The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  † This title appears to be Drout’s, taken from the chapter of Lewis’s book in which the poem first appeared (The Pilgrim’s Regress [1933], Book Ten, Chapter VIII).

  14 Tolkien here was objecting to two sentences in the proposed blurb that compared his work to that of Lewis Carroll (‘The birth of The Hobbit recalls very strongly that of Alice in Wonderland. Here again a professor of an abstruse subject is at play’), pointing out among other things that Rev. Charles Dodgson, the mathematics lecturer who wrote under the pen name of Carroll, never reached his own rank of professor. More importantly, Tolkien maintained that ‘I do not profess an “abstruse” subject [e.g., Old English] . . . Some folk may think so, but I do not like encouraging them’. He did however concede that philology, which he called ‘my real professional bag of tricks’, might perhaps be ‘more comparable to Dodgson’s maths.’ If so, then any parallel would lie in ‘the fact that both these technical subjects in any overt form are absent’ (Letters pp. 21–2). See Note 30, pp. 64–5.

  15 Although the text of the rest of this paragraph gives a fair idea of how deeply Bilbo is moved by the sight, and hints at the enchantment that almost falls upon him (especially when compared with the dwarves’ similar but even stronger reaction to the same sight a few chapters later; cf. page 580 & DAA.295–6). Note the lack of punctuation in the original text (‘the spendour the lust the glory’) where Tolkien piles on words to suggest aspects of the irreproducible experience:

  He had heard tell and sing of dragon-hoards before, but the splendour the lust the glory of such treasure had never before come home to him. His heart was filled and pierced with the desire of dwarves – and he gazed, almost forgetting the frightful guardian, at the gold, gazed and gazed for what seemed ages, before drawn almost against his will he stole from the shadow of the door, across the floor, to the nearest edge of the mound of treasure.

  16 At the time Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, Barfield had published three books: The Silver Trumpet [1925], History in English Words [1926], and Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning [1928]. We know that Tolkien read, and was deeply impressed by, Poetic Diction, since Lewis reported to Barfield:

  You might like to know that when Tolkien dined with me the other night he said à propos of something quite different that your conception of the ancient semantic unity had modified his whole outlook and that he was always just going to say something in a lecture when your conception stopped him in time. ‘It is one of those things,’ he said ‘that when you’ve once seen it there are all sorts of things you can never say again.’

  —CSL to OB [date unknown],

  quoted in Carpenter, The Inklings [1978], page 42.

  Based on this, Verlyn Flieger has eloquently argued that Barfield was a greater influence on Tolkien than any other writer excepting perhaps the Beowulf-poet (Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World [1983, rev. ed. 2002], page xxi). This is probably overstating the case, since there seems to be no great break or change in the late 1920s in the ongoing evolution of either Tolkien’s invented languages nor in the myths expressed in the Silmarillion tradition of his legendarium (i.e., between the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ and the alliterative lays on the one hand and the 1930 Quenta, the Annals, and the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion on the other). It might be better to say that, like many other readers of Barfield, Tolkien found Barfield’s ideas challenged his preconceptions and forced him to rethink the grounds upon which he based his ideas. As a result, Tolkien’s work did not become Barfieldian but even more Tolkienesque, a process that was already a constant feature (indeed a hallmark) of the legendarium.

  As for the other two books, we know that shortly before Tolkien submitted The Hobbit to Allen & Unwin, Lewis loaned him Barfield’s little children’s story The Silver Trumpet, which Tolkien read to his children to an enthusiastic reception – so much so that, when he had finished, the younger Tolkiens are said to have protested: ‘You’re not going to give it back to Mr. Lewis, are you?’ (CSL to OB, June 28th 1936; The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. II [2004], page 198).

  By contrast, History in English Words lays out the groundwork and provides a good deal of the proofs for the ideas expressed in Poetic Diction. There is no direct evidence that Tolkien read this book, but it seems very likely; it may even have inspired the abortive Tolkien-Lewis collaboration Language and Human Nature, which Tolkien described as being ‘on “Language” (Nature, Origins, Functions)’ (Letters pp. 105 & 440); this project was first mooted in 1944 and abandoned circa 1949–50 (cf. Letters of C. S. Lewis, revised edition [1988], page 399). In any case, History in English Words certainly served as the model of Lewis’s Studies in Words [1960], a book which Tolkien greatly disliked.

