Chapter I(c)
The Adventure Continues
The next stage of the manuscript begins in mid-sentence, resuming the story where the ‘Bladorthin Typescript’ ends, in the middle of Chapter 1. This first page of manuscript in the Second Phase is numbered 13 (in the upper right-hand corner) because it followed directly on the final, or twelfth, page of the Bladorthin Typescript; see p. 41.TN1 This marks the beginning of the Second Phase of composition, which carried the story from manuscript page 13 (Marq. 1/1/1:3) all the way to manuscript page 167 (Marq. 1/1/15:7) – that is, from the middle of the Unexpected Party in Chapter I to the scene on Ravenhill in what is now Chapter XV. Tolkien did not achieve this much of the story without several breaks or halts in composition, and occasionally stopped to sketch out several Plot Notes or outlines of what would follow in the as-yet unwritten chapters, each of which will be discussed in its appropriate location in the pages that follow.
While the text for the first page or so of this manuscript derives directly from the Pryftan Fragment, this would be difficult to deduce from the text itself – that is, had the Fragment not survived, there is nothing in this manuscript to indicate the point at which it ceases to be ‘fair copy’ and new drafting begins. This is because while clearly directly based on the earlier draft, incorporating revisions and the like written onto the old manuscript, the material has been rearranged and expanded in the course of creating this new draft. The suggestion found in the final paragraph of the Fragment to sit on the back door and think of a plan (‘if one does not sprout up on the way’) is deferred for several pages, while Bilbo’s question to know ‘a bit more about things’ and his demand to have things made ‘plain and clear’ sets off a long interpolation by Gandalf the dwarf giving the history of the Mountain and describing the dragon’s attack. This in turn leads to a second interpolation as Bladorthin the wizard answers Gandalf’s questions about how he got the map. Only then, after almost four Ms. pages, does the story return to the suggestion (now transferred from the wizard to Bilbo) about sitting on the back doorstep. From this, we might conclude that the Fragment might not be so incomplete as it appears; it probably represents the entire latter half of the opening chapter as originally conceived, rather than roughly the middle third as we might otherwise assume.
As before, I give the text in its original form, silently supplying punctuation where necessary and noting interesting revisions and additions to the text in brackets. The present chapter divisions did not yet exist and were not inserted by Tolkien until much later, probably at the point when he was creating the First Typescript (that is, after he reached the end of the Second Phase). For ease of reference for readers familiar with the published text, I have, after considerable debate, decided it is best to break the Second and Third Phase manuscripts at the points where the eventual chapter divisions occur. While publishing several blocks of chapters together and only pausing when Tolkien broke off composition for one of the periodic interruptions that occurred over the two and a half years he spent writing the book (e.g., at pages 316 [Ms. p. 118] and 620 [Ms. p. 167]) would give a better idea of the smooth flow of the original story from incident to incident and site to site, the familiar chapter breaks help organize the material into short, convenient segments and enable notes and commentary to be much closer to the relevant passage than would otherwise be the case. But it must be emphasized that these chapter divisions are, so far as the manuscript of The Hobbit goes, purely artificial breaks which were not yet present when the text was written. Textual notes follow the transcription; these do not record every slip of the pen but instead remark upon variant readings that seem to me significant. Commentary follows the textual notes. Those who want to read the story as Tolkien wrote it without interrupting the flow of the narrative for notes and commentary can simply skip over these sections on an initial reading since I have distinguished typographically between the commentary (all of which is printed in this smaller font) and the original text.
his mouth shut. He loved maps, and in his hall there was a large one of the Country RoundTN2 with all his favourite walks marked on it in red ink. ‘How could such an eenormous door (he was a hobbit, remember) be kept secret?’, he asked.
‘Lots of ways’ said Bladorthin, ‘but which one of them we don’t know without looking. From what it says on the map I should say that there is a closed door which has been made to look exactly like the side of the mountain. That is the ordinary dwarves’ method – I think I am right?’
‘Quite’ said Gandalf. ‘This rather alters things – for the better. We had thought of going [up along the River Running >] East as quiet and careful as we could, until we came to the Long Lake. After that the trouble would begin. We might go up along the River Running, and so to the ruins of Dale – the old town in the valley there under the shadow of the Mountain – if we ever got so far! But we none of us liked the idea of the Front Door. The river runs right out of that great gate at the south of the mountain, and out of it comes the Dragon too – far too often.’
‘That would have been no good’ said the wizard, ‘not without a mighty warrior, even a Hero. I tried to find one. But warriors are busy fighting one another in distant lands, and in this neighbourhood heroes are scarce – or simply not to be found. Swords in these parts are mostly blunt, and axes are used for trees, and shields for cradles or dish-covers, and dragons are comfortably far off (and therefore legendary).TN3 Therefore burglary seemed indicated – especially when I remembered the existence of a side-door.’
‘Yes, yes’ said all the dwarves; ‘Let’s find a burglar!’
