Chapter VIII
Mirkwood

As before, the manuscript continues without anything more than a paragraph break between what are now Chapters VII (‘Queer Lodgings’) and VIII (‘Flies & Spiders’), the new chapter starting in the middle of manuscript page 99 (Marq. 1/1/7:23).

They walked in single file. The entrance to the track was like a sort of arch leading to a gloomy tunnel made by two great trees that leant together, too old and hung with ivy and shaggy with lichen to bear many leaves of their own. The track [> path] itself was narrow, winding on among the great trunks of trees, about as wide and clear as a rabbit-track. Soon the light at the entrance was like a little bright hole far behind, and the quiet was so deep that their feet seemed to thump along, while all the trees listened. But their eyes were getting used to the dimness, and they could see some way to each side in a sort of darkened green light. Just occasionally a little beam of sun that had the luck to creep in through some opening in the leaves from above and still more luck in not being caught by the tangled boughs beneath, stabbed down thin and bright [. But >] before them, but this was seldom.

There were black squirrels in that wood.^TN1 As their eyes got used to seeing things they could see them whisking off the path and scuttling behind tree trunks. There were other quiet noises, grunts scuffles and hurryings in the undergrowth and among the leaves piled endlessly thick on the forest floor, but what made the noises they could not see.

The nastiest thing they saw was the cobwebs: Dark thick [> dense] cobwebs, with threads extraordinary thick, often stretched from tree to tree, or tangled in the lower branches on either side of them. But none were across their path; whether because some magic kept this path open or not they did not know.^TN2

Very soon they got to hate the forest almost as heartily as they had disliked the tunnels of the goblins. But they had to go on and on long after they were sick for the sight of the sun and of the sky, and longed for the feeling [> feel] of the wind on their faces. It was still and dark and stuffy down under the unbroken forest roof. Nights were the worst. It then became pitch dark – not what you call pitch-dark, but really pitch: so black you simply couldn’t see anything. Bilbo tried flapping his hand in front of his nose, but he couldn’t see [added: them] at all. It isn’t true to say they couldn’t see anything: they could – eyes. They slept all closely huddled together, and took it in turns to watch; and when it was Bilbo’s turn he would see gleams in the darkness round them, and sometimes pairs and pairs of yellow or red or green eyes would stare at him from a little distance and then slowly fade and disappear. And they would sometimes look down from the branches above. That frightened him more still. But the eyes he liked least were horrible pale bulbous sort of eyes – ‘insect eyes’, he thought, ‘not animal eyes, only they are much too big’.^TN3

Although [he >] it was not cold at first they tried lighting a watch-fire at night, but they soon gave it up. It seemed to bring hundreds [of] eyes all round, only the creatures (whatever they were) were careful never to let their bodies show in the little flicker of the flames. Worse still it brought thousands of great dark grey and black moths, some nearly as big as your hand flapping and whirring round their ears. They could not stand that, nor the big bats (black as a top hat) either; so they gave up fires, and just sat or dozed in the enormous uncanny dark.^TN4

This went on for what seemed ages and ages to the hobbit; and he was always hungry, for they were very very careful with their provisions. Yet as time went on, days and days, they began to get anxious. The food would not last forever, and was in fact already running low. Yet the path straggled on just as before, and there was no change in the forest. The only new thing that happened was the sound of laughter [added: often], and once of singing, in the distance. The laughter was the laughter of fair voices not of goblins, and the singing was beautiful, but it sounded so eerie and strange, that they were not at all comforted.

At last their food began to give out; and they could not find any thing in the wood to eat to eke out what they carried. Nothing wholesome seemed to grow here, [but >] only funguses, or [pale >] herbs with pale leaves and unpleasant smell. In parts where beech-nuts^TN5 grew, and were already dropping their mast (for autumn was now far on)^TN6 they tried gathering the nuts, but they were hard and bitter. Yet they liked the beechen part of the wood best for here there was no undergrowth, the shadows were less dense, the light was clearer, and sometimes they could see for a longish way all round them – an endless vista of great straight trunks like the pillars of huge dark hall. In these parts they heard the laughter.

Of course it was Bilbo that had to climb a tree. Not in the beech-grown parts, [but >] for their trunks were too smooth and their branches too high. But in what seemed a sort of valley mostly filled with oaks, when their food was nearly gone,^TN7 the dwarves said:

‘Some one must take a look round, and the only way is to climb the tallest tree we can see’.

They chose the hobbit because of course to be of any use the Climber must get his head above the topmost leaves, and so he must be light enough for the highest and slenderest branches to bear him. Poor Bilbo hadn’t had much practice in climbing trees; but they hoisted him up into the lowest branches of the tallest tree they could find near, and up he had to go as best he could.

He pushed his way up through the tangled twigs, getting slapped in the eye, and all greened and grimed [with >] from the old bark of the big boughs. All the time he was hoping there were no spiders in that tree.^TN8 He slipped and caught himself, he struggled up places were the branches grew difficult, and at last he got near the top. There he found spiders all right, but only small ordinary ones; and he found out why they were there. They were after the butterflies! When at last poor little Bilbo swaying Dangerously on the small top branches poked his head out of the leaves he was nearly blinded. He could hear the dwarves shouting up at him from far below, but he could not answer, only hold on and blink. The sun was shining brightly and it was a long time before he could bear it. Then he saw all round him a sea of dark green ruffled here and there by the breeze. And there were hundreds [of] butterflies. I expect they were a kind of ‘purple emperor’, but they were dark dark velvety black without any markings at all.

He looked at these for a long time, and he liked the breeze; but soon the shouts of the dwarves (who were simply [shouting >] stamping with impatience down below) reminded him of his real business. It was no good. He couldn’t see any end to the trees and leaves in any direction. It was really very horrible with no food down below to go to.

Actually I believe they were coming fairly near to the end of the forest now, if they had only known it. (If they had it might have saved them a deal of trouble, as you will see). And if they or Bilbo had the sense to see it,^TN9 he had climbed a tree that was tall in itself but was standing near the bottom of a wide hollow or valley, and so from its top the trees seem to swell up all round it, like the edges of great bowl. No wonder [they >] he could not see very far.

Down Bilbo scrambled at last, scratched, hot, and miserable, and he could not hardly see anything in the gloom below when he got there. Very unhappy they all were when he told them [they>] ‘this forest went on for ever and ever in all directions’. They were quite cross with him, as if it was his fault; and they didn’t care tuppence^TN10 about the butterflies, and were only made more angry when he told them of the beautiful breeze (because they were too heavy to get their heads out and feel it).

That night they ate their last scraps of food, and woke up horribly hungry sometime next day (you could hardly call it morning it was so dim). All they could do was to tighten their belts round their empty tummies, and trudge along the track without much hope of ever seeing the end of it. You can perhaps guess how desperately hungry they were (especially Bilbo) when the blackness of night came on.

Bombur had just said ‘I won’t go a step farther. I am going to lie down here and sleep, and I don’t care if I never wake up!’^TN11 When Balin^TN12 said.

‘What’s that? There’s a twinkle of light’.

They all looked, and a longish way off (as far as they could guess) and to the left of their path, they saw a twinkle in the dark. Then they hurried along hardly caring whether it was trolls or goblins. The light did not seem to come any nearer, but first one and then another little twinkle came out. At last they had drawn level with it, and they could feel sure that lights (torches perhaps or small fires) were burning in some place in the forest along side of them, but a good way off their path.

They argued about it for a bit, but not for long. They did not forget the warnings of Medwed and Bladorthin, of course! But they all agreed, that they would starve to death quite soon if they stuck to the path, so that things could not be much worse if they left it and lost it. But [> Only] at first they could not agree whether to send out one or two spies or all go towards the light. In the end they all went (as quietly as they could, with the hobbit on the end of the line),^TN13 because nobody liked to go off into the forest alone, nor to be left alone on the path.

After a good deal of creeping and crawling along they peered round the trunks of trees and could see a place where it seem[ed] one or two trees had been cut down so that there was a more open space. And bless me if there were not people there, elvish looking folk all dressed in green and brown, sitting on logs. There was a little fire, and there were torches on some of the tree-trunks; but most splendid sight of all they were feasting, eating and drinking and laughing.

Without waiting to ask each other [> one another] each of them scrambled forwards with the same idea of begging some food and drink (for their water skins were as empty as their food bags).^TN14 But not one of them got into the clearing, before all the lights went out. Somebody kicked the fire and it went out in a shower of sparks, as if by magic. There they were in inky blackness, and they couldn’t even find one another. Not for a long while at any rate. At last after blundering about falling over logs, bumping crash into trees, and shouting and calling till they must have waked all the things in the forest for miles round,^TN15 they managed to gather themselves together in a bundle and count themselves (fourteen) by touching. By that time of course they had no idea left as to where their track lay, and they were quite lost, until morning, at any rate.

There was nothing for it, but to lie down for the night where they were. They didn’t even dare to grope about for any scrap of food for fear of getting separated again. But they had hardly settled down, before Dori (whose turn it was to watch first)^TN16 said in a loud whisper:

‘The lights are coming out again over there!’

Up they all jumped again. There were the lights twinkling again not far off, and they could hear low voices and laughter quite plainly.

This time they crept even more slowly and carefully towards them; and Gandalf said ‘No one is [to] stir from hiding, till I say. I shall step forward alone quietly first, and try to beg for food.’^TN17 They came right to the edge of the circle of light made by the torches this time, and they lay each behind a tree peering cautiously out.

Up got Gandalf finally and stepped into the ring. Out went all the lights again, and [they were >] if it was bad collecting themselves before it was worse still this time. Gandalf simply couldn’t be found. Every time they counted it only made thirteen, and though they shouted [and called] ‘Gandalf’ there was no answer. Bilbo found him. He fell over what seemed a log, and found it was the dwarf lying down fast asleep.^TN18

They soon woke him up, and until he understood what had happened he was very displeased [> annoyed]. ‘I was having such a good dream, all about having a most gorgeous dinner’ he said.^TN19

‘Dreaming about dinner won’t do any good’, said they. [‘These people don’t seem likely to offer us any more. But dreams about food is about all we seem likely to get in this place,’ said he >] ‘and we can’t share it anyway.’