  Finally, we must not forget that Tolkien actually knew Barfield, although not well. The two men had first met through their mutual friend Lewis sometime in the late 1920s, when the Barfields were living in the village of Long Crendon a few miles from Lewis’s home at the Kilns (in fact, near Thame and Worminghall, the sites where Tolkien set his Oxfordshire story, Farmer Giles of Ham), and both were founding members of the Inklings (circa 1933–34), although having by that time joined his family firm of solicitors (Barfield & Barfield) in London, Barfield could only rarely attend meetings. Tolkien particularly admired Barfield’s knack of puncturing Lewis at his most dogmatic (cf. Letters p. 103), and felt that of all the memoirs of their joint friend in Light on C.S. Lewis [1965] that ‘Barfield who knew him longest . . . gets nearest to the central point’ (Letters p. 363).

  17 One side effect of Barfield’s theory is that it counters the assumption, implicit in almost all discussions of the past, that people who lived a long time ago were somehow stupider than those of us fortunate enough to live in the present day. The phrase ‘chronological snobbery’ represents C.S. Lewis’s coinage to express this attitude and neatly encapsulates the concept he took from Barfield (cf. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life [1955], page 208).

  18 Barfield many also have contributed to the inspiration for Entish with his description in Poetic Diction of ‘the “holophrase”, or long, rambling conglomeration of sound and meaning, which is found among primitive and otherwise almost wordless peoples.’ In the same context, he also mentions ‘languages in which there are words for “gum-tree”, “wattle-tree”, etc., but none for “tree’’’ (Poetic Diction, 3rd ed. [1973], page 83). In its love of specificity over common nouns and its additive, repetitive word-building and syntax, Entish sounds very like a language of the type Barfield describes, except that Tolkien removes any pejorative sense of the language’s being ‘primitive’ (it has, after all, been preserved and presumably developed over more than seven thousand years by the time Merry and Pippin hear Treebeard and the other ents use it).

  Chapter XIII The Death of Smaug

  1 That Smaug had to be slain by a single character rather than simply perish in a hail of arrows or smash into the lake in a misjudged dive or be crushed beneath the rockfalls that Tolkien intended would partially collapse the chamber within the Lonely Mountain (cf. Plot Notes C) goes without saying. To repeat what Tolkien said in his unpublished lecture on dragons (see Note 5 following the commentary to Chapter XII), Tolkien felt that

  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. Dragons are the final test of heroes . . .

  It follows that, if a dragon is the supreme challenge for a hero, it is only fitting that a dragon face a hero as his nemesis in turn, dying in single combat in the traditionally approved manner.

  2 For example, if Gandalf re-appeared suddenly and struck the dragon dead in mid-flight, the reader would wonder why the wizard had bothered to involve the hobbit in Thorin’s quest at all, and it would make hay of all Gandalf’s earlier assertions that this is not his adventure after all (e.g., page 230).

  3 I am assuming here that the surly-voiced watchman looking a
t the lights to the north is not the same character as the watch-captain who kept such poor look-out over the main bridge to Lake Town (cf. page 438 and Text Note 10 to Chapter X), who might have been expected to show a little more interest in the return of Thror’s Heir if he himself were a descendant of Girion Lord of Dale. It seems likely that Tolkien would have clarified this point and introduced Bard into the earlier scenes in Lake Town (Chapter X) in the 1960 Hobbit, had his revisionary work reached this far into the story, paralleling his work in The Lord of the Rings drafts to insert brief appearances by or mentions of Arwen back into the earlier parts of the story before her first actual entry quite late in the story (see HME VIII.370, 386, & 425; HME IX.52, 58–9 & 66).

  Even if we were to assume that the two characters are the same, then the point still applies, though then we should say that only two pages separate the character’s sudden assumption of significance from his death.

  4 See, for example, C. S. Lewis’s comment in his review of The Hobbit, where he remarks upon ‘the curious shift’ between the earlier parts of the story and ‘the saga-like tone of the later chapters’ (TLS 2nd October 1937; reprinted in C. S. Lewis, On Stories, ed. Walter Hooper [1982], page 81). For more on Lewis’s critique, see Note 3 following the commentary on the Bladorthin Typescript.

