No. 3 : Mirkwood
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He intended the black and white version, Mirkwood, to be the first endpaper of The Hobbit, and Thror’s Map to be placed in Chapter I (or in Chapter III, where Elrond first observed the secret runes). The Moon-runes were originally to appear on the reverse of the map: on the first carefully drawn form of the map, which closely followed the original sketch reproduced here, the caption was ‘Thror’s Map. Copied by B. Baggins. For moon-runes hold up to a light.’ It was objected by Charles Furth of Allen & Unwin that readers would ‘just turn over, instead of looking at them through the page as they should’; ‘we are trying a rather more cunning method of letting the runes be both there and not there,’ he wrote in January 1937. My father replied that he was ‘looking forward to finding out your method of reproducing the magic runes’; but later in that month he learned that ‘the “magic” was left out through a misunderstanding on the part of the block-maker.’ He then drew the runes in reverse ‘so that when printed they would read the right way round held up to the light. But I leave this to the Production Department, hoping nonetheless that it will not be necessary to put the magic runes on the face of the chart, which rather spoils it (unless your reference to “magic” refers to something “magical”).’ The question of costs seems to have settled the matter. As was explained to him, the book had to be modestly priced, and there was no margin for any illustrations; ‘but when you sent us these drawings,’ wrote Susan Dagnall, ‘they were so charming that we could not but insert them, though economically it was quite wrong to do so.’ ‘Let the Production Department do as it will with the chart [Thror’s Map]’, my father wrote, when the decision was taken to make it an endpaper; ‘I am very grateful to it.’ So that it is how it has always appeared; but it seems that he had sent in two copies of the Moon-runes, and those that were printed were not ‘the better drawn runes’ he had substituted: ‘those now shown are ill-done (and not quite upright).’
This is only a sample of that extremely courteous but slightly desperate correspondence of half a century ago. Letters crossed, and influenza struck at block-maker, printer and production department alike and at the most inopportune moments. The upper border of the Mirkwood picture was cut out (and never restored; since my father afterwards gave the original to a Chinese student of his it is never likely to be so). He twisted unhappily in the restriction to two colours for the maps – ‘the change from blue to red on end-paper 2 [the Wilderland map] is detrimental’, and wondered whether to substitute blue for red on Thror’s Map. Perhaps worst, and involving him in the most labour, was the dust-jacket. As originally coloured, there was a red sun and a red dragon, a red title, and a red flush on the great central mountain that appears on the spine or shelf-back. When my father sent it in in April he foresaw the objection that he had used too many colours (blue, green, red, and black): ‘this could be met, with possible improvement, by substituting white for red; and omitting the sun, or drawing a line round it. The presence of the sun and moon in the sky together refers to the magic attaching to the door.’ (See p. 56: ‘We still call it Durin’s Day when the last moon of Autumn and the sun are in the sky together.’) ‘We would suggest removing the red,’ replied Charles Furth, ‘both because the title will show up better in white and because the only feature about which we are not entirely happy in the cover is the flush on the central mountain, which makes it to our eyes just a trifle like a cake.’
J.R.R. Tolkien’s original artwork for The Hobbit jacket
My father then re-drew the jacket design. ‘I have omitted the offending pink icing on the mountainous cake,’ he wrote. ‘It is now arranged in blue, black, green. The sun and dragon still have some red, which can be left out, in which case the sun will vanish or can have a thin black outline. The colours of the original draft were, I think, more attractive. I may say that my children (if they are anything to go by) much prefer the original, including the red flush on the central mountain – but possibly the cake-suggestion is attractive to them.’ He argued still for red dragon, red sun, red title on the front cover, and other details; but Charles Furth was firm. ‘Alas,’ he wrote, ‘the red will have to go.’ ‘The sun in outline is my chief sorrow,’ my father wrote when he saw the final result, ‘but I realize that it cannot be helped.’3 The American edition had a different jacket, because, as the publishers said, ‘Your jacket has rather a British look which always seems to disconcert and depress our book trade.’ ‘I am delighted to learn that our jacket has a British look,’ he wrote, ‘but I would not depress or disconcert their book trade for anything.’
He drew and drew again certain subjects from The Hobbit: most especially Hobbiton, the Lonely Mountain, and the entrance to the Elvenking’s Halls. No. 5 is a fine drawing of the Lonely Mountain in the possession of Mr Baird Searles of New York, who has most kindly allowed it to be reproduced here and provided a transparency. He received it as a present from Mr Paul Banham, to whom my father had sent it, about 1959. This shows the great meander in the River Running around the site of Dale;
No. 4: Smaug flies round the Mountain
the water-colour of Smaug flying round the Mountain (no. 4) published in Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien (no. 18) shows the course of the river still to the west of the ruins, as on the original map. The flights of steps up to the old guard-post on Ravenhill can be seen at the left (see p. 240).
