Chapter I(b)
The Bladorthin Typescript

At some point before the first few pages of the Pryftan Fragment were lost, Tolkien made the following typescript (Marq. 1/1/27:1–12). Only twelve pages long, the portion near the end that overlaps the surviving pages of the manuscript shows that it follows the first rough draft very closely, incorporating changes and corrections jotted onto the Ms. pages, along with a few further revisions made in the course of typing (mainly slight improvements of phrasing and substitutions to avoid repetition). This, and the fact that the names have not yet undergone any changes (for example, the dragon’s name is still ‘Pryftan’ and ‘Fingolfin’ is the goblin king), suggests it was made very shortly after the manuscript itself, probably as fair copy. This typescript is, then, the closest approximation we have to the lost opening and marks the fullest extent of the First Phase of the book’s composition. The typescript was, typically, later revised itself, but I give it here as it was originally typed, aside from silently incorporating Tolkien’s corrections of typos and omitted words necessary for the sense; the more interesting revisions are noted in the textual notes, followed by the commentary. A few eccentric spellings have been preserved, where they might be indications of pronunciations (e.g., ‘particularrly’).

The chapter originally had no title, but much later ‘Chapter I: An Unexpected Party’ was added to the first page.

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 eat or to sit down on; it was a hobbit’s hole, and that means comfort. It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green with a shiny yellow knob in the exact middle; and the door opened onto a tubeshaped hall like a tunnel, but a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, and lit by rows of little red lights and provided with polished seats against the walls and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats: the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly straight but not quite, under the hill (The Hill as all the people for many miles round called it), and many little round doors opened out first on one side 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.

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 least because they never had any adventures, or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say about any question almost without the bother of asking him. This is the story of how a Baggins had an adventure and found himself doing things altogether unexpected; he lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained – well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.

The mother of this hobbit – what is a hobbit? I meant you to find out, but if you must have everything explained at the beginning, I can only say that hobbits are small people, smaller than dwarves (and they have no beards), and on the whole larger than lilliputians. There is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when ordinary big people like you or me come blundering along, making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off; they are inclined to be fat in the tummy, dress in bright colours (chiefly green and yellow), wear no shoes because their feet grow natural leathery soles and thick warm brown hair like the stuff on their heads (which is curly), have long clever brown fingers, goodnatured faces, and laugh deep fruity laughs (especially after dinner, which they have twice a day when they can get it). Now you know quite enough to go on with. The mother of this hobbit (of Bilbo Baggins, that is) was the famous Belladonna Took one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took, head of the hobbits who lived across the Water. It had always been said that long ago some or other of the Tooks had married into a fairy family (goblin family said severer critics); certainly there was something not entirely hobbitlike about them, and once in a while members of the Took hobbits would go and have adventures. They discreetly disappeared and the family hushed it up, but the fact remained that the Tooks were not as respectable as the Bagginses, though they were undoubtedly richer. Not that Belladonna Took ever had any adventure other than becoming Mrs Bungo Baggins and making Bungo (Bilbo’s father) build the most luxurious hobbit-hole either under the Hill or over the Hill or across the Water. But it is possible that Bilbo, her only son, although he looked and behaved exactly like a second edition of his father, got through her something a bit queer from the Tooks, something that only waited for a chance to come out. And it never got its chance until Bilbo Baggins was grown up and living in the beautiful hole that I have just described to you, and in fact had settled down.

By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world when there was less noise and more green and the hobbits were still numerous and prosperous, and Bilbo Baggins was standing at his door after breakfast smoking an enormous long wooden pipe that reached down nearly to his woolly toes (neatly brushed), Bladorthin came by. Bladorthin! If you had heard only a quarter of what I have (and I have heard only a little tiny bit of what there is to hear) about him you would be prepared for any sort of remarkable tale. Tales and adventures sprouted up all over the place wherever he went in the most extraordinary fashion. He hadn’t been down this way under the Hill for ages and ages, and the hobbits had almost forgotten what he looked like; he had been away over the Hill and across the Water since their grandfather’s time at least. All the unsuspecting Bilbo saw was a little old man with a tall pointed blue hat, a long grey cloak, a silver scarf over which his long white beard hung down below his waist, and immense black boots. ‘Good morning’ said Bilbo, and he meant it: the sun was shining and the grass was very green. But Bladorthin looked at him from under very long bushy eyebrows that stuck out farther than the brim of his shady hat.

‘What do you mean’ he said. ‘Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning, or that you feel good this morning, or that it is a morning to be good on?’

‘All of them at once’ said Bilbo. ‘And a very fine morning for a pipe of baccy out of doors into the bargain. If you have a pipe about you sit down and have a fill of mine; there’s no hurry, you have got all the day in front of you!’ And Bilbo sat down on a seat by his door, crossed his legs and blew out a beautiful grey ring of smoke that sailed up in the air without breaking and floated away over the Hill.

‘Very pretty; but I have no time to blow smoke-rings, I am on the way to an adventure, and I am looking for some one to share it – very difficult to find’.

‘I should think so – in these parts. We are plain quiet folk, and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing, uncomfortable things, make you late for dinner; can’t think what anybody sees in them’, said our Mr Baggins and stuck his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets and blew out another and even bigger smoke-ring. Then he took out his letters and began to read, pretending to take no more notice of the little old man; he had decided that he was not quite his sort, and wanted him to go away. But the old man didn’t move. He stood leaning on his stick and gazing at the hobbit without saying anything, until he got quite uncomfortable and even a little cross.

‘Good morning’ the hobbit said at last. ‘We don’t want any adventures here, thank you. You might try over the Hill or across the Water’. By which he meant that the conversation was at an end.

‘What a lot of things you do use “good morning” for’ said Bladorthin. ‘Now you mean you want to get rid of me, and that it won’t be good until I move off!’

‘Not at all, not at all! my dear sir (I don’t think I know your name)’.

‘Yes, yes! my dear sir – and I do know your name, Mr Bilbo Baggins, and you know mine though you don’t know that I belong to it. I am Bladorthin and Bladorthin means me! And to think that I should have lived to be good-morninged by Belladonna Took’s son, as if I were selling buttons at the door!’

‘Bladorthin? Bladorthin? Let me see – not the wandering wizard who gave Old Took a pair of magic diamond studs that fastened themselves and never came undone – not the fellow who turned the dragon of the Far Mountains inside out, and rescued so many princesses, earls, dukes, widow’s sons and fair maidens from unlamented giants – not the man who made such particularrly excellent fireworks (I remember them! Old Took used to let us have them on Midsummer’s Eve. Splendid! They used to go up like great lilies and snapdragons and laburnums of fire and hang in the twilight all evening) dear me! – not the Bladorthin who was responsible for so many quiet lads and lasses going off into the blue for mad adventures, everything from climbing trees to stowing away aboard the ships that sail to the Other Side. Dear me, life used to be quite inter – I mean you used to upset things badly in these parts a while ago. I beg your pardon – but I had no idea you were still in business.’

‘Where else should I be? I am pleased to see that you remember something about me. You seem to remember the fireworks kindly at any rate, and that is not without hope. Indeed for your Old grandfather Took’s sake, and for the sake of poor Belladonna, I will give you what you have asked for’.

‘I beg your pardon, I haven’t asked for anything!’

‘Yes you have. Twice. My pardon! I give it you. In fact I will go so far as to take you on my present adventure with me. Very amusing for me, very good for you.’

‘Sorry. I don’t want any adventures, thank you. Good morning. But please come to tea or dinner (beautiful dinner!) any time you like. Why not tomorrow? Come tomorrow! Good bye!’ And the hobbit turned and scuttled inside his round green door, and shut it as quickly as he dared not to seem rude. ‘What on earth did I ask him to tea for?’ he thought to himself as he went to the pantry. He had only just had breakfast, but he thought a cake or two and something to drink would do him good after his fright. Bladorthin in the meanwhile was still standing outside the door and laughing long but quietly. After a while he stepped up and made a little magic sign on the hobbit’s beautiful green front door and then he strode away, just about the time that the hobbit was finishing his second cake and beginning to think that he had escaped adventures very well.

The next day he had almost forgotten about Bladorthin. He didn’t remember things very well unless he put them down on his engagement tablet (thus ‘Bladorthin, tea Wednesday’), and yesterday he had been too flustered to do anything of the sort. Just before tea-time there came a tremendous ring at the front-door bell, and then he remembered! He rushed and put on the kettle and put out another cup and saucer and an extra cake or two, and went to the door.

‘I am so sorry to keep you waiting’ he was going to say, when he saw that it wasn’t Bladorthin at all. It was a dwarf with a blue beard tucked into a golden belt, and very bright eyes under his dark green hood, and as soon as the door was open he pushed inside just as if he had been expected. He hung his hood on the nearest peg, and ‘Dwalin at your service’ he said with a bow.