  5 It is important that from the very first we are told that Bard is a descendant of Girion (a fact that enters in with the same sentence as his name; see page 549); this gives a new application to Bilbo’s words to Smaug about revenge and his reminder that ‘your success has made you some bitter enemies’ and a direct answer to Smaug’s rhetorical question ‘Girion lord of Dale is dead . . . and where are his sons’ sons who dare approach me?’ (page 511). Bard’s heritage as Girion’s heir gives him just as much right to revenge the Fall of Dale as Thorin would have for the destruction of Thror’s kingdom; it keeps the scales of poetic justice balanced.

  Dynasty: We know nothing about Bard’s queen and little about his son Bain, who apparently ruled after him, but we do know that his grandson Brand is the king of Dale at the time of the War of the Ring some eighty years later and dies fighting alongside King Dain Ironfoot defending the Kingdom under the Mountain against Sauron’s forces in the Battle of Dale (LotR.1116 & 1130). By King Brand’s time, the Men of Dale are known as the Bardings (LotR.245; cf. the Beornings and Eorlings and Beowulf’s Scyldings) and the Kingdom of Dale extends down to include the lands surrounding the Long Lake: ‘his realm now reaches far south and east of Esgaroth’ (ibid.). Despite Glóin’s description of him as ‘a strong king’, Brand seems to have been a less forceful personality than his progenitor, since Glóin reports at the Council of Elrond that messengers from Mordor seeking news of hobbits have come not just to Dain but ‘also to King Brand in Dale, and he is afraid. We fear that he may yield. Already war is gathering on his eastern borders’ (LotR.259) – that is, that Brand might try to appease the Dark Lord and buy peace by giving Sauron’s emissaries news of Bilbo. After Brand’s death fighting in battle alongside King Dain Ironfoot, his son Bard II becomes ‘King in Dale’, extending the dynasty into the Fourth Age (LotR.1131), partnered with Dain’s son Thorin III Stonehelm as King under the Mountain.

  6 Dailir: The word is Noldorin, Tolkien’s more developed form of ‘Gnomish’ (i.e., what during the Lord of the Rings period would be renamed ‘Sindarin’), and means ‘cleaver’ (‘Noldorin Word-lists’, Parma Eldalamberon XIII [2001], page 141). The –ir suffix here indicates a verb (daila, ‘to cleave’) transformed into an ‘agent noun’ (cf. Salo, A Gateway to Sindarin page 165), as in English pierce > Piercer, or the goblins’ names for Orcrist and Glamdring (‘Biter’ and ‘Beater’, respectively).† If we accept Dailir as parallel to the contemporary names Dairon and Daideloth, then the dai- element would probably have become dae- in later Elvish (cf. Dairon > Daeron and Daideloth > Dor Daedeloth). In any case, while Beleg’s arrow itself clearly served as a model for Bard’s arrow, its name is not an Elvish parallel to ‘Black Arrow’, which in the Noldorin of The Hobbit would have been something like Morlin or Morhlin (mor- ‘black’, as in Moria and Mordor, + lhinn ‘arrow’; cf. Parma Eldalamberon XIII page 163).

  † Note that Tolkien believed that the unknown god Nodens’ name was also of this type, derived from a verbal form and thus meaning something like The Hunter or The Catcher (‘The Name “Nodens”’ [1932], pages 135–7).

  7 This is not the only such passage in the book – cf. the Lord of the Eagles scene in Chapter VI or Gandalf/Thorin’s capture by the wood-elves – but it is by far the longest, and the only one which complicates the narrative, forcing Tolkien to choose which of the two series of events to tell first: the story of what happened to Smaug or the adventures of Bilbo and the dwarves at the Mountain in his absence. Here we see Tolkien employing the interlace narrative technique which will come to be such a feature of The Lord of the Rings, especially in Book III and the early parts of Book V of that work (cf. Richard West’s masterly article ‘The Interlace Structure of The Lord of the Rings’ in A Tolkien Compass, ed. Jared Lobdell [1975], pages 77–94). Initially Tolkien chose to follow the epic storyline, describing the dragon’s death and its effect on Bard, the wood-elves, and the folk of Lake Town and only then turning back to the Lonely Mountain; in the published book he reversed this and transposed the two respective chapters.

