Chapter V
Gollum

The text continues as before, near the bottom of manuscript page 49 (Marq. 1/1/4:9) with no more than a paragraph break to separate it from the preceding ‘chapter’.

When he opened his eyes he wondered if he had, for it was just as dark as with them shut. No one was anywhere near him. Just imagine his fright. He could hear nothing, see nothing, nor could he feel anything except the stone of the wall and the floor. Very slowly he got up and groped about on all fours. And however far he went in either direction he couldn’t find anything:^TN1 nothing at all, no sign of goblins, and no sign of dwarves. Certainly he did find what felt like a ring of metal lying on the floor in the tunnel. He put it in his pocket; but that didn’t help much. So he sat down and gave himself up to complete miserableness for a long while. Of course he thought of himself frying bacon and eggs in his own kitchen at home (for his tummy told him it was very near to some meal-time), but that only made him miserabler. He couldn’t think what to do, nor could he think what had happened, and if he had been left behind, and why if he had been left behind the goblins hadn’t caught him.^TN2 The truth was he had been lying quiet in a very dark corner out of sight and mind for a good while.

After a while [> some time] he felt for his pipe. It wasn’t broken and that was something. Then he felt for his bacca^TN3 pouch, and there was some bacca in it, and that was something more. Then he felt for matches, and he couldn’t find any at all, and that [was a >] shattered his hopes completely. But in slapping all his pockets and feeling all round himself for matches his hand came on the hilt of [added: his] sword (a tiny dagger for the Trolls), and that he had forgotten, nor did the goblins seem to have noticed it. He drew it out and it shone pale and dim. ‘So it is an elvish sword [> blade], too’ he thought ‘and goblins are not very near, nor yet far enough.’ But somehow he was comforted. It was rather splendid to be wearing a blade made in Gondolin of which so many songs used to sing;^TN4 and also Bilbo had noticed that such weapons made a great impression upon Goblins.

‘Go back?’ he thought – ‘no good at all! Go sideways – impossible! can’t be done. Go forward – only thing to do’.

So up he got, and trotted along with his little sword in front of him, and one hand feeling the wall, and his heart all of a patter and a pitter.^TN5

Now certainly Bilbo was in what is called a tight place. But you must remember it was not quite so tight for him as for you or me. Hobbits are not quite like ordinary people; and after all if their holes are nice cheery places quite different to the tunnels of goblins, still they are more used to tunnelling than we are, and they don’t easily lose their sense of direction under ground. Also they can move very quietly, and hide easily, and recover wonderfully from bumps and bruises, and they have a fund of wisdom and wise sayings that men have mostly never heard of, or have forgotten long ago.

I shouldn’t have liked to have been in Mr Baggins’ place, all the same. The tunnel seemed to have no end. He knew it was going on down pretty steadily and keeping on in the same direction in spite of a twist [or a >] and a turn or two. There [seemed >] were passages leading off to the side every now and then, as he could see by the pale glimmer of his sword, and feel with his hand on the side-wall. Of these he took no notice, except to hurry past for fear of goblins or other things coming out of them. On and on he went down and down; and still he heard no sound of any one except the swish [> whirr] of bat near his ears occasionally (which startled him).^TN6

Suddenly he trotted splash into water! Ugh! it was icy cold. That pulled him up sharp and short. He didn’t know whether it was just a pool in the path, or the edge of an underground stream across [> that crossed] the passage, or the brink of a deep dark subterranean lake. He could hear water drip-drip-dripping from an unseen roof into the water below, but there seemed no other sort of sound; so he came to the conclusion that it was a pool or lake not a running river.^TN7 Still he did not dare to wade out into the darkness – he couldn’t swim, and he thought of ghastly slimy things with big bulging eyes [like <lanterns> to >]^TN8 wriggling in the water.

There are strange things living in the pools and lakes in the hearts of mountains: fish that swam in [> whose fathers swam in], goodness only knows how many years ago, and who never swam out again, while their eyes grew bigger and bigger and bigger from trying to see in the blackness; also other things more slimy than fish. And even in the tunnels and caves the goblins have made for themselves, there are other things living unbeknown, that have sneaked in from outside, and lie up in the dark. Also some of these caves go back ages before the coming of the goblins (who only widened them, and joined them up with passages), and the original owners were [> are] still there in odd corners.

Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum. I don’t know where he came from or who or what he was. He was Gollum, as dark as darkness except for two big round pale eyes. He had a boat, and he rowed about quiet quietly on the lake – for lake it was, wide and deep and deadly cold. He paddled it with large feet dangling over the side, but never a ripple did he make. Not he: he was looking out of his pale lamp-like eyes for blind fish, which he grabbed with his long fingers, as quick as thinking.

He liked meat too – goblins he thought good when he could get them; but He took care they never found [added: him] out: he just throttled them from behind if they came down alone anywhere near the edge of the water, while he was prowling about. They jolly seldom did, for they felt something not quite nice lived down there, down at the very roots of the mountain.^TN9

As a matter of fact Gollum lived on a slimy island in the middle of the lake. He was watching Bilbo now with his pale eyes like telescopes from the distance. Bilbo couldn’t see him, but he was wondering a lot about Bilbo, for he could see he was no goblin at all.

Gollum got onto his boat and shot off from the bank. There Bilbo was sitting altogether flummuxed^TN10 and at the end of his way and his wits. Suddenly up came Gollum and whispered and hissed:

‘Bless us and blister us [> splash us], my precious! I guess ’tis a choice feast, a tasty morsel at least you’d be for Gollum [> it’d make us, Gollum]’, and when he said ‘Gollum’ he swallowed unpleasantly in his throat – that’s how he got his name. The hobbit jumped nearly out of his skin when the hiss came in his ears and he saw the pale eyes sticking out at him.

‘Who are you?’ he said, holding his sword in front of him.

‘What is he?’ said [> whispered] Gollum (who always spoke to himself not to you).

That is what he had come to find out, for he was not really hungry at the moment, or he would have grabbed first and whispered afterwards.

‘I am Mr Bilbo Baggins. I have lost the dwarves and the wizard and I don’t know where I am, and don’t want to know, if I can only get away.’

‘What’s he got in his handses?’ said Gollum looking at the sword, which he didn’t quite like.

‘A sword, a blade that came out of Gondolin’ said Bilbo.

‘Praps ye sits here^TN11 and chats with it a bitsy’ said Gollum, ‘Does he like riddles, does he praps?’^TN12 He was anxious to appear friendly, at any rate for the moment, and until he found out more about the hobbit, whether he was quite alone, whether he was good to eat, & whether Gollum was really hungry or not. Asking (and sometimes answering [> guessing]) riddles had been a game he played with other funny creatures sitting in their holes in the long long ago before the goblins came, and he was cut off from his friends far under the mountains.^TN13

‘Very well’ said Bilbo, who thought it best to agree until he found out more about the fellow, and whether he was quite alone, whether he was fierce or hungry, and whether he was a friend of the goblins. ‘You ask first’ he said, because he hadn’t had time to think of a riddle.

‘What has roots [no >] as nobody sees, is taller than trees, and [do >]^TN14 yet never grows?’

‘Easy’ said Bilbo – ‘mountains, I suppose’.

‘Does it guess easy? – it must have a competition with us, my precious. If precious asks, and it doesn’t answer, we eats it my precious. If it ask us and we doesn’t answer, we gives it a present: Gollum.’

‘Alright’ said Bilbo, not daring to disagree, and nearly bursting his brain to think of riddles that could save him from being eaten.^TN15

‘Thirty white horses on a red hill first they stamp, then they champ, then they stand still’ he said [> asked] (the idea of eating was rather in his mind you see). This was rather a chestnut [> an old one], and Gollum knew the answer as well as you do.

‘Chestnuts, chestnuts’ he hissed: ‘toosies, tooies^TN16 my precious but we has only six.^TN17

Voiceless it cries,

Wingless flutters,

Toothless bites,

Mouthless mutters.

‘Half a moment’ said Bilbo who was still thinking uncomfortably about eating. Fortunately he had heard this kind of thing before, and so soon got it [> his wits back]. ‘Wind, wind’ he said.

An eye in a blue face

Saw an eye in a green face.

“That eye is like to this eye”

Said the first eye,

“But in low place

Not in high place.”

‘Ss, ss, ss’ said the Gollum^TN18 who had been underground a long long while and was forgetting that sort of thing. But just as Bilbo was [thinking >] wondering what Gollum’s present would be like [‘ss ss ss’ he said >] Gollum [remembered >] brought up memories of long before when he lived with his grandmother in a hole in a bank by a river. ‘Ss ss ss, my precious’ he said: ‘sun on the daisies it means, it does’.

But these ordinary above ground every day homely sort of riddles were tiring for him, and what is more reminded him of days when he was not so lonely and sneaky and nasty. Still he made another effort^TN19

It cannot be seen, cannot be felt,

Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt.

It lies behind stars and under hills,

And empty holes it fills.

It comes first and follows after,^TN20

Ends life, kills laughter.

You notice he was hissing less as he got excited – also this was an easy one.^TN21

‘Dark’ said Bilbo without scratching his head.