‘Bilbo Baggins at yours’ said the hobbit, too surprised to say anything else. When the silence had become uncomfortable he added: ‘I am just going to have tea; pray come and have some with me’ – a little stiff perhaps but he meant it kindly; and what would you do if a dwarf came and hung his hat up in your hall without a word of explanation! They had not been at the table long, in fact they had hardly reached the third cake, when there came another even louder ring at the bell.

‘Excuse me’ said the hobbit, and off he went to the door. ‘So you’ve got here at last’ was what he was going to say to Bladorthin this time. But it wasn’t Bladorthin. There was a very old-looking dwarf there with a yellow beard and a scarlet hood, and he too hopped inside as soon as the door was half open, just as if he had been invited.

‘I see some of the others have come’^TN1 he said when he saw Dwalin’s hood on the peg. He hung his yellow^TN2 one next to it, and ‘Balin at your service’ he said with his hand on his breast. ‘Thank you’ said Bilbo with a gasp. It was the wrong thing to say, but ‘some of the others’ had put him in a fright. He liked visitors, but he liked to know them before they arrived and he preferred to ask them himself. He had a horrible thought that the cakes might run short, and then he (as the host – he knew his duty as the host and stuck to it however painful) would have to go without.

‘Come along in to tea’ he managed to say after taking a deep breath.

‘A little beer would suit me better, if it is all the same to you, my good sir’ said Balin with the Yellow Beard, ‘but I don’t mind some cake – seed-cake if you have any’.

‘Lots’ Bilbo found himself answering to his own surprise, and scuttling off to the cellar to fill a pint beer-mug, and to the pantry to fetch two beautiful seed-cakes which he had baked that afternoon for his after-supper morsel.

Balin and Dwalin were talking like old friends at the table (as a matter of fact they were brothers, but he didn’t know though he ought to have done) when he got back. He plumped down the beer and the cake, when loudly there came a ring at the bell [,] and then another. ‘Bladorthin this time, for sure’ he thought as he puffed along the passage. But it wasn’t. It was two more dwarves, both with blue hoods, silver belts, and white beards; and both carried a bag of tools and a spade.

In they hopped as soon as the door began to open – Bilbo was quite expecting it. ‘What can I do for you, my dwarves’ he said.

‘Fili at you service’ said the one; ‘and Kili’ added the other, and they both swept off their blue hoods.^TN3

‘At yours and your family’s’ said Bilbo, remembering his manners this time.

‘Dwalin and Balin here already I see’ said Kili. ‘Let us join the throng!’

‘Throng!’ thought the hobbit, ‘I don’t like the sound of that. I really must sit down for a minute and collect my wits and have a drink’. He had only just had a sip (in the corner while the dwarves sat round the table, and talked all about mines and gold and jewels and troubles with the goblins and the depredations of dragons, and lots of other things that he didn’t understand, and didn’t want to – they sounded highly adventurous) when, ding-dong-a-ling-lang, his bell rang again as if some naughty little hobbit-boy was trying to pull the handle off.

‘Someone at the door’ he said.

‘Some four, I should say by the sound’ said Fili, ‘besides we saw them coming along in the distance behind us’.

And the poor little hobbit sat down in the hall and put his head in his hands, and [added: wondered] what had happened and what was going to happen and whether they would stay to supper.

Then the bell rang again louder than ever, and he had to run to the door. It wasn’t four it was five; another one had come up while he was wondering. He had hardly turned the knob before they were all inside bowing and saying ‘at your service’ one after the other. Dor[i], Nori, Ori, Oin, and Gloin were their names, and very soon two purple hoods, a grey hood, a brown hood, and a white hood were hanging on the pegs, and off they marched with their broad hands stuck in their gold and silver belts to join the others. Some called for ale and some for stout, and one for coffee, and all of them for cake; and so the hobbit was kept very busy for a while. A big jug of coffee was just set in the hearth and the seed-cakes were almost gone, when there came – a loud knock. Not a ring, but a hard rat-tat on the hobbit’s beautiful green door; somebody was banging with a stick. Bilbo rushed along the passage very angry and altogether bewildered and bewuthered (this was the most awkward Wednesday he ever remembered), and he pull[ed] open the door with a jerk. They all fell in one on top of the other. More dwarves; four more. And there was Bladorthin standing behind with his stick. He had made quite a dent in the beautiful door and, by the way, had knocked out the magic mark that he put there on the yesterday morning.

‘Carefully, carefully’ he said. ‘This is not like you, Bilbo, to keep friends waiting and then open the door like a pop-gun. Let me introduce Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, and Gandalf’.

‘At your service’ they said, all standing in a row. Then they hung up two yellow hoods, a pale green one, and a sky-blue one with a silver tassel. This belonged to Gandalf, a very important dwarf,^TN4 and he wasn’t very pleased at falling flat on Bilbo’s mat with Bifur, Bofur and Bombur on top of him; but the hobbit said he was sorry so many times, that he forgave him.

‘We are all here now’ said Bladorthin, looking at the row of twelve^TN5 hoods on the pegs. ‘Quite a merry party. I hope you have left something for us to eat and drink. What’s that? Tea? No thank you. A little red wine, I think, if you don’t mind, for me’.

‘And for me’ said Gandalf.

‘And raspberry jam and apple-tart’ said Bifur.

‘And mince pies and cheese’ said Bofur.

‘And pork-pie and salad’ said Bombur.

‘And more beer – and tea – and coffee – if you don’t mind’ called the other dwarves [through]^TN6 the door.

‘Put on a few eggs, there’s a good fellow’ Bladorthin called after him, as the hobbit stumped off to the pantries; ‘and just bring out the cold chicken and tomatoes’.

‘Seems to know as much about the inside of my larder as I do myself’ thought Mr Bilbo Baggins, who was now feeling positively flummuxed, and beginning to wonder whether a wretched adventure hadn’t come right to his house. By the time he had all the bottles and dishes and knives and forks and plates and spoons and things piled up on big trays, he was beginning to feel very hot and red in the face and annoyed.

‘Confusticate’ (he was annoyed, I told you) ‘and bebother those dwarves’ he said aloud, ‘why don’t they come and lend a hand’.

Lo! and behold there stood Dwalin and Fili at the door of the kitchen, and Kili behind them; and before he could say ‘knife’ they had whisked the trays into the parlour, and set out the table all afresh.

Bladorthin sat at the head of the table and the twelve dwarves all round, and Bilbo sat on a stool at the fireside, nibbling a biscuit,^TN7 and trying to look as if this was all quite ordinary and not at all an adventure.

The dwarves ate and ate, and talked and talked, and time got on. At last they pushed their chairs back, and Bilbo made [a] move to collect the crocks.

‘I suppose you will all stay to supper’ he said in his politest unpressing tones.

‘Of course’ said Gandalf, ‘and afterwards. We shan’t get through the business till late, and we must have some music first. Now to clear up!’

Thereupon all the twelve dwarves (Gandalf was too important; he stayed talking to Bladorthin) got up and piled the things in tall piles. Off they went not waiting for trays, balancing columns of plates with bottles on the top on one hand, while the hobbit ran after them saying ‘please be careful’ and ‘please don’t trouble, I can manage’ one after another. But the dwarves only started to sing:

Chip the glasses and crack the plates!

Blunt the knives and bend the forks!

That’s what Bilbo Baggins hates–

Smash the bottles and burn the corks!

Cut the cloth and tread on the fat!

Pour the milk on the pantry floor!

Leave the bones on the bedroom mat!

Splash the wine on every door!

Dump the crocks in a boiling bowl;

Pound them up with a thumping pole;

And when you’ve finished, if any are whole,

Send them down the hall to roll!

That’s what Bilbo Baggins hates!

So, carefully! carefully with the plates!^TN8

And of course they did none of these dreadful things, and everything was put away quite safe while the hobbit was turning round and round in the middle of the kitchen trying to see what they were doing. Then they went back, and found Dwalin^TN9 with his feet on the fender with a pipe. He was blowing the most enormous smoke-rings, and wherever he told one to go it went – up the chimney or behind the clock on the mantelpiece or under the table or round and round the ceiling; but wherev[e]r it went it was not quick enough to escape Bladorthin. Pop! he sent a smaller one straight through it from his short clay pipe. Then Bladorthin’s smoke-ring would go green with the joke and come back to hover over the wizard’s head. He had quite a cloud of them about him already, and it made him look positively sorcerous.

Bilbo stood still and watched – he loved smoke-rings – and then he blushed to think how proud he had been yesterday morning of the smoke-ring he had sent up the wind over the Hill.

‘Now for some music’ said Gandalf. ‘Bring out the instruments!’