‘But it is the best I seem likely to get in this place!’ he grumbled.

But that was not the last of the lights. Once again, when the night must have been wearing on, Kili who was watching, came and waked them and said:

‘There is a regular blaze of light not far away – just as if many torches and fires had all been lit up suddenly. And hark to the singing’.

This was too much for them, and so after lying and listening a little while they all got up once more. The result was worse than ever. This time Gandalf said he would step forward himself. [It was a >] The feast they looked on was larger and merrier than ever. The elvish folk were passing bowls round and round as across the fires, and some were harping and many singing, but the language seemed strange and they could not catch the words.

Out stepped Gandalf. Out went the lights. The fires went up in dark smoke. Ashes and cinders were in his eyes. The wood was full of cries and voices.

This time they did not find one another at all. Bilbo found himself running round and round (or so he thought) calling and calling Dori Nori, [Ori] Oin Gloin, Fili, Kili, Bombur, Gandalf Dwalin Balin Bifur Bofur^TN20 – and other people all round seemed to be doing the same (with an occasional Bilbo thrown in). But the other voices got fainter and fainter, [till at last >] and he thought he heard far off cries for help, and shouts, but at last it all died away [and he was >] though he did his best to go in the direction of the calls; and he was quite alone in the dark.^TN21

That was one of his most miserable moments. But he soon made up his mind that there was no help for it till ‘morning’. It was no good blundering about tiring himself out, with no hope of breakfast. So he sat down with his back to a tree, and not for the last time fell to thinking of his far distant hobbit-hole, & its beautiful pantries.

He was deep in thoughts of [mutton >] bacon and eggs, and toast and butter, when he felt something touch him. Something like a [string or] sticky rope was against his left hand. He found his left leg was already wrapped in it. He leapt to his feet and fell over. Then the great spider who had been busy beginning to tie him up while he dozed & dreamed came from behind him, and made for him. He could only see the thing’s eyes, but he could feel the hairy legs, as she^TN22 [> it] tried to wind <her> great abominable threads round and round him.

It was lucky he had come to his senses in time. Soon he would not have been able to move. As it was he had a horrible fight and struggle. He beat the creature off with his hands – it was trying to poison him to keep him quiet, as small spiders do to flies – until he remembered his sword, and drew it out.

The spider drew back and he had time to cut his leg free. Then it was his turn to attack. The spider was certainly not used to things that carried such stings at their sides, and before it could go off Bilbo came at it and stuck at it with his sword right at its eyes. Then it went mad and leapt and danced, in a horrible fashion, but soon he killed it with another stroke, and then he fell down and remembered no more for some time.

There was the usual grey light of the forest-day when he came to. The spider was dead beside him, and his sword blade was stained black. Somehow the killing of the spider, winning his battle all by himself alone in the dark, without help of dwarves or wizard or anyone else, made quite a difference to Mr Baggins. He felt a different person, and much bolder and fiercer as he put his sword back into its sheath.^TN23 More still he sharpened up his wits and he gathered the horrible string of the great spider’s thread together – there seemed an endless amount of it, that the creature had spun wildly out in the battle. Soon he had a huge ball, as much as he could carry. One end he tied to his tree, and then carrying his ball he set out to explore.

By some sort of luck it was not a very great while before in his casting round – and anyways hobbits are rather clever in woods, and can remember differences between trees and the way they grow which would all seem this same to you or me – he came upon the track that they had left. Soon he found the empty skins and bags they had put down before they crept towards the lights. Not that they were much use to him, though it certainly made him feel less lost.

‘Perhaps some of the dwarves will find the way back here too’ he thought as he turned the bags inside out for crumbs, ‘and I suppose I ought to wait here, & not try to go on – or back.’

So he waited, but time went on & he heard no sounds at all. At last he made up his mind that it was his duty to look for his companions. I can tell you he didn’t like it at all, but when he thought of his string he was a bit comforted. He cut it with his sword. Tied the new end to a tree close by the track, and then holding his ball, and also the old end he followed back along the thread he had himself laid until he came to the tree where he had fought the spider. From there he plunged into the forest clutching his ball with one hand, his little sword in the other. And luckily he remembered to put on his ring before he started.

That is why the spiders did not see him coming. Bilbo took care that nothing heard him. Hobbits can do that, as I have told you already. Creeping along in the direction – as far as he cd. guess – from which the cries had come in the night he saw a place of dense black shadow like a patch of night ahead.

It was made by spiders’ webs one behind and over and tangled with another, as he saw as he drew near. There were [added: spiders] huge and horrible sitting in the branches above him, and ring or no ring he was terrified lest they should discover him. Standing behind a tree he watched some of them; and then in the stillness of the wood he suddenly realized that these loathsome and enchanted creatures were speaking one to another; with a sort of low creaking hissing sound, and he cd. make out many of the words.

They were talking about the dwarves!^TN24

‘Fine eating they will make’ said one ‘when they have hung a bit’.

‘Don’t hang ’em too long’ said another ‘– they are not as fat as they might be; not been feeding too well of late, I should say’.

‘Well kill ’em then, kill ’em, and hang ’em again dead for a while.’ said a third.

‘They’re dead now I’ll warrant’.

‘That they’re not; I saw one a-struggling just now. Just coming round again, I should say, after a beautiful [> bee-autiful] sleep. I’ll show you!’

Then one of the fat spiders ran along a rope till it came to a dozen bundles hanging up from a branch. Bilbo was horrified, now he noticed them for the first time in the shadows, to see a dwarvish foot stick out of the bottoms of some of these bundles, and here and there a tip of nose, and bit of beard, or hood. [added: The spider went to] One of the fattest of the bundles – ‘that is poor old Bombur I’ll bet’ thought Bilbo – and nipped hard at the toe sticking out. There was muffled yelp inside and the toe shot out and kicked the old spider hard. There was a soft noise like kicking a flabby football, and the spider fell nearly to the ground before its thread caught it.

The others laughed. ‘You were right’ they said. ‘The meat is still alive and kicking’.

‘I’ll soon stop that’ said the angry spider climbing back.

Then Bilbo thought it was time he did something. He could not get up and [at] the brutes, but he found a stone. There was good many here among the leaves and moss on the floor. Now Bilbo was a fair shot. Yes he was. He could blow smoke-rings if you remember, and cook, and do lots of other things which I haven’t told you of. As a boy he used to practise throwing stones [till rabbits >] – though he never meant any harm by it – still rabbits and squirrels and even birds got out of his way if he stooped in <those> days. Even grown up he went on being good at quoits, dart-throwing, shooting arrows at a wand, bowls, ninepins and other quiet games of the sort that he liked.^TN25 Now it came in useful for his first shot knocked a great spider senseless off its branch, and it fell flop to earth with its legs all curled up. The next went whistling through a big web, snapping its cords and knocking the spider sitting in the middle off with it, whack, dead.

There was a deal of commotion among the spiders then you can guess, and he forgot about the dwarves for a bit, I can tell you. They couldn’t see Bilbo but they made a very good guess where <the> two shots had come from. They came running and swinging in that direction as quick as lighting, flinging out their long threads in all directions too, till the air seemed full of waving snares.

The Hobbit lost no time in slipping off to a different point. Now his idea was to get the spiders away from the dwarves, if he could. There seemed fifty of them at least. The only thing was to get them excited, curious, and angry all at once. So when a good many had gone off to his old place he threw another stone at those that stopped behind; and dancing among the trees he began to sing a song to infuriate them (and to let the dwarves hear his voice).

This is what he sang:–^TN26

Old fat spider spinning in a tree,

old fat spider can’t see me!

Attercop! Attercop!

Won’t you stop,

Stop your spinning and look for me?

Old Tom-noddy, all big body,

Old Tom-noddy can’t spy me!

Attercop! Attercop!

Down you drop,

You’ll never catch me up your tree!

With that he threw some more stones, & stamped. Some more spiders came towards him. Some dropped to the ground; others ran along the branches, swung from tree to tree, or cast new ropes across the dark spaces. They were after his noise quicker than ever he expected. And they were angry. No spider likes being called Attercop;^TN27 Tom-noddy of course is insulting to anyone, spider or anybody else.^TN28

The hobbit scuttled off to a new place, but others of the spiders were busy spinning webs across all the spaces between the trunks. Very soon the hobbit would be caught in a very hedge of them – that was their idea, anyway.

Still [in a new place>] standing in the middle of the hunting and spinning spiders he plucked up courage, and began a new song.

‘Lazy lob [>Lob] and crazy Cob^TN29

are weaving webs to wind me

I am far more sweet than other meat,

but still they cannot find me!

Here am I, naughty little fly;

You are fat and lazy.

I laughing fly as I go by

Through your cobwebs crazy!’

Then he turned and found the last space between two tall trees close together was closed with a web – not a proper web, but great strands of spider rope run quickly backwards and forwards from trunk to trunk. Out came his sword. He slashed the web to pieces and went off singing. The spiders heard, and they saw the sword I expect, though I don’t suppose they knew what it was. At any rate they all came now hurry him after on ground and branch, hairy legs waving, nippers and spinners snapping, eyes popping, full of rage. They followed^TN30 him into the forest as far as Bilbo dared go. Then he went quicker than a mouse and stole back.

He had precious little time, he knew, before they were disgusted and came back. The worst of all the jobs was getting up into the tree where the dwarves were hung. Luckily a spider had left a rope dangling down and with its help though it stuck to his hand and hurt him, he reached the lowest branch, and got up at last – to meet an old slow wicked spider who had remained behind to guard the prisoners and was busy pinching them to see which was fattest. He^TN31 thought of trying one, while the others were away hunting the noise in the forest.

He hadn’t much chance with Mr Baggins who was in a hurry – and he couldn’t see him. But he saw and felt his little sword, and soon fell off the branch dead.

The next bad job was to loose a dwarf. If he cut the string which hung each up, the wretched dwarf would fall bump to the ground a good way below, but what else was he to do?

Wriggling along the branch (which made all the poor dwarves dance and dangle like ripe fruit) he reached one bundle.