‘Here he is’ said Bladorthin; ‘here is our little Bilbo, Bilbo Baggins the burglar!’
‘The burglar[?]!’ said Dwalin.
‘Precisely’, said Bladorthin not allowing poor Bilbo a chance to speak. ‘Did not I tell you all last Thursday that it would have to be a burglary not a battle? And a burglar I promised to find – I hope no one is going to say I put the sign on the wrong door again!’ He frowned so frightfully that Bilbo dared not say anything, though he was bursting with exclamations and questions.
‘Well well’ said all the dwarves, ‘now we can make some plans. What do you suggest, Mr Baggins?’ they asked, more respectfully than they had spoken to him yet.
‘First I should like to know a bit more about things’ said Bilbo feeling all confused and a bit shaky inside – though it was partly from excitement. ‘About the gold and the dragon, and all that, and how it got there, and who it belongs to, and so on and further’.
‘Bless me’ said Gandalf, ‘haven’t you got a map, and didn’t you hear our song, and haven’t we been talking all about it for hours’.
‘All the same I would like it all plain and clear’ said Bilbo, putting on his business manner and doing his best to be wise and prudent, and live up to his new job.
‘Very well’ said Gandalf: ‘long ago in my grandfather’s day [the dwarves >] some dwarves were driven out of the far north and came with all their wealth and their tools to this Mountain on the map. There they mined and tunnelled and made huge halls and great workshops – and I believe in addition found a good deal of gold and of jewels too. Anyway they grew immensely rich and famous, and my grandfather was king under the mountain, and the mortal men who lived to the south, and even up the Running river as far as the valley beneath the mountain, where a merry town of Dale was in those days, treated them with great reverence.
Kings would send for our smiths, and reward even the least skilful richly. Fathers would beg of us to take on their sons as apprentices, and pay us well in excellent food – which we never bothered to grow or make. Altogether those were good days for us, and we had money to lend and to spend, and leisure to make beautiful things just for the fun of it, so that my grandfather’s halls were full of marvellous jewels, and cups, and carvings.
Undoubtedly that was what brought the Dragon. They steal gold and jewels you know, from men and elves and dwarves, wherever they can find it. And they guard it as long as they live (which is practically forever if they are not killed) and never enjoy a brass-ring of it. They hardly know a good bit of work from a bad, though they have a good notion of the price, and they can’t make anything for themselves, not even mend a loose scale of their armour.
There were lots of dragons in the North in those days, and gold was probably running short there with the dwarves flying south or getting killed, and all the general waste and destruction that dragons make going from bad to worse. There was a most especially strong, greedy and wicked worm called Smaug.TN4 One day he flew up into the air, and came South. The first we heard of it was a noise like a hurricane coming from the North, and the pine trees on the mountain-sides creaking and cracking in the wind. Some of the dwarves outside (I was one, a fine lad in those days I was, always wandering about, and that saved me that day) – well from a good way off we saw in the middle of the wind the dragon settle on the mountain in a spout of flame. He came down the slopes, and when he reached the woods they all went up in fire. By that time the bells were all ringing in Dale, and warriors were arming. The dwarves rushed out of their great gate, but there was the dragon waiting for them. None escaped that way. The River rushed up in steam, and a fog fell on Dale, and in the fog the dragon came and [destroyed it >] destroyed most of the warriors. Then he went back and crept in through the Front Gate, and routed out all the halls, and lanes, and tunnels, alleys, cellars, mansions and passages. There were no dwarves left, and all their wealth he took for himself. Probably, for that is the dragons’ way, he has piled it all up in [a] great heap in some hall far inside, and sleeps on it for a bed.TN5
Out of the gate he used to creep and come by night to Dale, and carry off people, especially maidens, to eat, until Dale was ruined, and all the people gone. What goes on now, I don’t know, but I don’t suppose anyone lives nearer the mountain than the Long Lake nowadays.
The few of us that were well outside sat and wept in hiding and cursed Smaug; and there we were very unexpectedly joined by my father and grandfather with singed beards. They looked very grim, but they said very little. When I asked how they had got away, they told me to hold my tongue, and one day, in the proper time, I would know.
After that we went away, and we have had to earn our living as best we could up and down the lands – and often enough we have had to sink as low as black smithing and coal mining. But we have never forgotten our stolen treasure. And even now, when I will allow we have all a good deal laid by and are not so badly off,’ (and Gandalf stroked the gold chain round his neck) ‘we still mean to get it back, and bring our curses home to Smaug – if we can.
‘I have often wondered about my father’s and grandfather’s escape – & now I see they made a map, and I should like to know how Bladorthin found it’.
‘I didn’t’, said the wizard; ‘I was given it. Your grandfather Gandalf you will remember was killed in the mines of Moria by a goblin’.TN6
‘Curse [him >] the goblin, yes’ said Gandalf.
‘And your father went away on the third of March a hundred years ago last Tuesday, and has never been seen (by you) since.’
‘True, true’ said Gandalf.