Kili and Fili rushed for their bags and brought back little fiddles; Dori, Nori and Ori brought out flutes from somewhere inside their coats; Bombur produced a drum from nowhere; Bifur and Bofur went into the hall and came back with [their] walking-sticks and turned them into clarinets; Dwalin and Balin said ‘excuse us we left ours in the porch’. ‘Just bring mine in with you’ said Gandalf. They came back with viols nearly as big as themselves, and with Gandalf’s harp in a green cloth. It was a beautiful golden harp, and when Gandalf struck it the music began all at once, so sudden and sweet that Bilbo forgot everything else, and was swept away into dark lands under strange moons far over the Water and very far away from his hobbit-hole under the Hill.

The dark came into the room from the little window that opened in the side of the Hill; the firelight flickered – it was April – and still they played on, while the shadow of Bladorthin’s beard wagged against the wall.

The dark filled all the room, and the fire died down, and the shadows were lost, and still they played on. And suddenly first one and then another began to sing as they played, deepthroated singing of the dwarves in the deep places of their ancient homes, and this is like a fragment of their song, if it can be like their song without their music.

Far over the misty mountains cold

To dungeons deep and caverns old

We must away ere break of day

To seek the pale enchanted gold.

The dwarves of yore made mighty spells,

While hammers fell like ringing bells

In places deep, where dark things sleep,

In hollow halls beneath the fells.

For ancient king and elvish lord

There many a gleaming golden hoard

They shaped and wrought, and light they caught

To hide in gems on hilt of sword.

On silver necklaces they strung

The flowering stars, on crowns they hung

The dragon-fire, in twisted wire

They meshed the light of moon and sun.

Far over the misty mountains cold

To dungeons deep and caverns old

We must away, ere break of day,

To claim our long-forgotten gold.

Goblets they carved there for themselves

And harps of gold; where no man delves

There lay they long, and many a song

Was sung unheard by men or elves.

The pines were roaring on the height,

The winds were moaning in the night.

The fire was red, it flaming spread;

The trees like torches blazed with light.

The bells were ringing in the dale

And men looked up with faces pale;

The dragon’s ire more fierce than fire

Laid low their towers and houses frail.

The mountain smoked beneath the moon;

The dwarves, they heard the tramp of doom.

They fled their hall to dying fall

Beneath his feet, beneath the moon.

Far over the misty mountains grim

To dungeons deep and caverns dim

We must away, ere break of day,

To win our harps and gold from him!^TN10

As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves. Then something Tookish woke up inside him and he wished to go and see the great mountains and hear the pinetrees and the waterfalls and explore the caves and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick. He looked out of the window. The stars were out in a dark sky above the trees. He thought of the jewels of the dwarves shining in dark caves. Suddenly in the wood beyond the Water a flame leapt up – somebody lighting a wood-fire, probably – and he thought of plundering dragons settling on his quiet Hill and kindling it all to flames. He shuddered, and very quickly he was plain Mr Baggins of Bag-End Under-Hill again.

He got up trembling; he had less than half a mind to fetch the lamp, and more than half a mind to pretend to, and go and hide behind the beer-barrel in the cellar and not come out again until all the dwarves had gone. Suddenly he found that the music and the singing had stopped and they were all looking at him with eyes shining in the dark.

‘Where are you going?’ said Gandalf, in a tone that seemed to show that he guessed both halves of the hobbit’s mind.

‘What about a little light?’ he said apologetically.

‘We like the dark’ all the dwarves said. ‘Dark for dark business! There are many hours before dawn’.

‘Of course’ said Bilbo and sat down in a hurry. He missed the stool and sat in the fender, knocking the poker and shovel over with a crash.

‘Hush!’ said Bladorthin. ‘Let Gandalf speak!’ And this is how he began.

‘Bladorthin, dwarves and Mr Baggins, we are met together in the house of our friend and fellow conspirator, this most excellent and audacious hobbit – may the hair on his toes never grow less! – all praise to his wine and ale! –’ He paused for breath and for a polite remark from the hobbit, but the praise was quite lost on poor Bilbo Baggins, who was wagging his mouth in protest at being called audacious and worst of all ‘fellow conspirator’; but no noise would come he was so upsettled. So he went on:

‘We are met to discuss our plans, our ways means, policy and devices. We shall soon, before the break of day, start on our long journey, a journey from which some of us, or perhaps all of us (except our friend and counsellor, the ingenious wizard Bladorthin), may never return. It is a solemn moment. The object is, I take it, well known to us all. To the estimable Mr Baggins, and to one or two of the younger dwarves (I think I should be right in naming Kili and Fili, for instance), the exact situation at the moment may require a little brief explanation –’

This was Gandalf’s style – he was an important dwarf –; in the end he would probably have gone on like this, without telling anybody anything that he didn’t know already, until he was out of breath. But this time he was rudely interrupted. Poor Bilbo couldn’t bear it any longer. At ‘may never return’ he began to feel a shriek coming up inside, and very soon after it burst out like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel.^TN11 All the dwarves sprang up, knocking over the table. Bladorthin struck a blue light on the end of his magic staff, and in its firework-glare the poor little hobbit could be seen kneeling on the hearthrug shaking like a jelly that was melting. Then he fell flat, and there he kept on calling out ‘struck by lightning, struck by lightning’ over and over again; and that was all they could get out of him for a long while.^TN12 So they took him and laid him out of the way on the drawingroom sofa, with a lamp and a drink beside him, and they went back to their dark business.

‘Excitable little man’ said Bladorthin, as they sat down again. ‘Gets funny queer fits but he is one of the best, one of the best – as fierce as a dragon in a pinch’. If you have [ever] seen a dragon in a pinch you will realize that this was only poetical exaggeration applied to any hobbit – even to Old Took’s great-uncle Bullroarer, who was so large that he could just ride a shetland pony, and charged the ranks of the goblins of Mount Gram in the Battle of the Green Fields. He knocked their king Fingolfin’s^TN13 head clean off with a wooden club; it sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment.

In the meanwhile, however, Bullroarer’s gentler descendant was reviving in the drawing-room. After a while, and a drink, he crept nervously to the door of the parlour. This is what he heard: Dwalin speaking.

‘Humph! will he do it, d’you think? It is all very well for Bladorthin to talk about this hobbit being fierce, but one shriek like that in a moment of excitement would be enough to wake the dragon and all his relatives and kill the lot of us. Personally, I think there was more fright in it than excitement, and if it hadn’t been for the secret sign on the door, I should have been sure I had come to the wrong house. As soon as I clapped eyes on the little fellow bobbing and puffing on the mat I had my doubts. He looks more like a grocer than a burglar!’^TN14

Then Mr Baggins turned the handle and walked in. Took had won. He felt he would go [added: without] bed and breakfast to be thought fierce. As for ‘little fellow bobbing on the mat’ it almost made him feel really fierce. Many a time afterwards the Baggins part regretted what he did now, and he said to himself ‘Bilbo, you were a fool, you walked right in and put your foot in it’. He did.

‘Pardon me’ he said ‘if I have overheard some words that you were saying. I don’t pretend to understand what you are all talking about, but I think I am right in believing’ (this is what is called ‘being on one’s dignity’) ‘that you think I am no good. I will show you. I have no magic signs on my door – it was painted a week ago – and I am sure you have all come to the wrong house; as soon as I saw your funny faces on the door-step I had my doubts. But treat it as the right one. Tell me what you want me to do, and I will try it, if I have to walk from here to the last desert in the East and fight the Wild Wireworms of the Chinese. I had a great-great-great-uncle, Bullroarer Took, and –’^TN15

‘We know, we know’ said Gloin (he was very fond of golf); ‘holed out in one on the Green Fields! But I assure you the mark was on the door – “Burglar wants a good Job, plenty of Excitement and reasonable Reward” it means – it was there last night. Oin found it, and we all came tonight as soon as we could get together; for the mark was fresh. Bladorthin told us there was a man of the sort in this neighbourhood, and that he was seldom out of a job’.

‘Of course’ said the wizard. ‘[I] put the mark there myself. For very good reasons. I chose Mr Baggins for your fourteenth man, and let any one say I chose the wrong man who dares. If any one does you can stop at thirteen and have all the bad luck you like, or go back to digging coal. Bilbo, my boy’ (he went on, turning to the hobbit), ‘fetch the lamp and let’s have a little light on this matter.’^TN16

On the table in the light of a big lamp with a red shade he spread a parchment map.

‘This I got from your grandfather, Gandalf’ he said in answer to the dwarves’ excited grunts. ‘It shows the Mountain and the surrounding country. Here it is. Over there is the Wild Wood, and far beyond it to the North, only the edge of it is on the map, is the Withered Heath where the Great Dragons used to be’.

‘We know all that’ said Balin. ‘I don’t see that this will help us much. There is a picture of a Dragon in red on the Mountain, but it will be easy enough to find him without any picture – if ever we arrive at the Mountain’.^TN17

‘There is one point which you haven’t noticed’ said the wizard ‘and that is the secret entrance. You see that rune^* on the East side, and the hand pointing from it from the runes below? That marks the old secret entrance to the Lower Halls’.

