As before, the text continues on the same page (Ms. page 39; Marq. 1/1/3:7), with what would later become the chapter break indicated only by a short gap of a few lines in mid-page and a slightly larger opening letter on the first word of the new section.
There are many paths that lead up into those mountains and many passes over them. But most of the paths are cheats and deceptions, and lead nowhere or to bad ends; and most of the passes are infested by wicked things and dreadful dangers.
The dwarves and Bilbo helped by the good advice of Elrond and by the wisdom and memory of Bladorthin, took the right path to the right pass.
Long days after they climbed out of the valley and left the Last Homely House miles behind, they were still going up and up and up. It was a hard path and a dangerous path, a crooked way, and a lonely way and long. Now they could look back on the lands behind laid out below them. Far far away in the west where things were blue and faint Bilbo knew his own country was of safe and comfortable things, and his little hobbit-hole. He shivered. It was getting bitter cold up here, and the wind came shrill among the rocks. Also boulders came galloping down the mountain sides at times, and passed among them (which was lucky) or over their heads (which was alarming). And nights were comfortless and chill, and they did not dare to sing or talk loud, for the echoes were uncanny, and the silence did not seem to want [> seemed to dislike] being broken – except for [> by] the noise of water and the wail of wind, and the crack of stone.
‘The summer is getting on’ thought Bilbo, ‘and haymaking is going on, and picnics. They will be harvesting and blackberrying before we are [> even begin to go] down the other side at this rate’.
And he was quite right. When they said goodbye to Elrond they had had the notion of coming to the side-door of the Lonely Mountain perhaps that very next first moon of autumn – and ‘perhaps it will be Durin’s Day’ they had said. Perhaps. But they were not going to get there to see [> so soon to see].TN1
Even the good plans of wise wizards like Bladorthin and good friends like Elrond go wrong sometimes when you are off on such peculiarly dangerous adventures over the Edge of the Wild.
Now you will want to know what [added: really] happened; and I expect you guessed quite rightly that they would never get over those great tall mountains and those lonely [> with their lonely] peaks and valleys where no king ruled without some fearful adventure.
One day they met a thunderstorm – no not a thunderstorm a thunder-battle. You know how terrific a really big thunderstorm can be down in the land and in a river-valley; perhaps you have even seen two thunderstorms meet and clash. But have you seen thunder and lightening <sic> in the mountains at night, when storms meet and their warring shakes the rocks and . . . the valleysTN2 [> when storms come up from East and West and make war]? The lightning splinters on the peaks, and rocks crash [> shiver], and the great crashes split the air and go rolling and tumbling into every cave and hollow; and the darkness is filled with fearful noise and sudden light.
Bilbo had never seen anything of the kind. They were high up on a narrow track, with a dreadful fall into a dim valley on one side. [The night was >] There they were sheltering under a hanging rock for the night, and he lay under a blanket and shook from head to toe.
He peeped out and in the lightning-flashes he saw that across the valley the stone-giants were out, and were hurling rocks at one another for a game, and catching them, and tossing them down into the darkness where they crashed among the trees far below or splintered into little bits with a dreadful noise.
Then came a wind and a rain, and the wind whipped the rain and hail about in every direction so that an overhanging rock was no protection at all. Soon they were getting drenched, and their ponies were standing with their heads down and their tails between their legs, and some were whinnying with fright. They could hear the giants guffawing and laughter and shouting all over the mountain-sides.
‘This won’t do at all’ said Gandalf. ‘If we don’t get blown off, or drowned or struck by lightning, we shall be picked up by some giant and kicked sky high for a football’.
‘Well if you [think we >] know of anywhere better take us there’ said Bladorthin who was feeling very grumpy, and wasn’t very happy about the giants either. And the end of their argument was that they sent Fili and Kili who had very sharp eyes – and being the youngest of the dwarves usually got these sort of jobsTN3 (when they could see that it was absolutely no use sending Bilbo). There is nothing like looking if you want to find something. You usually find something if you look, though it may not be quite the something you were after. Soon Fili and Kili came crawling back holding on to the rocks in the wind.
‘We have found a dry cave’ they said ‘not far round the corner, and ponies and all could get inside’.
‘Have you thoroughly explored it?’ asked the wizard, who knew that caves up in the mountains were not often unoccupied.
‘Yes yes’ they said, though everybody knew they couldn’t have been long about it, they had been too quick. ‘It isn’t all that big, and it doesn’t seem to go far back’.
That is of course the dangerous part about caves – you don’t know how far they go back, or where a passage behind may lead to, or what is waiting for you inside.
In the end they went. The wind was howling, and the thunder still growling, and they had a business getting themselves and their ponies along. Still it wasn’t very far, and before long they came to a big rock standing out into the path. If you slipped behind (there wasn’t much room to do it, except perhaps for little Bilbo) you found a low arch in the side of the mountain, just high enough for a small pony to get under.TN4 Under that arch they went, and it was good to hear the wind and the rain outside instead of all round them, and to feel safe from the giants and their rocks.
Bladorthin lit up his wand (like he did that day in Bilbo’s dining room, if you remember) and they explored the cave. It seem quite a good size, but not too big and mysterious. It had a dry floor and some comfortable nooks. At one end there was room for the ponies, and there they stood (mighty glad to be there) and they had their nose bags on for a treat. Oin and Gloin [lit a fire near the arch >] wanted to light a fire at the door to dry their clothes, but Bladorthin wouldn’t allow it. So they spread out their wet things on the floor, got dry ones out of their bundles, made their blankets comfy, got out their pipes, and blew smoke rings, which Bladorthin turned into different colours and set a dancing up on the roof to amuse them. They talked and talked and forgot about the storm, and [made plans >] discussed what they would each do with their share of the [gold >] treasure (when they got it which now seemed not so impossible), and so they dropped off to sleep one by one. And they never saw their ponies [added: alive] again, or most of their baggages packages tools and paraphernalia.TN5
It turned out a good thing that night that they had brought little Bilbo with them, after all. For somehow he could not go to sleep for a long time; and when he did sleep he had very nasty dreams. He dreamed that a crack in the wall at the back of the cave got bigger and bigger and bigger and opened wider and wider, and he was very afraid but couldn’t call out or do anything save lie and look.
Then he dreamed that the floor of the cave was giving way, and he was slipping – beginning to fall down down goodness knows where. Then he woke up with a horrible start, and found that part of his dream was true. A crack had opened at the back of the cave, and was now a wide passage. He was just in time to see the last of the ponies’ tails disappearing into it.