‘Your father gave me this’ said Bladorthin, ‘[and >] to give to you, and if I have chosen my own time and way to give it to you, you can hardly blame me considering the trouble I had to find you.
‘Here it is’, said he and handed the map to Gandalf. ‘Your father couldn’t remember your name when he gave it me and never told me his own, so on the whole I think I am to be thanked.’
‘I don’t understand’ said Gandalf. Neither did Bilbo, who felt that the explanation, which [was >] had begun by being given to him, was getting difficult once more.
‘Your grandfather’ said Bladorthin ‘gave the map to his son for safety before he went to the mines of Moria. Your father went away to try his own luck with it after his father was killed; and lots of adventures he had, but he never got near the Mountain. How he ended up there I don’t know; but I found him a prisoner in the dungeons of the Necromancer.’
‘What were you doing there’ said Gandalf with a shudder, and all the other dwarves [went >] shivered.
‘Never you mind’ said Bladorthin: ‘I was finding things out, and a nasty dangerous business it was. Even I only just escaped. However I tried to save your father, but it was too late. He was witless and wandering, and had forgotten almost everything except the map’.
‘The goblins of Moria have been repaid’ said Gandalf; ‘we must give a thought to the Necromancer’.
‘Don’t be absurd’ said the wizard. ‘That is a job quite beyond the powers of all the dwarves, if they could be all gathered together again from the four corners of the world. And anyway [others >] his castle stands no more and [his >] he is flown [added: to another darker place] – Beren and Tinúviel broke his power, but that is quite another story. Remember the one thing your father wished was for his son to read the map, and act on its message. The Mountain & the Dragon are quite big enough tasks for you’.
‘Hear hear!’ said Bilbo, and said it accidently aloud.
‘Hear what?’ they all said turning suddenly towards him, and he was so surprised that he answered:
‘Hear what I have got to say!’
‘What’s that?’ they asked.
‘Well’ said Bilbo ‘I should say we [> you] ought to go East and have a look round, at least. After all there is the back door, and dragons must sleep sometimes.TN7 If we [> you] sit on the back doorstep long enough I daresay we should [> you will] think of something. And well, don’t you know, I think you have said [> talked] enough for one night, if you see what I mean. What about bed, and an early start. I will give you a good breakfast before you go’.
‘Before we go’ said Gandalf. ‘Aren’t you the burglar,TN8 and isn’t the side door your job? But I agree about bed and breakfast’.
So they all got up. And Bilbo had to find room for them all, and filled all his spare-rooms, and made beds on couches and chairs; and when he went to his own little bed very tired and not altogether happy, he could still hear Gandalf humming to himself in the best bedroom
‘Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away ere break of day
To find our long forgotten gold’
He went to sleep with that in his ears and it gave him uncomfortable dreams, and it was after break of day when he woke up.
TEXT NOTES
1 For another example of a composite typescript/manuscript text, see the initial draft of ‘The Great Cake’ (i.e., Smith of Wootton Major), published in facsimile on pages 102–29 of the Extended Edition of SWM edited by Verlyn Flieger [2005].
2 The ‘County Round’ of the Pryftan Fragment has now become the ‘Country Round’ of the published text, the precursor for what would, in the sequel, become the Shire.
3 A similar sentiment is expressed in Farmer Giles of Ham, which was first drafted either immediately before or immediately after The Hobbit (see pp. 492–3):
. . . dragons on their side may have been forgetting about the knights and their swords, just as the knights were forgetting about the real dragons and getting used to imitation tails made in the kitchen.
—FGH [50th anniversary extended edition, 1999], pp. 84–5.
This passage from the second draft text was recast in the third draft of the story (‘The Lord of Thame’), about the time Tolkien was putting the final text of The Hobbit in order for submission to Allen & Unwin, into a form much more closely resembling the phrasing in The Hobbit:
‘So knights are mythical!’ said the younger and less experienced dragons. ‘We always thought so.’
‘At least they may be getting rare,’ thought the older and wiser worms; ‘far and few and no longer to be feared.’
—ibid., p. 25.
4 Here the name ‘Smaug’ occurs for the first time as part of the original text (as opposed to a later revision); in the Bladorthin Typescript it appeared only as a revision replacing Pryftan. The name change may be taken as one indication of a gap in time between composition of these two (for more evidence, see the commentary on ‘The Third of March’ beginning on p. 84).
5 This habit of sleeping atop a mound of treasure is indeed traditional, and is shared by Beowulf’s dragon, Sigurd’s Fafnir, and dragons of medieval romance such as the dragon slain by Fulk Fitzwarrin (an exile from King John’s court), of which we are told that its treasure consisted of ‘the cool gold upon which alone it could sleep, because of the hot fire in its belly’ (Jacqueline Simpson, British Dragons [1980; rev. ed. 2001], p. 57). It is also a hallmark of Tolkien’s dragons: Glorund (see pp. 529–30), the nameless dragon of ‘The Hoard’ (first published in 1923 as ‘Iúmonna Gold Galdre Bewunden’), and Snaug himself, and presumably also of Giles’ Chrysophylax Dives (who certainly has a mort of treasure in his lair) and Scatha the Worm (from whose horde come heirlooms still treasured by the Rohirrim eleven centuries later).