Typed in the margin and marked for insertion at this point is the following authorial aside:

^* Don’t ask what that is. Look at the map and you will see.

‘It may have been secret once’ said Gandalf ‘but why should it be any longer? Old Pryftan^TN18 has lived there long enough now to find out anything there is to know about those caves’.

‘He may – but he can’t have used it for years and years’.

‘Why?’

‘Because it is too small. “Five feet high is the door and three abreast may enter it” say the runes, but Pryftan could not creep into a hole that size, not even when he was a very young dragon, certainly not after he had devoured so many of the maidens of the valley’.

‘It seems a great big hole’ squeaked Bilbo (who had no experience of Dragons and only of hobbit-holes). He was getting excited and interested, so he forgot to be shy and keep his

The typescript ends here, at the bottom of the twelfth page but not, interestingly enough, the end of a line. The text is continued, resuming in the middle of the same sentence, by the first page of the Second Phase manuscript, Marq. 1/1/1:3, which continues the pagination of the Bladorthin Typescript; see p. 70.

TEXT NOTES

1 ‘some of the others have come’ was later changed to the more precise ‘one of them has come already!’

2 The colour of Balin’s hood was changed in ink from yellow to red (to match the mention of his ‘scarlet hood’ in the preceding paragraph), but this slip was probably not corrected until a much later date than the others noted in this section; not only is it made in a different colour of ink than that used in most of the other revisions to this typescript but Balin’s hood is still mistakenly described as ‘yellow’ as late as Chapter VI (see pp. 198 & 210–11).

3 Note that here Fili names himself first, rather than Kili, just as in the list of names written across the top of the last page of the Pryftan fragment (see p. 11); the order was reversed in the Third Phase typescript (Marq. 1/1/51:6) and all subsequent texts, including the published book (DAA.39).

4 Added in the later ink: ‘in fact none other than the great Thorin Oakenshield’. Since the name ‘Thorin’ did not arise in the Ms. until a much later stage – in fact, the arrival at Lake Town in Chapter X, although it had been suggested in Plot Notes A, written during the drafting of Chapter VII (see p. 293) – this is another late addition, made long after the original typescript.

5 Both here and at the next occurrence (when they all sit down to dinner), ‘twelve’ is corrected to ‘thirteen’.

6 The word ‘through’ is hand-written over an erasure, but whatever word was originally typed here has been completely obliterated.

7 American readers should take note that the ‘biscuit’ Bilbo nibbles on is not a flaky wheat roll leavened with baking soda but a cookie (one of the few points where English and American usage diverge, so far as understanding the book goes).

8 This, the first of what would be many poems in The Hobbit, appears here already in nearly final form, clearly preceded by drafting that does not survive (presumably in the lost pages of the Pryftan Fragment, although we cannot be certain it was included). Aside from minor adjustments to punctuation only three lines have any variants: (1) in the second half of line 8 ‘the cellar’ would be replaced with ‘every’ (‘Splash the wine on every door!’), (2) in the first half of line 9, ‘Put the things’ would be replaced by the more colourful ‘Dump the crocks’ (‘Dump the crocks in a boiling bowl’), and (3) in the last line, ‘careful, carefully’ is replaced by ‘carefully! carefully’ (‘So, carefully! carefully with the plates!’). All these changes already appear in the next text of the poem, that appearing in the First Typescript (Marq. 1/1/51:8).

9 ‘Dwalin’ was emended to ‘Gandalf’, a change necessitated by the fact that Dwalin, like the other twelve, was busy with the washing up; only Gandalf had stayed behind. The rather more prominent role Dwalin played in the First Stage texts may be due to his name having been taken from one of the most famous of all dwarves in Norse lore, Dvalin. As Christopher Tolkien notes in his edition and translation of Heidreks Saga,

Dwalin seems to have been one of the most renowned of all dwarfs, and often appears in the Eddaic poetry (especially Volospá 14, Fáfnismál 13, Hávamál 143).

—The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise [1960], page 15.

In ‘The Waking of Angantyr’, one of several ancient poems incorporated into the much later (late twelfth/early thirteenth century) prose saga,^† it is said that the cursed sword Tyrfing was forged by Dvalin (ibid., page 15). An alternate opening of the saga given as an appendix to Christopher Tolkien’s edition gives the full story of how Dvalin and Durin, ‘the most skillful of all dwarfs’, were captured and forced to forge a magnificent magical sword, upon which they put a curse (The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, page 68); the saga is essentially the story of the subsequent owners of the cursed sword. It is ironic that in Norse lore Dvalin was far better known than Durin, whereas through Tolkien’s usage in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that situation has now reversed.

^† another being ‘The Battle of the Goths and Huns’, a probable remote inspiration for the character Éowyn in The Lord of the Rings.

10 Several small changes were made to the poem: ‘to claim our long forgotten gold’ is written in the margin alongside the line ‘To claim our pale enchanted gold’ in the fifth stanza. In the sixth stanza, ‘cups’ is changed to ‘goblets’, in the eighth ‘vale’ is changed to ‘dale’, and in the final line ‘take’ is changed to ‘win’. That these minor refinements were all that was needed to bring the poem into its final form was due to the fact that the missing section of the Pryftan Fragment contained a draft of this poem, although only a single line of it survives; see p. 14.

11 As this line shows, The Hobbit’s trademark mix of the familiar and the strange is perhaps at its strongest in this chapter: references to pop-guns, trains, tea-parties, and familiar names for days of the week lie alongside wizards, dwarves, dragons, and hobbits, just as the ‘Wild Wireworms of the Chinese’ is juxtaposed against the Battle of the Green Fields and the goblins of Mount Gram. Tolkien had good precedent for his mentions of tobacco and tomatoes;^† even the Brothers Grimm allowed potatoes and contemporary coaches into their folk-tales. Some of the so-called anachronisms, however, are nothing of the sort; it is the narrator, not one of the characters in the story, who compares the scream welling up inside Bilbo to a train-whistle, just as in The Lord of the Rings it is again the narrator who compares the noise made by the firework dragon to an express train rushing by (LotR.40).

^† In the third edition of 1966, Tolkien changed the tomatoes to pickles (see pp. 777 & 786) but let the tobacco stand, despite having used the less specific ‘pipeweed’ in the sequel. A devoted rather than a heavy smoker himself, Tolkien once recorded an amusing dialogue in praise of tobacco called ‘At the Tobacconist’s’ for the Linguaphone Institute.

12 Bilbo’s cry ‘struck by lightning, struck by lightning’ refers not to anything in Gandalf’s speech but to Bladorthin’s staff with its blue light and ‘firework glare’. Compare the scene several chapters later when the goblins try to capture the wizard in the mountain-cave. There we are told ‘there was a terrific flash like lightning in the cave and several fell dead’ (p. 130); the goblin guards later report to the Great Goblin that ‘Several of our people were struck by magic lightning in the cave, when we invited them to come below, and are dead as stones’ (p. 132).

13 An ink revision here changes ‘Fingolfin’ to ‘Golfimbul’.

14 Here ‘burglar’ was changed in ink to an illegible word, possibly ‘hunter’, which is then rejected in favor of ‘burglar’ once more.

15 References to the ‘shetland’ pony and the aforementioned wireworms ‘of the Chinese’ survive here from the previous draft, while the Gobi (famous at the time for Roy Chapman Andrews’ fossil-hunting expeditions there throughout the 1920s, which led to the discovery of the first dinosaur eggs in 1923) has become ‘the last desert in the East’; also gone is the Hindu Kush (already marked for deletion in the Pryftan Fragment). Through these exotic but real features, Bilbo’s world remains firmly tied to our own.

16 Both this paragraph and the one before it were extensively reworked, with marginal additions in dark ink:

. . . plenty of Excitement and reasonable Reward’; that is how it is usually read. You can say ‘Expert treasure-hunter’, if you like, instead of ‘Burglar’. Some of them do. It’s all the same to us. Bladorthin told us there was a man of the sort in these parts looking for a job at once, and that he would arrange for a meeting this Wednesday tea-time.’

‘Of course there is a mark’ said the wizard [cancelled: not letting Bilbo speak] I put it there myself. For very good reasons. I chose Mr Baggins for your fourteenth man, and let any one say I chose the wrong man who dares. If any one does you can stop at thirteen and have all the bad luck you like, or go back to digging coal.’ He scowled so angrily at Gloin, that the dwarf huddled back in his chair; and when Bilbo tried [to speak >] to open his mouth to ask questions, he turned and frowned at him and stuck out his <bushy> eyebrows, till Bilbo shut his mouth tight with a snap. ‘That’s right’ said Bladorthin. ‘Let’s have no more argument. I have chosen Mr Baggins, and that ought to be enough for all of you. If I say he is a Burglar, a Burglar he is, or will be when the time comes. There is a lot more in him than you guess, and a lot more than he has any idea of himself. You may (possibly) all live to thank me yet. Now Bilbo, my boy fetch the lamp and let’s have a little light on this.’

