The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  4 This edition was not published in Tolkien’s lifetime but appeared in 1981, edited by Joan Turville-Petre. Its exact dating is unknown; Turville-Petre simply says it was ‘based on full notes for a series of lectures delivered to a specialist class in the 1930s and 1940s’ (The Old English Exodus: Text, Translation, and Commentary by J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Joan Turville-Petre [1981], page v). However, Tolkien had already given some of the poem’s vocabulary a very close look during the period when he was drafting The Hobbit (i.e., the very early 1930s): he begins his detailed study of the unusual phrase Sigelwara land with a quote from Exodus in an article that appeared in the December 1932 issue of Medium Ævum (that is, published during the weeks when Tolkien was writing the Third Phase text) and had been announced in the journal’s first issue back in May 1932† It thus seems quite possible that Tolkien’s notes on herefugolas and wælceasega, or at least the thinking that underlies them, dates from the very early thirties.

  † The second part of Tolkien’s article did not appear until the June 1934 issue (Vol.III No.2).

  5 In real life, ravens and wolves often form a symbiotic relationship: the ravens help spot the prey, the wolves make the kill, and the ravens get to feast on the carrion after the wolves have eaten their fill. See Bernd Heinrich’s Mind of the Raven [1999], particularly the chapters describing ravens as ‘wolf-birds’ because of the close association between the two in the wild (‘Ravens and Wolves in Yellowstone’ and ‘From Wolf-Birds to Human-Birds’). Bernd also includes a number of accounts of eagles feasting alongside ravens from the same corpses despite the generally hostile relations between the two types of bird (the predator-scavenger eagles and the scavenger-predator ravens).

  6 Bats had of course already appeared in ‘Goblin Feet’, arguably the first piece of what became Tolkien’s ‘legendarium’ to see print (Oxford Poetry 1915, pages 64–5; cf. DAA.113). But here they are not threatening (‘pretty little flittermice’); like the ‘goblins’ themselves they are simply one more element of the elusive, gone-before-it-can-be-grasped little people. Hammond & Scull also see ‘bat-like faces’ on the curtains in Tolkien’s early drawing ‘Wickedness’ [H-S#32], one of the pieces in The Book of Ishness [1911–13], but given these images’ similarity to the Siamese cat that can just be glimpsed between the parted curtains of this image I suspect they are actually cats’ heads instead (cf. Artist & Illustrator, pages 37 and 36).

  7 ‘Deadly Nightshade’ and Taur-na-Fuin are both alternative names for the same place, the dark forest elsewhere called Mirkwood. The tower Thû the Necromancer builds there after the escape described here is clearly the same Necromancer’s tower in southern Mirkwood in The Hobbit, where Thrain died and which Bladorthin advises Bilbo to avoid; see page 244.

  1 See the passage quoted on page 78 in the commentary following Chapter I (c). This is echoed in the 1930 Quenta, written about the time Tolkien wrote the First Phase of The Hobbit (i.e., the bulk of the opening chapter): ‘the sons of Fëanor . . . made war upon the Dwarves of Nogrod and Belegost; but they did not discover whence that strange race came, nor have any since’ (HME IV.103–4). The story of Aulë’s creation of the dwarves (cf. Silm.43–4) did not arise until about the time of The Hobbit’s publication (i.e., a year or so after the completed typescript had been submitted to Allen & Unwin) in the ‘(Later) Annals of Beleriand’; see HME V.129 and 149. For the brief later development of the original negative, elven-centric view of the dwarves, see the passages cited on page 721 from the ‘(Later) Annals of Beleriand’, the Lhammas, and the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion.

  2 Note that Tolkien’s friend C. S. Lewis, in what is perhaps his best book, The Discarded Image [posthumously published in 1964], names the chapter devoted to elves, nymphs, fauns, and fairies ‘The Longaevi’; i.e., ‘long-livers’.

  3 That is, the first if we except the Arkenstone affecting the description of the Silmarils; cf. page 607.

  4 For Tolkien, the chance for an artist to take part in actual Creation was the highest reward; cf. ‘Leaf by Niggle’. For Tolkien’s opinion that our own world was itself a sub-creation and that a writer might be able to contribute through his imaginative works in enriching the post-apocalyptic world that would succeed it, see my essay ‘“And All the Days of Her Life Are Forgotten”: The Lord of the Rings as Mythic Prehistory’, especially part v: ‘“We Make Because We Are Made”: Tolkien’s Sub-creative Theology’, in The Lord of the Rings 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, ed. Wayne G. Hammond & Christina Scull [Marquette University Press, 2006].