6 Tolkien began to write another word, which may have begun with a capital letter, before cancelling it and writing ‘a goblin’, but the cancellation is so complete that I cannot make out any letter(s).
7 As originally drafted, this paragraph reads
‘Well’ said Bilbo ‘I should say we ought to go East and have a look round, at least. After all there is the back door, and dragons must sleep sometimes, and well, don’t you know. I think we have talked as much as is good for us. What about bed, and an early start. If we sit on the back doorstep long enough I daresay we should [> will] think of something. And well, don’t you know, I think you have said [> talked] enough for one night, if you see what I mean. What about bed, and an early start. I will give you a good breakfast before you go’.
The portion printed in italics here was cancelled and that text repeated after the following sentence, incorporating the revision ‘. . . as much as is good for us [> you]’ made before the cancellation. By the simple expedient of changing ‘we’ and ‘us’ to ‘you’ throughout the first few sentences, this whole passage was revised to mute Bilbo’s newfound enthusiasm and distance the hobbit from the rest.
8 Gandalf’s speech originally ended here after a short cancelled word or phrase, possibly ‘after all’ (i.e., ‘aren’t you the burglar after all’).
Through Bilbo’s request for more information, and first Gandalf’s and then Bladorthin’s explanations, we learn a good deal more about the setting and characters, particularly about the dwarves.1 This is important, for the most significant departure in The Hobbit from the old mythology of the Silmarillion texts lies in the new story’s more or less sympathetic treatment of Durin’s Folk. In their earlier appearances in Tolkien’s tales, the dwarves had always been portrayed as an evil people: allies of goblins, mercenaries of Morgoth, pillagers of one of the great elven kingdoms.2 Thus, their characterization here is totally at variance with what is said and shown of them in the old legends. And the break is both sudden and complete: no intermediate stages prepared the way. For them to be treated sympathetically as heroes of the new story is nothing short of amazing: no less surprising than if a company of goblin wolf-riders had ridden up to Bag-End seeking a really first-class burglar.
It seems impossible now to pinpoint exactly where dwarves entered the mythology, but it was sometime during the Lost Tales period (i.e., 1917–20). They played a major role in only one of the tales – ‘The Nauglafring: The Necklace of the Dwarves’ – but are mentioned, at least in passing, in three others: ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’ (the story of Beren & Lúthien), ‘Turambar and the Foalókë’ (the story of Túrin), and the unfinished ‘Gilfanon’s Tale’ (the story of the Coming of Men). Throughout these early stories they are viewed exclusively from an (unflattering) elvish perspective, one best conveyed by an entry in the Gnomish Lexicon, where the Goldogrin/Gnomish word nauglafel is glossed as ‘dwarf-natured, i.e. mean, avaricious’ (BLT I.261; Parma Eldalamberon XI.59).
The Tale of Turambar’s portrayal of Mîm the Fatherless, the first dwarf of note in the legendarium, establishes Tolkien’s dwarves as guardians of vast treasure-hoards as well as the originators of inimical curses. The image of ‘an old misshapen dwarf who sat ever on the pile of gold singing black songs of enchantment to himself’ and who ‘by many a dark spell . . . bound it to [him]self’ (BLT II.113–14), along with the dying curse he lays upon the treasure, comes directly from the Icelandic legends which formed such a large part of Tolkien’s professional repertoire. In particular, the old story of the famous hoard of the Nibelungs that plays a crucial part in works as different as the Völsunga Saga, Snorri’s Prose Edda, the Nibelungenlied, and Wagner’s Ring cycle provides the motif of a treasure stolen from the dwarves which later brings disaster upon all those who seek to claim it, even the descendants and kin of its original owners – the theme which dominates the final quarter of Tolkien’s book.3 Another work that Tolkien was much interested in for the glimpses it provided of ancient lore, Heidreks Saga (edited and translated into English by Christopher Tolkien as The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise [1960]), features an episode wherein a hero captures the dwarves Dvalin and Durin and forces them to forge him a magical sword; they do so but before departing lay a curse upon it so that once drawn it can never be resheathed until it has taken a human life.4
Of all these early references to dwarves, that in ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’ is the slightest and least judgmental. As part of her lengthening spell, Lúthien names ‘the tallest and longest things upon Earth’, foremost among which are ‘the beards of the Indravangs’ (BLT II.19). From the Gnomish Lexicon we learn that Indravang is ‘a special name of the nauglath or dwarves’ meaning Longbeards (ibid., p. 344; the ‘vang/fang’ element is the same as that occurring in the later Fangorn or ‘Treebeard’ and written on Fimbulfambi’s Map). Here again we see a tie to Tolkien’s philological studies: for the Langobards, or Longbeards, were one of the Germanic tribes who invaded the crumbling Roman Empire in the sixth century, settling in that area of Italy still called Lombardy in their memory. Tolkien was much interested in the Langobards’ history and legend; in his unfinished time-travel story The Lost Road [circa 1936], he gave the main characters Lombardic names (Alboin and Audoin) and planned a chapter set in Lombardic times (HME V.37 & 77–8). This chapter was never written, but he did recast an episode from Beowulf into an alliterative poem he called ‘King Sheave’, presenting it as the mythical history of the Lombards (HME V.87–91; cf. Christopher Tolkien’s comments on pages 53–5 and 93 regarding his father’s fascination with Langobardic legends). Finally, Gandalf’s curious phrase about ‘money to lend and to spend’ (p. 71) gains new significance in light of the fact that the Lombards became famed bankers, so much so that by the fourteenth century ‘lombard’ had became a common noun in Middle English meaning banker, money-lender, or pawnbroker.