A box without hinges, key, or lid,

Yet golden treasure inside is hid,

he asked to gain time till he could think of a really hard one. All the same this proved a nasty poser for Gollum.^TN22 He sat and twiddled his fingers and toes [in the >] he hissed to himself and still he didn’t answer. After some while Bilbo said ‘Well, what is it?’

‘Give us a chance; let it give us a chance, my precious’.

‘Well’ said Bilbo after giving him a good chance. ‘What is your present?’

But suddenly the Gollum remembered sitting under the river bank long long ago teaching his grandmother, teaching his grandmother to suck —— ‘Eggs’ he [said >cried > ] croaked ‘eggs it is’.

Then he asked:

Alive without breath,

As cold as death;

Never thirsty, ever drinking,

All in mail never clinking.

He [added: also] felt this was a dreadfully easy one, because he was always thinking of the answer; but he couldn’t think of anything better at the moment [added: he was so flustered by the egg-question]. All the same it was a bit of a poser to [> for] Bilbo, who never had anything to do with water (I imagine of course you know the answer since you are sitting comfortably at home, and haven’t the danger of being eaten to disturb your thinking).

After a while Gollum began to hiss with pleasure to himself: ‘Is it nice, my precious; is it juicy; is it scrumptiously crunchable?’ he said, peering at Bilbo out of the dark.

‘Half a moment’ said Bilbo. ‘Give me a chance, I gave you a good long one’.

‘It must make haste, haste’ said Gollum, beginning to climb out of the boat to come at Bilbo. But when he put his long webby foot in the water, a fish jumped out in fright to get away from him and touched Bilbo’s toe. ‘Ugh’ he said ‘it’s cold and clamy’ – and so he guessed.

‘Fish, fish’ he said ‘it is fish!’

Gollum was dreadfully disappointed, but Bilbo asked another riddle as quick as ever he could so that Gollum had to get back [added: in the boat] and think.

‘No legs lay on one-leg; two-legs sat near on three legs; four-legs got some.’ he said. It wasn’t the right moment for this riddle at all, but he was a bit flurried. Very likely Gollum wouldn’t have guessed it, if Bilbo had asked it at another time. As it was, talking of fish, ‘no-legs’ wasn’t so very difficult, and after that the rest is easy.

Fish on little table; man at table on a stool. – gives bones to the cat – that is the answer of course, and Gollum soon gave it. Then he thought the time was come to ask something hard, and horrible.

This thing all things devours:

Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;

Gnaws iron, bites steel;

Grinds hard stones to meal;

Slays king, ruins town,

And beats high mountain down.

Poor Bilbo sat in the dark thinking of all the horrible names of all the giants and ogres he had ever heard told of in tales; but never a one had done all these things. He began to feel frightened. The answer wouldn’t come. Gollum began to get out of the boat. He flapped into the water and paddled to the bank; Bilbo could see his eyes coming towards him. His tongue seemed to stick to his mouth; he wanted to shout out ‘give me more time, give me more time’ but all that came out in a sudden squeal was

“Time! Time!”

And that of course was the answer. Bilbo was saved by pure luck.

Gollum was dreadfully disappointed again. And now he was getting tired of the game, and also the game had begun to make him hungry once more. So he didn’t go back to his boat. He sat down in the dark by Bilbo,^TN23 and that made the hobbit most horribly uncomfortable, and scattered his wits.

‘It’s got to ask us a question, my precious, yes yes just one more question to guess, yes, yes’ said Gollum; but Bilbo simply couldn’t think of one with that nasty wet cold thing sitting next to him poking him. He scratched his head, he pinched himself, still he couldn’t think of anything.

‘Ask us, ask us’ said Gollum.

He pinched himself, he slapped himself, he gripped on his little sword, he even felt in his pocket with his other hand. There he found the ring he had picked up in the passage.

‘What have I got in my pocket?’ he said aloud (but he only meant it for himself). Gollum thought it was a riddle, and he was dreadfully upset.

‘Not fair, not fair’ he hissed ‘it isn’t fair, my precious, is it, to ask us what it’s got in its nasty little pockets’.

Still Bilbo having nothing better to ask stuck to his question. ‘What have I got in my pocket’ he said louder.

‘S-s-s-s’ hissed Gollum. ‘it must give us three guesses, my precious, three guesses’.

‘Very well’ said Bilbo ‘guess away’.

‘Hands’ said Gollum.

‘Wrong’ said Bilbo ‘guess again’. He had taken his hand out and held the ring [> with the ring in it] (which was lucky). ^TN24

‘S-s-s’ said Gollum, more upset than ever. He thought of all the things [people keep in pockets >] he kept in his pockets (fish bones), ^TN25 goblins teeth, bits of stone to sharpen his teeth on and other nasty things) he tried to think and remember what other people kept in their pockets.

‘Knife’ he said.

‘Wrong again’ said Bilbo who had lost his some time ago (very luckily again). ‘Last guess!’

Now Gollum was in a much worse state that when Bilbo asked him the egg-question. He hissed and spluttered, and rocked backwards and forwards, and slapped his feet on the floor and wiggled and squirmed – but still he did not dare to waste his last guess.

‘Come on’ said Bilbo ‘I am waiting’. He tried to sound bold and cheerful, but he didn’t feel at all sure how the game was going to end, whether Gollum guessed or no [> right or not].

‘Time’s up’ he said.

‘String, or Nothing’ said [> shrieked] Gollum – which wasn’t quite fair, [trying >] working in two answers at once: still it was a very nasty thing to answer.

‘Both wrong!’ said Bilbo very much relieved – and jumped to his feet and held out his little sword with his back to the wall. But funnily enough, he need not have been frightened. For one thing the Gollum had learned long long ago was never to cheat at the riddle-game. Also there was the sword. He simply sat and blubbered [> whimpered].

‘What about the present?’ said Bilbo, not that he cared very much; still he felt he had won it, and in very difficult circumstances too.

‘Must we give it precious; yes we must – we must fetch it precious, and give it to the thing the present we promised.’ So he paddled back into his boat, and Bilbo thought he had heard the last of him. But he hadn’t. The hobbit was just thinking of going back up the passage (having had quite enough of the Gollum and that dark water-edge), when [Gollum came back >] he heard Gollum wailing and squeaking away in the dark [cancelled: on his island]. He was on his island (of which Bilbo, of course, knew nothing) scrabbling here and there, searching and seeking in vain, and turning out his pockets.

‘Where is it, where is it’ he heard him squeaking. ‘Lost, lost, my precious, lost lost; bless us and splash us, we haven’t the present we promised, and we haven’t [added: even] got it for ourselves’.

Bilbo turned round and waited, wondering what it could be that the creature was making such a fuss about. This turned out very fortunately; For Gollum came back, and made a tremendous chatter and whispering and croaking; and in the end Bilbo [found >] understood, that Gollum had a ring, a wonderful beautiful ring, a ring that he had been given for a birthday-present ages and ages before in old days when such rings were less uncommon. Sometimes he had kept it in his pocket; usually he kept it in a little hole in the rock on his island; sometimes he wore it – wore it when he was very very hungry and tired of fish, and crept along the dark passages looking for stray goblins. Then (being very hungry) he ventured even into places where the torches were lit and made his eyes blink and smart; but he was safe. O yes quite [> very nearly] safe; for if you slipped that ring on your fingers, you were invisible; only in the strongest sunlight could you be seen, and then only by your shadow, and that was [a faint >] only a faint shaky sort of shadow.

I don’t know how many times Gollum begged Bilbo’s pardon. And he offered him fish caught fresh to eat instead (Bilbo shuddered at the thought of it); [but somehow or other he had to >] ^TN26 but he said ‘no thank you’ quite politely.

He was thinking, thinking hard – and the idea came to him that^TN27 he must have found that ring, that he had that very ring in his pocket. But he had the wits not to tell Gollum. ‘Finding’s keeping’ he said to himself; and being in a very tight place I think he was right, and anyway the ring belonged to him now.

But to Gollum he said: ‘Never mind, the ring would have been mine now if you could have found it, so you haven’t lost it. And I will forgive you on one condition’.

‘Yes what is it, what does it wish us to do, my precious.’

‘Help me to get out of these places’, said Bilbo.

To this Gollum agreed, as he had to if he wasn’t to cheat, though he would very much have liked to have just tasted what Bilbo was like. Still he had lost the game [> promised]; and also there was the sword, and also Bilbo was wide awake & on the look out, not unsuspecting as the Gollum liked to have things which he caught.

That is how Bilbo got to know that the tunnel ended at the water, and went on no further on the other side, where the mountain wall was dark and solid. He ought to have turned down one of the side passages before he came to the bottom, but he couldn’t follow the directions he was given to find it. So he made Gollum come and show him.

As they went along up the tunnel together, Gollum flip-flapping along, Bilbo going very quietly, Bilbo thought he would try that ring. He slipped it on.

‘Where are you [> is it], where is it gone to?’ said Gollum at once, peering round with his long eyes.

‘Here I am following behind’ said Bilbo slipping off the ring, and feeling very pleased to have it in his pocket.^TN28 So on they went, while Gollum counted the passages to left and right: ‘one left, one right, two right, three right, two left’ and so on. He began to get very shaky and afraid as he got further from the water, and at last he stopped by a low opening on the left (‘six right, four left’).