  1 The poems in The Hobbit are distributed thusly: two in Chapter I (‘Chip the Glasses’ and ‘Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold’, plus a refrain from the latter), ‘O Where Are You Going’ in Chapter III, the goblin song in Chapter IV (‘Ho Ho My Lad’), the riddles (eight in all) in Chapter V, the second goblin song in Chapter VI (‘Fifteen Birds’), the dwarf song in Chapter VII (‘The Wind was on the Withered Heath’), Bilbo’s spider songs (‘Attercop’ and ‘Lazy Lob’) in Chapter VIII, two river songs in Chapter IX (‘Heave Ho Splash-plump’ and ‘Down the Swift Dark Stream You Go’), the Lake-men’s song in Chapter X (‘At the Mountain-king’s Return’), then a gap before the dwarven song in Chapter XV (‘The King is Come Unto His Hall’, a reworked version of the second song from Chapter I), and then a second gap before the three songs in Chapter XIX (‘Tra-la-la-lally Come Back to the Valley’, ‘Sing All Ye Joyful’, and ‘Roads Go Ever Ever On’).

  Thus Chapter II is the only one of the first ten to lack a poem, while Chapter XV is the only one of the next eight to have one, followed by a sudden burst of three poems in the final chapter.

  2 I give here the typescript text (1/1/69:4) for ease of reference; see page 693 above for the initial rough drafting of this poem. The only changes between the First Typescript version and the published text are the latter’s capitalization of the first words in the two lines not capitalized here (both are capitalized in the Second Typescript [1/1/50:4–5], a rare case where Michael’s typescript more closely resembles the published text than the main typescript) and the indenting of every other line in the published text (cf. DAA.359–60). The third line of the poem has been erased and retyped in the original, but I think this was simply to correct a carriage return error or some similar typing mistake.

  Note that by referring to it as ‘Bilbo’s first poem’ Tolkien has either forgotten about the two spider-songs Bilbo spontaneously composed in Mirkwood (‘Attercop’ and ‘Lazy Lob’) or does not consider them ‘poems’ per se so much as rhyming nonsense to annoy his foes.

  3 This is the first of the two ‘Songs on the Downs’ (Oxford Poetry 1915, page 60). Smith was one of Tolkien’s closest friends, and the poem is included in A Spring Harvest [1918], the book of Smith’s poems edited by Tolkien after GBS’s death in the Battle of the Somme.

  4 Both Tolkien’s and Geach’s poems appear in Fifty New Poems for Children: An Anthology, Selected from Books Recently Published by Basil Blackwell (Basil Blackwell, Oxford [1922]). ‘Goblin Feet’ appears on pages 26–27 and ‘Romance’ on page 28; a bibliographic note on page 62 notes that Geach’s poem first appeared in Oxford Poetry 1918. For more on Geach, see The Annotated Hobbit (DAA.360–1).

  5 These are stanzas two, twelve, and thirteen from Thomas’s poem, which continues with an all-too-timely application:

  Now all roads lead to France

  And heavy is the tread

  Of the living; but the dead

  Returning lightly dance;

  Whatever the road bring

  To me or take from me

  They keep me company

  With their pattering . . .

  Simonson’s piece, ‘The Lord of the Rings in the Wake of the Great War’, appears in Reconsidering Tolkien, edited by Thomas Honegger (Walking Tree Press [2005]); see in particular pages 161–163. So far as I have been able to discover, no substantial comparison has yet been written of Tolkien with Thomas, who like Tolkien celebrated the quiet English coun
tryside in his work, wrote fairy-tales, and fought on the Western Front, where he died in 1917.

  6 The only difference between the two versions in The Lord of the Rings is that when Frodo repeats the poem two chapters later, he changes the word eager in line five to weary; Christopher Tolkien reveals in The Return of the Shadow that ‘weary’ is in fact the wording of the original draft (HME VI.47).

  The Fortunate Misunderstanding

  1 Tolkien had earlier described this material to Unwin in a letter written on 31st July 1947 but not sent until 21st September along with the Fourth Phase Hobbit material:

  . . . when I revise chapter II [of LotR] for press: I intend, in any case, to shorten it. The proper way to negotiate the difficulty would be slightly to remodel the former story [The Hobbit] in its chapter V. That is not a practical question; though I certainly hope to leave behind me the whole thing revised and in final form . . .

