The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  Esgaroth itself first appears in the text on manuscript page 155 (see page 549); an alternate spelling, Esgaron, appears in Plot Notes D. See Text Note 11 above and Text Note 7 following Plot Notes D (page 571).

  16 The element –roth corresponds to –(th)rond ‘(fortified) cave’, the same element that we have already seen in the personal name Thranduil and the place-name Nargothrond; see page 417. ‘The Etymologies’, HME V page 384, under the root ROD- (cave), gives rondo as the Quendian (Quenya) form, rhond/rhonn as the Noldorin (Sindarin) form, and roth as the Doriathrin equivalent – that is, the form the word would take in the dialect of Ilkorin or native Middle-earth Elvish spoken in Thingol’s kingdom.

  17 ‘Ilk.’ here means Ilkorin, the language of the elves of Middle-earth who never made the Great Journey to Valinor; cf. ‘The Three Kindreds of the Elves’ on page 406.

  18 By contrast, in ‘The Etymologies’ Tolkien glossed this same word-element twice in contradictory ways, neither of which agrees with the earlier ‘Noldorin’ nor with the ESKE-/reed entry given elsewhere within ‘The Etymologies’, which certainly suggests uncertainty on his part as to the word’s meaning. First he gives it under the root EZGE- (‘rustle, noise of leaves’): ‘Q eske; Ilk. esg; cf. Esgalduin’ (HME V.357), but then this is cancelled and the word given yet a third alternate explanation under the root SKAL- (‘screen, hide [from light]’): ‘Ilk. esgal screen, hiding, roof of leaves’ with the derivative name ‘Ilk. Esgalduin “River under Veil (of leaves)”’. The Quendian form includes the meanings ‘veiled, hidden, shadowed, shady’ (HME V.386), and accordingly Salo glosses it as ‘the river of the veil’ (e.g., the Veiled River), ‘“veiled” or screened by the trees that overhung it’ (Salo, A Gateway to Sindarin, page 377). None of these meanings yields a satisfactory gloss for Lake Town, which is certainly not hidden nor overshadowed by trees and does not stand in the reedy part of the lake, as may plainly be seen by Tolkien’s various illustrations of the scene.

  Luckily, the –duin element of Esgalduin is relatively straightforward, meaning ‘river’, likewise described as an Ilkorin term in ‘The Etymologies’ (HME V.355). Its most familiar appearance is as part of the Sindarin name Anduin (‘the Great River’) in The Lord of the Rings.

  Plot Notes D

  1 Actually, more accurately the B/C/D/B sequence, since the original final page of the earliest layer was renumbered 5 > 6 when Plot Notes D was inserted into the composite document, indicating that this page was still intended to outline the conclusion.

  2 In this he is like Frodo, who in Tolkien’s opinion actually fails in his mission to destroy the Ring (cf. JRRT 1965 BBC radio interview with Denys Gueroult), but who is a hero nevertheless for having made its destruction possible. Similarly, Bilbo in the published book fails to establish an accord between King Thorin and the besieging forces, loses for a time the friendship (or at least the trust) of the dwarves, and actually finds himself joining forces with the men and elves who are there to kill his travelling companions and take Smaug’s gold by force; disaster is averted only through the unforeseen intrusion of the goblins.

  3 ‘Long will I tarry, ere I begin this war for gold . . . Let us hope still for something that will bring reconciliation’ (DAA. 338).

  4 One must, however, sympathize with his outburst that, if Thorin was indeed the heir of Thrain and Thror, ‘why did he not say so?’ The comment that ‘then he believed at last’, which presents the wood-elf king in a slightly more favorable light, however contradicts his having already accepted Thorin’s identity back near the end of Chapter XIII (‘When news of the rousing of the Dragon reached him, and of the fire upon the mountain tops, he thought that he had heard the last of Thorin Oakenshield’, and he certainly knew exactly who Thorin was since ‘he . . . had not forgotten the legend of the hoard of Thror’).