‘Here’s the passage [added: he whispered]; it must squeeze in, and sneak down, – we durstn’t go with it, my precious, no we durstn’t: Gollum!’

So Bilbo slipped under the arch, and said goodbye to the nasty miserable creature, and very glad he was. He wasn’t comfortable till he felt quite sure it was gone; and he kept his head out in the main tunnel listening until the flip flap of Gollum going back to his boat died away in the darkness.

Then he went down the new passage. It was a low narrow one, roughly made. It was all right for the hobbit, except when he stubbed his toes in the dark on nasty jags in the floor, but it must have been a bit low for Goblins. Perhaps it was not knowing that goblins are used to this sort of thing and go along quite fast stooping low with their hands almost on the floor, that made Bilbo forget the danger of meeting them, and go along a bit recklessly.

When he saw a glimmer of light in front of him, not red light of torch or fire or lantern, but pale ordinary out of doors sort of light that seemed to be filtering in round the comer of the passage, he began to really hurry. Scuttling along as fast as his little legs would take him, he came round a corner right into a wider place where the light seemed suddenly clear and bright after all that time in the black tunnel. Really the light was only <a ray> in through a door, a stone door, left a little way open. Bilbo blinked, and then he suddenly saw the goblins. Goblins in full armour with swords sitting just inside the door watching it and the passage that led to it. They saw him at once, and yelled with delight as they rushed at him.

Whether it was accident or presence of mind I don’t know. Accident, I think, because Bilbo was not yet used to his new treasure. Anyway he slipped the ring on his left hand – and the goblins stopped. But they yelled all the louder, only not quite so delighted.

They couldn’t see him any more. ‘Where is he’ they called. ‘Go back in the passage’ some shouted ‘This way; that way’ some said. ‘Mind the door’ said others. Whistles blew, armour clashed, swords rattled, goblins cursed and swore and ran hither and thither, getting in one another’s way, and getting very angry. There was a terrible outcry, to do and disturbance.

Bilbo was very frightened, but he had the sense to understand what had happened, and to sneak behind a big barrel which held drink for the goblin-guards, and to get out of the way, and avoid being bumped into, trampled to death, or being caught by feel.

‘I must get to the door! I must get to the Door’ he kept on saying to himself, but it was a long time before he ventured to try. Then it was like a horrible game of blind-man’s buff.^TN29 The place was full of goblins running about, and poor little Bilbo dodged this way, dodged that way; was knocked over by a goblin that could’nt make out what he had bumped into; scrambled away on all fours; slipped between the legs of a big goblin just in time; got up and ran for the door.

It was still ajar – but a goblin had pushed it nearly to. Bilbo struggled but he couldn’t move it. He tried to squeeze through the crack; he squeezed and squeezed – and he stuck!

Wasn’t that horrible! His buttons had got wedged on the edge of the door & the door post. He could see outside into the open air, there were steep steps running down into what seemed a valley; [there was the river shining bright>] the sun came out from behind a cloud & shone bright on the outside of the door – but he could’nt get through.

Suddenly one of the goblins inside shouted: ‘There’s a shadow by the door. Somebody’s outside!’ Bilbo’s heart jumped into his mouth; he gave terrific squirm, buttons burst off in all directions, and he was through with a torn coat and waistcoat, and leaping down the steps like a goat, while bewildered goblins were still picking up his nice brass buttons on the doorstep.

Of course they soon came down the steps, hooting and hollering, and hunting among the trees of the valley. But they don’t like sun – it makes them quickly faint and feeble – and anyway they couldn’t find Bilbo with the ring on, while he slipped in and out in the shadow of the trees, and took care not to throw any shadows. Soon they went back grumbling and cursing to guard the door, and Bilbo had escaped.

TEXT NOTES

1 This was altered to ‘But however far he went [either back >] in either direction he couldn’t find anything’.

2 Added in margin and marked for insertion at this point: ‘nor even why his head was so sore’.

3 Both here and at the next occurrence, ‘bacca’ has been changed to ‘baccy’.

4 Note that Bilbo is conversant with elven history to some extent even before his adventures began, as witnessed by his familiarity with the ‘many songs’ about Gondolin.

5 There is a slight change of ink at this point.

6 This line was changed to ‘. . . no sound of any one except occasionally the whirr of a bat near his ears, which startled him at first.’ Also, a sentence was added in the top margin in very small letters and marked for insertion at this point: ‘I don’t know how long he kept on like this hating to go on, not daring to stop, on, on till he was tired as tired – it certainly seemed like all the way tomorrow and over it to the day beyond.’

7 This passage was revised to read ‘so he thought that it must be a pool or a lake & not a moving river.’

8 The unfinished sentence presumably would have read something along the lines of ‘like lanterns to see in the dark’.

9 Crowded into the top margin and marked for insertion at this point: ‘They [made the >] came on the road [> lake] when they were tunnelling down long ago and they found they could go no further, so there their road ended in that direction, and there was no reason to go there unless the King sent them. Sometimes he took a fancy for fish from the lake. And sometimes neither goblin nor fish came back.’

10 The word ‘flummuxed’ (or flummoxed) is old slang for confused or perplexed or bewildered. Probably of dialectical origin (Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Cheshire, Sheffield), it seems to have come into vogue in early Victorian times (the OED’s earliest citation is from Dickens’ Pickwick Papers [1837]) and largely faded from use after mid-century (only one OED citation postdates 1857, and that is from 1892, the year of Tolkien’s birth).

11 Added at this point: ‘my precious,’. For more on ‘ye’ (dialectical for you), see p. 187 (Note 10).

12 This sentence was revised to read ‘It likes riddles, does it praps?’ – with the dehumanizing shift from ‘he’ to ‘it’. ‘Praps’ is of course a clipped form of perhaps; like bitsy it injects almost a touch of babytalk into the sinister conversation.

13 Added in pencil at the end of the paragraph: ‘It was the only game <the old wretch> could remember.’

14 Added at this point: ‘up rises > up up it goes’.

15 Tolkien originally followed this sentence with the single cancelled word, ‘What’. Only two of the riddles begin with this word: the one Bilbo has just answered, and the final, unanswerable question that ends the contest – raising the possibility that Bilbo’s first response was also to be his last and bring the exchange to a sudden, premature close. If such was the case, we can be grateful that Tolkien changed his mind and interpolated the full contest into this scene. It would also show that he had the scene’s conclusion firmly in mind from the very beginning. An alternate explanation might be that he accidently began to repeat the first riddle but caught his mistake in time.

No separate drafts for the riddles have been found. All are written right into the text, but despite hesitations and minor variants these are so close to the final versions that it would be remarkable if they were all spontaneous compositions. It seems likely, then, that Tolkien may have been writing down riddles he had composed, perhaps orally, at some earlier point. At any rate, whether he was transcribing them from rough drafting (now lost) or recreating them from memory, the order in which he used them was not yet set (see p. 174).

16 Here ‘toosies, tooies’ were cancelled in ink, and ‘teeth, teeth’ written above them.

17 The next, cancelled words – ‘Alive without breath’ – indicate that originally the fish-riddle was to follow next.

18 This is the first of five references to Bilbo’s opponent as ‘the Gollum’ rather than just Gollum; in three cases (pages 156, 157, & 160), Tolkien cancelled the article but in two others (pp. 160 & 161) he let it stand.

19 This last sentence was cancelled and replaced by the following, which was added in the top margin and marked for insertion at this point: ‘On the other hand they made him hungry: So he tried something a bit more difficult, and more nasty.’

20 This line was originally preceded by a cancelled partial line: ‘follows & comes a > Goes before &’.

21 This sentence was cancelled and the following crowded in at the end of the line: ‘Unfortunately for him Bilbo had heard one rather like that before.’ At the same time, the following line was altered to read ‘“Dark” said he without even scratching his head, or putting on his thinking cap.’

22 The opening of this sentence was replaced by the following mostly marginal addition: ‘He thought it a dreadfully easy chestnut; but it proved a nasty poser for Gollum.’

23 Added in the top margin and marked for insertion at this point: ‘and pinched [> prodded] him to feel if he was fat and munchable’.

24 This sentence was recast while being written, then changed again to read ‘He had just taken his hand out of his pocket again (which was lucky).’

25 Here ‘fish bones’ is a revision, but I cannot make out the original short word that bones replaced, other than that it was short (perhaps three or four letters) and began with p-; pin(s) is my best guess.

Note that Gollum is not naked, as he is sometimes portrayed by inattentive illustrators, nor reduced to merely a loincloth, but has at least some clothing (however ragged), with pockets.

26 Written in small, neat letters in the bottom margin and marked for insertion at this point to replace everything in this paragraph after ‘Bilbo’s pardon’:

He kept on saying ‘we are sorry, we didn’t mean to cheat, we meant to give <our> only only present if it won the [game >] competition’ He even offered to catch him some nice juicy fish to eat as a consolation. Bilbo shuddered at the thought of it.

27 Crowded in above the line and marked for insertion at this point: ‘Gollum must have dropped that ring some time; that he’.