  —Letters, page 121.

  The End of the Fifth Phase

  1 While Elrond’s maintenance of the road makes sense and is in keeping with his role as the preserver of the last vestiges of the North Kingdom, it is hard to picture the elves of Rivendell working at road-mending, since throughout the legendarium the elves are never associated with road-making. We might speculate that he hires dwarves to do the work without actually permitting these contractors to know Rivendell’s exact location (lying as it does some way off the main road), but that solution runs afoul of this text’s statements that dwarves were not welcome here and did not know this part of the world well. No doubt if Tolkien had fully developed this idea we would know the answers to these apparent difficulties.

  2 Hastings had argued that this phrase implied that William was capable of feeling pity and thus making a moral judgment. This would of course run counter to the legendarium’s presentation of the Creatures of Morgoth as irredeemably wicked. Tolkien however disagreed: ‘I do not say William felt pity – a word to me of moral and imaginative worth . . . Pity must restrain one from doing something immediately desirable and seemingly advantageous. There is no more “pity” here than in a beast of prey yawning, or lazily patting a creature it could eat, but does not want to, since it is not hungry’ (Letters p. 191). Thus there was no need to rewrite the scene of William’s actions, and Tolkien left his little comic masterpiece of the trolls’ dialogue intact, even preserving the mild profanity of ‘what the ’ell’.

  Timelines and Itinerary

  1 For example, as Janice Coulter has pointed out (private communication), if Gollum’s eyes glowed in the dark how did he sneak up on goblins? Or, to repeat a question Tolkien himself asked and left unanswered, why did the dwarves bring their musical instruments, some of which would have been quite bulky, to Bag-End? Overthinking such points is a hallmark of approaching a work in the first of these two traditions as if it were in the second.

  2 Tolkien of course was not alone in creating this shift: Joyce’s Ulysses, where both of the major characters’ actions can be followed hour-by-hour and street-by-street through a single day on a Dublin city map, pioneered this mode in the realistic novel a decade and a half before Tolkien began work on his magnum opus. One might expect the detective novel or mystery to have pioneered this approach, but in fact Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, which defined the genre, is very much written in the old school, with a fine carelessness about dates, Holmes’ fields of expertise and expert knowledge, the location of Watson’s war wound (leg or shoulder), the dates (and number) of Watson’s marriage(s) and bereavement(s), and even the narrator’s first name (variously James or John). Before Tolkien, most fantasy novels followed the example of one of those two great masters, Dunsany and Morris, and took place in either dreamworlds à la Dunsany or deliberately unmapped and borderless medieval settings à la Morris (frameless tapestries, as it were). Post-Tolkien, world-building has become a key defining part of the genre: elaborate histories (‘backstory’) and chronologies, invented languages, multiple cultures and distinct humanesque races, fantasy pantheons, creation myths, and above all maps are all essential elements that make a work recognizably ‘fantasy’.

  3 According to the ‘(Later) Annals of Beleriand’, the city was destroyed ninety years before the end of the First Age (HME V.142 & 144); 90 + the 3441 years of the Second Age (LotR.1121) + the 2941 years of the Third Age that had passed before Bilbo reached Rivendell (LotR.1126) = 6,472 years. The 1930 Quenta states that the attack came before dawn as the people were preparing to celebrate a festival known as the Gates of Summer (HME IV.144), which I take to mean greeting the dawn on midsummer’s day. Appendix D of The Lord of the Rings states that the elven day starts at sunset (LotR.1141); therefore the midsummer’s eve on which Elrond reads these runes is the anniversary of the day when his father’s city was destroyed.

  4 Note that Tolkien’s friend C. S. Lewis makes the same mistake in his narrative poem The Queen of Drum [1927], as was pointed out to him by John Masefield, the poet laureate, to whom he sent the unpublished poem in 1938. Cf. Canto V, line 123 (page 170) and Masefield’s correction on page 178 (CSL, Narrative Poems, ed. Walter Hooper [1969]).

  If we were to pursue a mythological explanation, of course, we could do so by noting that Tilion, the Maia who steers the moon, is well-known for his wayward behavior and difficulty in keeping a regular course, being easily distracted by the beauty of the Sun-maiden (Silm.99–100) or overindulgence in beer or brandy (1927 Father Christmas letter, ATB poem #5, LotR.174–6). But while this would be a perfectly reasonable explanation in Bilbo’s world, it would be special pleading in Frodo’s.