17 These three paragraphs were reproduced with only minor changes in the First Typescript (that is, the first complete typescript of the entire book, begun after the manuscript draft had reached the scene on Ravenhill), but there they were recast by black ink revisions (indicated below in italics) written interlinearly in Tolkien’s neatest script:

On the table in the light of a big lamp with a red shade he spread a piece of parchment rather like a map.

‘This I got from your grandfather, Thorin’ he said in answer to the dwarves’ excited questions. ‘It is a plan of the Mountain.’

‘I do’nt see that this will help us much’ said Thorin disappointedly after a glance. ‘I remember the Mountain well enough, and the lands about it. And I know where Mirkwood is, and the Withered Heath where the great dragons bred.’

‘There is a dragon marked in red on the Mountain’, said Balin, ‘but it will be easy enough to find him without that, if ever we arrive there.’

As may be seen, this closely approaches the text of the published book, although the phrase ‘This I got from your grandfather’ was not replaced by ‘This was made by your grandfather’ until the final page proofs.

18 Both here and at its next occurrence ‘Pryftan’ was later changed in dark ink to ‘Smaug’.

(i)
Baggins of Bag-End

From this typescript, we can see that while the story underwent considerable rewriting, its general outlines remained stable from the very earliest drafts. Actors and dialogue shifted around, names changed, and details were in flux, but the essential narrative remained from first germ to final flowering. Indeed, the evidence of this typescript shows that, once he turned his attention to finding out what that opening line meant, hobbits arrived fully developed in Tolkien’s mind, right down to their eating habits and hairy feet.¹ The use of the present tense quietly establishes that although this story is set ‘long ago in the quiet of the world when there was less noise and more green and hobbits were still numerous and prosperous,’ hobbits are in fact still around today, if elusive and shy around ‘ordinary big people like you and me.’ The lighthearted comparison to lilliputians, surprising as it is to readers approaching The Hobbit from the more somber perspective of The Lord of the Rings, survived into the published text and was only removed almost three decades later, in the third edition of 1966.²

Bilbo himself is introduced gradually, almost casually, first as ‘a hobbit’, then ‘the hobbit and ‘he’; not until the second paragraph do we find out that the name of ‘This hobbit’ is Baggins, and we have to wait another paragraph before the full name is dropped in parenthetically in passing: ‘(Bilbo Baggins, that is)’. The gradual introduction of the main character is only one of Tolkien’s many rhetorical devices that establish the relationship between the narrator and the reader; here Tolkien entices the reader’s curiosity by feeding him or her information bit by bit. In contrast, Bladorthin’s sudden intrusion, which begins the actual story, echoes the abruptness of the book’s opening line, creating the feeling that the thing named exists before, and outside of, the tale about to be told.

The opening paragraphs are more concerned to introduce a context than a character, the background which Bilbo will at first seem part of and against which he will later stand out; hence the detailed description not of Bilbo but of his home, the neighborhood, and even bits of family gossip. The use of proper nouns made out of common nouns – The Hill, the Water – once again recalls William Morris, though it may be simple verisimilitude; well-known local landmarks are usually referred to in precisely this way, especially in small towns and rural communities. Some of the details of the description of Bag-End itself conjure up the civilized atmosphere of a comfortable sitting room in an old manor house, with ‘little red lights’ and ‘polished’ seats, while others suggest rather a railway tunnel from the days of steam trains: ‘a tubeshaped hall like a tunnel, but . . . without smoke’ (granting that train stations and underground tunnels had an elegance of their own in bygone days). While the name ‘Bag-End’ appears to be a family joke deriving from the nickname of the farm in Worcestershire where Tolkien’s aunt Jane Neave and his grandfather Suffield lived in the 1920s (Carpenter, p. 106), on another level ‘Bagg-ins of Bag-End’ is a simple word-association joke of the golf/Fingolfin variety. The nearest literary antecedents for Bilbo’s home come from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows [1908]: the snugness of Mole End, the rambling underground passages of Badger’s home, and the grandeur of Toad Hall (like Bag-End, the grandest dwelling of its type in the neighborhood, inherited by the present owner from his father) all contributed to the portrait of the hobbit-hole.³

Then there are the neighbors to consider, the other hobbits who while not appearing as characters nonetheless form the backdrop against which the hobbit begins his adventures. Like Giles, Niggle, Smith, and Mr. Bliss, Bilbo does not live in a void, and through reports of what ‘people said’, we soon learn what to expect of a Baggins and of a Took, cluing us in to Bilbo’s typical behavior for the rest of the book. This is not to say that Tolkien had these later incidents in mind when he originally drafted these passages but rather the reverse: he jotted down details as they came to him and then, with typical attention to consistency, he later took those details into consideration as he came to write further chapters, developing the book along the lines he laid down very early on.

Much is made here and elsewhere of Bilbo’s ancestry and its effect on his character. The rumor of fairy (i.e., elf⁴) or goblin blood is another point modified in the third edition, where all mention of the malicious slander about possible goblin ancestry was dropped and the idea of a Took ancestor having ‘taken a fairy wife’⁵ is dismissed as ‘absurd’. This establishes that whereas the Bagginses are archetypical hobbits in being predictable, unadventurous, and respectable,⁶ Tooks are ‘not entirely hobbitlike’. That is, they are occasionally unpredictable, adventurous, and hence not ‘respectable’ – by hobbit standards, anyway.

Since Bilbo is both a Took and a Baggins, it is worthwhile stopping for a moment to consider what we are told here about his parents. We are never told what was so ‘remarkable’ about Belladonna and her sisters, nor why Bladorthin should refer to her as ‘poor Belladonna’, while we know little of Bungo besides a few of his favorite sayings (which Bilbo tends to repeat to himself when in a tight spot) and the fact that outwardly he looked, and acted, very like Bilbo (who is described as ‘a second edition of his father’ in appearance and behavior). That the Belladonna of the First Phase never had any adventure ‘other than becoming Mrs Bungo Baggins’ makes one wonder if like his famous son Bungo was perhaps also not so ‘prosy’ as he seemed; in the published text ‘other than’ was changed to ‘after’, conjuring up images of a life of dreary respectability. Another First Phase phrasing not appearing in the finished book has Belladonna ‘making Bungo . . . build the most luxurious hobbit-hole either under the Hill or over the Hill or across the Water’; the published version has it that ‘Bungo . . . built the most luxurious hobbit-hole for her (and partly with her money) that was to be found either under The Hill or over The Hill or across The Water, and there they remained to the end of their days’. Tolkien is deft at conveying characterization with extreme economy (so much so that careless readers and critics often miss it entirely); had it been retained we would have here in a single word the shadowy figure of Belladonna T. Baggins indelibly delineated as the first in what becomes in The Lord of the Rings and after a line of indomitable hobbit matriarchs: Smeagol’s grandmother, Lobelia B. Sackville-Baggins, Dora Baggins, and the tyrannical Lalia the Great.⁷ Years later, when attempting to address all the loose threads left over from The Hobbit for the sequel, Tolkien returned to the question of ‘poor Belladonna’ and drafted a passage relating how Bilbo ‘was left an orphan, when barely forty years old, by the untimely death of his father and mother (in a boating accident)’ (HME VI.25), a fate later transferred to Frodo’s parents rather than Bilbo’s.

The Name ‘Bilbo’

Like the similar hobbit names Bingo, Ponto, Bungo, and Drogo, all of which eventually end up in the Baggins family tree (see LotR page [1136] and HME XII.89–92), ‘Bilbo’ is both a short, simple, made-up name appropriate for the hero of a children’s book or light-hearted fantasy story and also the sort of nickname that was actually in use in England at the time (or perhaps, more truthfully, a slightly earlier time), as preserved in the humorous tales of P. G. Wodehouse. Examples of the former include Gorbo, the main character in E. A. Wyke-Smith’s The Marvellous Land of Snergs [1927], a book popular among the Tolkien children,⁸ and Pombo, the anti-hero of one of Dunsany’s short tales (‘The Injudicious Prayers of Pombo the Idolater’, in The Book of Wonder [1912]).⁹ Examples of the latter can be found in Bingo (Richard) Little and Pongo (Reginald) Twisleton, both from Wodehouse’s work.¹⁰

Bilbo is also, of course, a real surname which, while rare, survives into modern times: when my father was growing up near Hope, Arkansas in the early 1930s among his neighbors were the Bilbos, some of whom still lived in the area in the mid-1970s.¹¹ Unfortunately, the best-known person with that surname is the notorious Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi (1877–1947), a politician infamous by the not too fastidious standards of the time for his racism and corruption; luckily, he cannot be the source for Tolkien’s use of the name, since he did not rise to national prominence until 1934, by which time Tolkien had already completed the first draft of The Hobbit.