28 Added and marked for insertion at this point: ‘and to find it really did what G. said it would’.

29 This game was originally called ‘blind man’s buff’ but is more often now known as ‘blind man’s bluff’.

This chapter, the most famous in the entire book,¹ is paradoxically little-known in its original form. Only some 17,000 copies of the first edition were ever offered for sale,² and since 1951 those who wished to know how Tolkien originally conceived the crucial Gollum episode have had to consult sources such as Anderson’s textual notes in The Annotated Hobbit or the parallel text presentation of excerpts from the two versions in Bonniejean Christensen’s article ‘Gollum’s Character Transformation in The Hobbit’.³ So far as I know, the first edition text of the chapter has been reprinted in its entirety only once in the last fifty-five years, in the anthology Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural, ed. Marvin Kaye & Saralee Kaye [1985].

The following commentary, therefore, while taking into account some features common to all versions of the chapter, from first draft through the third edition – such as the riddles – focuses primarily on the remarkable differences between the story as Tolkien first wrote it and the revised version he eventually, after much hesitation,⁴ adopted as canonical.

(i)
The Gollum

One of Tolkien’s greatest characters makes his auspicious debut in this chapter, and no point more firmly separates the draft and first edition on the one hand from the second and all subsequent editions on the other than their respective characterizations of Gollum. The most surprising difference, usually overlooked by the commentators, is that Gollum is clearly not a hobbit in the original – ‘I don’t know where he came from or who or what he was’ says the narrator, and there’s no reason not to think he speaks for the author here and take him at his word. It’s not clear from the manuscript text whether Gollum is one of the ‘original owners’ who predate the goblins, ‘still there in odd corners’ or one of the ‘other things’ that ‘sneaked in from outside’.⁵ But in either case, all the details of his description argue against his being of hobbit-kin. Unlike Bilbo, the hobbit, Gollum is ‘dark as darkness’, with long fingers (p. 155), large webbed feet (p. 158) that flap when he walks (unlike the silent hobbit; cf. p. 161), and ‘long eyes’ (p. 161), huge and pale, that not only protrude ‘like telescopes’ but actually project light.⁶ Small wonder that early illustrators like Horus Engels⁷ depict a huge, monstrous creature rather than the small, emaciated figure Tolkien eventually envisioned.⁸ Not until he came to write the sequel, The Lord of the Rings, and forced himself to confront all the unanswered questions in The Hobbit that might be exploited for further adventures, did Tolkien have the inspiration to make Gollum a hobbit. He subsequently very skillfully inserted the new idea into the earlier book through the addition of small details in the initial description of the creature. Thus the readings in the third edition [1966], with the interpolations highlighted in italics:

‘Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature . . . as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face.’

Just as Tolkien changed his mind – or, rather, delved more deeply into the subject in the course of writing the sequel before finally committing himself – as to Gollum’s origin, so too he changed the character’s personality in the post-publication revisions. For Gollum is far more honorable in the draft and first edition than he later appears. He is perfectly willing, even eager, to eat Bilbo, should the hobbit lose the riddle-game, but abides by the results (cf. p. 160: ‘[Bilbo] need not have been frightened. For one thing the Gollum had learned long long ago was never to cheat at the riddle-game’). Without discounting his cowardice, or prudence, in the matter of the sword, we should nonetheless give him his due: having lost the contest, he is pathetically eager to make good on his debt of honour (‘I don’t know how many times Gollum begged Bilbo’s pardon’), offering a substitute reward (‘fish caught fresh to eat’) in place of the missing ring. Remember too that Gollum had not yet specified what the ‘present’ was; a less scrupulous monster might have been tempted, upon discovering the ring’s absence, to substitute some other prize, such as the fish, for the unnamed reward – but not Gollum. We are thus faced with the amusing depiction of a monster who is considerably more honorable than our hero. For Bilbo soon realizes that he already has Gollum’s treasure but goes ahead and demands a second prize (being shown the way out) in addition to the one he has quietly pocketed – a neat parallel to Gollum’s earlier trick of ‘working in two answers at once’ on that final attempt to answer the last question. The narrator, moreover, applauds his duplicity (‘“Finding’s keeping” he said to himself; and being in a very tight place I think he was right, and anyway the ring belonged to him now.’) with spurious logic that sounds so much like special pleading that Tolkien eventually decided it was just that: Bilbo’s own attempt, in writing this scene for his memoirs, to justify his claim to the ring (see the Fourth Phase of this book, beginning on p. 729, for Tolkien’s eventual solution to this problem).

We should also note that Gollum’s distinctive speech pattern – his hissing, overuse of sibilants, and peculiarity of referring to himself in the plural – was present from the very first, although greatly emphasised by revisions prior to publication.⁹ As we might expect, though, it is somewhat more erratic in the draft, particularly in the matter of pronouns – thus he at first refers to Bilbo several times as ‘he’ before sliding into the depersonalized ‘it’, and once as ‘you’. Similarly, he refers to himself as ‘ye’ at one point rather than his usual ‘we/us’. Interestingly enough, it is quite clear that ‘my precious’ originally applied only to Gollum himself and not the ring: Gollum ‘always spoke to himself not to you’, usually in first person plural, yet he refers to the ring as ‘it’ (‘bless us and splash us, we haven’t the present we promised, and we haven’t got it for ourselves’). Some of these aberrant elements remained in the published text,¹⁰ even through Tolkien’s careful revisions of 1947 and his recording of the Gollum-episode in 1952.¹¹

One final point that we should perhaps consider before moving on is whether or not Gollum in some form predated The Hobbit. Carpenter notes that one of the poems Tolkien wrote as part of the series ‘Tales and Songs of Bimble Bay’, titled ‘Glip’, described ‘a strange slimy creature who lives beneath the floor of a cave and has pale luminous eyes’ (Carpenter, page 106). Carpenter mistakenly dates this poem to the Leeds period (1920–1925/6), while Anderson, who prints the entire poem for the first time (DAA.119), assigns it to ‘around 1928’.¹² Glip seems to be yet another example of something escaping out of family folklore into one of Tolkien’s books, like the Gaffer (cf. Mr. Bliss), the Dutch doll who became Tom Bombadil, the toy dog whose loss inspired Roverandom, or the teddy bears who helped inspire such figures as the three bears of Mr. Bliss, the North Polar Bear of the Father Christmas series, and of course Medwed/Beorn. The reverse is, of course, also equally possible: that Tolkien adapted a purely literary creation into the children’s bedtime stories. In either case, the character did become a private bogeyman for the Tolkien children: Michael Tolkien recalled in a 1975 radio interview how John Tolkien, the oldest brother, terrified his younger siblings by ‘playing Gollum’, creeping into their room at night, with twin torches (flashlights) for the monster’s shining eyes.¹³

(ii)
Riddles

And what about the Riddles? There is work to be done here on the sources and analogues. I should not be at all surprised to learn that both the hobbit and Gollum will find their claim to have invented any of them disallowed.

—JRRT to The Observer, 20th February 1938; see Appendix II.

Despite Tolkien’s challenge nearly sixty years ago, relatively little has been done to date tracing the ‘sources and analogues’ of Bilbo’s and Gollum’s riddles, although many critics have offered suggestions of sources for specific riddles (the most thorough such treatment being Anderson’s in The Annotated Hobbit) or drawn parallels between this riddle-contest and other wisdom-exchanges and question-challenges in medieval literature (including Vafthrúthnismál¹⁴ and Alvíssmál from the Elder Edda, ‘The Deluding of Gylfi’ from Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, Joukahainen’s challenge to Vainamoinen in Runo III of the Kalevala, the Old English ‘Second Dialogue of Solomon and Saturn’,¹⁵ and most importantly the riddle-contest in The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise).¹⁶ Most of these contests involve one character questioning the other about obscure or mythological events, such as the origin of the earth, sun, and moon or the nature of the gods, or asking for prophecies of events still to come like the end of the world. Several have similarly high stakes as in Bilbo and Gollum’s contest: the dwarf Alvis in Alvíssmál is kept answering questions until day breaks and the sunlight kills him (an obvious source for Bladorthin’s earlier trick with the trolls; cf. p. 103), while the wise old giant Vafþrúðnir warns his challenger (the disguised god Odin, operating under the nom de guerre of Gagnrad) that he never leaves alive those who cannot answer his questions, only to forfeit his own life in the end when Odin asks him an unanswerable question: ‘What words did Odin whisper to his son/when Balder was placed on the pyre?’ Only Odin himself knows the answer, just as only Bilbo knows what lies hidden in his pocket. The riddle-contest in The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, Tolkien’s direct model, ends with exactly the same question – Odin, disguised as Gestumblindi (‘The Blind Stranger’), puts riddles to King Heidrek, who answers each with ease until the final question (not a riddle) is sprung on him. Again the stakes are high: Heidrek has promised to pardon any criminal who ‘should propound riddles which the king could not solve’, and when he realizes he has been tricked he goes into a rage and attacks Odin, who eludes him but curses the king to a shameful death at the hands of slaves, a curse quickly fulfilled (cf. the death of Tinwelint in ‘The Nauglafring’ and of Thingol in The Silmarillion). In his own story, Tolkien has combined features of both Vafthrúthnismál and the scene in The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise; like the former, both participants get a chance to ask and then answer; like the latter (where one character does all the asking and the other all the answering), the questions are in riddle-form. Indeed, one of Gollum’s riddles derives directly from one answered by Heidrek (see below).

