The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  16 So beautiful is this piece of jewelry that the poet compares it to the legendary Brosinga mene (‘necklace of the Brosings’, line 1199b), familiar in Old Norse legend as the Brisingamen, the goddess Freya’s most valued treasure (cf. ‘The Deluding of Gylfi’ [Gylfaginning] in Snorri’s Prose Edda, ‘The Lay of Thrym’ [Þrymsqviða] in the Elder Edda, and the tale of Loki’s theft of the necklace hinted at in the surviving fragments of the Húsdrapa [‘House Song’] of Ulf Uggason). Like the Book of Lost Tales’ Nauglafring (‘Necklace of the Dwarves’), which it no doubt inspired, the Brisingamen was made by great dwarven craftsmen working at the behest of others. Interestingly enough, Tinwelint’s captive dwarven jewelsmiths demand an elven maiden apiece as payment (which the elvenking refuses, having them beaten instead); Freya had to promise to sleep with each of the four dwarves who make her necklace and honors her agreement.

  17 Christopher Wiseman told me (interview, August 1981) that Tolkien used to come to Rugby practice with a great big Gothic book under his arm, which he would apparently read in snatches when not engrossed in the game or actually on the field. This could not have been either Joseph Wright’s Gothic Grammar or Gothic Primer, both of which are smallish (octavo) volumes. I suspect Balg’s massive quarto (more than ten inches tall, seven inches wide, and over six hundred pages thick), simultaneously published in New York, London, Germany, and Mayville Wisconsin, to have been the book Wiseman remembered.

  18 The Greek word is best known as the name of the hundred-eyed monster Argos (more commonly spelt Argus), who was so-named because of the clarity and sharpness of his vision. The Greek, Sanskrit, and Gothic words all probably go back to the same Indo-European root *ar(e)g- meaning ‘shining’ or ‘bright’ – the same root, in fact, which seems to underlie the word elf (Germanic *alba- or *albinjo, which seem to have meant ‘white’ and ‘shining’ – cf. ‘the White People’ as one of the euphemisms of the Fair Folk and the discussion of an uncanny whiteness as a defining elven characteristic in the commentary following Chapter IX). The Latin word for silver, argenta, also derives from the same root, and it may underlie the names for the Alps (‘the Whites’, so called for their snow-cover; cf. the White Mountains of Gondor) and Albion, a traditional name for Britain in old legends (‘The White Land’, from the White Cliffs of Dover, the first part of the island seen by someone approaching from mainland Europe).

  19 By ‘glass’ Tolkien here probably means some sort of clear crystal, since the Silmarils survive many encounters that would have shattered mere glass. Cf. also the reference in the alliterative poems to the Silmarils as crystal, such as the allusion to Beren’s Silmaril as ‘the Gnome-crystal’ in The Lay of the Children of Húrin (line 379; HME III.107).

  The appearance of pearls and opals here may owe something to Jacob Grimm’s guess, in Teutonic Mythology, that eorcanstan probably originally was applied either to ‘the oval milk-white opal’ and/or to the pearl (Grimm/Stallybrass, vol. III pages 1217–18).

  20 The passage from the 1977 Silmarillion derives primarily not from the Later Quenta (X.187), which closely resembles the passage in the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion, but from the ‘Annals of Aman’ (the final version of the ‘Annals of Valinor’, supplemented by a few details taken from the Later Quenta):

  . . . As three great jewels they were in form . . . Like the crystal of diamonds it appeared and yet was more strong than adamant, so that no violence within the walls of this world could mar it or break it. Yet that crystal was to the Silmarils but as is the body to the Children of Ilúvatar: the house of its inner fire, that is within it and yet in all parts of it, and is its life. And the inner fire of the Silmarils Fëanor made of the blended Light of the Trees of Valinor . . . Therefore even in the uttermost darkness the Silmarils of their own radiance shone like the stars of Varda; and yet, as were they indeed living things, they rejoiced in light and received it, and gave it back in hues more lovely than before.

  —HME X.94–5.

  21 The Gnomish Lexicon’s entry for ‘Nauglafring’ agrees, stating plainly that the Necklace of the Dwarves was ‘[m]ade for Ellu [= Tinwelint/Thingol] by the dwarves from the gold of Glorund, that Mîm, the fatherless, cursed and that brought ruin on Beren Ermabwed [the One-Handed], and Damrod [Dior], his son, and was not appeased till it sank with Elwing, beloved of Earendel, to the bottom of the seas’ (Parma Eldalamberon XI.59).