We learn more of the Longbeards in ‘The Nauglafring’, the one of these early stories in which dwarves play the largest part. Here it is revealed that there are two main races of dwarves: the Nauglath of Nogrod and the Indrafangs (or Longbeards) of Belegost.5 The dwarves in The Hobbit are descendants of the latter, as Gandalf states at Rivendell (p. 116):
‘Durin, Durin’ said Gandalf. ‘He was the father of the fathers of one of the two races of dwarves, the Longbeards, and my grandfather’s ancestor.’
The Indrafangs or Longbeards may have had some special tie to Mîm, for in ‘The Nauglafring’ they join in the planned raid on Tinwelint’s kingdom (Artanor, the later Doriath) only when they hear of Mîm’s death and the theft of his treasure (BLT II.230) – but what this tie may be, we do not know. At any rate, the King of Nogrod’s vow ‘to rest not ere Mîm was thrice avenged’ (BLT II.230) is strikingly echoed in Gandalf’s determination to ‘bring our curses home to Smaug’ and his reflection that ‘The goblins of Moria have been repaid . . . we must give a thought to the Necromancer’.
Unedifying though it may be, ‘The Nauglafring’ does offer us the first extended view of Tolkien’s dwarves – one so much at variance with that race as developed in The Hobbit that Tolkien was eventually obliged to create a new name for the old race, the ‘petty dwarves’, to distinguish the people of Mîm from Durin’s Folk and their peers, the kindred of the Seven Houses of the dwarves.6 According to the old story,
The Nauglath are a strange race and none know surely whence they be; and they serve not Melko nor Manwë and reck not for Elf or Man, and some say that they have not heard of Ilúvatar, or hearing disbelieve. Howbeit in crafts and sciences and in the knowledge of the virtues of all things that are in the earth or under the water none excel them; yet they dwell beneath the ground in caves and tunnelled towns, and aforetime Nogrod was the mightiest of these. Old are they, and never comes a child among them, nor do they laugh. They are squat in stature, and yet are strong, and their beards reach even to their toes, but the beards of the Indrafangs are the longest of all, and are forked, and they bind them about their middles when they walk abroad. All these creatures have Men called ‘Dwarves’, and say that their crafts and cunning surpass that of the Gnomes [i.e., the Noldor or Deep-Elves] in marvellous contrivance, but of a truth there is little beauty in their works of themselves, for in those things of loveliness that they have wrought in ages past . . . renegade Gnomes . . . have ever had a hand. (BLT I.223–4)
Here we see the ‘elvish’ bias of the Lost Tales at its most blatant (a bias altogether missing from the more equitable narrative of The Hobbit), with the elvish narrator of the Tale unwilling even to give the dwarves credit for creating beautiful objects without elven help. Furthermore, we are told that as a result of the estrangement between the races that occurs in this tale (the ‘old quarrel’ referred to in passing in The Hobbit) ‘the Dwarves [have] been severed in feud for ever since those days with the Elves, and drawn more nigh in friendship to the kin of Melko’ (BLT II.230). Thus Naugladur, the dwarf-lord of Nogrod, hires Orc mercenaries to aid in the assault on Artanor, and in the outlines for the unfinished ‘Gilfanon’s Tale’ it is a host of Dwarves and Goblins in the service of Melko-Morgoth who attack the first Men and their elven allies in the Battle of Palisor.
