Entwives), the Dead Marshes, and Mordor itself, not to mention regions depopulated by the forces of evil and turned into wilderness, such as Hollin (‘laid waste’ more than four thousand years before in S.A. 1697 and still desolate during the time of Frodo’s journey; cf. Book II Chapter 3: ‘The Ring Goes South’ and Appendix B ‘The Tale of Years’, LotR.1120), the Enedwaith, and most of the lands that had once made up the Kingdom of Arnor (‘Tale of Years’ entry for Third Age year 1636: ‘many parts of Eriador become desolate’; LotR.1123).
† Tolkien actually included No Man’s Land or Nomensland as a label on several of the Lord of the Rings maps in the early 1940s (see ‘The First Map’, HME VII, esp. pages 320–21). While the word vanished off the map after 1943, it appears in the text of the published book to describe the area between the Dead Marshes and the ashheaps before the Black Gate: ‘a dismal waste . . . dead peats and wide flats of dry cracked mud. The land ahead rose in long shallow slopes, barren and pitiless, towards the desert that lay at Sauron’s gate . . . the arid moors of the Noman-lands’ (LotR.656–7).
9 It is not known when Tolkien wrote the earliest of the four versions of Farmer Giles of Ham, but since the story originated as an impromptu tale told during a family picnic according to his eldest son, Fr. John Tolkien, it was certainly after 1926 when his family returned from Leeds to Oxford, especially since part of the story’s inspiration is to provide the ‘real’ explanation for Oxfordshire place-names such as Worminghall (and later Thame as well) and, I suspect, the nearby barrow known as Dragon Hoard (see Leslie Grinsell, Folklore of Prehistoric Sites in Britain [1976], pages 145 and 70). Since Tolkien was working on Roverandom from 1925–27 and The Hobbit from 1930–32/33, the most probable dates for FGH’s composition† are 1928–29 or 1933–34. And since the handwriting of the surviving pages of the Pryftan Fragment, the earliest part of The Hobbit to be set down, resembles that of the first draft of Farmer Giles, this makes it likely that Farmer Giles’ story immediately preceded Mr. Baggins’.
† That is, of the first two drafts, in which the narrator is called ‘Daddy’ and the ‘Family Jester’, respectively; the third draft, the greatly expanded version known as The Lord of Thame, was written in 1936–7 and the final version shortly before the book’s publication in 1949.
10 Christopher Tolkien notes that the word might be track instead of tract and that instead of ‘the lands were hurt and scorched’ his father might actually have written ‘. . . burnt and scorched’ (BLT II.118). In either case, Tolkien is clearly drawing here on the Fafnir story – in the saga and subsequent versions Fafnir has over the years worn a track or path through the stone between his lair and the spot where he goes to drink, and it is in this slot or groove that Sigurd digs his pit and lies in wait to stab him as he goes by:
Thou shalt find a path in the desert, and a road in the world of stone;
It is smooth and deep and hollow, but the rain hath riven it not,
And the wild wind hath not worn it, for it is Fafnir’s slot,
Whereby he wends to the water and the fathomless pool of old . . .
—Sigurd the Volsung, page 122.
By contrast, Glorund is so terrible and destructive that he carves such a path simply by moving across the landscape.
11 These parallels were present from the very first draft of Farmer Giles of Ham, although the description of the destruction around the dragon’s lair was much briefer in the original:
There was no mistaking the dragon’s tracks now. They were right in the parts where the dragon often walked or alighted from a little passage in the air. In fact all the smaller hills had a burned
look about their brown tops as if these parts had been a dragon’s playground for many an age. And so they had.
—FGH, expanded edition, page 94.
12 This name had originally appeared with a different application in The Book of Lost Tales, where it was used for a spot near Tavrobel (Great Haywood in central England), site of the disastrous last battle wherein the Elves of Tol Eressëa were utterly defeated; cf. BLT II.284 & 287.