  22 Note that the Three Rings of the Elves were originally to have been ‘of earth, sea, and sky’ (e.g., in the draft of the Ring-verse [HME VI.269] and also the ‘third phase’ text of ‘Ancient History’ [VI.319]: ‘the Three Rings of Earth, Sea, and Sky’). In the original draft of the Lothlórien chapter(s), it is plainly stated that Galadriel’s ring is the Ring of Earth (HME VII.252) and an associated page of drafting speculates that Fëanor himself made the three elven rings, ‘the Rings of Earth, Sea and Sky’ (ibid., page 255).

  In the published book, of course, Kemen the Ring of Earth is replaced by Narya the Ring of Fire, Galadriel holds Nenya, the Ring of Water, and Elrond Vilya the Ring of Air, so that Earth, Sea and Sky have been replaced by Air, Water, and Fire. This later arrangement better matches the later (1937) Quenta Silmarillion, in which the three Silmarils are lost in the sky (Air), the fires in the depth of the earth (Earth > Fire), and the sea (Water).

  Chapter XVa The Kindness of Ravens

  1 It might seem unlikely that birds could carry enough food to make any appreciable difference, but ravens are quite large, typically about two feet in length and with a wingspan of some four feet. They are not only quite capable of killing and carrying off small animals but also sometimes carry off small items that attract their curiosity (a habit for which their smaller cousins the jackdaws are notorious).

  ‘A Thief Indeed’

  1 ‘My tale is not consciously based on any other book – save one . . . the “Silmarillion”, a history of the Elves, to which frequent allusion is made’ – JRRT, letter to The Observer; see Appendix II. Although at times Tolkien sought to distance The Hobbit from the pre-existing legendarium, at others he freely admitted or even laid stress upon the connection.

  2 Carpenter’s first involvement with Tolkien’s work was to direct a children’s theater adaptation of The Hobbit, and he later wrote a radio-play depicting Tolkien as a detached eccentric (‘In a Hole in the Ground, There Lived a Tolkien’ [1992]); most of my second meeting with him (in Oxford, in 1985) was spent watching him direct a rather odd adaptation of The Wizard of Oz for an all-teen cast. For more on Carpenter’s interests and background in drama, see the obituary by Charles Noad and Jessica Yates, published in the March 2005 issue of Amen Hen; I am grateful to its authors for sharing a pre-publication copy with me. See also Douglas A. Anderson’s detailed account of Carpenter’s work with Tolkien in Volume II of Tolkien Studies (pages 217–24).

  3 See the Introduction to Douglas Anderson’s The Annotated Hobbit for more on the identities of those who read the book before its publication (DAA.12).

  4 See Tolkien’s 4th June 1938 letter to Stanley Unwin telling him of ‘our literary club . . . before whom the Hobbit, and other works (such as The Silent Planet) have been read’ (Letters p. 36). Our best evidence suggests that the Inklings did not yet exist in January 1933 when Tolkien completed the story, but came together very shortly thereafter, one of the significant factors that led to the group’s formation being the retirement of Major (then Captain) Warnie Lewis in December 1932, his return from Shanghai to live with his brother at the Kilns, and his joining Tolkien and Lewis at some of their regular gatherings. The Inklings seem to have come about from the two men’s desire to include Warnie in their meetings while providing a comfortable environment for less exclusively academic discussion; the late Dr. Humphrey Havard told me he was invited to join the group upon returning to Oxford and meeting the Lewis brothers in 1934. The first documentary evidence for the group’s existence comes in C. S. Lewis’s first letter to Charles Williams (11th March 1936) inviting him to attend a meeting of ‘a sort
of informal club called the Inklings’ (Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper, vol. II, page 183). The early members of the group included Tolkien, Lewis, Warnie, and Havard (the four who formed the core of the group throughout its existence), as well as Nevill Coghill (a fellow member with Lewis in Tolkien’s Kolbítars, and specially mentioned along with Tolkien and Warnie in Lewis’s letter to Williams), Hugo Dyson, Owen Barfield (usually in absentia, since he lived in London), Adam Fox (who seems to have promptly quit the group after they got him elected Professor of Poetry in 1938), and C. L. Wrenn.