The mysteries surrounding the dwarves’ origins expressed in ‘The Nauglafring’ endured to the time of The Hobbit’s composition and beyond;7 the Silmarillion account of Aulë’s creation of the dwarves did not enter the mythology until around the time of The Hobbit’s publication (and thus postdate the book’s composition by roughly half a decade). Even here, in the (Later) ‘Annals of Beleriand’ (which are associated with the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion), it says that when dwarves die ‘they go back into the stone of the mountains of which they were made’ (HME V.129). The mystery about the dwarves’ origins go all the way back to Norse myth: Snorri’s Prose Edda mentions the old legend that dwarves ‘had quickened in the earth and under the soil like maggots in flesh’, acquiring ‘human understanding and the appearance of men’ through ‘the decree of the gods . . . although they lived in the earth and in rocks’ (Prose Edda p. 41). The essay ‘Durin’s Folk’, which makes up the final third of Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings, mentions ‘the foolish opinion among Men that there are no dwarf-women, and that the Dwarves “grow out of stone”’ (LotR.1116) only to dismiss it out of hand, but this was clearly an afterthought: Tolkien’s portrayal of dwarves exclusively as men, and usually old men, wherever they appear as characters in his works, from The Book of Lost Tales through to The Lord of the Rings, agrees with both Norse myth and folklore; the Brothers Grimm are as devoid of any female dwarves as are the two Eddas and the sagas.
In one important way, The Hobbit is closer to the original Norse lore than ‘The Tale of the Nauglafring’ had been: nomenclature. All but one of the dwarves in our story have Norse names, drawn directly from the Elder Edda (the sole apparent exception being Balin; cf. pp. 23–4), whereas in ‘The Nauglafring’ Tolkien had given them names in his invented languages. Fangluin the Aged, Naugladur king of Nogrod, Bodruith of Belegost, the Indrafangs and the Nauglath, the Nauglafring itself: all the nomenclature is Gnomish, the names the elven historians gave these people and places, not what they called themselves (in the Gnomish Lexicon, ‘Bodruith’ is glossed as ‘revenge’, while ‘Naugladur’ probably means simply ‘Lord of the Dwarves’). By contrast, the name ‘Mîm’ harkens back to Old Norse, like Dwalin, Kili, Gandalf, and the rest.8 Furthermore, there is no hint of any sort that Dwalin, Balin, &c., are not their real names: the ‘secret language of the dwarves’ and the motif of their hiding their true names had not yet arrived.
One curious motif that I believe was already present by the time this first chapter of The Hobbit was completed was the partial identification of the dwarves, in Tolkien’s mind, with the Jewish people. Tolkien himself made the comparison in his 1965 BBC interview with Denys Gueroult9 (much to the interviewer’s astonishment). This is not to say that The Hobbit is an allegory of twentieth-century Zionism; rather that Tolkien drew selectively on the history of the medieval Jews when creating his dwarves. Some elements, such as the secret ancestral language (Khuzdul, Hebrew) reserved for use among themselves while they adopt the language of their neighbors (Common, Yiddish) for everyday use, were layered on later, during the Lord of the Rings stage.10 But others were clearly present already. Like the ancient Hebrews, the dwarves have been driven from their homeland and suffered a diaspora; settling in scattered enclaves amongst other folk, yet still preserving their own culture. Their warlike nature could have come straight from Joshua, Judges, or 1st & 2nd Maccabees, while their great craftsmanship harkens back to the Jewish artisans of medieval Iberia, whose work was renowned throughout Christendom. Gandalf’s phrase about ‘money to lend and to spend’ (p. 71) could apply equally to the Lombard-Longbeards, as we have already seen, and to the Jews – banking and money-lending being one of the reserved occupations for the Jews in most Christian countries. To his credit, Tolkien has been selective in his borrowings, omitting the pervasive anti-Semitism of the real Middle Ages expressed in such works as Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale’, Jocelyn of Brakelond’s chronicle, or (to cite a somewhat later but all-too-relevant example) Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.11
With Bladorthin’s offhanded reference to ‘the mines of Moria’, a major element of Tolkien’s dwarven mythology enters the legendarium. This is the first known mention anywhere in Tolkien’s work of Moria, what would later become the Wonder of the Northern world, Khazad-dûm, the ancestral home of Durin’s Folk. However, all this would come later: there is nothing in the text of The Hobbit to identify Moria as a dwarrowdelf (dwarf-delving) nor mark it as having any special significance for Gandalf’s people, other than being the site of his grandfather’s murder; from the context, it is far more likely a goblin-mine (we are told much of their ‘mines’ in the Misty Mountains chapter [Chapter IV]).