Of course he gave a very loud shout, as loud as hobbit could [cry >] make. Out jumped the goblins, big goblins, great ugly-looking goblins, lots of goblins before you could say ‘rocks and blocks!’.
There were six to each dwarf (at least) and two even for Bilbo,TN6 and they were all grabbed and carried through the crack before you could have said ‘tinder and flint’. All except Bladorthin. Bilbo’s yell had waked him up wide in a splintered second, and when goblins came to grab him there was a terrific flash like lightning in the cave and several fell dead.
The crack closed with a snap and Bilbo and the dwarves were on the wrong side of it. But where was Bladorthin? That neither they nor the goblins had any idea, and the goblins did not wait to find out.
They picked up Bilbo and the dwarves and hurried them along. It was deep deep dark such as only goblins who have taken to living in the heart of the mountains can see through.TN7 The passages there were crossed and tangled, but the goblins seemed to know their way, as well as the way to the nearest post-office; and the way went down and down, and it was most horribly stuffy. The goblins were very rough and pinched unmercifully, and chuckled and laughed in their horrible stony voices, and Bilbo was more unhappy even than when William had picked him up by his toes. He wished again & again for his nice bright hobbit hole – not for the last time.
And now there came a glimmer of red light before them. Then the goblins began to sing, or croak, keeping time with the flap of their flat feet on the stone, and shaking their prisoners as well.
Clap! Snap! the black crack!
Grip, grab! Pinch, nab!
And down down to Goblin-town
You go, my lad!
Clash, crash! Crush, smash!
Hammer and tongs! Knocker and gongs!
Pound, pound, far underground!
Ho, ho! my lad!
Swish, smack! Whip crack!
Batter and beat! Yammer and bleat!
Work, work! Nor dare to shirk,TN8
While Goblins quaff, and Goblins laugh,
Round and round far underground
Below, my lad!
It sounded very terrifying, and the walls echoed to the ‘clap snap’ and ‘crash smash’ and to the ugly laughter of their ‘ho ho my lad’. The general meaning of the song was only too plain, for now the goblins took out whips and whipped them with a swish smack and set them running as fast as they could [added: go], and more than one of the dwarves were already yammering like anything when they came [> stumbled] into a big cavern.
It was lit with red fires & torches along the walls,TN9 and was full of goblins. How they laughed and stamped and clapped their hands when the dwarves with poor little Bilbo came running in with the goblin-drivers cracking their whips behind. The ponies were already there, and all the packages and baggages broken open and were being rummaged by goblins, and smelt by goblins, and fingered by goblins, and quarrelled about by goblins.
I am afraid that was the last they ever saw of those excellent little ponies, for goblins eat horses and ponies and donkeys (and other worse things). Just now they had themselves to think of, though. The goblins chained their hands behind their backs, and chained [> linked] them all together in a line, and dragged them along, with Bilbo tugging at the end of the row, to the far shadows [> end of the cavern]. There in the shadows on a large flat stone sat a very big goblin, and armed goblins were standing round him carrying the axes and the bent swords that they use.
Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad hearted. They make no beautiful things, but make many clever things. They can tunnel and mine as well as any dwarves, and hammers, axes, swords, daggers, pickaxes, and also instruments of torture they make (or get other people to make – prisoners and slaves) very well. Also they make machines, all wheels and noise and stench, and doubtless they invented a great many of the machines – for wheels and engines, always delighted them, and also not working with their hands more than they were obligedTN10 – but in those days and in those wild parts they had not yet advanced (as it is called) so far. They did not hate dwarves especially; in some parts wicked dwarves had even made alliances with them. But goblins did not care who they caught as long as it was done smart and secret, and the prisoners were not able to defend themselves.
‘Who are these miserable persons?’ said the big goblin.TN11
‘Dwarves and this’ said one of the drivers, pulling at Bilbo’s chain so that he fell forward on to his knees. ‘We found them sheltering in our front door’.
‘What do you mean by it?’ said the great goblin turning to Gandalf. ‘Up to no good I will warrant or spying on the private business of my people, I expect! [Come, what have you got to say >] Thieves, I shouldn’t be surprised to learn! Murderers and friends of elves, not unlikely! Come what have you got to say!’
‘Gandalf the Dwarf’ he replied ‘at your service’ (which is merely a polite nothing). ‘[Nothing of >] Of the things you suspect and imagine we had no idea at all. We sheltered from a storm in what appeared a convenient cave, and unused; nothing was further from our thought than inconveniencing goblins in any way whatever’ (that was true enough).
‘Um’ said the great goblin ‘so you say! Might I ask what you were doing up in the mountains at all, and where you were coming from, and [what >] where you were going to? – and in fact I should like to know all about you’.
‘We were on a journey to our relatives, our nephews and niecesTN12 and first, second and third cousins and other descendants of our grandfathers who live on the East side of these truly hospitable mountains’ said Gandalf, not quite knowing what to say all at once in a moment, when obviously the exact truth [was > would have been no >] wouldn’t do at all.
‘He is a liar, O truly great and tremendous one’ said one of the drivers. ‘Several of our people were struck by magic lightning in the cave, when we invited them to come below, and are dead as stones. Also he has not explained this’. He held out the sword which Gandalf had worn, the sword which came from the Trolls’ lair.
The great Goblin gave a truly awful howl of rage when he looked at it, and all the soldiers gnashed their teeth, clashed their swords, and stamped. They knew this sword at once. It had killed hundreds of goblins in its time, when the fair elves of Gondolin hunted them in the hills, or did battle before their walls. They had called it Orcrist, the goblin-slasher, as its runes said;TN13 but the goblins called it simply Biter. They hated it, and hated worse anyone that carried it.
‘Murderers and elf-friends!’ the great-goblin shouted. ‘Slash them, beat them, gash them – take them away to dark holes full of snakes, and let them never see the light again.’
He was [so in a >] in such a rage he jumped off his seat and rushed at Gandalf with his mouth open.
Just at that very moment all the lights went out in [the] cavern, and the great fire went off ‘poof’ into a tower of blue-glowing smoke right up to the roof, and scattered burning white sparks all among the goblins.