  Chapter XIX The End of the Journey

  1 As the leader of the expedition, Thorin has more lines of dialogue than any other character except Bilbo, and he is present through far more chapters than, say, Gandalf. At first Thorin’s sudden death – shocking within the traditions of classic British children’s fantasy (e.g., Carroll, Grahame, Milne, Lofting, Nesbit)† – would seem to reverse Tolkien’s theory of eucatastrophe, the sudden unexpected happy ending to the tale, but in fact the eagles’ arrival that turns the tide serves as the eucatastrophe that makes The Hobbit a successful fairy-story within Tolkien’s own conception of the genre. Thorin’s death, and the later addition of those of Fili and Kili, serve rather to ground the eucatastrophe and prevent the book from being ‘escapist’ in a negative sense: in Tolkien’s terms they confirm ‘the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; [eucatastrophe] denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat’ (OFS.62).

  † MacDonald, who shared the late Victorian sentimentality over early death, is the chief and notable exception to this rule, but Thorin’s death is quite unlike anything in MacDonald except perhaps the death-in-combat of the narrator of Phantastes [1858], and even there the author’s interest is primarily in the character’s first-person description of what happens to him immediately following his death.

  2 See for instance in Beowulf, where Beowulf is offered the throne after his uncle Hygelac’s death but insists it go to his young cousin, Hygelac’s son, instead. Similar non-direct successions can be found in sources as widely ranged as Hamlet (based on Saxo Grammaticus’s twelfth-century Geste Danorum), where Prince Hamlet is passed over for his father’s throne in favor of his uncle Claudius, the early history of Islam (where Mohammad is succeeded as the first caliph by his father-in-law, not by his closest male relative, his cousin and son-in-law), and English history, which especially in early Norman times provides all too many examples.

  3 That is, if I am right in my guess that Thrain and Nain were brothers in Tolkien’s original conception; see Text Note 13 following chapter XVII. Already by the time of the earliest family tree in the late 1940s Thorin and Dain had become the children of cousins – that is, third cousins or as hobbits would no doubt say each was the other’s ‘second cousin once removed’, descendants of a common great-grandfather – which they remained thereafter; see HME XII.277 and LotR.1117. For the idea of Thorin having close kin somewhere in the area that he could call upon in extremity, see his remark to the Great Goblin in Chapter IV: ‘We [are] on a journey to our relatives, our nephews and nieces and first, second, and third cousins and other descendants of our grandfathers who live on the East side of these truly hospitable mountains’ (page 132); this passage contains the first germ that eventually led to Dain and his band of five hundred hardened warriors marching from the Iron Hills.

  4 See for example in Beowulf the elaborate comparison between Sigemund the dragon-slayer (= Sigurd) and bad King Heremod (lines 875–915), of whom it is said nallas beagas geaf Denum aefter dome – translated by Howell Chickering as ‘never a ring did he give, for glory, to the Danish men’, adding ‘Joyless he lived and unhappy he died’ (Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition, lines 1719–1721, tr. Howell D. Chickering Jr. [1977]).

  5 Thus the question arises: why did Thror, Thrain, and Thorin not themselves settle in the Iron Hills and merge their group with the larger settlement of their kin already established there? Tolkien nowhere addresses this issue, but one suspects that King Thror wished neither to usurp his brother’s halls nor dwell in them as a guest and that his son and grandson were similarly proud and independent.

  6 The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, ed. & tr. Christopher Tolkien [1960], page 68.

  7 Tolkien explicitly refers to the story of Högni and Hedin’s endless battle in his essay ‘The Name “Nodens”’ (Report on the Excavation . . . in Lydney Park [1932], page 133).

  8 This is the same source from which Tolkien had two or three years earlier taken the name ‘Fimbulfambi’ as the last King under the Mountain; see page 15.

  9 Cf. Jonathan Evans on Tolkien’s dragon-lore; see Note 2 to the commentary on ‘Tolkien’s Dragons’ following Chapter XII (page 538).

  1 The other, of course, being Golfimbul (or, in the First Phase text, Fingolfin) of Mount Gram, killed by Bullroarer Took in the Battle of the Green Fields. Mount Gram appears only in this context, but this may merely be another name for Gondobad/Gundabad, not least because ‘Gram’ is a Norse name (famous as the name of Sigurd’s sword forged or reforged by Regin) and thus would seem to belong to the area north and east of Bilbo’s home and because the Misty Mountains, which are particularly associated with the goblins throughout The Hobbit, also seem to be the mountains closest to Bilbo’s home (cf. Bilbo’s never having seen a mountain before, page 111).