It should be stressed however that, whatever Tolkien’s sources and inspiration, this striking scene and the riddles it is built around are almost entirely of Tolkien’s own creation. Both frame (the back and forth interaction of the two contestants) and content (the riddles themselves) differ greatly from their precursors. This point was made strongly by Tolkien himself when, a decade after publication, Allen & Unwin suggested that Houghton Mifflin need not secure Tolkien’s permission before reprinting several of the riddles in an anthology of poetry,¹⁷ as ‘the riddles were taken from common folk lore and were not invented by you’. Tolkien responded

As for the Riddles: they are ‘all my own work’ except for ‘Thirty White Horses’ which is traditional, and ‘No-legs’. The remainder, though their style and method is that of old literary (but not ‘folk-lore’) riddles, have no models as far as I am aware, save only the egg-riddle which is a reduction to a couplet (my own) of a longer literary riddle which appears in some ‘Nursery Rhyme’ books, notably American ones. So I feel that to try and use them without fee would be about as just as walking off with somebody’s chair because it was a Chippendale copy, or drinking his wine because it was labelled ‘port-type’. I feel also constrained to remark that ‘Sun on the Daisies’ is not in verse (any more than ‘No-legs’) being but the etymology of the word ‘Daisy’, expressed in riddle-form.

—JRRT to Allen & Unwin, 20th September 1947; Letters p. 123.

Tolkien’s delvings into riddle-lore parallel not just the great philologist Jacob Grimm’s work on fairy-tales but that of James O. Halliwell, the great Shakespearean scholar, who became deeply interested in nursery rhymes for the nuggets of ancient belief embedded in them, producing what was essentially the first critical edition of The Nursery Rhymes of England in 1842.¹⁸ What of Tolkien’s sources can be identified with some plausibility testify to his eclecticism, deriving as they do from Old English and Old Norse scholarship as well as Mother Goose. Of the ten ‘riddles’ in the exchange (counting the final, unanswered one, despite Gollum’s quite reasonable objection that it’s ‘not a riddle, precious, no’ – DAA.129),¹⁹ only three can be shown to derive from nursery rhyme sources. The second riddle, ‘thirty white horses’, is a familiar nursery rhyme riddle still in common usage, and the eighth (‘no-legs’) is Tolkien’s own variant of a once-familiar class of riddles that some have traced all the way back to The Riddle of the Sphinx;²⁰ the more common version reads

Two legs sat upon three legs

With one leg in his lap;

In comes four legs

And runs away with one leg;

Up jumps two legs,

Catches up three legs,

Throws it after four legs,

And makes him bring one leg back.

—Wm. S. & Cecil Baring-Gould, The Annotated

Mother Goose [1962]; #709, page 276.²¹

As for the egg-riddle, we would be able to identify this with some certainty even without the letter already cited, for Tolkien had, years earlier, translated the aforementioned ‘longer literary riddle’ into Old English verse:

Meolchwitum sind marmanstane

wagas mine wundrum frœtwede;

is hrœgl ahongen hnesce on-innan,

seolce gelicost; siththan on-middan

is wylla geworht, waeter glaes-hluttor;

Thær glisnath gold-hladen on gytestreamum

æppla scienost. Infær n(æ)nig

nah min burg-fæsten; berstath hw(æ)thre

thriste theofas on thryth(æ)rn min,

ond thæt sinc reafiath – saga hwæt ic hatte!²²

The traditional form of this nursery-rhyme riddle appears in both Baring-Gould (p. 270) and the Opies (The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes by Peter & Iona Opie, p. 152):

In marble walls as white as milk,

Lined with a skin as soft as silk,

Within a fountain crystal-clear,

A golden apple doth appear.

No doors are there to this stronghold,

Yet thieves break in and steal the gold.

I have found no specific parallel or antecedent for the first riddle (‘mountain’), nor the third (‘wind’), though Anderson notes that ‘flying without wings’ and ‘speaking without a mouth’ are common elements in wind-riddles (DAA.122). Nevertheless it is interesting to note that the very first riddle in that famous Anglo-Saxon collection of verse riddles known as the Exeter Book is a wind-riddle,²³ though it bears little resemblance to Tolkien’s; careful examination of Old English sources, and the contemporary critical literature of the first third of the twentieth century debating their correct interpretation, would probably shed a good deal of light on Tolkien’s exact sources and his treatment of them.

The fourth riddle (‘daisy’) is a straightforward example of the philologist at play, drawing on his knowledge of the history of our language (we should not forget that Tolkien’s first professional job was researching word-origins for the OED). Just as he would later quote directly from the OED to define ‘blunderbuss’ in Farmer Giles of Ham, here he turns etymology into poetry, creating a riddle whose answer is self-evident to anyone who knows his or her own language well enough to see through the changes wrought by the years, that have slowly compressed daeges eage (‘day’s eye’) through day’s e’e to daisy.²⁴

Several of the riddles seem to owe more to Scandinavian rather than Old English sources. Thus Taum Santoski pointed out that the fifth riddle (‘dark’) may owe something to a less sinister riddle found in Jón Árnason’s Ízlenzkar Gátur (‘Icelandic Riddles’), a nineteenth-century collection of contemporary riddles published in Copenhagen in 1887:

It will soon cover the roof of a high house.

It flies higher than the mountains

and causes the fall of many a man.

Everyone can see it, but no one can fetter it.

It can stand both blows and the wind, and it is not harmful.

—Árnason, riddle #352: Darkness.

Similarly, the ninth riddle (‘time’) has many parallels. Shippey (The Road to Middle-earth, page 112; revised edition, page 133) traces it back to ‘The Second Dialogue of Solomon and Saturn’:

Saturn said:

‘But what is that strange thing that travels through this world, goes on inexorably, beats at foundations, causes tears of sorrow, and often comes here? Neither star nor stone nor eye-catching jewel, neither water nor wild beast can deceive it at all, but into its hand go hard and soft, small and great. Every year there must go to feed it three times thirteen thousand of all that live on ground or fly in the air or swim in the sea.’

Solomon said:

‘Old age has power over everything on earth. She reaches far and wide with her ravaging slave-chain, her fetters are broad, her rope is long, she subdues everything that she wants to. She smashes trees and breaks their branches, in her progress she uproots the standing trunk and fells it to the ground. After that she eats the wild bird. She fights better than a wolf, she waits longer than a stone, she proves stronger than steel, she bites iron with rust; she does the same to us.’

—Poems of Wisdom and Learning [1976], pages 91 & 93.

Taum Santoski, on the other hand, suggested the following Icelandic riddle as a source:

I am without beginning, yet I am born

I am also without ending, and yet I die

I have neither eyes nor ears, yet I see and hear

I am never seen, and yet my works are visible

I am long conquered, I am never conquered,

and yet I am vanquished

I labor ever, but am never tired

I am wise but dwell among the foolish

I am a lover of Providence, and yet it

may appear to me that it hates me

Often I die before I am born, and yet I am immortal

Without being aware of it, I often take by surprise

I live with Christians, I dwell among the heathen

among the cursed in Hell I am cursed, and I reign in the

Kingdom of Glory.

—Árnason, riddle #105: Time.

Tolkien would also have been familiar with the odd scene in the Prose Edda where Thor wrestles with, and is bested by, an old woman named Elli who turns out to be Old Age itself – in the words of Thor’s wily host, ‘there never has been, nor ever will be anyone (if he grows old enough to become aged) who is not tripped up by old age’ (Prose Edda, ‘The Deluding of Gylfi’, pages 76 & 78). Finally, the strange little story that ends ‘The Hiding of Valinor’ in The Book of Lost Tales tells how the three children of Aluin (or Time), Danuin, Ranuin, and Fanuin (Day, Month, and Year), wind invisible chains that bind the sun and moon:

‘. . . and so shall all the world and the dwellers within it, both Gods and Elves and Men, and all the creatures that go and the things that have roots thereon, be bound about in the bonds of Time.’

Then were all the Gods [i.e., the Valar] afraid, seeing what was come, and knowing that hereafter even they should in counted time be subject to slow eld and their bright days to waning, until Ilúvatar at the Great End calls them back.

—BLT I.219.

Beside this ferocious abstract riddle, the fish-riddle’s source is simple: here Tolkien is quoting directly from The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, where at one point Gestumblindi (the disguised Odin) asks King Heidrek

What lives on high fells?

What falls in deep dales?

What lives without breath?

What is never silent?

This riddle ponder,

O prince Heidrek!

‘Your riddle is good, Gestumblindi,’ said the king; ‘I have guessed it. The raven lives ever on the high fells, the dew falls ever in the deep dales, the fish lives without breath, and the rushing waterfall is never silent.’

—The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise,

tr. Christopher Tolkien, page 80; italics mine.