13 This fair green plain received the name Bladorion (‘the Wide Land’) in the ‘(Earliest) Annals of Valinor’, written in 1930 or very shortly thereafter (cf. HME IV.280). This was eventually replaced (circa 1951) in ‘The Grey Annals’ and other late Silmarillion texts by Ardgalen (‘the Green Region’); cf. HME XI.113. This latter name is the one used in The Silmarillion, in the hyphenated form Ard-galen; cf. Silm.119. Ardgalen was apparently similar in terrain to Rohan, since an inverted form of the same name, Calenardhon (Calen+ardhon), was the original Gondorian name for that province (Silm.317).
14 For the inversion of Thror’s and Thrain’s names on the maps (‘the map tradition’), see the commentary following Chapter X.
15 For those unfamiliar with birds who wouldn’t know a thrush from a warbler, suffice it to say that the song thrush is about the same size as the (American) robin, a fellow thrush (T. migratorius),† and has much the same habits, except that it prefers snails to earthworms. Despite their particular association with snails, song thrushes are omnivores and also eat worms, bugs, and berries as available. I am grateful to Yvette Waters and especially Jacki Bricker for help in identifying the particular species of thrush Tolkien based his Lonely Mountain thrush upon.
† not to be confused with the English robin, which is a different bird altogether, and only about the size of a sparrow.
16. In Culhwch and Olwen, Arthur sends Gwrhyr Gwastad Ieithoedd (‘interpreter of tongues’) with Cei (Kay) and Bedwyr (Bedivere), his two most trusted companions, on this quest because Gwrhyr ‘know[s] all tongues, and can translate the language of birds and animals’:
They went forth until they came to the Blackbird of Cilgwri.
‘For God’s sake,’ said Gwrhyr, ‘do you know anything about Mabon son of Modron, who was stolen from between his mother and the wall when only three nights old?’
‘When I first came here,’ replied the Blackbird, ‘a smith’s anvil was here, and I was a young bird. No work was done on it except while my beak rested upon it each evening; today there is not so much as a nut-sized piece that isn’t worn away, and God’s revenge on me if I have heard anything of the man you want. But what is right and just for me to do for Arthur’s messengers, I will do: there is a species of animal that God shaped before me, and I will guide you there.’
—tr. Patrick Ford, The Mabinogi and other Medieval Welsh Tales [1977], page 147.
This is merely the first of five encounters with progressively older creatures – a stag, an owl, an eagle, and finally a salmon – whom the questers question in turn before finding a clue to the location of the person they seek. Both Jones & Jones [1949] and Gantz [1976] prefer ‘Ouzel’ (page 124) and ‘Ousel’ (page 164), respectively, this being an old-fashioned term (along with water ouzel) for the bird also known as the dipper.
17. JRRT to Denys Gueroult, 1965 BBC radio interview. Tolkien’s remark originally applied to the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings but is generally applicable throughout many of his works.
Plot Notes C
1 We might also include Gondolin in this tally, since Elrond says ‘dragons it was that destroyed that city many ages ago’ (page 115). I am not counting here Túrin’s ambush of Glorund, which was achieved en route before the dragon reached the woodmen’s settlement, nor Giles’ encounter with Chrysophylax on a back-road several miles from Ham; these were essentially heroic or mock-heroic single combats à la Sigurd, not cooperative defenses by beleaguered townsfolk.
2 ‘darts’: that is, arrows. The word was originally not restricted to the small darts thrown in pub games but also applied to javelins, to arrows shot from a bow, and even to projectiles from siege weapons.
3 Compare the three following passages:
• ‘Now when that mighty worm was ware that he had his death-wound, then he lashed out head and tail, so that all things soever that were before him were broken to pieces’ (Volsunga Saga, page 59).
• ‘[T]he Dragon lashed with his tail till stones broke and trees crashed about him’ (‘The Story of Sigurd’, The Red Fairy Book, page 360).
• ‘Then did that drake writhe horribly and the huge spires of his contortions were terrible to see, and all the trees he brake that stood nigh to the place of his agony’ (‘Turambar and the Foalókë’, BLT II.107).