No. 5: The Lonely Mountain
No. 6 is a schematic drawing of the Lonely Mountain seen from the west, showing the position of the second camp and the perilous path which Bilbo with the dwarves Fili and Kili found (p. 206). This path brought them to a ledge ‘narrow and breathless’, ‘with a fall of a hundred and fifty feet beside them on to sharp rocks below’; the ledge led into a ‘little steep-walled bay’, and ‘at its inner end a flat wall rose up in the lower part, close to the ground, was as smooth and upright as mason’s work’. This is shown in no. 7, a sketch of ‘The Back Door.’ Dwarves are seen pulling up goods on ropes from the second camp below, and above are seen two figures on the path ‘that led higher and higher on to the mountain’ (p. 207).
No. 6: The Lonely Mountain from the west
No. 7: The Back Door
Three weeks after the publication of The Hobbit, Stanley Unwin wrote to my father saying that ‘a large public’ would be ‘clamouring next year to hear more from you about Hobbits!’ In the course of his reply (15 October 1937) he said:
All the same I am a little perturbed. I cannot think of anything more to say about hobbits. Mr Baggins seems to have exhibited so fully both the Took and the Baggins side of their nature. But I have only too much to say, and much already written, about the world into which the hobbit intruded. You can, of course, see any of it, and say what you like about it, if and when you wish. I should rather like an opinion, other than that of Mr C. S. Lewis and my children, whether it has any value in itself, or as a marketable commodity, other than hobbits. But if it is true that The Hobbit has come to stay and more will be wanted, I will start the process of thought, and try to get some idea of a theme drawn from this material for treatment in a similar style and for a similar audience – possibly including actual hobbits. My daughter would like something on the Took family. One reader wants fuller details about Gandalf and the Necromancer. But that is too dark – much too dark for Richard Hughes’ snag.4 I am afraid that snag appears in everything; though actually the presence (even if only on the borders) of the terrible is, I believe, what gives this world its imagined verisimilitude. A safe fairyland is untrue to all worlds. At the moment I am suffering like Mr Baggins from a touch of ‘staggerment’, and I hope I am not taking myself too seriously. But I must confess that your letter has aroused in me a faint hope. I mean, I begin to wonder whether duty and desire may not (perhaps) in future go more closely together. I have spent nearly all the vacation-times of seventeen years examining, and doing things of that sort, driven by immediate financial necessit
y (mainly medical and educational). Writing stories in prose or verse has been stolen, often guiltily, from time already mortgaged, and has been broken and ineffective. I may perhaps now do what I much desire to do, and not fail of financial duty. Perhaps!
No. 8: Bag End Underhill
The Simarillion, the long unfinished poem The Lay of Leithian (concerned with one of the major stories of the Elder Days), and other things went to Allen and Unwin in November, and were returned in the following month. In his accompanying letter of 15 December Stanley Unwin, urging my father ‘to write another book about The Hobbit’, reported to him that ‘the first edition is now sold out’, and that ‘we are expecting supplies of the reprint containing the four coloured illustrations5 almost immediately. If any of your friends want to make sure of their copies of the first edition they had better buy them quickly from any bookseller who still has one in stock.’
On 16 December he replied to Stanley Unwin:
I did not think any of the stuff I dropped on you filled the bill. …I think it is plain that quite apart from it, a sequel or successor to The Hobbit is called for. I promise to give this thought and attention. But I am sure you will sympathize when I say that the construction of elaborate and consistent mythology (and two languages) rather occupies the mind, and the Silmarils are in my heart. So that goodness knows what will happen. Mr Baggins began as a comic tale among conventional and inconsistent Grimm’s fairy-tale dwarves, and got drawn into the edge of it – so that even Sauron the terrible peeped over the edge. And what more can hobbits do? They can be comic, but their comedy is suburban unless it is set against things more elemental.
Three days later he wrote to Charles Furth: ‘I have written the first chapter of a new story about Hobbits – “A long expected party”.’
That was the first chapter of The Lord of the Rings.
Christopher Tolkien
1 When he wrote this note my father knew only of the sheet that I have reproduced, but two others had in fact been included in the Hobbit manuscripts that went to Marquette University in 1957.