The yells and yammers, croaking, jibbering and jabbering, howls growls and curses, shrieks and skriking that followed passes all description.TN14 Several hundred cats and wolves being roasted alive together could [> would] not have compared with it. The sparks were burning holes in the goblins, and the smoke made the dark too thick for even them to see in it, and soon they were falling over one another and rolling in heaps on the floor and biting and kicking and fighting [like >] as if they had all gone mad. Suddenly a sword flashed in its own light. Bilbo saw it go right through the great goblin where he stood dumbfounded in the middle of his rage. He fell dead, and the goblin soldiers fled before the sword shrieking into the darkness.
The sword went back into its sheath. ‘Follow me quick!’ said a voice fierce and quiet, and before Bilbo understood he was trotting along again at the end of the line as fast as he could trot, down more dark passages with the yells of the goblin-hall growing fainter behind him. A faint light was leading them on.
‘Quicker quicker!’ said the voice ‘the torches will soon be relit’. [Now Dori who was at the back next to Bilbo, and a decent fellow, picked up the hobbit and put him on his shoulders, and off they went as >] ‘Half a minute’ said Dori. He made the hobbit scramble on his shoulders as best he could with his tied hands and chain and everything, and then off they went at a run with a clink clink of chains, and many a stumble, since they had no hands to steady them. Not for a long while did they stop, and they must have been right down in the very mountain’s heart by that time.
Then Bladorthin lit up his wand. Of course it was Bladorthin, and wait a minute if you want to know how he got there. He took out his sword and it flashed in the dark all by itself. [It was refreshed after >] It burned with rage so that it shone [> gleamed] if goblins were about; and it was brighter then ever after killing the great goblin [> now it was as bright as pale blue flame for pleasure in the killing of the great lord of the cave]. Certainly it made no bother about cutting through the goblin-chains, and setting all the prisoners free as quick as possible. This sword’s name was Glamdring (which means goblin-beater)TN15 and it was if anything [<more> >] a better sword than Orcrist. Oh no Orcrist wasn’t lost, Bladorthin had [<p>ut it >] brought it away all right. He thought of most things, and did what he could.
‘Are we all here?’ said he. ‘Let me see: one,TN16 two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven (where are Fili and Kili; here they are) twelve, thirteen, and here’s Mr Baggins – fourteen. Well well, it might be worse, and then again it might be a deal better. No ponies, no food, and no knowing quite where we are, and hordes of angry goblins behind! On we go’.
On they went. He was quite right, they began to hear goblin-noises, and horrible cries far behind in the passages they had come through. That sent them on faster than ever, and as poor Bilbo couldn’t possibly go half as fast (dwarves can shamble along a good pace, I can tell you, when they have to), they took it in turns to carry him on their backs.
Still goblins go faster, and also the goblins knew the ways <better> (they had made them themselves); so do what they would [> the dwarves would] the cries of the goblins got closer and closer. Now they could even hear the flap of their feet, many many feet, which seemed only just round the last corner. The blink of red torches could be seen [in the tunnel behind >] behind them in the tunnel they were following. They were getting deadly tired. ‘Why o why did I ever leave my hobbit-hole’ said poor Mr Baggins bumping up and down on Bombur’s back; and ‘why o why did I ever bring a wretched little hobbit on a treasure hunt’ thought poor Bombur staggering along with the sweat dripping down his nose in heat and terror.
Now Bladorthin fell behind. They turned a sharp corner – ‘about turn!’ he said. ‘Draw your sword Gandalf’. There was nothing else to be done. Nor did the goblins like it.
They came scurrying round the corner to find Goblin-slasher and Goblin-beater shining cold and bright right in their astonished eyes. They dropped their torches and gave one yell before they were killed. The others yelled still more behind, and ran back knocking over the ones that were running after them. ‘Orcrist and Glamdring’TN17 they shrieked and soon they were all in confusion, and most of them hustling back the way they had come.
It was quite a long time before they dared to turn that corner. By that time the dwarves had gone on again, a long long way on into the dark tunnels of the goblins’ kingdom. When they found out that, they put out their torches and they put on soft soft shoes, and they chose out their very quickest runners. These ran on as quick as weasels in the dark with hardly as much noise as bats (of which there were lots in those nasty holes). That is why neither Bilbo, nor the dwarves, nor even Bladorthin heard them coming. Nor did they see them. But the goblins could see them when they had [come >] nearly overtaken them, for Bladorthin was letting his wand give out a faint light to help them as they went along.
Quite suddenly Dori at the back (with Bilbo on his shoulders) was grabbed from behind in the dark. He shouted and fell and Bilbo rolled off his shoulders into the dark, bumped his head and remembered nothing more.
TEXT NOTES
1 The narrator’s observation that Bilbo’s misgivings were ‘quite right’ (and that Gandalf & Company would not reach the mountain by Durin’s Day) show that the expanded time scheme in which Bilbo and his companions would be more than a year on the road was already in place; see Plot Notes A. In the First Typescript (Marq. 1/1/54:1), this paragraph was merged with the one preceding it by the deletion (through erasure) of the narrator’s comment and the addition (in ink, in the left margin) of the others’ ‘equally gloomy thoughts’, and also merged with the one following it by the addition of a sentence about the wizard’s foreboding and the dwarves’ lack of recent experience in these parts. Finally, the paragraph after that was changed from second person to third, so the narrator’s breezy segue (‘Now you will want to know what really happened’) becomes part of the wizard’s forebodings (‘He knew that something unexpected might happen . . .’).
2 The illegible word before ‘the valleys’ starts with r and seems to end in s, perhaps ruins.
3 The typescript adds the detail ‘the youngest of the dwarves by some fifty years’ (Marq. 1/1/54:2). From this, combined with the information in the dwarven family tree in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings (LotR.1117), we can deduce that the six dwarves among Bilbo’s companions whose birth dates are not given (Dori, Nori, Ori, Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur) were all born after T.A. 2763 (Balin’s birthdate, since we know he is the eldest after Thorin; see p. 380) but before about T.A. 2809 (fifty years before Fili’s birth), although none of this precision of detail existed at the time The Hobbit was written.
4 Added in the left margin, and marked for insertion either within the parenthetical after ‘little Bilbo’ or at the end of the sentence: ‘and they had to unpack the ponies or they would have stuck’.
5 This last line was cancelled and replaced by the following in the margin: ‘And that was the last time they used their ponies, baggage, packages tools & paraphernalia they had brought with them.’ – a change necessitated by their later sight of the ponies & baggage on p. 131.