  5 In The Lord of the Rings, Elrond makes clear that the Last Alliance is so called because ‘Never again shall there be any such league of Elves and Men; for Men multiply and the Firstborn decrease, and the two kindreds are estranged’ (‘The Council of Elrond’, LotR.261). It is unclear on the surface why the alliance here in The Hobbit of men and elves fighting side-by-side against first dwarves and then wargs and goblins does not count, unless by ‘such league’ Elrond meant something grander than the relatively small armies and localized battles of the Anduin Vale or Lonely Mountain projected here. In any case, his statement reflects a later conception than that described in The Hobbit, especially so far as the projected ‘Battle of Anduin Vale’ is concerned, and can only be accepted as true if we reserve the grand title of ‘alliance’ for massive struggles between great hosts (e.g., the surviving Númenoreans and Noldor against all Sauron’s armies) resulting in the end of an Age of the world. Here again we see The Hobbit closer in conception to similar battles described in the early Silmarillion material than either is to The Lord of the Rings and the later Silmarillion material.

  6 Although, strictly speaking, Thorin may just have been wanting to honor the letter as well as the spirit of the contract: ‘one fourteenth share of total profits (if any)’ and been willing to count the sacrifice of the Gem of Girion as a necessary ‘expense’ in achieving their goal. Even so, this reinforces the point that he shows no signs of contracting the dragon-sickness anywhere in these Plot Notes or in the few remaining pages of the Second Phase text that follow.

  Chapter XIV While the Dragon’s Away . . .

  1 The other being the introduction of Bard, the legitimate heir of Girion.

  2 That is, according to the original time-scheme, in which Bilbo with Thorin & Company spent more than a year on the road.

  3 So ancient is the idea of dragons sleeping on gold that Jacob Grimm noted ormbedr or ‘worm’s bed’ as a standard kenning (traditional metaphor) for gold in Old Norse poetry; Teutonic Mythology (tr. James Stallybrass [1883], vol. II, page 689).

  4 The later developments of this passage in subsequent Silmarillion texts bring it much closer into line with Smaug’s situation. Thus, in the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’, the rather odd detail of the dragon’s gold-bed being outside the caves out in the open is dropped:

  Glórung lies in the caves of Narog and gathers beneath him all the gold and silver and gems there hoarded (HME IV.30).

  This brings the Glorund story back into accord with the Sigurd story, in which Fafnir’s ‘abiding place’ is ‘dug down deep into the earth: there found Sigurd gold exceeding plenteous . . .’ (Völsunga Saga, tr. Morris & Magnússon, page 67). The 1930 Quenta refines this still further, until it becomes a very close approximation of Smaug’s practice:

  Glómund . . . gathered unto himself the greater part of its wealth of gold and gems, and he lay thereon in its deepest hall, and desolation was about him (HME IV.127).

  It would have been on the basis of a line such as this that Gandalf the dwarf can say with such confidence that ‘. . . all their wealth he took for himself. Probably, for that is the dragon’s way, he has piled it all up in [a] great heap in some hall far inside, and sleeps on it for a bed’ (page 72). Like Glorund, Smaug chooses the deepest chamber within the Lonely Mountain for his lair: every stair Thorin & Company take after leaving it leads up (cf. page 581).

  5 It is true that the elves are accompanied by Túrin’s mother and sister, who might be thought to serve as a parallel for the presence in The Hobbit of Thorin, Fili, and Kili, since Mavwin and Nienóri were close kin of the man who had been acting as the Rodothlim’s champion while the three dwarves are all descendants (grandchild and great-great-grandchildren, respectively) of Thror, whose people had been destroyed or dispossessed by Smaug. It might also be noted that disaster comes about in every iteration of the Túrin story because of the presence of the two women in the group, just as it is Thorin’s behavior under the dragon-sickness that almost brings disaster in the Third Phase Hobbit story, but this might be pressing the point too far. Finally, Tinwelint’s sending a group whose brief is not just to take the treasure but also slay the dragon (a p
oint made explicit on BLT II.96, where they are described as ‘that band of dragon-slayers’) could be taken as a parallel for the projected Bilbo-as-dragon-slayer theme of Plot Notes B & C.

  6 This curse, the dragon’s ability to directly manipulate the minds of those who look into his eyes and to individually curse any whose name he knows, is distinct from the more general dragon-sickness attached to treasure that has come into contact with a dragon. Both Túrin and Nienóri make the mistake of making eye contact with the wyrm and are beguiled, and his knowledge of who they are enables Glorund to craft specific curses that set both on the road to incest and suicide. There is no mention of whether Sigurd looks into Fafnir’s eyes while the dragon is still alive, but the Fáfnismál and Völsunga Saga both agree that he initially gives a false name to avoid Fafnir’s dying curse; Bilbo wisely both avoids meeting Smaug’s gaze and giving him his real name. Both motifs are lacking in Beowulf, whose dragon is more animalistic and less of a personality, but note that even in Farmer Giles of Ham Chrysophylax wants to know the farmer’s name at their first meeting and the farmer refuses to tell him until he has gained the upper hand (FGH 41 & 43). See also Tolkien’s dragon lecture summarized in Note 5 following the commentary to Chapter XII.