Finally, as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) bears witness, ‘bilbo’ also exists, alone or in combination, in several archaic common nouns, the most important of which is the name of a type of well-tempered, flexible sword originating from Bilbao in Spain. Such ‘bilbow blades’ were often simply called a ‘Bilbo’, often uppercased (no doubt because of the proper noun nameplace that gave them their name) – e.g., Falstaff’s ‘compass’d like a good Bilbo in the circumference of a Pecke’ (The Merry Wives of Windsor [1598], Act III. scene v. line 112) or Drayton’s ‘Downe their Bowes they threw/And forth their Bilbos drew’ [1603], both cited by the OED. Similarly, a kind of shackles was also known from the mid-sixteenth century as a ‘bilbo’ or ‘bilbow’, and a cup-and-ball game popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was called ‘bilbo-catch’ (earlier bilboquet).¹² But it seems unlikely that our Bilbo’s name derives from any of these: his acquiring a little sword early in his adventure is probably a case of the cart following the horse, as Tolkien brought in elements (such as a ‘bilbo-blade’) that would go well with the character he had already named Bilbo. Exploring linguistic associations no doubt gave Tolkien ideas of things he could do with the character, just as scholarly researches seem to have led him to later incorporate some elements of Plato’s ring of Gyges into his own ring of invisibility (see p. 176 & ff), but they are not likely to have been the source of his name. Like hobbit itself, Bilbo is almost certainly Tolkien’s own coinage.

(ii)
Bladorthin

After Bilbo, the most important character in this first chapter is Bladorthin. Bladorthin, the wizard in The Hobbit, later developed into the Gandalf the Grey of The Lord of the Rings, but it is difficult to tell in this first appearance how much of the later character was already present in Tolkien’s mind in this first draft and how much he discovered in the course of writing, partly because the character is deliberately kept somewhat mysterious. Certainly the phrase ‘Gandalf the Grey’ is never used in The Hobbit, being part of the many layers of later accretions the character picked up over the years (a process which reached its peak in the 1954 essay ‘The Istari’, printed in Unfinished Tales). Bladorthin by contrast is never associated with any one colour; indeed, the first description of him offers quite a variety: blue hat, grey cloak, silver scarf, white beard, and black boots (we are not told the actual colour of his robe, only these accessories). Separating the ennobled Gandalf we know from The Lord of the Rings from the wandering wizard who flits in and out of the drafts of The Hobbit might be a difficult mental exercise, but it is a worthwhile one; otherwise we’ll make assumptions that may not be justified, and bring things to The Hobbit that simply aren’t there. In the interest of clarity, in this commentary I refer to the wizard in The Hobbit as ‘Bladorthin’, the name Tolkien used right up to the arrival at the Lonely Mountain (and indeed a bit beyond), and the wizard in The Lord of the Rings as ‘Gandalf’ or ‘Gandalf the Grey’ (not to be confused with Gandalf the dwarf, the character later renamed Thorin Oakenshield).

Late in life Tolkien described Gandalf the Grey as

a figure strongly built with broad shoulder, though shorter than the average of men and now stooped with age, leaning on a thick rough-cut staff as he trudged along . . . Gandalf’s hat was wide-brimmed (a shady hat, H. p. 14)¹³ with a pointed conical crown, and it was blue; he wore a long grey cloak, but this would not reach much below his knees. It was of an elven silver-grey hue, though tarnished by wear – as is evident from the general use of grey in the book [i.e., in The Lord of the Rings] . . . But his colours were always white, silver-grey, and blue – except for the boots he wore when walking in the wild . . . Gandalf even bent must have been at least 5 ft. 6 . . . Which would make him a short man even in modern England, especially with the reduction of a bent back.¹⁴

This Odinic figure is an angel in incarnated form (i.e., a Maia), one of the five Istari, bearer of the Ring of Fire, whose other names are Mithrandir and Olórin, who passes through death and returns as Gandalf the White, the Enemy of Sauron; altogether a much more dignified, powerful, and political figure than the ‘little old man’ Bilbo meets on his doorstep one day ‘in the quiet of the world’.

In the essay on the Istari, Tolkien states that ‘they were supposed (at first) by those that had dealings with them to be Men who had acquired lore and arts by long and secret study’ (Unfinished Tales p. 388). However, it is by no means clear whether or not Tolkien himself was of the same opinion when he first wrote The Hobbit. Like so much else in the story, Bladorthin’s nature is ambiguous, no doubt deliberately so: he might be human, or he might already be something more. If we had only The Hobbit itself to go by, we should certainly have no reason to doubt that he was what he appeared, a ‘little old man’ – the phrase Tolkien twice uses to describe him when introducing the character (the second usage was later changed to ‘old man’ to avoid repetition, the first was likewise altered in the third edition, no doubt to increase the wizard’s stature).¹⁵ It might be objected that Tolkien also describes Bilbo as an ‘excitable little man’ in the Ms. and first edition, yet when children’s author Arthur Ransome objected to the loose application of ‘man’ in the first edition, specifically as applied to Bilbo and in Thorin’s concern for his ‘men’ (Ransome to Tolkien, 13th December 1937; see Appendix IV), Tolkien changed the description of Bilbo to ‘excitable little fellow’ and made similar adjustments regarding the dwarves but left the description of the wizard as a ‘little old man’ untouched, implying that it was literal and accurate.

However, The Hobbit does not stand alone, and once viewed in the context of the early Silmarillion material, Tolkien’s other tales for his children, and its own sequel, the case for Bladorthin’s being more than human grows somewhat stronger. Even if in the early drafts of the sequel Gandalf is still referred to as ‘a little old man’ (HME VI.20), a description retained as late as the sixth draft of the opening chapter (ibid.315), we must admit that within the published Lord of the Rings (where Gandalf’s more-than-human status is firmly established) he is still twice described as an ‘old man’ (LotR.37). Presumably these last, whether literal or not at the time they were written, must within their published context be taken as reflecting the point of view of the hobbits rather than the reality beneath the appearances. In the brief account of the wizards’ coming to Middle-earth that forms the headnote of the Third Age section of Appendix B: ‘The Tale of Years’, it is said that the wizards came ‘in the shape of Men’ (LotR.1121, italics mine), a statement that ties in closely with the viewpoint from the Istari essay already quoted. Moreover, Tolkien’s reply to Ransome suggests that by that point (December 1937), several days before he wrote the first pages of what would become The Lord of the Rings, he was already thinking of Gandalf as something not quite human:

The ancient English . . . would have felt no hesitation in using ‘man’ of elf, dwarf, goblin, troll, wizard or what not, since they were inclined to make Adam the father of them all . . .

– Tolkien to Ransome, 15th December 1937; cf. Appendix IV.

Obviously, Tolkien’s mythos provided the elves, dwarves, and others with their own creation myths, but the inclusion of ‘wizard’ here implies that they too stood apart in a separate category, distinct from Men (humans), whom Tolkien associates in his letter to Ransome with Elves as the Two Kindreds (anticipating here perhaps the five Free Peoples of The Lord of the Rings; LotR.485–6). Within this context, we should note that Tolkien’s Roverandom [1925–7], which he wrote a few years before The Hobbit, begins with an unsuspecting innocent encountering an ‘old man’ who turns out to be a wizard (page 3), and the Man-in-the-Moon in the same story is repeatedly called ‘an old man’ (or, in one case, ‘an old man with a long silvery beard’; page 22), as is his friend Father Christmas in the Father Christmas Letters, although the latter is certainly not human.

If Bladorthin, Roverandom’s Artaxerxes, and similar figures appearing in Tolkien’s earlier writings are not human, is it possible to determine where they fit within the context of Tolkien’s legendarium? Granted that the early stages of his mythology were less structured and more inclusive than it later became, the key figure in answering that question is Túvo the wizard, a figure who evolved into Tû the fay and eventually Thû the necromancer (see BLT I.232–5 and the discussion of this character beginning on p. 81 below). Túvo is emphatically neither elf nor human – in fact, he plays a part in the discovery and awakening of the first humans in Middle-earth – but rather a fay, the catch-all term Tolkien used at the time for beings created before the world and who came to inhabit it, including the Maiar. Thus from Tolkien’s very first wizard, who existed in the unfinished ‘Gilfanon’s Tale’ at least a decade before Bladorthin first came on the scene, can already be found the conceptual precedent for Tolkien’s much, much later bald statement that ‘Gandalf is an angel’ – or at least, in the case of Bladorthin, a supernatural being incarnated within the world, neither human nor mortal but very human in his behavior and character.