6 Therefore there are presumably eighty-six goblins who take part in this ambush: 6 x 13 = 78 for the dwarves, + 2 for Bilbo = 80, + 6 for Bladorthin (all of whom are struck dead) = a total of 86; rather a lot for a cavern of ‘quite a good size, but not too big’, unless more of Bilbo’s dream comes true than he realizes, and the cave actually does grow larger.
7 The phrase taken to living is interesting, since it implies that this was not their original habitat; presumably the fallen Dark Lord’s minions are conceived as having hidden themselves in remote places to escape destruction, from which havens they have rebuilt their numbers and are now beginning to assault others again; cf. a similar motif at the end of the Second Age and Third Age.
8 These three lines (‘Swish smack . . . dare to shirk’) were originally written at the beginning of the second stanza, then cancelled and moved to their present position. That is, lines 9–11 of the final poem were originally lines 5–7 of the draft. The poem is otherwise very neatly written into the page, indicating that this is fair copy from some rough drafting that does not survive; the replacement of ‘laugh’ by ‘quaff’ in line 12 was probably required because of a copying error, not a deliberate change.
9 This line was later changed to read ‘. . . with a great red fire in the middle & torches . . .’
10 This passage was revised via deletions and additions to read as follows: ‘. . . also instruments of torture they make very well (or get other people to make to their design – prisoners and slaves that have to work till they die for want of air & light.) I have no doubt they invented a great many of the machines – for wheels and engines, always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they were obliged . . .’
11 The goblin-chief is referred to in lower case, variously as ‘the big goblin’, ‘the great goblin’, and ‘the great-goblin’; not until the typescript (1/1/54:5) does his description become a proper name: the Great Goblin. Note, however, the reference to the goblin ‘King’ in the next chapter, p. 163.
12 This sentence was slightly altered to read ‘. . . on a journey to visit our relatives, our nephews and nieces . . .’ Aside from the much later references to Fili and Kili’s mother in Chapters X & XVIII, this is the only reference to female dwarves in The Hobbit.
13 This is the first appearance of the name Orcrist, a name which as the narrator says indeed means ‘Goblin-slasher’ in Gnomish; cf. the Gnomish Lexicon, page 63, which glosses orc as ‘goblin. (children of Melko.)’, and page 27, which glosses crist as ‘knife. slash – slice’. The Noldorin equivalent given in ‘The Etymologies’ is similar but the slight difference is significant, since it glosses crist as ‘a cleaver, sword’ (HME V.365). The passage in which Elrond names the swords in Chapter III did not appear in the manuscript text of that chapter, entering there instead in the First Typescript (1/1/53:5):
. . . many ages ago. This, Thorin, the runes name Orcrist, the Goblin-cleaver in the ancient tongue of Gondolin; it was a famous blade. This, Gandalf, was Glamdring, Foe-hammer that the king of Gondolin once wore. I wonder indeed where the trolls found them. Keep them well!
The word ‘cleaver’ here is written in ink over an erasure, but the word Tolkien originally typed has been obliterated and cannot be recovered. The penultimate sentence in this passage was cancelled in ink and does not appear in the Second Typescript (1/1/34:5).
14 As Douglas Anderson notes in The Annotated Hobbit (DAA.111), ‘skriking’ is not Tolkien’s own coinage but a dialectical word meaning a shrill screeching; Anderson also notes that the word appears in Haigh’s A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District, to which Tolkien contributed a Foreword.
15 This is the first appearance of the name Glamdring, which like ‘Orcrist’ is either Gnomish or Noldorin. The Gnomish Lexicon (page 39) gives ‘glam · hoth’ as the Gnomish word for the orcs. ‘Glam’ (glâm) itself means hatred or loathing, while ‘hoth’ (ibid. p. 49) means a folk, people, or army; thus glam+hoth = ‘People of [the] dreadful Hate’. In ‘The Etymologies’ glam has come to mean ‘shouting, confused noise’ and though glamhoth is still a name for the orcs, in Noldorin the word is said to mean ‘the barbaric host’ (HME V.358). I cannot account for the second half of the name, -dring, in Gnomish, but ‘The Etymologies’ has an entry defining it as Noldorin for ‘beat, strike’ (HME V.355), which is close enough to ‘hammer’ that we can consider them equivalent. The later translation ‘foe-hammer’ is thus a slightly less literal and somewhat more poetic, though still accurate, translation than ‘goblin-cleaver’, and avoids confusing the unphilological reader as why two such different words (Glam-, Orc-) were, in the original, both translated as ‘goblin’.
16 Added: ‘(that’s Gandalf)’.
17 Penciled over the Elvish words are the orcish names for these swords: ‘Biter and Beater’.
In keeping with the pattern established in the preceding chapters, this chapter introduces yet another a new race: the goblins. Like the elves and dwarves, goblins already had a long history in Tolkien’s writings predating The Hobbit. Even if we overlook the undifferentiated fairy-folk lumped under the ‘goblin’ label in ‘Goblin Feet’ [published 1915], goblins were featured prominently throughout the early Silmarillion material, especially in ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’, ‘Turambar and the Foalókë’, and ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ [all written 1916–20]. Goblins fought alongside balrogs and dragons in the sack of Gondolin, and goblin-mercenaries aided the dwarves in looting Tinwelint’s caves in Artanor (the precursors in the legendarium to Thingol’s Thousand Caves of Menegroth in Doriath). The terms ‘goblin’ and ‘orc’ were used more or less interchangeably in the early material – thus in ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ we hear of ‘Melko’s goblins, the Orcs of the hills’ (BLT II.157), ‘the Orcs who are Melko’s goblins’ (BLT II.159), and ‘an innumerable host of the Orcs, the goblins of hatred’ (BLT II.176), while in ‘Turambar and the Foalókë’ Beleg tracks ‘the band of Orcs . . . a band of the goblins of Melko’ (BLT II.77). It’s possible to read Orc as the more specific term and goblin as the more generic, but often ‘goblin’ apparently replaces the more common ‘orc’ simply for the sake of variety, especially in the alliterative poetry. On the whole, the evidence suggests that Tolkien preferred ‘orc’ for works in the direct line of the Silmarillion tradition (such as ‘The Sketch of the Mythology’, the narrative poems that make up The Lays of Beleriand, the 1930 Quenta, and so forth) and used ‘goblin’ in more light-hearted contexts, such as The Father Christmas Letters and The Hobbit.