‘Fili or Kili’ he thought, by the tip of a blue hood sticking out. ‘Fili rather’ by the long nose also sticking out.^TN32 He managed by leaning over to cut most of the strong sticky threads that bound him; and sure enough with a kick and a struggle most of Fili emerged. I am afraid Mr Baggins very nearly laughed at the sight of him jerking his stiff arms and legs as he danced on the spider string under the arm pits (like one of those funny toys hanging on a wire). But somehow or other he managed to help Fili up on to the branch. Then with his help they hauled up first one dwarf and then another, although poor Fili was feeling very sick and ill from the spider’s poison, and hanging most of the night & the next day, and being wound round and round with only his nose to breathe through. It took him ages to get the beastly stuff out of his eyes and eyebrows – and as for his beard he had to cut most of it off.

None of them were better off. Some were worse, and had hardly been able to breathe at all. They rescued Kili, Bifur, Bofur, Dori and Nori. Poor old Bombur [had >] was so exhausted [he >] (he was the one that had kicked the spider) that he just rolled off the branch and fell plop on the ground (fortunately on leaves) and lay there.

There were still five dwarves hanging up at the far end of the branch when the spiders began to come back, as full of rage as ever.

Bilbo went to the end of the branch and kept off those that crawled up the tree.

‘Now we see you, now we see you’ they said ‘you nasty little creature. We will eat you and leave your bones and skin hanging in a tree. Ugh! he’s got a sting has he – we’ll have him all the same’. [added: Of course Bilbo had taken off the ring when he rescued Fili, and forgotten all about it after.]^TN33

All this time the other dwarves were working at the rest of their friends, and cutting at the threads with their knives. Soon all would be free and sitting on the branch, [added, in darker ink: except Bombur] though they had not much idea what would happen next. The spiders had caught each of them easily enough the night before; but that was one by one and in the dark. This time there looked like being a terrible battle.

Then suddenly Bilbo noticed some of the spiders had got round old Bombur on the floor and had tied him up again, and were dragging him away.

He gave a shout and slashed at the spiders in front. They quickly made way, and he scrambled or fell down the tree into the middle of those on the floor. His little sword was something new in stings for them. It shone with delight as he stabbed at them.

He killed three, and the others left Bombur and drew away. ‘Come down Come down’! he shouted to the dwarves ‘don’t stay up there and be netted’.

Down they scrambled or jumped or dropped, eleven of them all in a heap, most of them shaky and little use on their legs. Anyway there they were twelve together, for old Bombur was free again and held on his legs by his cousins Bifur and Bofur.^TN34

Now spiders were [old >] all round them, and above them. There were more of them than before, in spite of the ones that had been killed; some of their horrible friends (there were a good many of the wretches about – though Bilbo and the dwarves had [not] struck one of their biggest colonies.) must have come up to see what the noise was about. It was then Bilbo thought he had lost his ball of guiding thread. He was ready to collapse, until he found he had stuck it in his pocket. Luckily it hadn’t snapped, but of course it marked all the winding path he had gone, and went in and out round tree trunks backwards and forwards, and most ridiculous path to follow.^TN35

Bilbo saw nothing for it, but to let the Dwarves into his ring secret. When he had done so very quickly and puffily, he made them stand where they were, while he very <bravely> followed up his own path, winding up his ball as he went. He put his ring on again; and that bothered the spiders once more. Because he kept on saying ‘Attercop’ and ‘Lazy Lob’ as he ran from tree [to] tree, and they [kept on >] did not like it, and couldn’t tell where he would be next. In fact he kept them from attacking the dwarves in force, or doing more than drop lines from above down on to them, until he had found the point where his thread went off away from the spiders, back towards the track.

Then he dashed back to the dwarves, and got them to understand that he could lead them back to the track. With groans and moans they hobbled after him, and the spiders came too. They couldn’t see Bilbo, and he tired himself out dashing to one side or to another or to the rear to keep them off. But soon they felt the sting so often they contented themselves with running ahead and barring the way with their sticky threads, which Bilbo and one or two of the dwarves who had knives and were more recovered had to cut and slash.

In some ways the most terrible time of all their adventures was that horrible fight back to the track. I am afraid they did not think just then how lucky they were ever to get there, when at last they did, leaving the angry and bewildered spiders behind. Only one or two followed them to the very edge of the path, and sat fuming and cursing at them from branches in the trees.

But the dwarves never forgot Bilbo’s work. Even then they thanked him, and all bowed several times right to the ground, though some of them fell over with the effort and could not get up again for a long while. [There they >] They never forgot Bilbo, and though they knew now about his ring – Balin in particular had to have the whole tale^TN36 told him twice – they thought no less of him. In fact they praised him so much, Bilbo began to feel a great bold fellow – or would have done, if there had been anything to eat. There was nothing, and they were worn out. They just lay and looked at one another – except Balin, who kept on saying – ‘so that is how he sneaked past me was it! Now I know. Little <terror> – good old Bilbo–Bilbo Bilbo-bo-bo-bo’, till they told him to shut up.

All of a sudden Dwalin opened an eye and look round at them. ‘Where is Gandalf?’^TN37 he said.

It was a terrible blow. Of course there were only thirteen of them: 12 dwarves, and the hobbit.^TN38 Where indeed was Gandalf?

If you want to know, read on and leave the rest of them sitting more or less hopeless on the forest path. They drowzed off into an uncomfortable sleep there, as evening came on; and they were too sick and weary to think of guards or taking watches. There you can leave them for the present.

[You rem<ember> >] Gandalf was caught much more fast than those bound by spiders! You remember Bilbo falling like a log into sleep as he stepped into the feasting ring? Next time Gandalf had stepped forward; and as the lights went out he fell like a stone enchanted. All the noise of the dwarves lost in the night, their cries as the spiders caught them, and all the sounds of the battle next day, had passed over him. Till the wood-elves (and wood elves the people were of course) came to him and bound him, and carried him away.

Are the wood elves wicked? Well not particularly – indeed not at all. But most of them are descended from the ancient elves who never went to the great FairyLand of the west,^TN39 where the Light-elves, and the Deep-Elves (or Gnomes) and the Sea-elves lived,^TN40 and grew fair, and learned and invented their magic and their cunning craft and the making of beautiful and marvelous things.

The woodelves lingered in the world in the twilight before the raising of the sun and moon, and in the great woods that grew after sun rise,^TN41 but they loved the borders of the forest best, whence they could escape at times to hunt, or ride over the more open lands. In a great cave some miles within Mirkwood on its Eastern side, before whose huge doors of stone a river ran from out of the heights of forest and out into the marshes at the feet of the highlands, lived their king.

These caves wound far underground, and had many passages, and wide halls, but they were brighter and more wholesome and not so deep nor so dangerous as goblin-dwellings. In fact the wood elves themselves mostly lived in the woods in huts on the ground or in the branches. Their king lived in the great wood-cave because of his treasure, and [as] a defense against enemies.^TN42

To this cave they dragged Gandalf. Not too gently, for they did not love dwarves. They had had wars in ancient days with dwarves, and accused them of stealing their treasure (& the dwarves accused them of the same, and [also] of hiring dwarves to shape their gold & silver, and refusing to pay them after!).^TN43

The king of the Wood-elves looked sternly on Gandalf. But Gandalf would say nothing to all his questions, except that he was starving, and [or that he] knew nothing.

‘Why did you and your friends burst three times upon my people[?]’

‘Because we were starving’ he said.

‘Where are your friends now and what are they doing?’

‘I don’t know’ said Gandalf – ‘but I expect starving in the forest.’

‘What brought you into our forest at all[?]’ said the king.

But to that Gandalf shut his mouth and would not say a word.

‘Take him away’ said the king; and they put chains upon him, and put him in one of the inner caves and left him – they did give him food and drink, plenty if not very fine. Wood elves are not goblins, and are reasonably well-behaved even to their worst enemies when they have them as prisoners. Except to spiders. These they hate above all things,^TN44 and fear for few of them have swords of iron or steel at all. Hardly any at all even now. None I expect in those days. They fight chiefly with clubs, and bows, and arrows pointed with bone or stone.^TN45

There poor Gandalf lay, and after he had got over the [> his] thankfulness for bread and meat and water, he began to wonder what had happened to his unfortunate friends . . .

He soon found out. The wood-elves were not going to have dwarves wandering about in their part of the forest, starving or not. So they went back to the place where they had caught Gandalf, and finding no one there they waylaid the track. They knew all about it, because they made it, and still guarded and kept [it] open most of the way. It was their only way of getting news of the western world.

It was not long before they found the hobbit and the dwarves staggering along – the day after the spider-battle – in a last effort to find a way out of the forest before they fell down and died of hunger and thirst. [Suddenly from behind the trees >] Such day as there was under the dark trees was fading into pitch blackness, when suddenly out sprang the light of torches on either side of them, like [<thousands> >] hundreds of red stars. Out leap the woodelves with their bows; and called the dwarves to halt.

There was no thought of a fight. The dwarves were exhausted; and their [added: small] knives, all the weapons they had, were no good [> use] against the bows of the woodelves that hit a bird’s eye in the dark; and they knew it.

At this point in the manuscript (at the bottom of manuscript page 118; Marq. 1/1/8:18) there is a change in the kind of paper used that almost certainly marks one of the two major pauses or breaks in composition to which Tolkien referred in his 1938 letter (see Appendix II and ‘The Chronology of Composition’ on p. xviii). Accordingly, I have chosen to make the chapter break between what later became Chapter VIII: ‘Flies and Spiders’ and Chapter IX: ‘Barrels Out of Bond’ here, even though the last two paragraphs above eventually became the opening paragraph and a half of the following chapter (contrast DAA.221 & 222). Henceforth, instead of being written on both sides of the sheet on ‘foolscap’ paper, the rest of the Second Phase manuscript (manuscript pages 119–167) is written on one side only of the sheet. The new paper is also somewhat inferior to the old and has aged more; the unused backs are lined, which shows that these are probably unused sheets torn from student ‘blue books’ used in examinations. See p. 379 for a continuation of the text.