Whether or not this was in Tolkien’s mind when he wrote the opening scenes of The Hobbit, or indeed was merely present in the background as a potentiality, it is clear that, just as the power of Bilbo’s ring was subtly altered between the original book and its sequel, so too were the wizard’s powers enhanced. Contrasting Bladorthin’s and Gandalf’s behavior when battling wargs (pages 203–8 vs. LotR.314–16) shows that while Bladorthin is perhaps the more resourceful of the two, Gandalf’s resources are greater; the wargs and goblins are almost too much for Bladorthin, while Gandalf can ignite a whole hillful of trees at a gesture. As Sam says, ‘Whatever may be in store for old Gandalf, I’ll wager it isn’t a wolf’s belly’ (LotR.315), while Bladorthin is only saved from leaping to his death in a final blaze of glory by the timely intervention of the eagles. Bladorthin’s greater vulnerability is also shown by the wound he receives in the final battle; it is hard to imagine the Gandalf of The Lord of the Rings walking around after the battle of Helm’s Deep or siege of Minas Tirith with his arm in a sling.

Unlike Gandalf, Bladorthin is very much a traditional fairy-tale enchanter: among his recorded exploits are rescuing ‘many princesses, earls, dukes, widow’s sons and fair maidens’ and slaying ‘unlamented giants’, exactly what we would expect of a hero from one of the old stories collected by Joseph Jacobs or Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm.¹⁶ Although his magical skills extend far beyond fireworks – we learn that he ‘turned the dragon of the Far Mountains inside out’ – he prefers trickery and glamour, as in the troll-scene, to more obvious displays of magic.

When we first meet him, Bladorthin is busy organizing an adventure, and not having an easy time of it. From various hints in this first chapter we can reconstruct his movements in the days immediately preceding the unexpected party and conclude that Bilbo was not, in fact, his first choice. On ‘last Thursday’ the wizard met with the thirteen dwarves and convinced them to hire a professional burglar to help in their quest (having already tried and failed to find them a warrior or hero; cf. p. 10), assuring them he knew of one in the vicinity ‘seldom out of a job’. The dwarves separate to look for the burglar. The following Tuesday, Bladorthin met Bilbo and put the sign on his door; that Bilbo was probably far down on his list¹⁷ is indicated by the wizard’s complaint that he is ‘on the way to an adventure, and . . . looking for some one to share it – very difficult to find!’ (to which Bilbo retorts ‘I should think so – in these parts’). Later that same day, Oin spotted the sign and informed the others, who meet by appointment the next day (‘as soon as we could get together’; cf. Gloin’s speech on p. 40).

That Bladorthin’s chief occupation lay in the organizing and expediting of adventures seems indicated not just by his role here but by Bilbo’s recollection: ‘dear me! – not the Bladorthin who was responsible for so many quiet lads and lasses going off into the blue for mad adventures, everything from climbing trees to stowing away aboard the ships that sail to the Other Side’.¹⁸ We are not told his motivations, other than the passing hint that the adventure will be ‘Very amusing for me, very good for you’; it is simply who he is and what he does (‘I am Bladorthin, and Bladorthin means me!’). It is amusing to note that, before Bladorthin is through with him, Bilbo does indeed vanish on what his hobbit neighbors would call a mad adventure (eventually passing into hobbit legend as ‘Mad Baggins’; cf. LotR.55), during the course of which he is forced to climb a tree not once but twice (to escape the wargs and to try to look for a way out of Mirkwood) and stow away invisibly on board a ship (actually a raft, on the way to Lake Town).¹⁹ He does not, in the course of this book, ever reach the Other Side (i.e., Valinor),²⁰ although eventually, in the sequel, Bilbo ends his career by undertaking just such a voyage. At one point, early on in the composition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien even considered making the main focus of that story Bilbo’s voyage into the West:

. . . Elrond tells him of an island. Britain? Far west where the Elves still reign. Journey to perilous isle. (HME VI.41)

– i.e., Tol Eressëa or Elvenhome. Had this story-idea been carried out, the hobbit-hero might well have replaced Eriol/Ælfwine from the Lost Tales as the travelling adventurer who journeys to the Lonely Isle that later became Britain and hears there the tales that eventually make up The Silmarillion.²¹ There is no reason to think Tolkien intended this when he drafted this passage in The Hobbit – indeed, it is clear he did not; rather, the possibilities implicit within it became one of the ‘loose ends’ he picked up on and ultimately addressed in the second book.

The Name ‘Bladorthin’

The name Bladorthin is difficult to gloss, and Tolkien never explained its meaning, although it is clearly Gnomish (or perhaps Noldorin). We can best approach its meaning by comparison with other words in Tolkien’s early writings containing the same elements.

The first of these, Bladorwen, appears in the Gnomish Lexicon [circa 1917] as the Gnomish equivalent for Palúrien, an early honorific for Yavanna, the goddess of the earth and all growing things. There Bladorwen is glossed as ‘Mother Earth’, as well as ‘the wide earth. The world and all its plants and fruit’ (Parma Eldalamberon XI.23); related words include blath (‘floor’), blant (‘flat, open, expansive, candid’), and bladwen (‘a plain’). Hence blador probably applies to wide open country.

This guess is reinforced by the second name, Bladorion. In the earliest ‘Annals of Valinor’ and ‘Annals of Beleriand’ (which are associated with the 1930 Quenta, and hence contemporary with the First Phase of The Hobbit), this is the name given to the great grassy plain dividing Thangorodrim from the elven realms to the south before it is turned into a wasteland (Dor-na-Fauglith) in the Battle of Sudden Fire. Again the meaning seems to be something close to ‘wide, flat, open country’, with the added connotation of a green and growing place (since the name is changed after the plantlife is destroyed). Curiously enough, the Qenya Lexicon [circa 1915 & ff] gives -wen as the feminine patronymic, equivalent to the masculine -ion (BLT I.271 & Parma Eldalamberon XII.103), raising the possibility that Bladorion and Bladorwen are simply gender-specific alternatives that share exactly the same meaning, despite the different applications given to them.²²

Finally, -thin is a familiar form: this word-element entered in at the very end of the Lost Tales period [circa 1919–20] when Thingol replaced the earlier Tinwelint as the name of Tinúviel’s father in the typescript of ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’, the last of the Lost Tales. I have not found a gloss of ‘Thingol’ from this early period, but there is no reason to doubt that it would have been the same as the later Sindarin translation: ‘grey-cloak’, with thin = grey. A second, apparently unrelated, occurrence of this element can be found in the Gnomish Lexicon as a plural indicator; we are told that Qenya silmaril, silmarilli = Gnomish silubrill/silubrilt, silubrilthin, where it is clear that -thin is a plural suffix equivalent to the English -s (Parma Eldalamberon XI.67).

Given these various elements, what then is the meaning of Bladorthin? The simplest translation would be ‘the Grey Country’ (blador+thin). Alternatively, if we stress the -or element, this becomes ‘Grey Plains Fay’ or even ‘Grey Master of the Plains’. If we interpret blador less literally and take ‘wide’ in the sense of ‘far and wide’, the name could even be interpreted as ‘Grey Wanderer’ (i.e., one who travels far and wide), thus becoming an early precursor of Gandalf’s Lord of the Rings-era elven name, Mithrandir.²³ In any case, whatever its original meaning the name must have been capable of yielding a meaning appropriate to its re-assigned application to King Bladorthin, perhaps there meaning the ruler over wide (grey?) lands (see pp. 514 & 525).

(iii)
Dwarven Magic

The thirteen dwarves round out the rest of the main cast, and again the general outlines remained while phrasing and details were endlessly revised. Thus the motif of Bombur’s obesity has not yet emerged²⁴ and it is still Dwalin, not Gloin, who bluntly expresses his doubts over whether Bilbo ‘will do’. The most striking thing about this earliest draft lies in its emphasis on ‘dwarven magic’: whereas in later revisions Tolkien was at pains to make the opening scenes more realistic, particularly in the 1960 Hobbit (see pp. 778 & 812), in the early drafts he stressed the wonder and magic of the scene. Detail after detail – the dwarves’ coloured beards, the musical instruments they pull out of thin air, the magical smoke rings – are all inessential to the plot but important to establish a sense of the uncanny, a world of wonder. The brightly-coloured hoods and beards are a good example of this light-hearted fairy-tale tone, obviously decorative rather than functional: thus Fili and Kili, the youngest of the dwarves, have white beards, while Balin, ‘a very old-looking dwarf’, has a yellow beard and no good reason is given for why Dwalin’s beard is blue, like the fairy-tale villain (indeed, one of the Lost Tales features a dwarf named Fangluin the aged – literally ‘Beard-blue’; cf. BLT II.229–30). We can rationalize that perhaps dwarves dye their beards or grow hair in tints that would be unnatural on a human head, but all that matters for the tale at hand is to make these strangers who have thrust their way into Bilbo’s predictable little world as outlandish as possible, both from our point of view and that of the hobbit. The musical instruments provide another good example, where Bifur and Bofur turn their walking-sticks into clarinets while Bombur produces a drum ‘from nowhere’, as if they were travelling conjurers entertaining their host rather than seasoned adventurers about to depart on a desperate journey from which some or all may never return.²⁵