  As for Azog, while we are told in the manuscript that Dain killed Bolg’s father at Moria, Azog’s name does not enter the story until the 1960 Hobbit (see page 781), nor see print within The Hobbit until the third edition of 1966 (cf. DAA.56 and 339), having arisen during the creation of the Appendices for The Lord of the Rings (contrast HME XII.276, where in early drafts of this material old Thror is ‘slain in the dark by an Orc’ in Moria, with the specific references to Azog in HME XII.284 and LotR.1110–12).

  2 Note that Nain’s forces chant ‘Azog! Azog!’, the name of their hated enemy, when they join the attack at the Battle of Moria (LotR.1112); hence, Dain’s dwarves in The Hobbit chant ‘Moria! Moria!’ as a reminder of the atrocity they wish to avenge on Bolg’s goblins (that is, the death of Thror). There is of course a long tradition of battle-cries that evoke famous defeats (‘Remember the Maine!’ ‘The Alamo!’) as well as victories.

  3 A probable real-world source for the name comes from the Fir Bolg, one of the mythical races of Ireland whose deeds are retold in the twelfth-century Lebor Gabála Érenn (or Book of Invasions) along with those of the Fomorians and the Tuatha dé Danaan. Tolkien was well-versed in this mythic material (see page 427), and his attention might have been drawn to the name by John Rhys’s claim in Celtic Britain [1884] that Bolg was probably an Ivernian name – that is, that it came from the pre-Indo-European language of the British Isles (Rhys, pp. 268 & 281).† Since this is the same book from which Tolkien took the word ond (Ivernian for ‘stone’) and adapted it into Sindarin, it is entirely plausible that it may have influenced him in other borrowings as well.

  † Rhys’s theory has since been rejected, and scholars now believe that Ivernian, like Pictish, was a Celtic language closely related to British (the ancestor of Welsh), superseded by Gaelic (Irish).

  4 David Salo glosses the name ‘soldier of torment’ (A Gateway to Sindarin, page 344) and points out that The Etymologies, written circa 1937–8, contain two entries on Boldog. The first (HME V.375, under the root NDAK-) identifies the -dog element as a variant of daug, meaning ‘warrior’ (‘chiefly used of Orcs’), and suggests that Boldog might simply be a generic term for orc-warrior, although this last point seems rather doubtful. The second (HME V.377, under the root ÑGWAL-) gives bol- as a variant of baul, ‘torment’, as in the more familiar balrog and states flatly that ‘Orc-name Boldog = Orc-warrior “Torment-slayer”’.

  1 See the last page of the original Plot Notes B and the associated commentary (pp. 366 & 375–6) for more on ‘the Battle of Anduin Vale’ and its proje
cted participants. The evidence that Beorn-Medwed associated with a large number of other bears, whom he could call upon at need, goes all the way back to the Second Phase text of Chapter VII, where Bladorthin describes following their host in secret and finds

  ‘There must have been a regular bear-meeting outside here last night. I soon saw that Medwed could not have made them all – there were far too many of them, and they were of various sizes too: I should say little bears, big bears, ordinary bears, and gigantic big bears must have been dancing outside from dark to nearly dawn. They came from almost all directions except West from over the river, from the Misty Mountains.’

  That night Bilbo sees this bear-moot in his dreams when he

  dreamed a dream of hundreds of black bears dancing slow heavy dances round and round in the moonlight in the courtyard.

  For Tolkien’s original audience’s enthusiasm for bears, see the commentary following Chapter VII, page 253ff.

  2 It is possible that this idea first arose in Plot Notes F, which represents a transitional stage between the Second and Third Phases. Here there is no hint that the battle might take place elsewhere, but that detail might simply not have been set down in these very sketchy notes; neither is it specifically stated that the battle described takes place at the Mountain, although that is the implication.

  3 ‘So began the battle . . . And it was called after [i.e., afterwards] the Battle of Five Armies . . . For upon one side were the Goblins and the Wolves and upon the other were men, elves, and dwarves’ (page 670; cf. DAA.339). This is remarkable, since the text is clear that the eagles played a decisive role in depriving the goblins of the devastating advantage they had claimed by seizing the high ground and that Beorn’s intervention turned the tide; the typescript and published book differ from the Third Phase manuscript in denying the eagles a full share of credit for the victory, ascribing it chiefly to Beorn’s assault.