Straightforward as this would seem, it also reveals something interesting about Tolkien’s sources. As T. A. Shippey has noted, Tolkien seems drawn to the grey areas of scholarship – that is, his creative inspiration was sparked by debatable points. Thus the cup-stealing episode in Beowulf, which inspired the chapter ‘Inside Information’ (see p. 533), is based on a scholarly reconstruction of a badly-damaged section of the manuscript. Similarly, the name Éomer in The Lord of the Rings is borrowed, not from Beowulf, but from a scholar’s emendation of the word which actually occurs in the Beowulf manuscript.²⁵ While The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise and its riddle-contest are well-known among Norse scholars, this particular riddle is found in only one of the three main versions of the saga, that found in the Hauksbok of Haukr Erlendsson (d. 1334). Furthermore, the page containing this riddle is lost from the original manuscript and only survives in two seventeenth-century copies made before the damage occurred – in short, making this exactly the kind of elusive, nearly-lost bit of ancient lore that Tolkien seems to have found most appealing.²⁶

Finally, there is Bilbo’s last, unanswerable question. It is true that it is not a riddle, but then Gollum’s words – ‘It’s got to ask us a question, my precious, yes yes just one more question to guess, yes, yes’ (italics mine) – open the door for a non-riddle: he asks for a question, and that is exactly what he got. This very neatly evades a problem: if, as Tolkien later said, ‘the riddle game was sacred and of immense antiquity, and even wicked creatures were afraid to cheat when they played at it’, then it is important that Bilbo himself not lie open to the accusation of cheating, that he win ‘pretty fairly’. Comparison with Tolkien’s sources is once again illuminating. In Vafthrúthnismál, the two contestants exchange questions to prove their knowledge; Bilbo’s final question would be perfectly fair by the standards of that contest. By contrast, in The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise Odin (Gestumblindi) asks riddles and the king answers them all – until Odin asks a non-riddle that is unanswerable, ‘winning’ by an underhanded method that drives his opponent into a rage. As Christopher Tolkien notes, ‘it is inapposite as the last question of a riddle-match, since it is not a riddle’ and suggests that ‘it was brought in . . . as the dramatic conclusion because it had become the traditional unanswerable question’ (The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise p. 735). To be blunt, Odin wins by a cheat, just as Gollum accuses Bilbo of having done in the revised version of this chapter (see p. xx). But Tolkien has forestalled that objection by Gollum’s careless wording just before the final puzzle, providing his hero with a valid out from the sticky situation.

One final curious feature about the riddles should be pointed out before moving on: as the narrator himself points out in a passage that did not survive into the published book, ‘You notice he [Gollum] was hissing less as he got excited’ (p. 157). In fact, he does not hiss at all when reciting his riddles; they are anomalous to his normal habits of speech. This fact, and the fact that all the riddles are written directly into the manuscript, in their final order, with little hesitation and with no preliminary drafting on scrap pages or the backs of pages (as is the case with the majority of the other poems in the book) – or at least none that survives – suggests that all these riddles predate the book. If this is the case, they may date from the Leeds period, like the two Anglo-Saxon riddles published in 1923, but the evidence is too slight to prove this one way or the other.

(iii)
The Ring

The most important point of connection between The Hobbit and its sequel, The Lord of the Rings, is the Ring itself. Just as hobbits, Gollum, the wizard, and the whole setting of Middle-earth grew and were transformed for the more ambitious requirements of the latter book, so too did the ring. For Bilbo’s ring is not the same as Frodo’s in its nature nor its powers, although the alteration was so smoothly done, with such subtlety and skill, that few readers grasp the extent of the change; many who read or re-read The Hobbit after The Lord of the Rings unconsciously import more sinister associations for the ring into the earlier book than the story itself supports. It is important to remember that Tolkien did not just expand the ring’s effects for the sequel; he actually altered them. Bilbo’s and Gollum’s ring is a simple ring of invisibility with rather limited power – it cannot make its wearer’s shadow disappear, for instance, and Bilbo has to be careful to avoid being given away by this flaw in the ring’s power. By the time of The Lord of the Rings, this limitation has completely disappeared; the descriptions of its use there by Frodo give no hint that his shadow remains behind. Rather than simply making the wearer disappear, putting on the Ring plunges Frodo into an invisible, ethereal world, most notably in the scene on Weathertop, where it enables him to see the hitherto invisible features of the Ringwraiths. Bilbo experiences nothing of the kind; his remains a simple ring of invisibility, a ‘very fine thing’ (DAA.228) for a burglar to have, useful but limited in scope.

There is also in the original book no connection between Gollum’s ring and The Necromancer who lurks on the fringes of the story – and indeed in ‘The Lay of Leithian’ this character had no special affinity with magical rings; only later, when Tolkien pondered possible connections between the various loose ends of Mr. Baggins’ first adventure, did he forge a relationship between the elusive Necromancer and Gollum’s ring. What’s more, in the later tale he created a malign aura for the ring totally absent from the original book. The brooding presence Tolkien gives the One Ring throughout The Lord of the Rings – a masterstroke, insofar as its character can only be judged indirectly by the effect it has on the thoughts of its possessor – is absent here. Significantly, the curious episode of the ring’s betrayal of its new master near the end of this chapter was not part of the original story and only came in with the revised version of 1947; in the original, the goblins saw Bilbo not because the ring had vanished from his finger without his knowledge but because he had taken it off immediately after playing his trick on Gollum to test its powers (contrast p. 161 with page 735). No shadow of murder hangs over it; the whole scene with Déagol had yet to be thought of. It is simply a magical ring that makes you (mostly) invisible: Gollum’s birthday-present, given to him ‘ages and ages before in old days when such rings were less uncommon.’

Tolkien’s source for the ring has been much debated.²⁷ His exact source will probably never be known for the simple reason that he probably didn’t have one in the sense of a single direct model. Magical rings are, after all, common in both literature and folk-lore, among the most famous being Aladdin’s genie ring (with the same power as his magical lamp, and almost as powerful), Odin’s Draupnir (which ‘drops’ eight identical gold rings every ninth night – cf. The Prose Edda p. 83), and the cursed Ring of the Nibelungs (which, like the Seven Rings of the dwarves, breeds wealth – cf. The Prose Edda pp. 111ff), none of which have the power to make their wearers invisible. Similarly, magical items that make one invisible are so common that Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature has three full pages (rev. ed. [1955–8], Vol. II, pages 195–8) listing various forms such an item might take: a feather or herb, a belt or cap or hat, a sword or jewel or helmet, pills or a salve, a wand or staff or ring, a mirror or boots or stone or ashes, or any of a number of stranger means (such as being pregnant with a saint, or holding a Hand of Glory). The combination of these two motifs, however, are surprisingly rare: of the vast number of items that confer invisibility, and the huge number of magical rings, there are surprisingly few rings of invisibility before Tolkien popularized the idea.²⁸

Of these rings the earliest, and widely (though I think mistakenly) thought the likeliest to have influenced Tolkien, is the Ring of Gyges. In Book II of Plato’s The Republic [circa 390 BC], Plato’s brother Glaucon tells Socrates a fable in order to make a point about power corrupting:

They relate that he [the ancestor of Gyges the Lydian]²⁹ was a shepherd in the service of the ruler at that time of Lydia, and that after a great deluge of rain and an earthquake the ground opened and a chasm appeared in the place where he was pasturing; and they say that he saw and wondered and went down into the chasm; and the story goes that he beheld other marvels there and a hollow bronze horse with little doors, and that he peeped in and saw a corpse within, as it seemed, of more than mortal stature, and that there was nothing else but a gold ring on its hand, which he took off and went forth. And when the shepherds held their customary assembly to make their monthly report to the king about the flocks, he also attended wearing the ring. So as he sat there it chanced that he turned the collet [i.e., setting] of the ring towards himself, towards the inner part of his hand, and when this took place they say that he became invisible to those who sat by him and they spoke of him as absent; and that he was amazed, and again fumbling with the ring turned the collet outwards and so became visible. On noting this he experimented with the ring to see if it possessed this virtue, and he found the result to be that when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, and when outwards visible; and becoming aware of this, he immediately managed things so that he became one of the messengers who went up to the king, and on coming there he seduced the king’s wife and with her aid set upon the king and slew him and possessed his kingdom. If now there should be two such rings, and the just man should put on one and the unjust the other, no one could be found, it would seem, of such adamantine temper as to persevere in justice and endure to refrain his hands from the possessions of others and not touch them, though he might with impunity take what he wished even from the market-place, and enter into houses and lie with whom he pleased, and slay and loose from bonds whomsoever he would, and in all other things conduct himself among mankind as the equal of a god. And in so acting he would do no differently from the other [i.e., unjust] man, but both would pursue the same course. And yet this is a great proof, one might argue, that no one is just of his own will but only from constraint . . .

—Plato, The Republic, ed. & tr. Paul Shore [1930].