The geography is still murky, and seems to bear little relationship to the well-worked-out geography of the old tale. There is no indication of where Moria lay at this point – north, south, east, or west. In the old tale, the dwellings of the dwarves had lain in the far south: the map made in the mid- to late-1920s and printed in The Shaping of Middle-earth (HME IV, between pages 220 and 221) indicates that the dwarven strongholds Nogrod and Belegost lay far to the south-east of Broseliand/Beleriand, off the map itself; the later ‘Eastward Extension’ of this old map still places their dwellings off the mapped territory, with a note in the lower right corner that ‘Southward in East feet of Blue Mountains are Belegost and Nogrod’ (HME IV.231, 232). Against this is Gandalf’s testimony that his ancestors came to the [Lonely] Mountain when they were driven out of the ‘far north’ by dragons. There is no mention in The Hobbit of Belegost, which in the old story had been the Longbeards’ ancestral home, or of Nogrod. In The Lord of the Rings the dwarves’ history is changed yet again and their movements greatly complicated: here Bilbo’s companions are made descendants of the dwarves of Moria, now described as Durin’s ancestral home, which had been ‘enriched by many people and much lore and craft when the ancient cities of Nogrod and Belegost in the Blue Mountains were ruined at the breaking of Thangorodrim’ at the end of the First Age (LotR.1108).12 After being driven from Moria, the dwarves fled north first to the Lonely Mountain and then passed on to the Grey Mountains (‘for those mountains were rich and little explored’ – LotR.1109). When dragons forced them southward out of the Grey Mountains, some returned to the Lonely Mountain while others settled in the Iron Hills further to the east. Smaug’s attack on the Lonely Mountain destroyed the Kingdom under the Mountain and caused the survivors to flee either east to the Iron Hills or far to the west to the Blue Mountains, not far from where Nogrod and Belegost had stood some six millennia before.
While Moria represents a new element in the legendarium, the Necromancer is an old acquaintance. The character goes back, in one form or another, all the way to the end of the ‘Lost Tales’ period. In the fragments and outlines that make up all we have of ‘Gilfanon’s Tale’ – one of the truly ‘lost’ tales – appears ‘a certain fay’ (i.e., one of the Maiar) named Tû the wizard, ‘for he was more skilled in magics than any that have dwelt ever yet beyond the land of Valinor’. According to one account, Tû or Túvo learned ‘much black magic’ from Melko in the Halls of Mandos during the latter’s imprisonment there and ‘entered the world’ after Melko’s destruction of the Two Trees and escape from Valinor, whereupon Tû ‘set up a wizard kingship in the middle lands’ (i.e., the center of the world, midway between East and West). Ruler of the Dark Elves of Palisor, the ‘twilight people’, the wizard-king dwelt underground in endless caverns beside a dark lake.
For all his sinister associations, this ‘eldest of wizards’ is not evil. In fact, he is god-fearing in the old-fashioned sense of the word; when one of his elves discovers the first Men sleeping in the Vale of Murmenalda, Tû forbids his people to waken them before their time, ‘being frightened of the wrath of Ilúvatar’. Furthermore, perhaps from his earlier association with Mandos (the prophet of the Valar), he is aware that the humans are ‘waiting for the light’ and will not awaken until the first rising of the Sun. When one of his folk disobeys these orders, Tû takes the new Children of Ilúvatar under his protection and seeks to protect Men and Elves alike from ‘evil fays’.
At this point a second, similar, figure appears upon the scene, variously called Fúkil or Fankil or Fangli, the servant (or, according to one version, the child) of Melko. Like Tû, Fangli is a fay or Maia, one of several who ‘escaped into the world’ at the time of Melko’s chaining. Coming among the newly awakened humans, Fangli corrupts them, playing serpent in this Eden, and stirs up strife among the first Men. The result is the Battle of Palisor, where the Men corrupted by Fangli with their Dwarf and Goblin allies attack the twilight elves and the few Men still loyal to them. The outlines differ on whether Fangli’s host or Tû’s folk gain the victory, but most agree that ‘the Men corrupted by Fangli fled away and became wild and savage tribes, worshipping Fangli and Melko’; some even specify that these Men become the ‘dark and savage’ peoples of the far south and east – the first hint of the Southron and Easterling, the Men of Harad and Khand and Rhûn (BLT I.232–7).
Neither Tû nor Fangli is mentioned again after the ‘Lost Tales’ were abandoned, but a new figure of great importance appears shortly afterwards who combines elements from both: Thû the necromancer. Also variously known as Gorthû and Sauron, this evil magician makes his first appearance in ‘The Lay of Leithian’13 and thereafter plays a major role in all of Tolkien’s Middle-earth works:
Men called him Thû, and as a god
in after days beneath his rod
bewildered bowed to him, and made
his ghastly temples in the shade.
Not yet by Men enthralled adored,
now was he Morgoth’s mightiest lord,
Master of Wolves, whose shivering howl
for ever echoed in the hills, and foul
enchantments and dark sigaldry
did weave and wield. In glamoury
that necromancer held his hosts
of phantoms and of wandering ghosts,
of misbegotten or spell-wronged
monsters that about him thronged,
working his bidding dark and vile:
the werewolves of the Wizard’s Isle.
—Lay of Leithian, Canto VII, lines 2064–2079;
HME III.227–8.
While not yet as powerful as he later becomes, we have here the character of Sauron the Great fully developed: his undead servants (cf. The Lord of the Rings’ Nazgûl); his desire for worship (prefigured in the Fangli story) and the dark temples which come to play so great a role in all versions of the Numenor story; his skill at sorcery, especially necromancy and mind-controlling enchantments. Elsewhere in the Lay there is even mention of his ‘sleepless eyes of flame’ (line 2055), with which he keeps endless watch on all comings and goings on the borders of Morgoth’s land. The fate of those thrown into his dungeons is vividly described:
Thus came they unhappy into woe,
to dungeons no hope nor glimmer know,
where chained in chains that eat the flesh
and woven in webs of strangling mesh
they lay forgotten, in despair.
