The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  In any case, by drawing his attention to the phenomenon known as the hierarchy of adjectives, the chance phrase ‘green great dragon’ seems to have played a role in Tolkien’s becoming aware of the deep structure of his own language and helped him discover his vocation as a philologist. For more on hierarchy of adjectives, and why for example an adjective of colour (like ‘green’) idiomatically follows an adjective of size (like ‘great’) in English, see Jose A. Carillo’s article ‘The hierarchy of adjectives’, available online at http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2003/may/21/top–stories/20030521top16.htm.

  † It is unclear whether ‘The Story of Kullervo’ predates or postdates the Eärendel poems; the two seem to have been essentially contemporaneous, two different expressions of the same creative impulse (see Carpenter pages 71–3, BLT II.267, and John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War [2003] page 45).

  2 For more on dragons in modern fantasy, and Tolkien’s influence on the way they are depicted, see my article ‘Dragons of Legend’ in the June 1996 issue of Dragon magazine (Dragon #230). For more on dragons in children’s literature from the 1890s to the 1950s, see Christina Scull’s ‘Dragons from Andrew Lang’s retelling of Sigurd to Tolkien’s Chrysophylax’ in Leaves from the Tree: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shorter Fiction [1991]. For more on Tolkien’s borrowing from, and transformation of, dragons in Old Norse and Old English literature and lore, see Jonathan Evans’ ‘The Dragon-Lore of Middle-earth: Tolkien and Old English and Old Norse Tradition’, in J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances, ed. George Clark & Daniel Timmons [2000]. Of particular note is Evans’ observation that

  In Tolkien’s Middle-earth the dragon-lore of our own Middle Ages is analyzed into its elementary components, rationalized and reconstituted, and then reassembled to fit the larger thematic purposes of Tolkien’s grand narrative design. Tolkien treated the disjointed inferences and disparate motifs found in medieval literature as if they were the disjecta membra [i.e., scattered fragments] of a once-unified whole – that is, as if there really were a coherent underlying medieval conception of the dragon from which all scattered references drew information. This is in fact a fiction . . . an example of what Shippey has described as the reconstruction of a hypothetical . . . ‘asterisk reality’ that characterizes Tolkien’s vision and method. It is analogous to, and for Tolkien part and parcel of, comparative historical linguistic reconstruction . . . of lost . . . languages and thus lost worlds . . . The dragon-lore embedded in the medieval literature of . . . our world . . . is not coherent: it springs from sources as diverse as medieval European geography, ancient Semitic and Hellenistic cosmology and cosmogony, Roman mythology and popular legend, Latin hagiography, and Germanic legend and folklore.

  —Evans, in Clark & Timmons, pages 27–8.

  3 Tolkien seems to have had The Hobbit in mind when drafting this discussion of dragons in ‘On Fairy-Stories’, since part of what he says in the essay strongly parallels a passage in The Hobbit that goes all the way back to the Pryftan Fragment. Compare Tolkien’s words in OFS

  I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood, intruding into my relatively safe world, in which it was, for instance, possible to read stories in peace of mind, free from fear. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril. The dweller in the quiet and fertile plains may hear of the tormented hills and the unharvested sea and long for them in his heart. For the heart is hard though the body be soft. (OFS.40)

  with Bilbo’s thoughts in the Pryftan Fragment:

  . . . something Tookish awoke within him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains and the seas, the pine trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves and wear a sword instead of a walking stick. He looked out of the window. The stars were out in a dark sky above the trees. He thought of the jewels of the dwarves shining in dark caves. Then in the wood beyond the Water a flame leapt up – somebody lighting a wood fire probably – and he thought of plundering dragons lighting on his quiet hill and setting it all in flames. Then he shuddered, and quite suddenly he was plain Mr. Baggins of Bag-end Under-Hill again (page 7; cf. DAA.45–6 for the final published text).

  4 Carpenter, page 38. Carpenter’s source seems to have been Tolkien’s 1938 Christmas Dragon lecture (see Note 5 below), in which as an aside Tolkien says:

  I [added: once as a boy] found a saurian jaw myself with nasty teeth at Lyme Regis – and thought I had stumbled on a bit of petrified dragon.†

  —Ms. Tolk. A 61. fols. 98–125.