TEXT NOTES

1 Most of what little wildlife the dwarves and hobbit encounter in Mirkwood is dark in coloration, no doubt from protective camouflage in this dimly lit environment: the black squirrels, the ‘great dark grey and black moths’ attracted by their campfires, the big bats (‘black as a top hat’) presumably attracted by the moths, even the ‘dark, dark velvety black’ purple emperor butterflies Bilbo sees atop the oak canopy. The only exception seems to be the ‘snowy white’ deer (a hind and her fawns) seen in the enchanted stream episode and deliberately contrasted to the ‘dark’ hart seen immediately before, and that scene is itself a later interpolation added into the story, not part of the original draft (see p. 350).

For a speculation on the melanistic nature of Mirkwood’s wildlife, see Henry Gee’s column ‘Melanism and Middle-earth’, posted on the Tolkien site TheOneRing.net (http://greenbooks.theonering.net/guest/files/081104–01.html). Note that while Gee refers to the spiders as ‘black’, their coloration is actually not mentioned in the text. We are told that their cobwebs were ‘dark’ (p. 303) and it would certainly make sense that their dark coloration prevented their being seen when they came to stare at the campfires (p. 304), but the only indication that the spiders themselves are black comes not in the text but in an illustration: the lost halftone of Mirkwood (Plate VII [top]) that appeared in the first two printings of The Hobbit (and as a line drawing in the first printing of the American edition; see DAA.192–3) – a mere 8800 copies, some of which were destroyed unsold during the Blitz (Hammond, Descriptive Bibliography, pages 4, 15, & 18).

2 We are told much later that the elves built and maintain the forest road (p. 316), and that the elves and spiders are enemies (ibid.). We cannot say with certainty that the forest path was an elf-road from first conception, but it seems likely, given its quietly understated eeriness through all versions of the story.

The cobwebs are Bilbo and the dwarves’ first hint of the spiders’ existence. Later readers had more hints from three pieces of accompanying cartography and illustration: the final Thror’s Map, one of whose labels reads ‘West lies Mirkwood the Great – /there are Spiders’ (DAA.50), the Wilderland Map, which clearly shows large spiders & cobwebs throughout northern Mirkwood (DAA.[399]), and the aforementioned Mirkwood halftone (Plate VII [top]), which shows a spider walking by prominently in the right foreground (ibid. [detail]).

3 These ‘horrible pale bulbous . . . insect eyes’ presumably belong to the Mirkwood spiders, since they stare down at Bilbo from the branches overhead. Tolkien does not actually describe the Mirkwood spiders, when we finally encounter them near the end of this chapter, as having compound insect eyes, but he did explicitly use that description for Shelob in The Lord of the Rings (‘two great clusters of many-windowed eyes . . . [with] their thousand facets’ – LotR.747), whom he linked to the Mirkwood spiders as their progenitor. See Commentary, ‘The Children of Ungoliant’, p. 326ff.

4 ‘Black as a top hat’ is the sort of detail often described by careless commentators on the book as anachronistic; it is not. Like the express-train in Chapter I of The Lord of the Rings or the whistling tea kettle it is merely a direct-address simile provided by the narrator (not Bilbo) to help his listeners, the modern-day audience, visualize the scene.

5 Tolkien originally wrote beechnuts, which he soon changed to beechtrees. For more on the role of beechnuts or beechmast in the story, see Plot Notes A, p. 294 and Text Note 8 page 298.

6 Much later, Tolkien changed ‘far on’ to ‘getting on’ in pencil (the first layer of revision in this chapter having been done in black ink, probably not long after the Ms. was written).

Note also the time-frame of the story; whereas in the published book they are already on the Mountain by late autumn, here they are still wandering in Mirkwood when ‘autumn is far on’, with the long captivity among the elves and rest of their journey still to come.

7 Curiously enough, the acorns eaten by the starving dwarves and hobbit in Plot Notes A dropped out of the story here and found no place in the published book. The beech-nuts (see Text Note 5) re-entered the story in the ‘Enchanted Stream’ interpolation in the form of bitter, inedible nuts thrown down from above at them by the black squirrels.

In the published book the ground underneath the beech trees is littered only by ‘the dead leaves of countless other autumns’ (DAA.199).

8 Bilbo’s concern about meeting a spider seems premature, given that the group’s first encounter with the giant spiders of Mirkwood does not come until later in this chapter. However, he has already seen the great cobwebs stretched from tree to tree and sinister eyes staring down at him from the trees (see Text Notes 2 & 3 above), so his apprehension is understandable.

The smaller spiders chasing the butterflies enter the story for the first time here (at any rate they are not mentioned in the extremely compressed paragraph devoted to this scene in Plot Notes A); see p. 343 Note 19.

9 Once again the narrator draws the reader’s attention to a small significant detail that has escaped the characters’ notice: in this case the innocuous line earlier on the page in what seemed a sort of valley mostly filled with oaks. For more examples, see the careful enumeration of how many dwarves are present in the spider-webs (Text Note 38).

10 Tuppence: two pence (two pennies), roughly equivalent in buying power to the American nickel (or, earlier, dime). A proverbial phrase.

11 Bombur’s sudden collapse here is motivated by nothing more than starvation, exhaustion, and despair, yet it is striking that almost the same words remain in the story after Tolkien had made this speech the climax of the Enchanted Stream interpolation; see p. 352.

12 Tolkien originally wrote ‘Ga’ – i.e., the beginning of the name Gandalf (the chief dwarf), but immediately switched the role of sharp-eyed dwarf to Balin, who had been the group’s look-out man during their council of war after their escape from the Misty Mountains (pp. 198 & 199). Back in Chapter II (p. 91) it had been Dwalin, not Balin, who had first spotted the campfire off in the distance that led to the disastrous but fateful encounter with the trolls, and Dwalin was even described there with the phrase ‘Dwalin, who was always their look-out man’ – the exact words ascribed to his brother Balin in the First Typescript (Marq. 1/1/33:3) and henceforth. The passage here, therefore, marks Tolkien’s decision to keep to the decision in Chapter VI to have Balin be the group’s most observant dwarf.

13 Note that the detail of the hobbit’s going last at the end of the line, which did not survive into the next stage (the typescript) nor the published book, reverses the sequence used with the trolls and with Medwed, where the hobbit went first each time.

14 This is the first mention in the original text of the thirst suffered by the adventurers, a motif developed with great effect in the Enchanted Stream interpolation and published book (see p. 351).

15 The ominous implications of this last phrase do not become apparent until the spiders attack several pages later; note that in the next chapter the Elvenking rebukes the dwarves with having ‘roused the spiders with your riot and clamour’ (see p. 380).

16 Unlike the many shifts in assigning an action to a specific dwarf (e.g. Text Note 12 above), the detail of Dori as the watchman who next spotted the lights persisted unchanged from the first draft through into the published book. The same applies to Kili as the watcher for the third (ultimately disastrous) encounter with the elf-lights.

17 All but the first two words of this sentence was later cancelled and replacement text written in the top margin: ‘send Mr Baggins forward alone first, to talk to them and ask for food. They won’t be frightened of him – (‘what about me of them?’ thought Bilbo) – and I hope they won’t do anything nasty to him!’ The slightly revised version of this that appears in the First Typescript (1/1/58) corresponds exactly to the published text (DAA.205).

18 This paragraph was heavily revised to fit the change from Gandalf to Bilbo having been the one to step forward on the second try:

Then Gandalf pushed Bilbo forward and he quietly stepped into the ring. Out went all the lights again, and if it was bad collecting themselves before it was worse still this time. Bilbo simply couldn’t be found. Every time they counted themselves it only made thirteen, and though they shouted and called ‘Bilbo Baggins. Hobbit. You dratted hobbit. Hi hobbit confusticate you’ & other such things there was no answer. Dori found him. He fell over what seemed a log, and found it was the hobbit lying down fast asleep.

19 The motif of dreaming about a wondrous feast enters the story here, long before the ‘enchanted stream’ interpolation developed the idea, but it is not Bilbo or Bombur but Gandalf himself who is the dreamer. This passage is another striking example of how a scene, image, or speech could remain practically unchanged while its application and significance altered greatly. The shift from Gandalf to Bilbo must have occurred almost at once, since Gandalf’s statement that this time he will step forward himself in their third attempt to beseech charity immediately follows only a few paragraphs later.

20 Tolkien seems have initially forgotten about Ori (who along with Bofur had also been omitted in the draft of this passage in Plot Notes A; see Text Note 13 on p. 298); the name appears as an addition to the line. The sequence of names is changed slightly in the typescript: the first eight are the same, but there Bombur is followed with ‘Bifur, Bofur, Dwalin, Balin, Thorin Oakenshield.’

21 This point, the bottom of manuscript page 106 (1/1/8:6), marks the second of the three times in the story Bilbo will be all alone in the dark. This dramatic moment seems to correspond to a brief pause in the writing, since the top of the next page on a new sheet (manuscript page 107; 1/1/8:7) shows a marked change in Tolkien’s handwriting style, which for the next page or two becomes thin and spidery but also more elaborate, with many more flourishes.

Only a few paragraphs into this new section, the text begins to show signs of being very quickly written, with many small mistakes (e.g., ‘seemed and endless’, ‘they way they grow’, ‘before it his casting around’, &c.). It clearly represents the very first stage of composition, the initial expansion of the skeleton given in Plot Notes A.

22 Remarkably enough, the spider that attacks Bilbo is initially referred to using female pronouns (she/her), though this is quickly switched to the gender-neutral pronouns (it/its) used in the published book. This carryover from the Plot Notes draft of the scene (see p. 294) is significant because it makes the giant spider the only female character to actually appear in the book.

See also Text Note 31 below.

23 Missing from this initial version of the scene is Bilbo’s naming his blade: the name Sting does not appear until the First Typescript version of the scene (typescript page 85; 1/1/58:10).