  Appendix I The Denham Tracts

  1 Although she was surely aware of it, since in her entry on Tolkien within the same book she praises his work for being ‘deepened by the use of traditional folklore which gave it that sense of being rooted in the earth which is the gift of folklore to literature’ – Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies, page 401. In her various entries on hobs and hobmen – ‘Hob, or Hobthrust’ (p. 222–223), ‘Lobs and Hobs’ (p. 270–271) and ‘Brownie’ (or little brown men, p. 45–49) – she summarizes traditional beliefs and in so doing helps us see the extent to which Tolkien was influenced by them. For example, her description of the brown men (brownies) as ‘small men, about three feet in height, very raggedly dressed in brown clothes, with brown faces and shaggy heads’ would take very little adjustment to serve as a description of hobbits in their latter days, when they have become a shy and fugitive people who ‘avoid us with dismay and are becoming hard to find’ (Prologue, LotR.[13]). Even though Denham’s groupings are somewhat erratic, it is suggestive that ‘hobbit’ is immediately followed by hobgoblin and brown-man (i.e., brownie) as items number one hundred and fifty-four, one hundred and fifty-five, and one hundred and fifty-six, respectively, in his final list. Elsewhere in The Denham Tracts he retells stories about several hobs, most notably the Cauld Lad o’ Hylton (‘the Cold Lad of Hilton’; Vol. I pages 55–57), Hob Thrush (Vol. II pages 355–356), and the Hazelrigg Dunnie (ibid. pages 157–163).

  Denham’s own closeness to the material may be judged from his admission of his childhood terror of Peg Powler, a local drowning spirit,† and the precautions he took as a child to avoid attracting the attention of the fairies.††

  † ‘the writer still perfectly recollects being dreadfully alarmed in the days of his childhood lest, more particularly when he chanced to be alone on the margin of those waters, she should issue from the stream and snatch him into her watery chambers’ – Vol. II page 42.

  †† ‘I well remember that on more occasions than one, when a schoolboy, I have turned my coat inside out in passing through a wood in order to avoid the good people’ – Vol. II page 88.

  2 Gomme’s preface to the second volume sums up the difficulties thusly: ‘Mr. Denham[’s] . . . peculiar practice of issuing these tracts sometimes without date or other means of identification makes it extremely difficult to ascertain whether all he published on folk-lore has been recovered. There is no c
omplete collection . . . It often happened that a tract was issued as a simple leaflet, and that later on this would be included in another tract without any alteration of or allusion to the original publication’ (Vol. II page x). Indeed, the bulk of ‘Tract VIII’ (ibid. pages [1]–80) in the Folk-Lore Society’s compilation turns out to be from another tract (pages 21–80) titled ‘Folklore; or Manners, Customs, Weather Proverbs, Popular Charms, Juvenile Rhymes, Ballads, &c. &c. in the north of England’ (see the editorial footnote on the bottom of Vol. II page 21), whose title accurately reflects the miscellaneous nature of the compilation.

  To compound the problem, the Folk-Lore Society volumes were carelessly edited and at several points inadvertently reprint slightly different versions of the same material – e.g., the long annotated list of items associated with fairies given as examples of ‘The not yet wholly exploded belief in fairies, fays, and elves’, which appears both as its own short tract (Tract XIV: ‘A Few Fragments of Fairy Folklore’; Vol. II pages 110–115) and in briefer form without explanatory notes on page 30 in the same volume as a single paragraph within what the editor designated as Tract VIII. Furthermore, at a number of points the editor either rewrote passages or inserted new material. Gomme’s preface (Vol. I page xi) promises that additional notes by Hardy would all be carefully identified with the latter’s bracketed initials (‘[J.H.]’), but in practice this is rarely the case. Contrast, for example, Denham’s first-person account of the strange behavior of his mother’s cat after its mistress died (Vol. II page 74) with the third-person reference to Denham on page 12 of the same volume, or quotations from letters by Denham (apparently to Hardy himself) woven into the main text on page 270 and elsewhere, not to mention many examples given in the text that are taken from works published after Denham’s death (e.g. Vol. II pages 182, 226, 257, 272, 287, 356, 357, &c.), the latest of these dating from 1888, when Denham had been dead almost thirty years. In short, the published text of these two volumes has undergone massive interference at the hands of its editor(s) and cannot reliably be taken as representing exactly what Denham wrote on specific points without outside confirmation from the original tracts.