—Canto VII, lines 2210–2214;
HME III.231.
Bladorthin’s comment that the Necromancer’s castle ‘stands no more, and he is flown to another darker place – Beren and Tinúviel broke his power, but that is quite another story’ is an explicit reference back to events in ‘The Lay of Leithian’. It is not surprising that the earlier work was still fresh in Tolkien’s mind, nor that he would forge this connection between it and the new story taking shape. He had written the passages in the poem referring to Thû in March and April of 1928 – that is, just over two years before beginning The Hobbit. What’s more, work on the two pieces overlapped: Tolkien began The Hobbit in the summer of 1930 and was still writing new lines for ‘The Lay of Leithian’ as late as September 1931 (HME III.304). Thus, if any part of the Silmarillion material were to have a direct impact on the new story, ‘The Lay of Leithian’ is the natural piece where we might expect to find it. And the influence is there, right down to verbal echoes: after Thû’s defeat, the destruction of his tower, and the release of his captives, the Lay describes how Thû abandoned his body and took the form of a giant vampire bat
for Thû had flown
to Taur-na-Fuin, a new throne
and darker stronghold there to build.
—Canto IX, lines 2820–2822;
HME III.254–5.
Why, having made explicit ties between Mr. Baggins’ story and that of Beren & Lúthien, did Tolkien later cut these lines? The answer, I think, lies in the problems of chronology they create. If, as Bladorthin says, Gandalf’s father perished in the dungeons of the Necromancer but his castle has since been cast down by Beren and Tinuviel, then less than a century has passed between those events and the time of our story (since Gandalf’s father set out on his ill-fated journey ‘a hundred years ago last Tuesday’) – far too short a time to create the narrative distance from the Silmarillion tradition Tolkien seems to be striving for. It also involves the story in a serious contradiction later on, for we are told by Elrond in Chapter III that the swords from the troll lair are ‘old swords, very old swords of the elves . . . made in Gondolin for the goblin-wars . . . dragons destroyed that city many ages ago’ (p. 115; emphasis mine), yet the Fall of Gondolin came a generation or two after the time of Beren and Lúthien. The simplest way out of these difficulties was to eliminate one of the two references, either to Gondolin or to Beren & Tinúviel. Since the swords (and knife) from Gondolin play a crucial part in the narrative while the allusion to ‘The Lay of Leithian’ is essentially ornamental, it is no surprise that this is the reference which Tolkien decided to cut. Still, it is significant that it stood in the manuscript throughout the Second Phase – that is, for the bulk of the drafting of the story – and was only removed in the Third Phase with the creation of the First Typescript, after the story had been brought to the brink of the Siege of the Mountain; it is our strongest indicator that while writing The Hobbit Tolkien already considered it part of the mythology.
Given Tolkien’s scrupulous attention to detail, how are we to account for Bladorthin’s remark that ‘last Tuesday’ was the third of March when only a few pages before the text had stated clearly and unambiguously that ‘it was April’ (see p. 36) – especially when we are told in the very next chapter that Bilbo’s journey began ‘one fine morning just before May’, a date borne out by subsequent references (cf. p. 90: ‘the weather . . . had off and on been as good as May can be . . . “To think it is June the first tomorrow” grumbled Bilbo’)? The answer, of course, lies in the gap in composition between the first and last parts of this chapter: when Tolkien drafted this line as part of the Second Phase, he simply forgot that he had already set the scene for the Unexpected Party in April during the First Phase. The error remained in the book until the second edition of 1951, when Tolkien changed the starting date of Thrain’s expedition to ‘the twenty-first of April, a hundred years ago last Thursday’ and toyed with ascribing the error to ‘a misreading of the difficult hand and language of the original diary’ (cf. p. 752).
From time to time efforts have been made to prove that Tolkien used the calendar for an actual year to construct the time-table for Bilbo’s journey – see, for example, Mick Henry’s ‘The Hobbit Calendar’ in the May 1993 issue of Amon Hen (pp. 14–15), which argues for 1932 on the grounds that April 21st fell on a Thursday that year. Interestingly enough, this error on Tolkien’s part offers the best proof possible that he was not working from the calendar of a specific year, since it would have been easy for him to avoid this and other chronological anomalies if he was simply following the current calendar (again, see Tolkien’s attempt years later to ‘fix’ the timeline of events in The Hobbit in the Fifth Phase). Furthermore, it is clear from reading his memorandum noting changes needed for the second edition that the change from Tuesday to Thursday was purely accidental; Tolkien simply forgot that the original text specified Tuesday rather than Thursday, and he was reluctant to abandon ‘the comic precision’ of ‘one hundred years ago last Thursday’ (see p. 750).