24 Added in the top margin and marked for insertion at this point: ‘It was a bit of struggle’ said one ‘– but worth it. What nasty thick skins they have to be sure, but I’ll wager there is good juice inside’. This addition called for small changes in the following lines; ‘said one’ becomes ‘said another’; in the next line ‘another’ becomes ‘a third’; in the next ‘said a third’ becomes ‘said a fourth’, and finally the line after that (‘They’re dead now I warrant’) was ascribed back to the first spider (‘said the first’).

25 Quoits, dart-throwing, shooting at the wand, bowls, and ninepins are all traditional English games.

Quoits: A game very similar to horseshoes, in which small hoops or rings are tossed at a spike or stake. Its modern descendant, the ring-toss, is still a favorite at carnivals and fairs.

Dart-throwing: Still a popular pastime, traditionally played in pubs.

Shooting at the Wand: According to Anderson (DAA.210), an archery game wherein players shoot at a ‘wand’, or flat slat of wood. If Bilbo were a good shot with a bow, one might expect him to have been given one of Medwed’s bows (see p. 250). Probably Tolkien never linked the two passages, and there is in any case a great difference between a bow used in a game and a hunting-bow (comparable, say, to the difference between badminton and professional tennis); Bilbo could probably not even pull a heavy bow such as Medwed provided.

Bowls: Better known today as lawn bowling, this is played with wooden balls on a grassy lawn. The winner is usually the player whose ball ends closest to a specific point.

Ninepins: Also known as skittles, this is the ancestor of modern bowling. Tolkien originally wrote ninepines, but this seems a simple error rather than a variant. Ninepins is mainly famous in literature through its appearance in Washington Irving’s ‘Rip Van Winkle’ [1819] as the game played by the magical dwarves in that story.

26 The spider-poem had already appeared in Plot Notes A; Tolkien clearly had his notes before him when writing this passage and simply copied the poem into the text here with only minor changes (see pp. 295 & 299).

27 Attercop is simply the Old English word for spider (attercoppe), first attested circa 1000 AD; a modernized spelling would be adder-cob (poison-spider). The ‘coppe/cobbe’ element is sometimes thought to mean ‘head’ but was more probably simply ‘spider’, which is still its meaning in some Germanic dialects (Flemish cobbelcoppe, Westphalian cobbe, Dutch spinne-cob); the word survives in modern English cobweb (spider-web).

Our modern word spider, while also derived from an Old English root (in this case, one meaning ‘spinner’), did not appear in English until around 1340 and was not definitely established for another century: early versions of Wycliffe’s Bible [circa 1440] use attercoppis while later versions use spiþers in its place. Cf. the OED, pages 138, 451, & 2960.

More recently, ‘attercop’ was revived within a technical context when the name was given to the earliest known spider fossil, Attercopus fimbriungis, which lived in the Devonian Period some three hundred and eighty million years ago.

28 Tom-noddy: Tom-fool. While ‘Tom-noddy’ is nineteenth-century, ‘noddy’ (fool, simpleton) itself goes back to Henry VIII’s time. Like booby, noddy is both a word for a fool and a seabird.

29 Like the first spider-taunting poem, this one originates in Plot Notes A; see p. 299 for comments on its composition. The only change made here in this version is the capitalization lob > Lob, which is in contemporary black ink.

‘Cob’ = spider (preserved in modern English cobweb: ‘spider-web’); see Text Note 27 above.

‘Lob’ is a neat piece of Tolkienian linguistic doubling, since the word means both spider (OE lobbe, loppe) and also a rustic or country bumpkin. Hence it is both accurate and insulting at the same time. Its use here is interesting because, as Tolkien may have been aware, ‘lob’ is also a variant for ‘hob’ or house-spirit, the probable root-word for hobbit; examples include the Taynton Lob and Lob-Lie-by-the-Fire – cf. Katharine Briggs, Hobberty Dick [1955] and A Dictionary of Fairies [1976], especially the latter’s entry under ‘Lobs and Hobs’.

Much later, Tolkien used ‘lob’ as part of the name for his most fully realized spider character, Shelob (= ‘she-spider’).^†

^† ‘Do you think Shelob is a good name for a monstrous spider creature? It is of course only “she+lob” (= spider), but written as one, it seems to be quite noisome’ (JRRT to CT, 21st May 1944; Letters p. 81).

30 At this point, near the bottom of manuscript page 111 (1/1/8:11), Tolkien drew a line or bracket in red pencil between this and the next word, accompanied by a blue pencil annotation in the lower left margin:

<here> begins 88

– that is, the next word corresponds to the top of page 88 in the First Typescript (1/1/58:13).

31 The male pronouns (he, him) for this spider appear only in the manuscript; by the time of the First Typescript they have already shifted to neutral gender (it, its), which remained thereafter.

32 The minor detail of Fili’s having a long nose is the only indication in the book that Fili and Kili are not, as many readers imagine them, identical in appearance; it is one of the very few bits of physical description of any character. The parenthetical comment about long noses proving useful first appears in the typescript.

33 The sentence about Bilbo’s having taken his ring off before helping the dwarves, added to the Ms., was moved to the end of the preceding paragraph in the typescript, where it has remained ever since.

34 Throughout the manuscript of The Hobbit the exact relationship between Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur remained in flux. Here we learn for the first time that they are kinsmen, and it is specifically stated that Bifur and Bofur are Bombur’s cousins, which in turn suggests that Bifur and Bofur are themselves brothers, given the analogy of the two brother-pairs Fili/Kili and Balin/Dwalin. For more on rhyming brother names, see Text Note 13 following Chapter XVII. When their relationship is mentioned again, in Chapter XII, all three dwarves have become brothers (‘“Bombur and Bofur!” cried Bifur their brother. “They are down in the valley!” “They will be slain . . .” moaned the others’ – see p. 508 and Text Note 20 following Chapter XII.

Several pages in the original First Typescript of this chapter were replaced at some point before the Second Typescript was made,^† including the page describing this scene (typescript page 89). The reading where Bifur and Bofur are Bombur’s cousins persisted here through both the original and replacement pages in the First Typescript (1/1/30:2 and 1/1/58:14), as well as the Second Typescript (1/1/39:17); not until black ink revisions to the page proofs was ‘his cousins Bifur and Bofur’ replaced by ‘his cousin Bifur and his brother Bofur’ (1/2/2 page 169), the reading of the published book (DAA.215). Similarly, the passage wherein Bifur describes Bofur and Bombur as ‘My brothers!’ appeared in the First Typescript, where it was altered in ink to ‘My cousins’ (typescript page 118; 1/1/62:4). This change was made before the Second Typescript was created, since the latter gives ‘My cousins’ as originally typed (1/1/43:5), the reading in the published book (DAA.274). Thus the final relationship between these three is that Bombur and Bofur are brothers, and Bifur is their cousin.

^† These were the bottom half of original typescript page 85 (now 1/1/30:1), the top half of which was retained and completed by new text pasted on to create a new composite page (1/1/58:10), and the original typescript conclusion to the chapter, original typescript pages 89–92 (now 1/1/30:2–5), which were replaced by new pages 89–92 (1/1/58:14–17). The replacement text expands upon the original somewhat, giving a more vivid account of the battle against the spiders. In addition, the bottom fifth of typescript page 83 (1/1/58:8) was covered by a pasteover of new text directly over the old; the three paragraphs of replacement text describe Bilbo’s stepping into the elf-circle and the dwarves’ search for him after he falls under the sleep enchantment. See Text Note 18 above and pp. 353–4 below for more on the evolution of this passage.

35 At this point, a pencil line is drawn in the left margin alongside four lines of text (from ‘It was then’ to ‘went in and out round’), and the words

make him <find> it by a tree

written in the margin; this of course refers to the ball of spider-thread.

The other two changes to this paragraph – changing ‘old’ to ‘all’ and inserting the negative (‘had struck one of their biggest colonies’ > ‘had not struck one of their biggest colonies’) – are also in pencil and thus postdate the writing, probably by a considerable time.

36 ‘The whole tale’: A revised version of this passage later introduced a crux into the text and became a disconnect between The Hobbit and its sequel The Lord of the Rings: see p. 739.

37 At this point, and on the next three mentions of the chief dwarf’s name, ‘Gandalf’ has been changed to ‘Thorin’ in pencil. This is clearly a much later emendation, only made on this single page (Ms. page 116; 1/1/8:16), probably when Tolkien was looking over the chapter in anticipation of preparing the typescript, since Thorin did not become the chief dwarf’s name until he emerges out of the barrel outside Lake Town (see p. 437 & Text Note 7 on p. 444).

38 This revelation is a good example of Tolkien’s narrative legerdemain, and the extent to which he rewards the attentive reader by letting them be in on the joke. He has been careful at three points in the preceding pages to enumerate the twelve dwarves without calling attention to the fact that there should have been thirteen: ‘a dozen bundles hanging up from a branch’ (p. 310), the fact that after having rescued seven dwarves (Kili, Fili, Bifur, Bofur, Dori, Nori, and poor old Bombur) there were ‘still five dwarves hanging up at the far end of the branch’ when the spiders returned (7+5=12, not 13; p. 313), and the final mention of eleven dwarves scrambling down to join Bombur on the ground (‘there they were twelve together’; ibid.).

39 ‘The great FairyLand of the west’: this is Eldamar or Elvenhome, also called ‘Fairyland’ in ‘Ælfwine of England’ [circa 1920] (BLT II.316) and in Roverandom [circa 1927] (pp. 103 & 73–74). Fairyland (so spelled) also originally appeared in the First Typescript of this chapter (original typescript page 91; 1/1/30:4), but the replacement typescript page (1/1/58:16) and the Second Typescript (1/1/39:20) has ‘Faerie’, the reading of the published book.

40 Light-elves, Deep-Elves (Gnomes), and Sea-elves: the Three Kindreds of the Elves go back to the earliest stages of Tolkien’s mythology; in the Book of Lost Tales period they were called the Teleri, the Noldoli (or Gnomes), and the Solosimpi (or Shoreland Pipers). By the time of ‘The Sketch of the Mythology’ [1926] and the 1930 Quenta, these had shifted to become the Quendi or Light-elves, the Noldoli or Deep-elves (also called Gnomes), and the Teleri or Sea-elves (also called Solosimpi, the Shoreland Pipers). The dwarves’ ‘capture by the Sea-elves’ had been foreseen in the very first rough outline, given back on p. 229 in the middle of Chapter VII. The wood-elves, according to this schema, are Ilkorindi or Dark-elves, those who never came to Valinor or saw the Two Trees (HME IV.85).