4 Although the gruesome, grotesque, and striking episode of Bilbo floating out through the Front Gate in a golden bowl vanished from the narrative, it is interesting to note that a huge cup appears both in the text (‘the great cup of Thror’; see page 514 [= DAA.287]) and also in the colour painting ‘Conversation with Smaug’ (Plate XI [top]); these may owe something to the long-since-abandoned plot-thread.
5 In full, the passage in question (from Chapter XVIII: Of the Slaying of the Worm Fafnir) runs thusly:
Then said Regin, ‘Make thee a hole, and sit down therein, and whenas the worm comes to the water, smite him into the heart, and so do him to death, and win for thee great fame thereby.’
But Sigurd said, ‘What will betide me if I be before the blood of the worm?’
Says Regin, ‘Of what avail to counsel thee if thou art still afeard of everything? Little art thou like thy kin in stoutness of heart.’
Then Sigurd rides right over the heath; but Regin gets him gone, sore afeard.
But Sigurd fell to digging him a pit, and whiles he was at that work, there came to him an old man with a long beard, and asked what he wrought there, and he told him.
Then answered the old man† and said, ‘Thou doest after sorry counsel: rather dig thee many pits, and let the blood run therein; but sit thee down in one thereof, and so thrust the worm’s heart through.’
And therewithal he vanished away; but Sigurd made the pits even as it was shown to him.
† [Morris’s note:] i.e., Odin in one of his many guises.
—Volsunga Saga, pages 58–9.
Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung omits the detail of the many pits but does describe ‘the rushing river of blood’ (page 124) that gushes forth when Fafnir receives his death-wound. By contrast, Lang’s ‘The Story of Sigurd’ includes the many pits but with typical carelessness omits any reason for their presence (Lang, The Red Fairy Book, page 360).
6 Glorund also died far away from his great bed of gold; cf. BLT II.87–8 & 107–9 (‘Turambar and the Foalókë’) and HME IV.127 & 129–30 (the 1930 Quenta).
7 Or, to be more accurate, part of the secret tunnel, presumably including that section in which the dwarves had stored their gold. The entire tunnel could not have collapsed, because it must have been within this passage that the dwarves hide when Smaug returns and thus escape being killed in the tumult. From the detail of Smaug smashing ‘walls [of his lair] and entrance to tunnel’, it seems clear that only the lower end of the passage is collapsed, which ‘[t]he dwarves dig through’ to once more gain access to Smaug’s great chamber.
8 The odd detail of the water around Smaug’s death site ‘shivering’ perhaps relates to the idea, expressed in the description of Leviathan (the dragon in the sea) in the Book of Job chapter 41 verse 31, that dragons make the water around them boil (‘like a pot’); see Text Note 33 following the next chapter (pp. 523–4) for more on this whole passage’s possible influence on Tolkien’s description of Smaug the Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities.
9 In this version of the story, Sigurd is called ‘Siegfried’, which led to Wagner’s usage of that name in his opera-cycle The Ring of the Nibelung [1869–76]; in Beowulf (lines 874–898) the dragon-slayer is Sigemund, whom Norse tradition by contrast considered the dragon-slayer’s fat
her.
Chapter XII Conversations with Smaug
1 This would have been about 1899, the year before Tolkien began his formal education at King Edward’s School; by this time he had already been able to read and write for about three years, or since the age of four (Carpenter, page 21). Tolkien gave another account of this story a decade later in his piece ‘Tolkien on Tolkien’ printed in the October 1966 Tolkien issue of the magazine Diplomat: ‘Somewhere about six years old I tried to write some verses on a dragon about which I now remember nothing except that it contained the expression a green great dragon and that I remained puzzled for a very long time at being told that this should be great green’ (Diplomat, page 39; reprinted in Letters p. 221).
The next story we know of that Tolkien wrote after this piece of lost juvenilia, about fifteen years later [circa 1914], was ‘The Story of Kullervo’,† a William Morris-style adaptation from the Kalevala, which strongly influenced his slightly later Túrin story [circa 1919] written for The Book of Lost Tales. While the original Finnish story has no dragon, Túrin’s story featured one so prominently that it shared the title with the hero: ‘Turambar and the Foalókë’ (that is, Túrin and the Dragon).
The History of the Hobbit Page 130