Were it not for the absence, in the manuscript and first edition of The Hobbit, of any hint that the ring corrupts its possessor, Plato’s little tale would seem the obvious source for Tolkien’s One Ring. Tolkien certainly knew his Plato – he had, after all, originally entered Oxford as a Classical scholar, and the whole Númenor story was, ultimately, inspired by passages in two others of Plato’s dialogues³⁰ – and the story has a mythical air to it likely to catch in the memory and re-emerge years or decades later. Indeed, Gandalf’s words in ‘The Shadow of the Past’ (‘A mortal . . . who . . . often uses the Ring to make himself invisible . . . sooner or later – later, if he is strong or well-meaning to begin with, but neither strength nor good purpose will last – sooner or later the dark power will devour him’) could almost be taken as a gloss on Plato’s passage. But there is a fatal flaw in this theory: the One Ring ‘to bring them all and in the darkness bind them’ did not exist in The Hobbit. Tolkien might well have been inspired by Plato, or by H. G. Wells’ Invisible Man [1897], which makes much the same point, when he was casting about in 1936–7 for a way of continuing the ‘series’ of Mr. Baggins’ adventures at his publisher’s request, but neither is likely to have inspired the original creation: the defining characteristics, the whole point of those stories – the inevitably corrupting nature of the power to move about invisibly – is totally absent from Tolkien’s original conception. It seems much more likely, therefore, that the affinities between the Ring of Gyges and Sauron’s ring are due to this passage having been drawn to Tolkien’s attention after the publication of The Hobbit in 1937.³¹

Much more likely is the second possible source, occurring some millennium and a half later: Chrétien de Troyes’ Ywain: The Knight of the Lion. In this Arthurian romance [circa 1177], Ywain is trapped in the castle of a man he has just mortally wounded, and escapes his foe’s enraged retainers only because a maiden he had once befriended, the Lady Lunete, loans him a

little ring, explaining that it had the same effect as the bark of a tree which covers the wood so that one cannot see it at all. It was necessary that one wear the ring with the stone inside the fist. Whoever had the ring on his finger need not be wary of anything, for no man could see him however wide his eyes were open any more than he could see the wood covered by the bark growing over it.

—Ywain: The Knight of the Lion, tr. Ackerman, Locke, & Carroll

[1957 & 1977], p. 18.

Ywain uses the ring to escape from a gatehouse (a good parallel to Bilbo’s escape from the goblins’ guardpost, although the knight makes his way into a stronghold filled with enemies, rather than escaping from one), easily evading their searches as they grope blindly for the unseen intruder in terms reminiscent of the goblin-guards at the Back Gate:

. . . There was much floundering about, and they set up a great turmoil with their clubs just as does a blind man who stumblingly goes tapping about searching for something . . .

—ibid., p. 19.

Like Plato’s ring, and unlike Bilbo’s, simply wearing this ring has no effect: the ring must be turned so that its stone or setting, which would normally rest on top of the finger, instead faces towards the palm (like turning a watch so that the face is on the inside of the wrist). It is implied, but not explicitly stated, that the hand wearing the ring must then be closed in a fist, concealing the stone within its grasp. There is thus no need to take the ring off to appear or to search frantically for it in a pocket when the sudden need to disappear arises, as when Bilbo encounters the goblin-guards.

The same is true of the magic rings in two romances directly based upon Chrétien’s work, Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein [circa 1210] and the anonymous ‘The Lady of the Fountain’ [mid-fourteenth-century or earlier]. Hartmann’s romance is a translation of Chrétien’s (Old) French story into his own Middle High German,³² as comparison of the ring-description shows:

‘. . . Sir Iwein, take this ring and you will be safe from harm. The stone is of such a nature that whoever holds it in his bare hand cannot be seen or found as long as he keeps it there. You don’t need to worry any longer: you will be hidden like wood under bark.

‘. . . Close your hand on the stone I gave you, and I’ll pledge my soul that you won’t be harmed, because truly no one will see you. What could be better? You will see all your enemies standing near you and going around you with ready weapons and yet so blinded that they can’t find you even though you are right in their midst.’

—Iwein, tr. J. W. Thomas [1979], p. 69.

The ring in ‘The Lady of the Fountain’, one of the three ‘French Romances’ that make up the final third of The Mabinogion in most editions and translations – in essence an adaptation of Chrétien’s Ywain into Welsh – has a similar power and activation method: The Lady Luned (as she is called here) tells Owein (Ywain)

‘Take this ring and put it on thy finger, and put this stone in thy hand, and close thy fist over the stone; and as long as thou conceal it, it will conceal thee too . . .’

. . . And Owein did everything the maiden bade him . . . But when they came to look for him they saw nothing . . . And that vexed them. And Owein slipped away from their midst . . .

—The Mabinogion, tr. Gwyn Jones & Th. Jones

[1949; rev. ed. 1974], pp. 164–5.

Of these three closely related rings (or more accurately three versions of a tale about the same ring), Tolkien is most likely to have been familiar with the Welsh iteration, since this fell squarely within his fourteenth-century specialization (e.g., the same era as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) and we know from other evidence that he was familiar with The Mabinogion.³³

The third ring to consider also appears in works by multiple authors, but rather than translations here we have an unfinished romance by one author completed by a sequel written by another: M. M. Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato [Roland in Love, 1495] and Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso [Roland Gone Mad, 1516] – the latter being the work to which C. S. Lewis compared The Lord of the Rings when it first appeared, rather to Tolkien’s annoyance.³⁴

A ring . . .

. . . of price and vertue great:

This ring can make a man to go unseene,

This ring can all inchantments quite defeat

—Orlando Furioso, Sir John Harington translation [1591];

Book III stanza 57.

Here the ring in question belongs to a femme fatale – Angelica, princess of Cathay, who uses it to sow chaos among Charlemagne’s knights. Angelica’s ring has the power not just of rendering her invisible, but her mount as well so long as she is touching it. More importantly, it has the additional power of making its wearer immune to any spell cast upon her, and as such is later used by the heroic virago (warrior-woman) Bradamante (the original of Spenser’s Britomart and one of the possible inspirations for Tolkien’s Éowyn) to defeat the evil wizard Atlante. Just as Angelica herself, in true ‘perils of Pauline’ fashion, is captured and rescued time and again, passing from knight to knight, so too does her ring pass from Angelica to Brunello to Bradamante to Rogero (Ruggiero) before it is finally regained by Angelica herself. Perhaps significantly, its separate powers each have a distinct activation method. To gain the invulnerability to spells, the ring must be worn on a finger; any finger will do, there is no mention of any stone or setting, and the ring’s protection can be negated simply by pulling it off an opponent’s hand. By contrast, to turn invisible a character must pop the ring into her mouth, and she remains invisible for as long as she keeps it there.

‘Then see you set upon him . . .

Nor give him any time, lest he convay

The ring into his mouth, and so thereby

Out of your sight he vanish quite away.’

—ibid., Book III stanza 61

Into her mouth the Ring she doth convay,

And straight invisible she goeth away.

Rogero . . .

Found all too late, that by the Rings strange power,

She had unseene convai’d her selfe away.

—ibid., Book XI stanzas 6–7.

With Angelica’s ring, we see a theme that would become common among enchanted rings: a duplication (sometimes a multiplicity) of arbitrarily selected powers, making them devices able to protect the wearer from any harm and granting him whatever powers the dictates of the plot require. The stories in which characters possess these multi-purpose rings tend to treat those rings in perfunctory fashion, as self-consciously artificial plot-devices inserted to ease all the hero’s challenges. This is certainly the case in our fourth ring, the first of the two rings of invisibility from relatively modern times discovered by Douglas Anderson (The Annotated Hobbit, page 133). Fr. François Fénelon’s ‘The Enchanted Ring’ [late seventeenth century] is best known today through its appearance in Andrew Lang’s collection The Green Fairy Book [1892], a volume Tolkien explicitly refers to in his Andrew Lang lecture that later became ‘On Fairy-Stories’ (OFS.38).

Archbishop Fénelon’s story is an example of the highly artificial literary fairy tale that flourished in France in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in the hands of writers like Charles Perrault and Madame D’Aulnoy, and its titular Fairy’s ring has a wide range of powers, the selection of which is decidedly eccentric:

Take this ring, which will make you the happiest and most powerful of men . . . If you turn the diamond inside, you will become invisible. If you turn it outside, you will become visible again. If you place it on your little finger, you will take the shape of the King’s son, followed by a splendid court [i.e., a group of richly dressed courtiers]. If you put it on your fourth finger, you will take your own shape.

—‘The Enchanted Ring’, in The Green Fairy Book, page 138.

The turning of the ring clearly derives from the older examples of Plato’s or Chrétien’s rings, although either Fénelon or his translator (or both) are so careless that he or she forgets how the Fairy’s ring works, and later in the story we are told that the hero turns the ring to assume the prince’s form (ibid., p. 141). The reader is also left to wonder why it has specific powers on three of the hero’s fingers, with no mention of the fourth. As with Plato’s and Ariosto’s rings, there is no sign that Fénelon’s ring had any influence on The Hobbit, but it may have influenced the later development of the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings, particularly if Tolkien came across Fénelon’s story while working on his Andrew Lang lecture in the period when he was beginning the sequel. Fénelon’s tale in fact can be taken as a refutation of Plato’s thesis (that such a ring would inevitably corrupt anyone who gained it): after the hero wisely decides he’s achieved everything he wants and gives the ring back to the Fairy he got it from, she gives it to his brother. The brother promptly drives home the moral of the story by using it for vicious, selfish purposes, embarking on a mini crime spree strikingly reminiscent of Sméagol’s behavior as retold by Gandalf:

The only use he made of the ring was to find out family secrets and betray them, to commit murders and every sort of wickedness, and to gain wealth for himself unlawfully. All these crimes, which could be traced to nobody, filled the people with astonishment.