For more on the Wood-elves, see the section titled ‘The Vanishing People’ following the next chapter (pp. 395ff).

41 These lines about the raising of the sun and moon, and the great woods that grew after the sun’s rise, make it clear that we are definitely in a world of Tolkien’s mythology here; Bilbo’s world shares the creation myth that underlies all the early versions of the legendarium. See in particular ‘The Tale of the Sun and Moon’ (BLT I.174–206), ‘The Sketch of the Mythology’ (HME IV.20), and the 1930 Quenta (HME IV.97).

42 The reference to the Elvenking’s treasure is interesting; although there are a number of pointed hints throughout about the Elf-king’s love of treasure, there is little indication that he already has much hoarded, aside from this passage. However, the opening canto of ‘The Lay of Leithian’ devotes several lines to Thingol’s hoard, both in its first and closing stanzas (see lines 15–18 and 93–5; HME III.155, 156, 157), and it seems clear that Tolkien’s older conception of the Woodland King strongly influenced his description here and throughout the wood-elf section of The Hobbit.

The motif of elves living in caves not only harkens back to the ancient folklore tradition of fairy-mounds but was a firmly established part of Tolkien’s elf-lore: the great woodland realm of Doriath, the oldest elf-realm in Middle-earth and the closest analogue in the older legendarium to the wood-elf realm of Mirkwood, was ruled from the great underground hall known as ‘the Thousand Caves’ (‘Sketch’, HME IV.13), later named Menegroth. Similarly, Nargothrond (‘fair halls beneath the earth’ – ‘Sketch’, HME IV.30) was a cave-kingdom, while Gondolin was a hidden city in a caldera that could only be reached through a natural tunnel. The late account of Tuor’s coming to Turgon’s abandoned halls in Nevrast also stresses the degree to which that was a hidden land, accessible from Hithlum only by a secret tunnel (Unfinished Tales, pp. 20–23).

43 This passage refers to the Nauglafring, or ‘Necklace of the Dwarves’, made by the dwarves of Nogrod for Tinwelint, king of Artanor (the figure who in later stages of the mythology came to be called Thingol Greycloak, King of Doriath); see ‘The Nauglafring’ (BLT II.221–51) and the commentary under the header ‘The King of Wood and Stone’ following Chapter IX.

44 Elves & Spiders: for the origins of this enmity, see commentary, p. 328.

45 Arrows pointed with bone or stone: a reference to the neolithic arrowheads occasionally uncovered in plowing, digging, or construction. In the United States, where they were still made by native peoples as recently as the early nineteenth century, these are called ‘Indian arrowheads’; in medieval England such finds were called ‘elf-shot’ and believed to be the physical evidence left behind by an elf-stroke. Briggs (A Dictionary of Fairies, pp. 118 & 385) notes that our modern word stroke (for what is more technically termed a cardiovascular accident) is a shortened form of ‘elf-stroke’, itself the folk-explanation of why a person might be suddenly laid low with no apparent cause.

In addition, note the use of present tense here by Tolkien’s narrator: even now few woodelves use metal weaponry – yet another of his subtle hints that the elves are still among us, though few know of or can detect their presence.

In this chapter, Tolkien depicts Mirkwood in ways that conjure up not just one but two archetypes: The Dark Wood and The Enchanted Forest. The realistic description of a desperate journey through primal woodlands, struggling against starvation and thirst, exhaustion and despair, dominates the first half of the chapter and represents yet another tour de force as Tolkien uses sensory details to build up a claustrophobic impression of a nightmarish journey in darkness and near-darkness that never seems to end. Tolkien’s other journeys into darkness are relatively brief in duration: Bilbo’s journey under the Misty Mountains, the Fellowship’s trek through Moria, the Grey Company’s passage of the Paths of the Dead, and Frodo and Sam’s disastrous trip through Shelob’s Lair all take a few days at most, in some cases only hours. By contrast, Bilbo and the dwarves’ trip through Mirkwood lasts for weeks if not months; in some outlines Tolkien projected that as much as an entire year might pass while they remained lost or captive within the forest. For more on Mirkwood, or Taur-na-Fuin as it was sometimes called, as it had appeared in Tolkien’s earlier works in the Silmarillion tradition, see the commentary on The Pryftan Fragment, p. 20.

The second half of the chapter shifts the descriptions to highlight the eerie aspects of the endless woods, dim rather than pitch-dark but full of disturbing features: the alluring sounds and smells and sights that lure the travellers off the path into disaster, the uncanny appearance and disappearance of the feasters, the spell of sleep that falls first upon the hobbit and then the chief dwarf. For more on this enchanted forest theme, see ‘The Vanishing People’ following Chapter IX.

(i)
The Children of Ungoliant

Like the dwarves, elves, goblins, wolves, and eagles, spiders had a long history in Tolkien’s mythology going back more than a decade before he started The Hobbit. They are yet another link back to the legendarium, another example of the foes and friends Bilbo encounters on his unexpected journey turning out, on examination, to be descendents of the servants and servitors of the first great Dark Lord or his foes. Even the Necromancer Bilbo’s group take pains to avoid (and rightly so, since he destroyed the previous dwarven expedition led by Gandalf’s father a century before) fits into the same category, being Thû himself, Morgoth’s lieutenant, who would soon gain the additional name of Sauron.¹ Unlike the goblins and wolves, however, the spiders cannot rightly be called Children of Morgoth, because they descend not from the first great Dark Lord himself but from his sometime ally Ungoliant, the Spider of Night. Significantly, when the goblins and wargs march to war at the book’s climax, the spiders stay put, playing no part in the Battle of Five Armies – like Ungoliant before them and Shelob after they are essentially an unaligned evil (as Bombadil in The Lord of the Rings is an unaligned good).²

At first glance a spider, however large, does not seem a very epic opponent for our hero, but this is deceptive. Tolkien’s use of spiders as major villains and dire threats goes back to an earlier layer of the mythology, when a hound (Huan) could defeat elf-lords, a cat (Tevildo) ably serve as one of Melko’s more capable lieutenants, and a Spider (Ungoliant) plunge the entire world into darkness. Certainly Lord Dunsany, a major influence on Tolkien at that early stage, pits his heroes against huge man-sized spiders in ‘The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save For Sacnoth’ ([1907]; collected in The Sword of Welleran [1908]) and also in ‘The Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller’ ([1910]; collected in The Book of Wonder [1912]). The monstrous spider-demon destroys the hero in the latter, while in the former the great spider is one of the few foes that evades the hero and escapes, defeated yet alive. These examples may underlie the prominence Tolkien gives in his own works to monstrous spiders and their slayers. By slaying one of the Great Spiders of Mirkwood, Bilbo joins a very select company of Tolkienian heroes: Eärendel the Mariner, the original character in Tolkien’s mythos (featured in the 1914 poem that was the very first piece of writing set in what later became ‘Middle-earth’; see below), was a spider-slayer. So too was Beren, the character Tolkien most identified with (even to the extent of having the name carved on his tombstone). And of course the inestimable Samwise Gamgee, whom Tolkien in some moods considered ‘the chief hero’ of The Lord of the Rings (Letter to Waldman; Letters p. 161), was if not a spider-slayer then certainly the victor in an epic battle with one, dealing her a near-mortal blow. As with Tolkien’s eagles (see p. 222), the Spiders represented a mythological element that originally occupied an important but specific part in the story which, over time, grew as they found their way into other parts of the tales. In this case, Ungoliant’s killing of the Two Trees of Valinor was the primal element going back to the original Lost Tales: the scene in which she and Melko make their alliance, sneak into Valinor, destroy the trees of light, and escape altered in details and tone over decades of revision but remained the same in essence all through the long evolution of the story.³

It is to this ur-story that our manuscript refers when, early in the next chapter (p. 380), Balin angers the Elvenking by asking

‘Are the spiders your tame beasts or your pets, if killing them makes you angry?’

Asking such a question made him angry at any rate, for the woodelves think the spiders vile and unclean.

This elven distaste for spiders goes all the way back to ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’ (BLT II.10–11), where we are told

Tinúviel danced until the evening faded late, and there were many white moths abroad. Tinúviel being a fairy⁴ minded them not as many of the children of Men do, although she loved not beetles, and spiders will none of the Eldar touch because of Ungweliantë [Ungoliant].⁵

Of the four earlier appearances of monstrous spiders in the legendarium before The Hobbit, three involve Ungoliant, who in initial conception is less a physical creature than an embodiment of what an earlier century would have called ‘Chaos and Old Night’ (Alexander Pope, The Dunciad): Primal Night itself made incarnate in monstrous form. The Gnomish Lexicon of 1917 glosses one of her many names, Muru, as ‘a name of the Primeval Night. personified as Gwerlum [Gloom-weaver], or Gungliont [‘the Spider of Night’] (Parma Eldalamberon, vol. XI, pp. 58 & 43; BLT I.index & 153). Gwerlum and (Un)Gungliont are themselves two earlier forms of her Gnomish (Sindarin) and Qenya (Quenya) names; Ungwë Lianti/Ungweliante (‘Spider-spinner’) and Wirilómë (‘weaver-of-shadows’) are other variants of the latter, while Ungoliant is the ultimate form of her name in Sindarin. Christopher Tolkien’s index to The Book of Lost Tales part I identifies Móru as ‘The “Primeval Night” personified in the great Spider’ (BLT I.288), and the earliest text describing her and her lair bears out this conception:

a region of the deepest gloom . . . a dark cavern in the hills, and webs of darkness lie about so that the black air might be felt heavy and choking about one’s face and hands . . . here on a time were the Moon and Sun imprisoned afterward; for here dwelt the primeval spirit Móru whom even the Valar know not whence or when she came . . . she has always been; and she it is who loveth still to dwell in that black place taking the guise of an unlovely spider, spinning a clinging gossamer of gloom that catches in its mesh stars and moons and all bright things that sail the airs . . . [S]he sucked light greedily, and it fed her, but she brought forth only that darkness that is a denial of all light. (BLT I.151–2)

Ungoliant’s greatest deed beyond doubt was her destruction of the Two Trees of Valinor, which plunged the world into darkness. But in the early stages of the mythology she remained a threat even after withdrawing back into her underground lair in Eruman far to the south (‘Melko held the North and Ungweliant the South’; BLT I.182); we are even told that the sun and moon travel an equatorial path to avoid the peril posed by these two archfoes (ibid.). The Valar’s successful attempt to bring light to the world once again through the creation of the Sun and Moon (‘The Tale of the Sun and Moon’, BLT I.174–206; see also Silm.99–101) was almost undone by the Great Spider, according to Tolkien’s outlines and notes for the (unwritten) ‘Tale of Eärendel’.