  Carpenter dates this as having occurred on a summer holiday with Father Francis after Mabel Tolkien’s death, so probably in the summer of 1905, summer 1906, or summer 1907, when Tolkien was between thirteen and fifteen years old. However, this seems rather old for literal belief in dragons, especially given Tolkien’s stated annoyance at the attempts during his childhood of condescending adults to conflate prehistoric animals with dragons (Note D, OFS.69). It seems likely, therefore, that the episode Tolkien recalls dates from an earlier unrecorded visit during his mother’s lifetime – Hammond & Scull, for example, reproduce a seaside watercolour by Tolkien which they tentatively date to 1902, when Tolkien was only ten (Artist & Illustrator, pages 11 & 13), and Judith Priestman, in the centenary Bodleian catalogue, reproduces a two-page spread from the same sketchbook entitled ‘Sea Weeds and Star Fishes’ (Life and Legend, pages 12–13). Priestman does not date the piece, but places it between items from 1896 and 1900; in any case it was clearly painted by a child, not a teen. Hammond & Scull suggest the watercolour they reproduce might have been painted at Bournemouth or Poole, which are about forty miles east of Lyme Regis; all three are on the south English coast, a little over 200 miles south of Birmingham, where Tolkien was living at the time. At any rate, Tolkien’s recollection about finding the fossil and the early watercolours taken together show that a visit to Lyme Regis during his mother’s lifetime is certainly possible.

  Lyme Regis is, incidentally, famous for its fossil finds, especially ichthyosaurs (which is probably what young JRRT found), plesiosaurs, and pterodactyls, many of which were discovered by amateur fossil-hunters in the early 1800s. For the role which actual fossils may have played in the rise of dragon-myths and legends of ‘giants in the earth’, see Simpson, British Dragons, pages 20–22.

  † A faint echo of this ‘bit of petrified dragon’ might perhaps be found in the comment, added in the First Typescript of this chapter, that Smaug ‘went back to his golden couch to sleep – and to gather new strength. He would not forget or forgive the theft, not if a thousand years turned him to smouldering stone, but he could afford to wait. Slow and silent he crept back to his lair and half closed his eyes’ (typescript page 119, Marq. 1/1/62:5; compare page 508).

  5 See Tolkien’s 16th December 1937 letter to Stanley Unwin (Letters pp. 27 & 435). Rather than a learned disquisition, this was a light-hearted slide-show for children, where Tolkien showed slides of dinosaurs† and of dragons, including his own dragon-paintings such as ‘Conversation with Smaug’ (Plate XI [top]), of which he said ‘This picture was made by my friend Mr Baggins or from his description . . . it shows a powerful lot of treasure’. Nonetheless, in the course of his lecture he makes a number of interesting points highly revealing of his personal dragon-lore. He describes the dragon as ‘a very special creature: draco fabulosus europaeus, the “European fabulous dragon”’, which he further divides into two kinds, ‘repus or creeping’ and ‘alatus or winged’; clearly, Glorund and Fafnir would belong to the former category, while Smaug is most definitely in the latter.†† In addition to alluding to several famous dragon stories, such as Thora’s dragon (from the legend of Ragnarr Shaggybreeks)††† and Thor’s encounter with the Miðgarðsormr (‘the Dragon of the Island-earth’), he observes of the dragon that ‘he is largely man-made, and therefore very dangerous’ and gives the admonition ‘If you ever come across a dragon’s egg, don�
��t encourage it.’ He describes dragons as ‘legendary creatures founded on serpent and lizard’, unlike the dinosaurs (‘No one I suppose can tell . . . how long strange obsolete creatures may have survived lurking in odd corners. But even such accidents cannot affect the fact that the Dinosaurs passed away infinitely long before the adventures of Men began’). Of Smaug in particular he says ‘A dragon made a desert. He rejoiced in destruction’ (see ‘The Desolation of the Dragon’ following Chapter XI).

  Regarding encounters with dragons, Tolkien warns that a dragon will first try to catch your eye and then get your name in order to curse you before he dies with ‘evil magic’; Smaug of course tries to do both, and Glorund succeeds on both counts, with disastrous results for the would-be dragon-slayer. Tolkien gives as a maxim that the right place to look for a dragon is in a burial mound, no doubt, basing this rule upon Beowulf’s dragon, but Chrysophylax Dives is the only dragon of his known to me who actually follows this rule. He is emphatic that dragon-slaying is a solitary art, observing that ‘It was the function of dragons to tax the skill of heroes, and still more to tax other things, especially courage [added: and fortune].’ Armies, he maintains, are no use at all, nor would modern weaponry avail: ‘. . . machine-gun bullets are usually no more troublesome to them than a cloud of gnats; armies cannot overcome them; poison gas is a sweet breath to them (they invented it); bombs are their amusement’. Instead, ‘Dragons can only be defeated by brave men – usually alone. Sometimes a faithful friend may help, but it is rare: friends have a way of deserting you when [you are faced >] a dragon comes’; this is certainly the experience of Beowulf and of Túrin. Finally, ‘Dragons are the final test of heroes’, requiring ‘luck (or grace) . . . a blessing on your hand and heart’.