Also known as the Glamhoth (or ‘people of hate’), goblins seem to be one of the Úvanimor, the monster-folk ‘bred in the earth’ by Melko; a category that includes ‘monsters, giants, and ogres’ and, early on, possibly the dwarves as well (BLT I.236 & 75). In the early myth, they seem to have been created by Melko – according to the elven narrator of ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, ‘all that race were bred by Melko of the subterranean heats and slime’ (BLT II.159).1 Eventually Tolkien adopted the Augustinian view that evil cannot create but only corrupt and that therefore orcs must be one of the ‘Free Peoples’ who have been twisted and corrupted, probably elves (since orcs appear in the stories before the first humans awaken). Both views are present in The Lord of the Rings, where one character asserts that ‘Trolls are only counterfeits, made by the Enemy in the Great Darkness, in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves’ (LotR.507) and another ‘The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them . . .’ (LotR.948). In his later years, Tolkien wrestled with the problem and attempted to come to a definitive solution in a fascinating sequence of essays printed in Morgoth’s Ring (HME X.409–22; these essays were written c. 1959–60 & 1969). Among the solutions he toyed with were (a) orcs are animals without souls; their speech is parrot-like and what little rational will they seem to have is part of Morgoth’s dispersed personality;2 (b) the original orcs were the least of the spirits corrupted by Morgoth, just as balrogs are greater spirits. Once incarnate, they could procreate (just as Melian could give birth to Lúthien and Morgoth could toy with the idea of taking Lúthien as his wife or concubine; cf. Silm.180) and the very act would trap them within the bodies they had assumed; their descendents would be weaker and weaker, perhaps dwindling in the end to mere poltergeists; (c) orcs are elves carried off by Morgoth from the awakening place, Cuiviénen, and corrupted. This is the position adopted in The Silmarillion:
[T]his is held true by the wise of Eressëa, that all those of the Quendi [i.e., elves] who came into the hands of Melkor, ere Utumno was broken, were put there in prison, and by slow arts of cruelty were corrupted and enslaved; and thus did Melkor breed the hideous race of the Orcs in envy and mockery of the Elves, of whom they were afterwards the bitterest foes . . . This it may be was the vilest deed of Melkor, and the most hateful to Ilúvatar. (Silm.50)
and again:
Whence they came, or what they were, the Elves knew not then, thinking them perhaps to be Avari [wild elves] who had become evil and savage in the wild; in which they guessed all too near, it is said. (Silm.94)
Furthermore, in later times a strong human strain was added to the mix; in the essay on the Drúedain, the Wild Men of the Woods, an author’s note states that ‘Doubtless Morgoth, since he can make no living thing, bred Orcs from various kinds of Men’ and raises the possibility of some distant kinship between orcs and the Wild Men (or woodwoses), noting that ‘Orcs and Drûgs each regarded the other as renegades’ (Unfinished Tales p. 385). Finally, (d) some orc-leaders, the Great Orcs, were Maiar who took on orcish shape,3 but the majority of their followers were mortal and short-lived by elven or Númenórean standards, being bred (by Sauron, not Morgoth)4 from human stock. According to this last theory, orcs were capable of independent thought and even, theoretically, of repentance but were easily controlled by Morgoth or Sauron from afar, having been especially bred to be so dominated.
Whatever their origin, the goblins in The Hobbit seem as capable of free thought and action as any of the other races in the book, whether dwarves or elves or men or hobbits. There seems to be no connection between the goblins of the Misty Mountains and the Necromancer who lurks in Mirkwood – Thû the Necromancer may have been served by wolf-packs and orc-patrols in ‘The Lay of Leithian’, but not even a hint suggests that the Great Goblin owes the Necromancer of our story allegiance or is in any way under his sway. Instead, just as dwarves come into their own in this book, so too are the goblins presented for the first time as something more than swordfodder, having their own (admittedly wicked) culture and civilization, complete with poetry, commerce, an apparently thriving slave-labor industry5, a hierarchical society (from the Great Goblin on top down through the warriors to the slaves), and xenophobia. In fact, they greatly resemble the goblins of one of Tolkien’s precursors.
Up until this point in the story, Tolkien himself has been his own chief source – such once well-known works as Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ [1861] and James Whitcomb Riley’s ‘Little Orphant Annie’ [1885], with its famous refrain
And the Gobble-uns’ll git you ef you Don’t Watch Out!
apparently having no discernible influence on him. Now, however, he draws directly from an outside writer popular to an earlier generation: George MacDonald. Tolkien himself freely acknowledged the debt in his 1938 letter to The Observer, noting that one of his chief sources had been ‘fairy-story – not, however, Victorian in authorship, as a rule to which George Macdonald is the chief exception’ (Letters, p. 31; see Appendix II). He was more explicit in the draft of his Andrew Lang Memorial Lecture, ‘On Fairy-Stories’:
. . . But in the short time at my disposal I must say something about George Macdonald. George Macdonald, in that mixture of German and Scottish flavours (which makes him so inevitably attractive to myself), has depicted what will always be to me the classic goblin. By that standard I judge all goblins, old or new.6
Elsewhere he admitted that his goblins ‘owe, I suppose, a good deal to the goblin tradition . . . especially as it appears in George MacDonald’ (JRRT to Naomi Mitchison, 25th April 1954; Letters pp. 177–8) and again contrasted his own goblins with ‘the goblins of George MacDonald, which they do to some extent resemble’ (JRRT to Hugh Brogan, 18th Sept 1954; Letters p. 185).7
A look at MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin [1872] confirms Tolkien’s debt. MacDonald’s goblins, like Tolkien’s, are ugly, cunning, wicked,8 and technologically advanced, delighting in waylaying benighted travellers or lone miners. At times they plan war or other mischief against the people who live nearby, aided by weird misshapen goblin animals called cobs – a possible inspiration for the goblin-warg and goblin-bat alliances in the chapters to follow later in The Hobbit. Moreover, MacDonald’s goblins can interbreed with humans, although the only offspring of such a union that we see resembles his orc father more than his human mother – a probable forerunner of the half-orcs of The Lord of the Rings (some of whom, like Saruman’s Uruk-hai, are orc-like, while others, like the spy at Bree, can pass for human). They greatly dislike daylight, being most active at night, and their homes are a mix of mines and caverns, just like the goblin-caves of the Misty Mountains.