In this original version of Tolkien’s cosmology, implicitly evoked by the line in The Hobbit manuscript

The woodelves lingered in the world in the twilight before the raising of the sun and moon, and in the great woods that grew after sun rise

— p. 315; italics mine

(that is, after the sun’s first rising in the West), the Sun and Moon were ships bearing the last lights of the Golden and the Silver Tree. Guided by a guardian Maia (Urwendi and Ilinsor, respectively), each sailed above the earth and out the Gates of Night in the west, then doubled back and sailed ‘behind’ or under the earth each night to re-emerge again in the east for the next dawn – a conception borrowed from Egyptian mythology, where Ra sails the sun-barge through the Duat or Underworld each night, battling his way past Apep the Devourer, a great serpent who was for the Egyptians the embodiment of Chaos, to emerge triumphant at dawn each day (a mythic journey celebrated in the so-called ‘Book of the Dead’, a set of ritual texts known to the Egyptians as The Book of Going Forth by Day). Similarly, Tolkien projected a tale wherein Ungoliant ensnared the Sun in her webs while it sailed under the earth: with the result that the Sun was no longer enchanted, only the Moon:

Urwendi imprisoned by Móru (upset out of the boat by Melko and only the Moon has been magic since). The Faring Forth and the Battle of Erumáni would release her and rekindle the Magic Sun.

—‘The History of Eriol or Ælfwine and the End of the Tales’

(BLT II.286).

Unfortunately, this elusive plot-thread, which underlay several major prophecies in The Book of Lost Tales, never found full expression in a written story.⁶

Ungoliant’s only other major appearance in the mythos was to have occurred in ‘The Tale of Eärendel’ – but, as Christopher Tolkien observed, ‘the great tale was never written’ (BLT II.252) and the story is known to us only through extensive outlines and synopses in several Silmarillion texts. Thus, an early outline simply lists an encounter with ‘Ungweliantë’ as one of the major incidents on Eärendel’s great voyage into the Firmament but gives no details. The 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ is succinct, but specific, following Eärendel’s decision to sail seeking Valinor:

Here follow the marvellous adventures of Wingelot [Eärendel’s ship] in the seas and isles, and of how Eärendel slew Ungoliant in the South.

—HME IV.38.

The 1930 Quenta adds a little to this in its equally brief account:

In the Lay of Eärendel is many a thing sung of his adventures in the deep and in lands untrodden, and in many seas and many isles. Ungoliant in the South he slew, and her darkness was destroyed, and light came to many regions which had yet long been hid.

—HME IV.152.

But the Lay itself remained unwritten; the closest Tolkien ever came to telling Eärendel’s story lay in two sets of poems, the first a group of four poems dating from the inception of the mythology [1914–15] telling of Eärendel’s voyages to furthest East and West and his glimpses of the Gates of Night and of Valinor: ‘Éalá Éarendel Engla Beorhtast’, ‘The Bidding of the Minstrel’, ‘The Shores of Faëry’, and ‘The Happy Mariners’ (all printed in BLT II.267–76). The second group began as a single poem, ‘Errantry’ ([circa 1931–2]; published in Oxford Magazine in 1933 and later collected as poem #3 in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil [1962]). This was slowly transformed through a dozen intermediate stages into the poem Bilbo sings in the House of Elrond, ‘Eärendil was a mariner’ (LotR.250–53). In his analysis of the chapter for the History of Middle-earth series (HME VII.84–105), Christopher Tolkien shows how his father recast the poem stage by stage. Most significantly for our purpose, in one of the intermediate versions he prints is the following account of the battle with Ungoliant, one of Eärendel’s greatest but most poorly documented deeds:

. . . unto Evernight [Eruman] he came,

and like a flaming star he fell:

his javelins of diamond

as fire into the darkness fell.

Ungoliant abiding there

in Spider-lair her thread entwined;

for endless years a gloom she spun

the Sun and Moon in web to wind.

She caught him in her stranglehold

entangled all in ebon thread,

and seven times with sting she smote

his ringéd coat with venom dread.⁷

His sword was like a flashing light

as flashing bright he smote with it;

he shore away her poisoned neb,

her noisome webs he broke with it.

Then shining as a risen star

from prison bars he sped away,

and borne upon a blowing wind

on flowing wings he fled away.

—lines 73–88 (HME VII.93).

This entire scene was deleted from the final typescripts of the poem, including the one that appeared in The Lord of the Rings.

The final appearance of the Great Spiders in the legendarium⁸ before Bilbo’s encounter with them in the wilds of Mirkwood is also the one closest to The Hobbit in tone and detail: Beren’s battles with giant spiders, descendents of Ungoliant. This scene was absent from most early versions of the Beren and Lúthien story,⁹ but it did feature prominently in the narrative poem ‘The Lay of Leithian’. In Canto III, lines 569–574 and 583–592, Tolkien describes Beren’s desperate journey from Taur-na-Fuin (the Forest of Night) to Doriath in these terms:

there mighty spiders wove their webs,

old creatures foul with birdlike nebs

that span their traps in dizzy air,

and filled it with clinging black despair,

and there they lived, and the sucked bones

lay white beneath on the dank stones—

... ever new

horizons stretched before his view,

as each blue ridge with bleeding feet

was climbed, and down he went to meet

battle with creatures old and strong

and monsters in the dark, and long,

long watches in the haunted night

while evil shapes with baleful light

in clustered eyes did crawl and snuff

beneath his tree

—(HME III.175–6).¹⁰

In the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion, which glosses Taur-na-Fuin as ‘Mirkwood’ (HME V.282), this is replaced by a similarly vivid passage written about the time The Hobbit was published:

Terrible was his southward journey . . . There spiders of the fell race of Ungoliant abode, spinning their unseen webs in which all living things were snared; and monsters wandered there that were born in the long dark before the Sun, hunting silently with many eyes. No food for Elves or Men was there in that haunted land, but death only. That journey is not accounted least among the great deeds of Beren, but he spoke of it to no one after, lest the horror return into his mind . . . (Silm.164).¹¹

Spiders or Spider-like?

As the preceding excerpts and quotes make clear, some of the details Tolkien gives when describing his spider-creatures do not correspond to real-world spiders. Leaving aside their size for the moment,¹² the Mirkwood spiders seem to have compound eyes like an insect (a feature they share with Shelob – cf. LotR.747 – and the things that beset Beren), whereas true arachnids have eight small separate eyes. Then too whereas spiders have tiny specialized legs that act as mandibles or mouth-parts Tolkien’s spiders are described as having a neb (a now-obsolete word meaning bill or beak; ‘Lay of Leithian’, Eärendil poem) or beak (LotR.756). We are not told specifically how the Mirkwood spiders poison their prey, but both Ungoliant (Eärendil poem) and Shelob (LotR.755) are described as having stings, another insect rather than spider feature (real spiders poison with their bite instead). Finally, spiders grow by shedding their carapaces, much as crustaceans do, yet we are told that Shelob has ‘age-old hide . . . ever thickened from within with layer on layer of evil growth’ (LotR.755). Not all of these features can be shown to be shared by all of Tolkien’s monstrous spiders, but he takes pains to connect them: Shelob is explicitly linked to the Mirkwood spiders as their progenitor, and to Ungoliant as her progeny (‘last child of Ungoliant to trouble the unhappy world’ – LotR.750). Ungoliant, Shelob, and the Mirkwood Spiders all share the ability to spin black webs (hence Ungoliant’s epithet ‘Gloom-weaver’; note her ‘ebon thread’ on p. 330 and see also LotR.750 and p. 303 above), which is not so far as I am aware true of any real-world spider.¹³

It can (and has) been argued that when Tolkien describes Shelob as a ‘monstrous spider creature’ (Letters p. 81) or states that Ungoliant ‘[took] the guise of . . . [a] spider’ (BLT I.152; emphasis mine) this implies his awareness of the deviation; they are meant to be spider-like rather than actual spiders. This is certainly possible, but the evidence (such as it is) is against it: in a letter to W. H. Auden, Tolkien wrote:

. . . I knew that the way [into Mordor] was guarded by a Spider. And if that has anything to do with my being stung by a tarantula when a small child, people are welcome to the notion . . . I can only say that I remember nothing about it, should not know it if I had not been told; and I do not dislike spiders particularly, and have no urge to kill them. I usually rescue those whom I find in the bath!

—JRRT to WHA, 7th June 1955; Letters p. 217.

This little bit of autobiography is important because tarantulas do not sting: they bite¹⁴ – a small point, but nevertheless suggestive. Tolkien cannot be faulted for forgetting such a detail, since he was only a toddler when the incident occurred, but its significance is that his account shows that even years after writing The Hobbit he was under the impression that spiders have stings. This strongly suggests that Tolkien’s other departures from spider physiology were simple mistakes, however uncharacteristic, rather than deliberate changes for effect – unlike, say, the Nazgûl’s mounts, where he expressly stated that he was not attempting historical accuracy in his depiction but merely drawing on the ‘semi-scientific mythology of the “Prehistoric”’ as inspiration (JRRT to Rhona Beare, 14th October 1958; Letters p. 282).¹⁵

In point of fact, Tolkien could not have been ‘stung by a tarantula’ as a child because these spiders are not native to the Orange Free State or indeed southern Africa at all. Instead, the name is locally applied to solifugae, an aggressive arachnid also known as ‘wind scorpions’, ‘sun-spiders’, or ‘camel spiders’ but in fact neither a spider nor a scorpion but a cousin of both.¹⁶ The true tarantula (L. tarantula) of southern Europe is a type of wolf spider, a free-ranging hunter very like the Mirkwood spider pictured in Tolkien’s halftone of Mirkwood (Plate VII [top]; cf. also Plate VII [detail]). The name’s most common usage today is through its application in the New World to various large hairy spiders of North, South, and Central America (Theraphosidae), some of which are so large that they can prey upon frogs, birds, and very small mammals (the so-called ‘bird-eating spiders’ and ‘monkey spider’).