  — Ms Tolkien A61 e., fols. 98–125.

  † Stegosaur, brontosaurus (‘only recently named’), pteranodon, triceratops (‘a good name for a terrible creature’), and iguanodon, among others, including one slide he called ‘two jolly dinosaurs at play’.

  †† Tolkien elsewhere notes that he is deliberately leaving out Chinese dragons, who are quite distinct from the European tradition, and symbolic dragons, such as St. George’s dragon, although he notes that the latter appears on the English money of the time (the gold sovereign).

  ††† This is the same Ragnar Lodbrok one of whose sons was named Beorn (see page 282) and whose son Ivarr the Boneless led the viking invasion of England. In brief, Thora was given a dragon’s egg or hatchling which grew up to be so fiercely protective of her that it endangered the whole area; Ragnar was the brave and clever hero who devised a scheme for challenging and defeating the dragon, thus winning her hand.

  6 Two of these cases – e.g., in the attacks on Gondolin and on the host of the Valar – have additional significance because they depict dragons acting in groups. Tolkien is almost unique among fantasy authors in showing dragons working in unison towards some goal; the great legends always depicted them as solitary beasts, and most later authors have followed suit. The only post-Tolkien modern fantasy of note to deal with dragons en masse are the ‘Dragonriders of Pern’ series by Anne McCaffrey [1968ff] and the ‘Dragonlance’ novels by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, et al. [1984ff]. Even here, the McCaffrey novels are not true fantasy but romance novels given fantasy trappings and a science-fiction rationale: later books in the series reveal that the ‘dragons’ are in fact creatures genetically engineered by space colonists to fulfill a specific role in that planetary ecosystem. By contrast, the Dragonlance novels, although describing considerable numbers of dragons over the course of the series, only very rarely depict more than one dragon at a time; scenes in which dragons interact with each other are extremely rare. As a result, in modern fantasy dragons remain pre-eminently solitary creatures.

  7 In the original [1937] version of this poem, the destruction is complete; in the version Tolkien re-wrote [circa 1961] for possible inclusion in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil the village’s sole survivor (Miss Biggins) ambushes and slays the dragon. Even this modern-day dragon is not the last of his kind, however; the final lines of the original poem describe how, having destroyed the town, he flies back to his own land of Finis-Terre (or, as Dunsany liked to call it, the World’s End):

  Far over the sea he saw the peaks

  round his own land ranging . . .

  And the moon shone through his green wings

  the night winds beating,

  And he flew back over the dappled sea

  to a green dragons’ meeting.

  It may be that in this poem Tolkien finally told the story of the ‘green great dragon’ he had begun circa 1899.

  Note that Tolkien is explicit that dragons survived the Third Age (Letters p. 177); in the account of the Last Battle that overthrew Morgoth in the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’, he is careful to include the detail that two (presumably one male and the other female, with this latter being the only female dragon to appear anywhere in Tolkien’s work) escaped the slaughter to propagate their kind (HME IV.39). In the Father Christmas Letters, he describes the modern-day dragons on the moon who cause eclipses (Letters from Father Christmas, 1927 letter), and in his 1937 Dragon Lecture he calls the moon ‘a refuge of dragons’ and showed a slide of one of the Roverandom pictures (also from 1927), describing his own white dragon (called the Great White Dragon of the Moon in Roverandom) as ‘a Saxon White Dragon that escaped from the Welsh borders† a long while ago.’ Tolkien is here probably drawing on the old tradition, most notably embodied in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso [1516], that the moon is the home of lost things and hence an appropriate retreat for mythological monsters lost from the world before modern times, such as dragons.

  † Chrysophylax’s home in Farmer Giles, we should note – cf. Letters page 130.