However, Tolkien was nothing if not selective in his borrowings, picking and choosing to suit his own ends and the needs of his story. Even where his sources can be identified through his own admission, he adapted what he borrowed and made it his own. For example, although MacDonald’s goblins are ruled over by a goblin king rather like the Great Goblin, there is nothing in Tolkien’s story to parallel MacDonald’s indomitable goblin queen, who stomps on her enemies’ feet with her great stone shoes. MacDonald’s goblins were originally humans who withdrew below-ground to escape persecution and now prefer a subterranean life, although they harbor a very understandable grudge against the king who wronged them and his descendants, including the princess of the title. All Tolkien’s goblins remain nameless in the original draft, and when he did add names (Azog, Bolg) it was in one of his invented languages, while MacDonald’s have comic names like Podge, Glump, Helfer, and Hairlip. The Princess and the Goblin even includes a comic scene of goblin family life that would be entirely inappropriate to the sense of menace Tolkien creates in this chapter, where the characters reel from peril to peril to peril. MacDonald’s goblins have hard heads and soft, toeless feet – their one vulnerable point, which the hero of his story is quick to exploit. Tolkien gave this idea short shrift; in the letter to Naomi Mitchison already cited, he continues, after acknowledging his debt to MacDonald’s goblin-lore, ‘. . . except for the soft feet which I never believed in’ (JRRT to Mitchison, 25th April 1954; Letters p. 178). Tolkien’s goblins, like hobbits, apparently go barefoot as a rule, only adopting footware at special need (such as to quiet the flapping of their feet when pursuing escaping guests).9
Most notably of all, MacDonald’s goblins are afraid of singing. They can neither sing nor compose themselves, and the best way to drive them off is to shout out spontaneous rhyming nonsense. Not only are Tolkien’s goblins, the goblins of the Misty Mountains, unafraid of a little verse, they seem as fond of breaking into a song as the villains in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. The goblin marching song in this chapter, with its alliteration and internal rhyme, might be a well-known chantey among the goblins for all we know, but the one they sing two chapters later (‘Fifteen Birds’) must be a spontaneous ‘occasional’ composition made up on the spot, so well does it fit the situation.
On one point, it’s difficult to tell if Tolkien and MacDonald are in agreement or not. MacDonald’s goblins are very long-lived (in the comic scene already referred to, the goblin-father remarks condescendingly to one goblin-child that ‘You were only fifty last month’ – The Princess and the Goblin, Chapter 8). The same may be true of Tolkien’s goblins. Upon seeing the sword rescued from the Trolls’ lair, they react instantly, howling and stamping and gnashing their teeth: they all recognize it at once (p. 132). And it is difficult to see how this could be so unless the majority of the goblins present in this scene took part in the siege of Gondolin.10 Even so, this falls short of proof on the point of goblin longevity, as earlier chapters have disagreed on whether the events of our story are taking place ages and ages after the fall of Gondolin (Chapter III, p. 115) or in the same century (Chapter I, p. 73). Perhaps the sword had passed into legend, along with a detailed description of its appearance, though this seems unlikely; in any case, Tolkien never altered this detail in the scene, even when he later firmly embraced the vast separation of time between Mr. Baggins’ world and the First Age.
No goblins appear in any of his illustrations for The Hobbit, but Tolkien did draw goblins in several of the Father Christmas Letters (see the illustrations for the letters from 1932, 1933, & 1935). These recurrent threats to the timely delivery of presents first enter the epistolary series in 1932, just about the time Tolkien was writing the final chapters of The Hobbit. Father Christmas describes them thusly:
Goblins are to us very much what rats are to you, only worse, because they are very clever, and only better because there are, in these parts, very few. We thought there were none left. Long ago we had great trouble with them, that was about 1453, I believe, but we got the help of the Gnomes, who are their greatest enemies, and cleared them out.11
Initially they are drawn as small black figures with pointy heads and large pale eyes,12 given to lurking and peering around corners (1932 Letter; see Plate VI [top left]); illustrations to later letters (1933 and 1935) reduce the size of the eyes somewhat and add a mouth and nose as well as showing them in much more active pursuits (battling elves, being squashed flat or thrown sky-high by the North Polar Bear, &c.). The later illustrations also replace the single crest or point atop the head with two very prominent ears, while the 1935 drawing gives them rather canine faces and very distinct tails. Their size throughout is the same as that of the ‘Gnomes’ or elves, or about half Father Christmas’s height.
Like the goblins in The Hobbit, those encountered repeatedly by Father Christmas (in 1932, 1933, and 1941) are experts at tunnelling and mining, laying low for long periods then suddenly coming forth in rampaging hordes to loot and pillage. One of their favorite tricks is to make secret tunnels from which to launch sorties and ambushes, just like the waylayers of the Misty Mountains. They share the latter’s alliances with bats and used to ride into battle on creatures named drasils (described as ‘dwarf “dachshund” horse creatures’) before these became extinct, a strong parallel both to MacDonald’s cob and to the wolf-riders we are shortly to encounter (although there is no parallel in The Hobbit to the bat-riders of The Father Christmas Letters). Finally, goblins are noisy: except when sneaking up on somebody they make all kinds of racket. As Father Christmas observes, ‘Goblins cannot help yelling and beating on drums when they mean to fight’ – a characteristic shared by their cousins in the Misty Mountains; cf. p. 162:
They saw him at once, and yelled with delight as they rushed at him . . . they yelled all the louder, only not quite so delighted . . . Whistles blew, armour clashed, swords rattled, goblins cursed and swore . . . There was a terrible outcry, to do and disturbance
and pp. 132–3:
The yells and yammers, croaking, jibbering and jabbering, howls growls and curses, shrieks and skriking that followed passes all description. Several hundred cats and wolves being roasted alive together could not have compared with it.
Note, however, one characteristic feature of Tolkien’s writings as a whole is not yet present: the goblins of The Hobbit do not have their own language but speak the same tongue as Bilbo and the dwarves. This feature never changed, so far as The Hobbit was concerned, but in the sequel Tolkien’s love of words led him to create a few snatches of goblin (cf. LotR.466 – Uglúk u bagronk sha pushdug Saruman-glob búbhosh skai – and the discussion of orc-speech later on that same page and in Appendix F, pages 1165–6). But for now, this thoroughly typical expression of Tolkien’s linguistic inventiveness lay in the future.