—Fénelon, ‘The Enchanted Ring’; The Green Fairy Book, pages 142–3.

Thus, in Fénelon’s fairy tale the good character uses the ring primarily for good and the evil character for evil – not unlike the Gollum/Bilbo dichotomy noted by Gandalf in ‘The Shadow of the Past’.

The fifth ring, also relatively modern, comes from an Estonian folktale [circa 1866] by Friedrich Kreutzwald, part of a group of nationalist writers who tried to do for Estonian what Elias Lönnrot had done for Finnish a generation earlier when he created the Kalevala [1835], writing down the surviving bits and pieces of old Baltic lore before they were entirely forgotten and constructing folk-tales and a national epic (the Kalevipoeg) from the remnants. Better known from its German translation in Ehstnische Märchen [‘Estonian Fairytales’] as ‘Der Norlands Drache’, it was translated by one of Andrew Lang’s assistants as ‘The Dragon of the North’ in The Yellow Fairy Book [1894]. Here the ring of invisibility is no less than King Solomon’s signet-ring, now the property of a beautiful witch-maiden whom the hero beguiles until he gains the chance to steal it from her. Its full powers are unknown, but even the ‘half-knowledge’ of the witch-maiden unlocks a wide array of useful powers:

If I put the ring upon the little finger of my left hand, then I can fly like a bird through the air wherever I wish to go.³⁵ If I put it on the third finger of my left hand I am invisible, and I can see everything that passes around me, though no one can see me. If I put the ring upon the middle finger of my left hand, then neither fire nor water nor any sharp weapon can hurt me. If I put it on the forefinger of my left hand, then I can with its help produce whatever I wish. I can in a single moment build houses or anything I desire. Finally, as long as I wear the ring on the thumb of my left hand, that hand is so strong that it can break down rocks and walls. Besides these, the ring has other secret signs which, as I said, no one can understand. No doubt it contains secrets of great importance. The ring formerly belonged to King Solomon, the wisest of kings . . . it is not known whether this ring was ever made by mortal hands: it is supposed that an angel gave it to the wise King.

—‘The Dragon of the North’, in The Yellow Fairy Book, page 14.

Again, although the hero does use the ring to slay a dragon, there is little here that resembles Bilbo’s ring, although there is a hint elsewhere in the tale that could be argued to anticipate The Lord of the Rings, when the witch-maiden offers the ring and herself to the hero:

Here is my greatest treasure, whose like is not to be found in the whole world. It is a precious gold ring. When you marry me, I will give you this ring as a marriage gift, and it will make you the happiest of mortal men . . .

—ibid., page 14 (italics mine).

Of all this array of five distinct rings of invisibility in eight separate works³⁶ – one classical (Plato), one medieval (Chrétien/Hartmann/Mabinogion), one renaissance (Boiardo/Ariosto), one from a literary fairy tale of the Enlightenment (Fénelon), and one from a reconstructed folk-tale of the Romantic era (Kreutzwald) – the one likeliest to have influenced Tolkien in The Hobbit is Owein’s ring in ‘The Lady of the Fountain’, the Welsh version of Chrétien’s tale. It seems very likely, however, that both Plato’s account and perhaps Fénelon’s as well contributed something to the One Ring as Tolkien developed it in The Lord of the Rings – never forgetting, however, that the primary influence on Frodo’s ring is in fact The Hobbit itself: here, as so often, Tolkien is his own main source. Doubtless other rings of invisibility exist which have eluded my researches, but no ring exactly like Bilbo’s has surfaced and it seems likely that this is because it was Tolkien’s own invention, giving his hero an edge to offset his small size and lack of martial experience and given limitations because that improved the challenges the hobbit would face, creating a better story.

(iv)
The Invisible Monster

The idea of an invisible monster stalking its unwary prey and suddenly seizing upon it with dire results, such as Tolkien describes Gollum as having done for ‘ages and ages’, is of course not original with The Hobbit, but comparison with earlier examples casts some interesting light on Tolkien’s treatment of the theme. It is a very old theme, going back at least to Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur [written by 1469, published 1485], which features as a recurrent villain in Book I (The Tale of King Arthur) Part ii (‘Balin or the Knight with the Two Swords’) Sir Garlon, the invisible knight, infamous for ambushing foes, striking them down, and then escaping under the cover of his invisibility. He is finally killed when struck down in turn by Sir Balin, who cares as little for the rules of chivalry as Garlon himself and seizes the chance of killing the apparently unarmed and visible Garlon while a guest of Garlon’s brother. There is never any explanation of how Sir Garlon, the evil brother of King Pellam (the Fisher-King and guardian of the Graal), is able to become invisible; it seems to simply be one of the inexplicable wonders associated with the Graal’s keepers. Tolkien was of course familiar with Malory and deeply interested in the rediscovery in 1934 of a manuscript version of Le Morte D’Arthur (cf. Verlyn Flieger’s essay ‘Tolkien and the Idea of the Book’ in The Lord of the Rings 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder [2006], especially pages 290–3), and the coincidence of an invisible villain and a character named Balin³⁷ in the same work is striking, but in the absence of any significant detailed parallels between Sir Garlon and Gollum it seems unlikely that Malory’s work influenced The Hobbit.

In more modern treatments closer to Tolkien’s own time, sometimes such a creature is human, as in Wells’ The Invisible Man [1897], or very near it, as in de Maupassant’s ‘The Horla’ [1887]. Other times it is starkly inhuman, as in Bierce’s ‘The Damned Thing’ [1893] and Lovecraft’s tale inspired by Bierce’s story, ‘The Dunwich Horror’ [1928]. Wells’ story is really a fable demonstrating the same moral as Plato – that the power to become invisible would inevitably be exploited for evil ends – with the Ring of Gyges replaced by modern chemicals and mathematical formulas, while de Maupassant’s tale is more a variant on Edgar Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ [1839], the story of an unseen doppelgänger who probably does not exist outside the narrator’s deranged imagination. Gollum, while certainly unpleasant, is (as Gandalf later observes in ‘The Shadow of the Past’) not a monster per se but a creature more like Bilbo than unlike him, invisible only through the use of a magic ring. By contrast, Bierce’s ‘Damned Thing’ is utterly alien, a creature whose size, shape, appearance, and nature can only be guessed from the viciousness with which it attacks and the horrible wounds it leaves on its victim (inspiring the subtitle of one part of the tale, ‘A Man Though Naked May Be In Rags’). Bierce’s Thing cannot be seen because it lies outside our frame of reference: one of his narrators suggests that, just as there are sounds audible to animals that we humans cannot hear, so too there are colours of the spectrum we cannot see. Since ‘the Damned Thing is of such a colour!’ it cannot be detected by human eyes.

The closest of all these invisible creatures to Tolkien’s presentation of Gollum comes in Fitz-James O’Brien’s ‘What Was It?’ [1859], a horror story by a little-known Irish writer who died fighting for the Union side in the Civil War. There is no record of Tolkien’s reading O’Brien, but some of the parallels are striking, whether due to influence or parallel inspiration or an untraced common source. For example, the description of the creature’s first attack in pitch-blackness sounds remarkably like what being attacked by Gollum must have been like. The narrator is lying down and trying to sleep when

. . . an awful incident occurred. A Something dropped, as it seemed, from the ceiling, plumb upon my chest, and the next instant I felt two bony hands encircling my throat, endeavouring to choke me.

—The Fantastic Tales of Fitz-James O’Brien,

ed. Michael Hayes [1977], page 60.

Later, after the unseen creature has been captured and bound by the two main characters after it attacked, they are able to gain a general idea of its still-unseen appearance by touch:

its outlines and lineaments were human. There was a mouth; a round, smooth head without hair; a nose, which, however, was little elevated above the cheeks; and its hands and feet felt like those of a boy.

— ibid., page 65.

For Gollum’s similarly smooth, round, hairless head, and relatively small size in the original conception, see Plate VI detail. Eventually O’Brien’s protagonists are able to find out what the creature is like only by making a plaster cast of its form:

It was shaped like a man, – distorted, uncouth, and horrible, but still like a man. It was small, not over four feet and some inches in height, and its limbs revealed a muscular development that was unparalleled. Its face surpassed in hideousness anything I have ever seen. Gustave Doré . . . never conceived anything so horrible . . . It was the physiognomy of what I should fancy a ghoul might be. It looked as if it was capable of feeding on human flesh.

—ibid., page 66.

In the end, the creature starves to death because the narrator and his friend cannot find any food that it will eat (an echo of Gollum’s rejection of lembas in The Two Towers?) and they dare not release it, given its initial murderous assault. O’Brien’s creature sounds very like Gollum as Tolkien originally conceived him: small, wiry, and vicious; humanoid but not human; an invisible strangler lurking in total darkness who ambushes his prey, throttles them, and devours the corpses.³⁸