  7 Later Tolkien inserted a reference earlier in the text to Glorund having ‘set a guard that he might trust to watch his dwelling and his treasury, and the captain of these was Mîm the dwarf’ before he set forth on his final fatal mission to seek Túrin (BLT II.103 & 118).

  8 The curse might be so relentlessly effective in part because, as Tinwelint concedes, none of the initial claimants have any real right to this treasure: ‘the Rodothlim who won it from the earth long time ago are no more, and no one has especial claim to so much as a handful save only Úrin by reason of his son Túrin, who slew the Worm, the robber of the Elves’ (BLT II.222). He advances his own claim on the fact that (a) ‘this gold belongs to the kindred of the Elves in common’ (a particularly specious argument, given that he is using it to deny Úrin’s elven companions more than a token share†) and (b) ‘Túrin is dead and Úrin will have none of it; and Túrin was my man’ (who had murdered a kinsman of the king and fled Tinwelint’s halls, abandoning his allegiance). The latter suggests additional complications that could have arisen in the scramble over Smaug’s gold had Bard not survived, as had been Tolkien’s original intent (see page 549), and the Master of Lake Town and Elvenking been left to settle matters between them.

  † These outlaws had been human in the original draft of this tale but became elves in the revision, from which this sentence is taken; see BLT II.242.

  9 I.e., Mîm’s curse: ‘Now Elves and Men shall rue this deed, and because of the death of Mîm the dwarf shall death follow this gold so long as it remain on Earth, and a like fate shall every part and portion share with the whole’ (BLT II.114). Mîm’s dying curse in ‘Turambar and the Foalókë’ pointedly excludes his own people, the dwarves, but a later passage in ‘The Nauglafring’ implies that whatever immunity they might have to the dragon-sickness does not protect them from Mîm’s all-encompassing curse: ‘Indeed all that folk love gold and silver more dearly than aught else on Earth, while that treasury was haunted by a spell and by no means were they armed against it’ (BLT II.229).

  To this might be added yet a third curse, that laid upon the Nauglafring itself by the dwarven-smiths held in prison by Tinwelint and forced to expend their craft in slave-labor on his behalf: ‘even had that gold of the Rodothlim held no evil spell still had that carcanet been a thing of little luck, for the Dwarves were full of bitterness, and all its links were twined with baleful thoughts’ (BLT II.228) – not to mention that they incorporate into the necklace the Silmaril Beren and Tinúviel took from Morgoth’s crown, with the additional perils that gem (and its proximity to the original Dark Lord) might bring.

  10 This piece was painted between 8th and 24th July 1937, too late for inclusion in the first printing but late enough that the text had already been typeset and thus finalized. The idea that Tolkien might himself provide additional illustrations, in colour, for the American edition was first mooted in May in a brief exchange between Charles Furth of Allen & Unwin and Tolkien (Furth to JRRT 11th May 1937, JRRT to Furth 13th May, Furth to JRRT 14th May), at which point Tolkien dispatched several Silmarillion illustrations as examples of his colour artwork. Unfortunately Houghton Mifflin mistook these for the actual pieces to be used, resulting in several months of confusion. In a letter written on or soon after 8th July, Tolkien says ‘I have done nothing about the new ones. I will now set about them, if they are still required, or it is not too late’ (JRRT to Furth, undated reply to Furth’s letters of 1st June & 8th July). In another undated letter, probably written on 24th or 23rd July, Tolkien asks for an update (‘I do not want to labour in vain’) and arranges to call on Stanley Unwin in London ‘on Wednesday next, 28th July’ to ‘submit what I have done’ and see if A&U’s production department thinks them ‘passable, & . . . suitable for reproduction’. Although HM had still not replied by 24th July (SU to JRRT), Tolkien seems by this point to have finished the four paintings,† since in his reply of 25th July (JRRT to SU) discussing their upcoming meeting he says ‘. . . I shall not take much of your time, as it will not take long to tell me if what I have done is suitable, & if unsuitable what is wrong’, suggesting that he was going to bring the paintings along for Unwin to vet them. Apparently the pieces were deemed acceptable, since the next mention of them is in Tolkien’s letter to Furth of 13th August, written while on vacation at Sidmouth in Devon, stating that ‘You are very welcome to use the coloured drawings at any time’ (that is, in any future reprint), suggesting the originals be stored at A&U’s offices once they are returned by the Americans, and concluding ‘I have completed the coloured version of the frontispiece. †† Would you care to have it to lay by (hopefully)?’ (JRRT to Furth, August 13th) – an offer which Furth, in his reply, gratefully accepts (Furth to JRRT, 16th August).