If the goblins open up a vast array of questions, the giants glimpsed from a distance during the crossing of the Misty Mountains remain on the fringes of the story. Giants occur in several of Tolkien’s works, but we never learn a great deal about them. Lúthien’s sleep-spell, already cited in reference to the beards of the dwarves (see p. 77), invokes ‘the neck of Gilim the giant’ and ‘the sword of Nan’ (BLT II.19) in its list of the longest things in the world, but little is known of either of these figures beyond the names. The version of this passage in ‘The Lay of Leithian’ names the sword as Glend and calls Gilim ‘the giant of Eruman’ (HME III.205). Christopher Tolkien notes that ‘Gilim’ is glossed as ‘winter’ in the Gnomish dictionary and cites an isolated note to the effect that Nan was a ‘giant of summer of the South’ like an elm (BLT II.67–8).13 The contrast between summer and winter seems obvious, perhaps harkening back to the fire-giants and frost-giants of Eddic lore, but whatever story Tolkien may have had in mind behind these shadowy figures (if indeed he had any at all) was apparently never written down. Nevertheless, Nan may have been in the back of Tolkien’s mind when he created the ents some twenty years later: for ‘ent’ simply means ‘giant’ in Old English, and it seems plain that the giant seen by Sam’s cousin Hal up beyond the North Moors was an ent, described as being ‘as big as an elm tree, and walking’ (LotR.57).14 The detail of the elm may be coincidental, but given Tolkien’s creative reuse of material time and again it would be rash to dismiss the parallel as sheer chance.
The Book of Lost Tales had referred to giants as one of the Úvanimor, or monster-folk (BLT I.75), a thoroughly traditional touch on Tolkien’s part; giants have a long, long tradition in folklore of being extremely dangerous if not downright wicked. Even Treebeard first appears in the LotR drafts as a distinctly sinister figure. It is initially ‘the Giant Treebeard’, not Saruman, who imprisons Gandalf the Grey and prevents him from warning Frodo to set out at once or accompanying him on his journey (HME VI.363), and an isolated draft passage survives describing Frodo’s encounter with ‘Giant Treebeard’, who here seems entirely tree-like. The episode seems harmless enough, slightly reminiscent of Ransom’s early adventures on Malacandra in Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet [1938], but Tolkien glossed it thusly in tengwar:
Frodo meets Giant Treebeard in the Forest of Neldoreth while seeking for his lost companions: he is deceived by the giant who pretends to be friendly, but is really in league with the Enemy.
—HME VI.382–415
An outline for ‘The Council of Elrond’ contains yet another warning in the midst of notes regarding the route the Fellowship and Ring will take:
‘Beware!’ said Gandalf ‘of the Giant Treebeard, who haunts the Forest between the River and the South Mts.’
—ibid., page 397.
But then Tolkien had a change of heart, and an outline relating to events in Fangorn Forest contains the suggestion ‘If Treebeard comes in at all – let him be kindly and rather good?’ (HME VI.410), a suggestion taken up in the rest of the outline, where Treebeard not only rescues Frodo when the latter is wandering lost in the forest but takes him to Ond (= Gondor) and raises the siege of the city, thereby rescuing Trotter (= Strider) and the others. The last trace of ambiguity appears in a reversal of the original idea; here it is only after the ‘tree-giant’ (described in terms that sound something like a cross between the Green Man of medieval legend, Sir Bercilak, and an actual tree) has carried Frodo to his castle in the Black Mountains that he is revealed to be friendly, whereas in the earlier draft he had pretended friendship but been false.
While the ents went on to become one of Tolkien’s most original and admired creations – attracting praise from critics as diverse as C. S. Lewis and Edmund Wilson16 – giants in the traditional sense of large, dangerous monsters in more or less human form vanished from the more integrated Middle-earth of Tolkien’s later work. Ents are one of the five Free Peoples; giants one of those races which may be called the Children of Morgoth. We have seen that both dwarves and goblins, who early on also fell under the ‘úvanimor’ rubric, underwent further development in The Hobbit, with the goblins remaining a monster race (‘cruel, wicked, and bad hearted’) and dwarves undergoing a transformation into ‘decent enough people’, if ‘commercial-minded’ (cf. p. 505). What, then, of the stone-giants? Is it possible, from the scanty evidence presented in The Hobbit, to determine whether they should be classified as Children of Morgoth or free agents?
In purely practical terms, our heroes are less concerned with the giants’ moral standing than the danger they pose. Their antics seem more the result of exuberance than malice, but that would be small consolation for any member of the party ‘kicked sky high for a football’. Similarly, the dim-witted giant of Farmer Giles of Ham blunders about causing all sorts of damage – breaking hedges, trampling crops, knocking down trees, smashing houses, and squashing the farmer’s favorite cow – yet all this destruction is merely the result of lack of attention on the part of the short-sighted and deaf giant, not active malice (unlike the dragon Chrysophylax Dives in the same story, whose depredations are quite intentional). The stone-giants of The Hobbit do not seem to be aware of the presence of the travellers, but then again there’s no indication that they would have behaved any differently had they known; in short, they are portrayed as a perilous but almost impersonal force, rather like the thunder-storm itself.17
By contrast, a much more traditional view surfaces in the next chapter – when Bilbo is trying to think of the answer to Gollum’s last riddle (‘This thing all things devours’), his mind is filled with ‘all the horrible names of all the giants and ogres he had ever heard told of in tales’ (p. 158). Here we can plainly see the echoes of such traditional tales as ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and ‘Jack the Giant Killer’, with their murderous, man-eating giants.18 Yet not all giants can be such monsters, for a chapter later Bladorthin casually suggests finding ‘a more or less decent giant’ to block up the goblins’ front gate in the mountain pass. It seems, then, that giants occupy a neutral ground, neither good nor evil as a race but varying from individual to individual. Dangerous, certainly – but as Gandalf points out in speaking of Treebeard, powerful and perilous is not the same thing as evil (LotR.521; & cf. also ibid.706).
While literature and his own earlier writings contributed much to The Hobbit, one element entered the story directly from personal experience: the descriptions of the mountain-crossing and thunderstorm in the Misty Mountains. As Tolkien recounted in a letter some fifty years after the event:
. . . with a mixed party of about the same size as the company in The Hobbit . . . I journeyed on foot with a heavy pack through much of Switzerland, and over many high passes. It was approaching the Aletsch that we were nearly destroyed by boulders loosened in the sun rolling down a snow-slope. An enormous rock in fact passed between me and the next in front. That and the ‘thunder-battle’ – a bad night in which we lost our way and slept in a cattle-shed – appear in The Hobbit. It is long ago now . . .