2 The ‘someone’ was Elaine Griffiths, and the ‘person’ was Susan Dagnall. The story is told, together with the report on the book written by Rayner Unwin (then ten years old), in Humphrey Carpenter’s Biography, pp. 180-1.
3 A red sun and dragon, and red title and author’s name, were used on the cover (a truncated version of the original dust-jacket) of the reset paperback edition of 1975, but not on the dust-jacket of the reset hardback edition of 1978.
4 Richard Hughes had written to Stanley Unwin about The Hobbit, saying ‘The only snag I can see is that many parents… may be afraid that certain parts of it would be too terrifying for bedtime reading.’
5 The first impression had no pictures in colour. My father was pleased with the four coloured reproductions, but regretted that ‘the Eagle picture’(illustrating the first sentence of Chapter VI, Queer Lodgings) had not been included – ‘merely because I should have liked to see it reproduced.’ It was in fact included in the first American edition (which did not use Bilbo Comes to the Huts of the Raft-elves), and finally appeared in a British edition in 1978. In my note on this painting in Pictures (no. 9) I said that the eagle was inspired by the painting of a Golden Eagle by Archibald Thorburn. This has been queried on the grounds that the base of the eagle’s tail is white, and so must depict a White-tailed Eagle. My father’s eagle was a Golden Eagle, nonetheless; I remember finding the picture for him in T. A. Coward, The Birds of the British Isles (Vol. 1 plate 132). Thorburn’s painting is of a young bird, which in this species has a white base to the tail.
Note on the Text
The Hobbit was first published in September 1937. Its 1951 second edition (fifth impression) contains a significantly revised portion of Chapter V, “Riddles in the Dark,” which brings the story of The Hobbit more in line with its sequel, The Lord of the Rings, then in progress. Tolkien made some further revisions to the American edition published by Ballantine Books in February 1966, and to the British third edition (sixteenth impression) published by George Allen & Unwin later that same year.
For the 1995 British hardcover edition, published by HarperCollins, the text of The Hobbit was entered into word-processing files, and a number of further corrections of misprints and errors were made. Since then, various editions of The Hobbit have been generated from that computerized text file. For the present text, that file has been compared again, line by line, with the earlier editions, and a number of further corrections have been made to present a text that, as closely as possible, represents Tolkien’s final intended form.
Readers interested in details of the changes made at various times to the text of The Hobbit are referred to Appendix A, “Textual and Revisional Notes,” of The Annotated Hobbit (1988), and J.R.R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography by Wayne G. Hammond, with the assistance of Douglas A. Anderson (1993).
Douglas A. Anderson
May 2001
This is a story of long ago. At that time the languages and letters were quite different from ours of today. English is used to represent the languages. But two points may be noted. (1) In English the only correct plural of dwarf is dwarfs, and the adjective is dwarfish. In this story dwarves and dwarvish are used1, but only when speaking of the ancient people to whom Thorin Oakenshield and his companions belonged. (2) Orc is not an English word. It occurs in one or two places but is usually translated goblin (or hobgoblin for the larger kinds). Orc is the hobbits’ form of the name given at that time to these creatures, and it is not connected at all with our orc, ork, applied to sea-animals of dolphin-kind.
Runes were old letters originally used for cutting or scratching on wood, stone, or metal, and so were thin and angular. At the time of this tale only the Dwarves made regular use of them, especially for private or secret records. Their runes are in this book represented by English runes, which are known now to few people. If the runes on Thror’s Map are compared with the transcriptions into modern letters (on pp. 24 and 59–60), the alphabet, adapted to modern English, can be discovered and the above runic title also read. On the Map all the normal runes are found, except for X. I and U are used for J and V. There was no rune for Q (use CW); nor for Z (the dwarf-rune may be used if required). It will be found, however, that some single runes stand for two modern letters: th, ng, ee; other runes of the same kind ( ea and st) were also sometimes used. The secret door was marked D. From the side a hand pointed to this, and under it was written:
The last two runes are the initials of Thror and Thrain. The moon-runes read by Elrond were:
On the Map the compass points are marked in runes, with East at the top, as usual in dwarf-maps, and so read clockwise: E(ast), S(outh),W(est), N(orth).
1The reason for this use is given in The Lord of the Rings, Appendix F.
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The Hill: Hobbiton-across-the-Water
Chapter I
An Unexpected Party
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats—the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill—The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it—and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same
passage. The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden, and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.
This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses had lived in the neighbourhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him. This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained—well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.
The Hobbit: Enhanced Edition Page 2