But nothing is ever simple or one-dimensional in Tolkien’s world, and the mood very quickly darkens. Once established, the uncanny wonder of dwarven magic is seasoned with somber warnings of the danger ahead; even the oddness of the visitors turns suddenly sinister with details like the dwarves’ eyes shining in the dark (‘dark for dark business’). The turning point is the dwarves’ song ‘Far Over The Misty Mountains Cold’. Against the comedy of confused expectations on all sides is set this poem describing the lost kingdom of the dwarves and its fiery destruction by the dragon. More than a reminder of the grim task awaiting them, although it is that too, like the passages about Tooks and Bagginses it opens up a sense of history behind the tale. What is more, it forms yet another link between this tale and the mythology, for the third and fourth stanzas of the poem clearly allude to the story of Tinwelint (Thingol) and the Nauglafring from the Book of Lost Tales, the ‘old quarrel’ referred to elsewhere in the book that soured relations between the dwarves and elves.²⁶

(iv)
The Voice of the Narrator

Finally, there is the voice of the narrator, an essential element in establishing the overall tone of the story and hence of the book’s success. In a way, the unnamed narrator, who blends seamlessly in and out of the story, leaving his mark behind everywhere, is one of the most important characters in the tale.²⁷ Through his interpolations in these opening pages, Tolkien develops several motifs that run throughout the book: a concern for etiquette, an ear for oral (and easily-visualized) elements, an interest in word-play. Intrusive narrators were once common in English fiction – Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones [1749] uses one with great flair, and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy [1759–67] raised it to an art form. Closer to Tolkien’s own time and tastes, Lord Dunsany – after Morris, the chief influence on The Book of Lost Tales and Tolkien’s other early work²⁸ – made adroit use of narrators who flitted in and out of their stories (e.g. in such tales as ‘A Story of Land & Sea’ [The Last Book of Wonder, 1916] and ‘Bethmoora’ [A Dreamer’s Tales, 1910]). Tolkien himself also employed the same device elsewhere with great aplomb; as in Farmer Giles of Ham (‘There was no getting round Queen Agatha – at least it was a long walk’) and its famed definition of the blunderbuss, lifted directly from the OED. Critics who have dismissed the narrative voice in The Hobbit out of hand have overlooked its purpose: Tolkien uses it to interact with his audience, and much of the book’s charm would be lost by its absence.

The voice of the narrator is by turns professorial and playful, now answering rhetorical questions from the reader (‘what is a hobbit? I meant you to find out, but if you must have everything explained at the beginning, I can only say . . .’), now delivering a learned discourse on hobbit culture or wry comments on Bilbo’s faulty memory. The narrator is not omniscient – he has heard only ‘a little tiny bit of what there is to hear’ regarding Bladorthin’s exploits, and several chapters later he will introduce Gollum with the words ‘I don’t know where he came from, or who or what he was’ (pp. 154–5). But he gives us the information we need to understand a scene, fills us in on the background as new people or places enter the narrative, and injects a great deal of humor into the book.

Aside from teasing the reader by foreshadowing or by withholding information, the narrator also frames the story by occasional direct addresses to the reader (‘I imagine you know the answer, of course, or can guess it . . . since you are sitting comfortably at home and have not the danger of being eaten to disturb your thinking’; ‘yes, I’m afraid trolls do talk like that, even ones with only one head’; ‘Tom-noddy of course is insulting to anyone’) and rhetorical interruptions; these help establish that the story is only a story and that the reader is, after all, ‘sitting comfortably at home’ – very important for any children’s story as dark and nightmare-inducing as this one. They deliberately break the illusion of secondary reality that the rest of the story is creating, thus defying all Tolkien’s rules and theories regarding the necessity of creating secondary belief, as later presented in his essay ‘Of Fairy-Stories’ (no doubt a major reason for his later strictures on the book).²⁹

The playfulness of the narrative perhaps comes out best in the wordplay. The Hobbit delights in using odd, archaic words, intermixing them with neologisms of Tolkien’s own invention, so that only a scholar familiar with the OED and various dialectical dictionaries (the special province of Joseph Wright, Tolkien’s mentor in his undergraduate days; Tolkien himself had provided the Foreword to one such work, Walter E. Haigh’s A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District, only a few years before, in 1928) could tell which was which: bewildered and bewuthered, upsettled, flummoxed, confusticate and bebother, cob, tomnoddy and attercop, hobbit. The blurb on The Hobbit’s original dustjacket compared Tolkien with Lewis Carroll, a point taken up by several early reviewers bemused by the idea of two academics writing fantasies for children; despite Tolkien’s objection that Through the Looking Glass was a better parallel to his own work than Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,³⁰ the comparison is apt. Both authors share the trick of taking everyday expressions quite literally (as in Bladorthin’s response to Bilbo’s phrase ‘I beg your pardon’). Even more Carrollingian is the use of the same word or expression to mean different things, as in Bilbo’s three separate ‘good mornings’.³¹

In addition to a fascination with wordplay, The Hobbit also shares with the Alice books a concern for etiquette. Whatever situation Alice finds herself in, she tries to mind her manners (often in the face of much provocation), and Bilbo is similarly careful to be polite even to uninvited guests:

‘I am just going to have tea; pray come and have some with me’ – a little stiff perhaps but he meant it kindly; and what would you do . . . ? (p. 32; italics mine)

‘Thank you!’ said Bilbo with a gasp. It was the wrong thing to say, but ‘some of the others’ had put him in a fright . . . He had a horrible thought that the cakes might run short, and then he (as the host – he knew his duty as the host and stuck to it however painful) would have to go without. (p. 32; italics mine)

‘I suppose you will all stay to supper?’ he said in his politest unpressing tones. (p. 35; italics mine)

The recurrent emphasis on good manners makes the exceptions stand out all the more strongly: Medwed, the trolls, Thorin’s words at the gate (‘Descendent of rats indeed’), or Bilbo’s own occasional lapse, as at the eagles’ eyrie or when provoked by Dwalin’s description of him as a ‘little fellow bobbing on the mat’, to which he retorts ‘as soon as I saw your funny faces on the door-step I had my doubts’ (p. 40). And the effort of being polite to someone who is both rude and dangerous (Carroll’s Queen of Hearts, The Hobbit’s Smaug the Magnificent, Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities) only adds to the fun. This motif may owe something to the importance placed on politeness in traditional fairy tales, or simply to the fascination small children have in the manners, good and bad, of others.

Finally, there is a strong sense of oral narrative at work in this chapter (and indeed throughout the book): this is a book meant to be read aloud to an attentive audience, just as Tolkien read it aloud to John, Michael, and Christopher during the ‘Winter Reads’ while he was writing it. Scenes are deliberately described in such a way as to help a listener visualize them, and sound effects are provided to liven up the narrative. Sometimes the reliance on colour is deliberately overdone for comic effect, as with the dwarves’ beards, belts, and hoods, where we get such a wealth of detail that the mind begins to boggle trying to keep track of it all; the joke seems to lie in the fact that there is no underlying pattern (significantly, we are never told the colours of the later arrivals’ beards and belts). Here Tolkien may be echoing a famous medieval work, ‘The Dream of Rhonabwy’, in which precise visual detail is provided in such reckless profusion that the tale ends with the boast that

no one, neither bard nor storyteller, knows the Dream without a book – by reason of the number of colours that were on the horses, and all the variety of rare colours both on the arms and their trappings, and on the precious mantles, and the magic stones.

—The Mabinogion, tr. Jones & Jones [1949], page 152.

The sound effects vary from onomatopoeia (from the doorbell going ding-dong-a-ling-lang to the ‘horrible swallowing noise’, gollum, which gives that character his name) to simile (‘he began to feel a shriek coming up inside, and very soon after it burst out like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel’) to song: all the ‘poems’ are in fact lyrics to songs, as the narrator is at pains to point out (‘this is like a fragment of their song, if it can be like their song without their music’). Setting his own lyrics to traditional tunes was a favorite hobby of Tolkien’s: Songs for the Philologists³² includes both funny jingles like ‘Éadig Béo þu’ (a ditty in Old English set to the tune of ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’) and serious pieces like ‘Bagme Bloma’ (perhaps the finest of all his tree-poems, in Gothic) and ‘Ides Ælfscýne’ (Tolkien’s own eerie and extremely effective take on the La Belle Dame Sans Merci legend). Thus ‘The Stone Troll’ (a piece appearing in different versions in both Songs for the Philologists and The Lord of the Rings, the latter reprinted in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil as ATB poem #7) borrows its tune from an old folk song called ‘The Fox Went Out’. If the evidence of Tolkien’s recordings of excerpts from The Hobbit, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and The Lord of the Rings (later released by Caedmon Records) may be trusted, more often Tolkien did not actually sing the pieces but used a sort of recitative.³³ All in all, his narrator employs a wide variety of devices, all with the common goal of making this a story to listen to, not just to read; the paragraphs preceding and following the dwarves’ song about their lost home (pp. 36 & 37–8) show just how skilled Tolkien was in using word-music to evoke a mood.