  † These four were ‘Bilbo Comes to the Huts of the Raft-elves’, ‘Bilbo Woke Up with the Early Sun in His Eyes’, ‘Conversation with Smaug’, and ‘Rivendell’ (H-S#124, 113, 133, & 108 ; DAA plates 2B, 2A, 3A, and 1B)

  †† This fifth painting is ‘The Hill: Hobbiton-across-the Water’ (H-S#98; DAA plate 1A).

  11 For example, the glowing cone-shaped object directly above the bowing hobbit, or the three glowing low mounds to the left behind Smaug’s elbow.

  12 Supreme, that is, within the context of The Hobbit; in The Lord of the Rings it is eclipsed by the Ring of Power belonging to Durin’s house, one of the Seven. After all, while they left the Arkenstone behind when they fled the Lonely Mountain Thror and Thrain managed to save their house’s Ring, just as their ancestors had done even from the Balrog’s rampage that drove them from Khazad-dûm (Moria); it later passed from Thror to Thrain and was not lost until the Necromancer captured Thorin’s father, a hundred years before the time of Bilbo’s journey (LotR.286, 1110, & 1113–14). But this is a Lord of the Rings-era innovation, not present at the time The Hobbit was written. For more on the emergence of Durin’s Ring, see the draft of Gloin’s speech at Rivendell in HME VI.398.

  13 This passage appears on a piece of typescript pasted over the original text of the First Typescript (typescript page 125; 1/1/62:11); the underlying text cannot now be read even when the page is held up to the light, due to the darkening of the glue or paste Tolkien used. This replacement occurred before the Second Typescript was made, since the latter faithfully reproduces the pasteover text; presumably the obscured text closely resembled the manuscript version on page 515 of this book describing ‘the white gem of Girion Lord of Dale’.

  Even though less is made of the Necklace of Girion than of the Arkenstone, it must be stressed that this was a rare and wonderful treasure in its own right: emeralds are far rarer and more valuable than diamonds or even rubies.

  The description here of silver with a strength three times that of steel sounds very like
the later mithril, but Tolkien never made this connection in later editions of The Hobbit after the introduction of mithril in The Lord of the Rings, although he did insert a single mention of mithril into the earlier book in his 1966 revision for the Ballantine paperback with regard to Bilbo’s ‘silvered steel’ mail-coat (DAA.295). It might be expected that the wondrous suit of mithril-mail, whose value is revealed in The Lord of the Rings to be greater than the Shire and everything in it (LotR.335), would turn out to be the very suit of armor King Girion surrendered his wondrous necklace for, but the connection is never made (perhaps because then the conscientious Bilbo would feel obliged to give Bard his mail-coat as well in the end).

  The ‘Thrain’ here, by the way, is Thorin’s grandfather, the King under the Mountain; the reversed genealogy was in place when Tolkien made this addendum to the typescript (see page 458). In later years rather than simply making it the ‘Arkenstone of Thror’ he instead resolved the inconsistency by ascribing it to a distant ancestor, Thrain I, Thorin’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. In the later story, it was this Thrain I who led the exodus from Moria after his father and grandfather had been killed by the Balrog and the ancestral kingdom overthrown, founding the realm-in-exile at the Lonely Mountain, and discovered the Arkenstone there deep beneath the mountain (LotR.1117 & 1109).

  14 For more on Eorcanstan and the cognate names in other Germanic languages, see Christopher Tolkien’s discussion in The Shaping of Middle-earth (HME IV.283) and Douglas Anderson’s note in The Annotated Hobbit (DAA.293–4). I am grateful to Doug’s entry for drawing my attention to Grimm.

  15 In the rather gruesome story of Wayland the Smith’s captivity, crippling, revenge, and escape, he murders the sons of his captor and makes goblets of their skulls, brooches of their teeth, and ‘pure gems’ (Old Norse iarknasteina) of their eyes Volundarkviða, stanzas 25 & 35; cf. Dronke, vol II. pages 250 & 252).