  8 Glorund, the only dragon described in detail in the older Silmarillion material, is of course wingless. Ancalagon the Black is the first great winged dragon, and his combination of flight, fiery breath, and draconic strength prove almost too much for the host the Valar send against Morgoth, so that he is only defeated by a similarly airborne foe, Eärendel in the flying ship Wingelot. Unfortunately, Ancalagon’s battle is only described in remote and general terms. Spenser’s archetypical dragon provides a better example, but like Chrysophylax his wing is injured early in the fight and thereafter his ability to fly plays no part in his combat. The Green Dragon in ‘The Dragon’s Visit’, Chrysophylax in his battle against the Middle Kingdom’s knights, and especially the White Dragon of the Moon in his pursuit of Roverandom all make full use of their wings; along with Smaug’s devastating attacks on the Secret Door and Lake Town, these make it clear that flying combat is very much a feature of Tolkien’s dragons.

  9 That pride is the cardinal sin in Tolkien’s ethos has been universally acknowledged among Tolkien scholars since Paul Kocher pointed it out more than thirty years ago (Master of Middle-Earth [1972]). It is perhaps less appreciated how often wrath accompanies it; the first sign of someone giving in to pride in Tolkien’s work is usually his losing his temper – cf. the scenes between Gandalf and Saruman (LotR.605–6), Sam and Sméagol (LotR.742), Frodo and Boromir (LotR.419–20), etc.

  10 This is unusual in itself, since Tolkien rarely did action shots; almost all of his illustrations to his Middle-earth works are landscapes or mood pieces, designed to help the reader more vividly visualize the places in the books. The three exceptions to this rule among his art for The Hobbit are ‘The Three Trolls are turned to Stone’ (Plate V [top]), ‘Death of Smaug’ (Plate XII [top]), and ‘The Coming of the Eagles’ (Plate XII [bottom]), of which the burning of Lake Town and the smiting of the dragon is by far the most dramatic.

  11 This unfinished painting may have been created in July 1937, when Tolkien was working to make several colour illustrations of The Hobbit for the American edition (see Note 10 following Chapter XIV on pp. 613–14). In addition to the five watercolours he submitted to Houghton Mifflin, illustrating The Hill (Hobbiton), Rivendell, the eagles’ eyrie, the barrel-ride down the Forest River, and Bilbo’s meeting with Smaug – all of which have appeared in many editions since – he also made or began colour pictures of Gandalf’s approach to and arrival at Bag-End, the trolls’ hill, four alternate depictions of Rivendell, Beorn’s Hall, the elf-hill in Mirkwood, two alternate versions of the barrel-riding scene, Smaug flying around the Lonely Mountain, the Battle of Five Armies, and Smaug’s death over Lake
Town. Some of these were essentially black and white drawings enhanced with a very effective bit of colour, such as the firelight in ‘Troll’s Hill’ (Plate IV [bottom]) and ‘Firelight in Beorn’s house’ (Plate VI [bottom]).

  12 In fact, it was the very next night, so even the crescent shown here should be far more slender.

  13 The best reproduction of this picture appears in Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien, plate 19.

  14 Similarly, he had denigrated his own art in public during his 1937 dragon lecture, when he included slides of several of his own dragon-pictures among the images he showed, saying of his charming little drawing ‘The White Dragon Pursues Roverandom & the Moondog’ (reprinted in Roverandom on plate 3, facing page 27) that ‘though a poor drawing’ it clearly showed a Saxon White Dragon, and drawing attention to ‘the world up in the sky’ (i.e., the image of Earth as seen from the moon in the upper left corner). Similarly, he said of the magnificent ‘Conversation with Smaug’ (Plate XI [top]) that ‘It is not very good – but it shows a powerful lot of treasure’. That is, in both cases the pictures included details he wanted to convey about dragons, whatever their merits (in his too-self-critical eyes) as art.

  15 For the original spelling of this river-name as Esgaduin, rather than the later Esgalduin, see Christopher Tolkien’s notes to ‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’ (the A text and pre-revision B text, HME III.81) and ‘The Lay of Leithian’ (rough workings, ibid.158). ‘Esgaduin’ is also the form of the name that appears on the First Silmarillion Map [circa 1926], reproduced in HME IV between pages 220 and 221.