—JRRT to Joyce Reeves, 4th November 1961; Letters p. 309.
A later letter provides more details of the events underlying the early parts of Chapters III, IV, & VI:
The hobbit’s (Bilbo’s) journey from Rivendell to the other side of the Misty Mountains, including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods, is based on my adventures in 1911 . . . One day we went on a long march with guides up the Aletsch glacier – when I came near to perishing. We had guides, but either the effects of the hot summer were beyond their experience, or they did not much care, or we were late in starting. Any way at noon we were strung out in file along a narrow track with a snow-slope on the right going up to the horizon, and on the left a plunge down into a ravine. The summer of that year had melted away much snow, and stones and boulders were exposed that (I suppose) were normally covered. The heat of the day continued the melting and we were alarmed to see many of them starting to roll down the slope at gathering speed: anything from the size of oranges to large footballs, and a few much larger. They were whizzing across our path and plunging into the ravine . . . They started slowly, and then usually held a straight line of descent, but the path was rough and one had also to keep an eye on one’s feet. I remember the member of the party just in front of me (an elderly schoolmistress) gave a sudden squeak and jumped forward as a large lump of rock shot between us. About a foot at most before my unmanly knees . . .
—JRRT to Michael Tolkien, 1967–8; Letters pp. 391, 392–3.
It was this journey that enabled Tolkien to envision the Misty Mountain scenes with such a wealth of realistic detail, from the first approaches to Rivendell (cf. pages 112) through the glissade in Chapter VI (cf. p. 202),19 and he may have drawn on these memories again in some of the Lonely Mountain scenes, such as the ascent of the ‘fly-path’ to the sheltered bay on the west slope (p. 473) or the march to Ravenhill (pp. 583 & 594).
(iv)
Bilbo’s Dreams, and Other Matters
In addition to the main business of this chapter, several recurrent motifs make an appearance that should perhaps be noted before we move on to the next chapter. For the reference to Durin’s Day, see Text Note I above. One motif that shows up here for the first time is Bilbo’s prophetic dream (p. 129), which enables Bladorthin to evade capture and later rescue the others – thus marking the first time that the hobbit is responsible for the party’s escape from peril, albeit indirectly. The first of several dreams in The Hobbit, this is also the most important to the plot (for other examples, see Bilbo’s evocative dream at the end of Chapter VI, Bombur’s dream of the elven feasts in the interpolation into Chapter VIII, and Smaug’s nightmare of ‘a small warrior, altogether insignificant in size, but provided with a bitter sword, and great courage’).20 As a student of medieval literature, Tolkien was of course familiar with the genre of dream-vision, being intimately acquainted with such an outstanding example as The Pearl. He not only translated this moving elegy into modern English but planned to edit the original with E. V. Gordon as a companion volume to their edition of Sir Gawain & the Green Knight (another work written by the same anonymous fourteenth-century author) – a plan forestalled by Gordon’s sudden and untimely death in 1938 and Tolkien’s increased academic responsibilities during the late 1930s and especially World War II.21 Dreams also play important parts in two other works Tolkien was professionally concerned with: Chaucer’s ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ and the anonymous Breton lay Sir Orfeo.22 Other important dream-visions Tolkien would have been familiar with include Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis (The Dream of Scipio) [circa 50 BC];23 Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess [1368], Parliament of Fowls [c. 1370s], and House of Fame [c. 1380s]; Langland’s Vision of Piers Plowman [1360s–80s]; Guillaume de Lorris’s Romance of the Rose [c. 1230]; and the anonymous Welsh tales ‘The Dream of Macsen Wledig’ and ‘The Dream of Rhonabwy’ [early thirteenth century]. Tolkien’s own remarks on the dream-vision genre can be found in the introduction to his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo (see especially page 20 of the 1978 edition). Nor should we neglect to consider the influence of life as well as literature: Tolkien himself was a lifelong dreamer, and the drowning of Númenor that figures so importantly in works such as ‘The Fall of Númenor’, The Lost Road, ‘The Drowning of Anadûnê’, and The Notion Club Papers is based on an actual recurrent dream (cf. Letters pp. 213 & 347).24
More important than its source, of course, is the use to which Tolkien put this motif. Some are mere dreams of no particular significance, as when a very hungry hobbit subsisting only on cram dreams of eggs and bacon during the siege of the Lonely Mountain (DAA.332). The dream in which he wanders from room to room of his home, looking for something he’s forgotten (p. 210), is both believable as a dream and suggestive for what it reveals about his state of mind, but it has no direct bearing on the plot. Of the prophetic dreams, it is a curious fact that unlike Frodo’s dreams in The Lord of Rings, which deal with distant events, the dreams in The Hobbit tend to relate to things which are either happening at the same time as they are being dreamed or follow in very short order. On the whole, dreams play a less important part in The Hobbit than in many of Tolkien’s other works, but their very presence marks the recurrence of a favorite Tolkienian motif and thus helps link the story to other works that share this element, from The Book of Lost Tales and its Cottage of Lost Play, a place most men can only reach via ‘the Path of Dreams’ (BLT I.18), through The Lost Road (where the time-travel begins while the main character is dreaming) and The Notion Club Papers (which devotes most of Part I to a discussion of lucid dreaming) to The Lord of the Rings itself. More importantly, it places Bilbo firmly in the tradition of Tolkien’s dreamers, alongside Eriol (whose name means ‘One who dreams alone’ – BLT I.14) and Ælfwine, Alboin and Audoin Errol, Michael Ramer and Arry Lowdham, Faramir, and Frodo Baggins.
Finally, we might note that admirable indirectness with which Gandalf responds to the Great Goblin’s questions, ‘not quite knowing what to say . . . when obviously the exact truth wouldn’t do at all’. Lines such as these, even more than the moral ambiguity of the closing chapters, place Tolkien firmly in the modern tradition, beginning with Kenneth Grahame’s The Golden Age [1895], that aligns itself with its audience and its foibles rather than preaches pieties in the Victorian manner. Tolkien is not directly parodying the older tradition, as Twain did in his lecture ‘Advice to Youth’ [1882] (‘Always obey your parents, when they are present . . . Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any . . . You want to be very careful about lying; otherwise you are nearly sure to get caught . . .’), but his lack of condemnation of this white lie represents a stark contrast to, say, a MacDonald or Alcott or Knatchbull-Huggesson.