  8 Probably, as Paul Kocher speculated long ago (A Reader’s Guide to The Silmarillion [1980], page 271), Morgoth created dragons from balrogs – who are, after all, fire demons – by a process similar to that which created the orcs; see page 138 and the section of Morgoth’s Ring entitled ‘Myths Transformed’ (HME X). Particularly significant in this context is the description in ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ of dragon-forms ‘given hearts and spirits of blazing fire’ (BLT II.170).

  9 For another ‘prophecy’ in The Hobbit that does not come to pass, see Smaug’s dreams of being slain by Bilbo (page 507 & Text Note 17 on page 519). This example is the exact obverse of Bilbo’s sudden vision while sitting safely at home in the Shire, since at the time it was written it foretold what Tolkien expected to happen in the next chapters. When he actually came to write them the story shifted in unexpected directions, leaving the dragon’s prophetic dream symbolically significant but no longer literally true.

  10 Tolkien himself acknowledges both Smaug’s affinities to Fafnir and his distinctiveness in his 1965 radio interview with Denys Gueroult:

  DG: I suppose Smaug might be interpreted as being a sort of Fafnir, is he?

  JRRT: Oh yes, very much so. Except no, Fafnir was a human or humanoid being who took this form, whereas Smaug is just pure intelligent lizard.

  It should be noted that, unlike Sigurd’s dragon, there is never any hint in Beowulf that its nameless dragon has ever been anything other than a ‘real worm, with a bestial life and thought of his own . . . a foe more evil than any human enemy’ (Beowulf essay, pages 14–15).

  11 Christensen’s dissertation is mainly important because one section from it was revised and published separately as the article ‘Gollum’s Character Transformation in The Hobbit’, which appeared in A Tolkien Compass, ed. Jared Lobdell [1975], pages 9–28. A careful analysis of the changes Tolkien made between the first and second editions of The Hobbit (also covered in Part Four of this book), it gives the variant texts in parallel passages and remains one of the dozen or so best essays ever written on Tolkien’s work.

  For another detailed study of Beowulf’s influence on The Hobbit, see Roberta Albrecht Adams’ Gollum and Grendel as Cain’s Kinsmen (
M.A. thesis, Stetson Univ., 1978).

  12 A good example of this is the phrase ‘the lord of the rings’, which appears in William Morris’s The Tale of Beowulf (tr. Wm Morris & A. J. Wyatt, Kelmscott Press [1895], page 82) as a translation of ‘hringa fengel’ (Beowulf, line 2345b), a phrase usually translated as ‘the prince of rings’ – that is, King Beowulf himself as ‘ring-giver’ or distributor of treasure to his followers. We know Tolkien read, and disliked, Morris’s translation (cf. his slighting reference to it in passing in the draft of his Beowulf essay given in Drout, Beowulf and the Critics [2002], page 97) – not surprising, given that Tolkien had probably already read Beowulf in the original before coming to Morris’s deliberately archaic, not to say idiosyncratic, translation – and it is certainly possible that this phrase popped back into Tolkien’s mind a quarter-century later when he was casting about for a suitable title to ‘The New Hobbit’.

  13 This poem was in existence by at least 1923, when it was published in the Gryphon, a Leeds University literary magazine. A revised version appeared in The Oxford Magazine in 1937 (only a month after ‘The Dragon’s Visit’ had appeared in the same journal) and, further revised, was collected in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil [1962] as ‘The Hoard’ (poem #14); the original version can be found in The Annotated Hobbit (DAA.335–7). The original title, ‘lúmonna Gold Galdre Bewunden’ (loosely ‘The gold of men of old time was wound about with enchantment’), comes from line 3052 in Beowulf near the poem’s end. The poem’s links with Beowulf are strengthened by the fact that Tolkien included the entire poem in early drafts of his Beowulf essay (cf. Drout, Beowulf and the Critics, pages 56–8 and 199–205), along with C. S. Lewis’s ‘The Northern Dragon’,† which had obviously been inspired by Tolkien’s poem. Lewis’s poem is given the title ‘Atol inwit gæst’ [‘The Terrible Unwanted Guest’; Beowulf line 2670a] in the second draft of Tolkien’s essay (see Drout pages 110–14), but it is unclear whether this title is assigned by Tolkien or Lewis’s own. A slightly revised version is reprinted under the title ‘The Dragon Speaks’ in Poems, ed. Walter Hooper [1964], pages 92–3, but again it is unclear whether this title is Lewis’s or provided by the editor.