In the end, it is perhaps unfair to hold Tolkien to a higher standard than God – or at least the authors of the Old Testament, which at one point describes grasshoppers as four-legged (Leviticus 11:20–23). After all, once the reader has accepted the idea of talking giant spiders (who speak in language that Bilbo can understand, unlike the wargs or even elves), quibbling over details seems, well, quibbling.

The Mirkwood Halftone

Finally, there is Tolkien’s illustration of the forest of Mirkwood which appeared in the first two printings of the English edition of The Hobbit (see Plate VII [top]). The picture itself has a rather complicated history, first discussed in Christopher Tolkien’s notes in Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien (1979) [picture #37] and again by Hammond and Scull in Artist & Illustrator (1995), pages 96–8 and 54–5, 58. In essence, Tolkien took a painting of Taur-na-Fuin he had made in 1928 to illustrate a scene from the story of Túrin Turambar and redrew it in black, white, and delicate shades of grey to serve as an illustration of Mirkwood in The Hobbit.¹⁷ While many of the trees in both pictures correspond exactly, point-by-point, he deleted the two elves from the original painting and instead inserted a big black spider in the foreground. While it’s impossible to tell exactly how large the spider is in this picture, if the same scale holds here as in the original painting (as seems to be the case), then comparison between the two shows that it is about half as large as an elf. While this may not seem all that big, especially since Tolkien’s elves were originally somewhat smaller than humans – after all, Bilbo is able to down one of these spiders with a single thrown stone – it still means they are a match for the halfling and dwarves, who are themselves considerably shorter than any full-grown man (Shelob and Ungoliant are, of course, much much larger).

It is not possible to make out many details of the spider as it appears in this picture, even with enlargement (see Plate VII [detail]), but it is interesting to note that it looks much more like a real spider than Tolkien’s description discussed in detail above would seem to indicate. There is no sign of compound eyes, for example, or any sort of neb or beak. It even roughly resembles a wolf spider, who like the Mirkwood spiders are highly mobile and aggressive in chasing down prey rather than remaining in webs. A very similar spider appears in a drawing Tolkien made ten years earlier, in 1927, to accompany Roverandom (see the illustration opposite page 27 in Scull & Hammond’s 1998 edition of this early work). Here we once again see a spider walking by, this time in pursuit of a lunar insect (probably a moonbeam or dragon-moth), its body about the same size as Rover, who we are told several times is a small dog. By contrast, both the lower left corner of the final version of Thrain’s Map (DAA.97) and the upper half of the final Wilderland Map (DAA.[399]) show spiders which are much more stylized in appearance, almost insectlike (though still with the correct number of legs).

(ii)
Butterflies

If Tolkien’s spiders are his own creation, not quite like anything else in fantasy literature before or since, the brief but memorable scene in which Bilbo discovers the ‘black emperor’ butterflies is by contrast a piece of strict fidelity to observed phenomena:

When at last poor little Bilbo . . . poked his head out of the leaves he was nearly blinded . . . The sun was shining brightly . . . he saw all round him a sea of dark green ruffled here and there by the breeze. And there were hundreds [of] butterflies. I expect they were a kind of ‘purple emperor’, but they were dark dark velvety black without any markings at all. (p. 305)

Not only are purple emperors (Apatura iris) quite real, but their preferred habitat is the upper canopy of mature oak forests. Tolkien even gets the time of year right when they can be seen in the greatest numbers (late summer), and may have known about the occasional rare dark (melanic) specimens, an aberration known as Apature iris ab. iole.¹⁸

Among Britain’s largest butterflies, with a wingspan of more than three inches (up to 84 mm), purple emperors are now almost extinct in England, limited mainly to the south-central portion of the isle (Wiltshire, Hampshire, and West Sussex). But at the time Tolkien was writing The Hobbit their range extended up into the Oxford area, and there are some indications that thirty or forty years earlier they could still be found in the Birmingham area when Tolkien was growing up there. It is entirely possible, therefore, that what Bilbo sees evokes such a vivid picture for the reader because Tolkien is drawing upon a real memory here, just as he used his memories of Switzerland in his descriptions of Rivendell and the Misty Mountains.

Where Tolkien departs from reality is not in his depiction of the butterflies but their predators, the tree-spiders (‘small ordinary ones’). These are almost certainly huntsman spiders of some sort (that is, free-range hunters who chase down their prey), but they seem purely fictional: no English spider is large enough to bring down butterflies of this size.¹⁹

(iii)
The Theseus Theme

One of the most remarkable features of the manuscript of The Hobbit, as will be readily apparent from this edition, is the degree to which the story remained essentially the same from the very first time it was set down in words through into the published book. There was great variation of phrasing, and many details changed – and details matter greatly to an author whose fictional world is as fully realized as Tolkien’s – but the essentials did not change. The Plot Notes and outlines show that at times he envisioned the story very differently from what he came to write, but once written it mostly stayed fixed.

This is not the case with the Mirkwood chapter, the only one in the book to undergo substantial re-writing before the book was published. In specific, Tolkien dropped what we may call the Theseus theme, wherein Bilbo uses a ball of spider-thread to find his way back to the path and, later, to help rescue his friends as well. At the same time, he inserted the story of the enchanted stream (which Medwed had warned them against before their entry into Mirkwood), Bombur’s being cast into a sleep from which they cannot awaken him, and the dwarves’ loss of their last arrows (thus providing an explanation for why they do not use them in their battles against the spiders or when ambushed by the elves). For more on the Enchanted Stream interpolation, see the section beginning on p. 347.

The Theseus theme derives from a very ancient folktale or myth, the story of Theseus and the minotaur.²⁰ In brief, like Bilbo Theseus set out with thirteen companions (in this case, as one of seven youths and seven maidens) from Athens, where his father was king, to travel to Crete as human sacrifices to the Minotaur, a bull-headed monster who preyed upon all who entered his Labyrinth. Ariadne, daughter of Crete’s King Minos, gave Theseus a ball of thread (and, in some versions of the story, a knife), with which he was able to find his way to the heart of the maze, kill the monster, and then find his way back out again by following the thread.²¹

Tolkien was certainly familiar with this myth, one of the most famous in all Greek literature: it is often forgotten that, as previously stated, Tolkien began his career as a Classical scholar, and did not switch to Old English until near the end of his second year at Oxford (Carpenter, pages 54–5 & 62–3). He was so proficient in Latin and Greek as a schoolboy that he not only took active part in his school’s Debating Society, where it was the custom to hold debates entirely in Latin, but once appeared as the ‘Greek Ambassador’, speaking entirely in (Classical) Greek (Carpenter, page 48). His very first published piece of creative writing, ‘The Battle of the Eastern Field’ [1911], was a parody of one of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome [1842], wherein Lord Macaulay had attempted the very Tolkienesque enterprise of trying to re-create the lost ballads he believed lay behind the great legends of Roman history, the ‘lost tales’ behind once-familiar but now almost forgotten events – in short, an ‘asterisk-text’ of the kind that fascinated Tolkien.²² Nor did he abandon interest in his former subject once he found his vocation in Gothic, Old English, Middle English, and Old Norse; as late as 1936, roughly half a decade after writing this chapter of The Hobbit, he compared Virgil’s Aeneid to Beowulf as examples of ‘greater and lesser things’, respectively, clearly identifying the greatest work of Old English poetry as the lesser of the two (‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, page 22).

Tolkien’s use of the Theseus story is typically subtle: he never mentions any names from the classical tale, and knowledge of the myth is not necessary to follow his own tale. Rather than a gift from the princess Ariadne, his thread is a ball of spider-thread unintentionally left for him by the arachnid he killed, ‘horrible string’ wildly spun out in her battle with him, that enables Bilbo to find his way through the trackless forest – and it may be significant that this Spider is the only character in the book explicitly identified as female (see Text Note 11 for Plot Notes A and Text Note 22 following Chapter VIII),²³ or that Bladorthin, echoing Medwed’s earlier warning (p. 242), speaks of Mirkwood in terms that make it sound very like a maze or labyrinth:

‘Don’t stray off the track – if you do it is a thousand to one you’ll never find the path again, or ever get out of Mirkwood; and then I don’t suppose I (or anyone else) will hear of you again!’ (p. 244).

Aided by this thread, Bilbo is able to find the path again, whereupon he indulges in the very hobbitlike act of making a little feast on the few remaining overlooked crumbs among their abandoned food-bags. As with his earlier experience when separated from the dwarves under the Misty Mountains (p. 198), he decides he is duty-bound to try to find and rescue his lost comrades. That he is mounting a rescue expedition is a point made more strongly in the draft than in the book where, still lost himself, he decides to look for his missing companions in the direction from which he thinks he heard cries for help the night before; here he has already reached the safety of the path and decides to go back into the treacherous woods after them.

The scene where he names his little sword Sting is absent, being introduced for the first time in the typescript, although he is still changed by the experience of ‘winning his battle all by himself alone in the dark’ (words that could apply equally well to his earlier battle of wits with Gollum or his later struggle with himself in the tunnel leading to Smaug’s lair). Bilbo is also comforted in his solitude by the thought of his string, which has already proven its usefulness. Equipped with sword in one hand, ball of string in the other, and his magic ring upon his finger he sets out to find the dwarves, first following the spider-thread back to the spot where he killed the spider and then exploring onwards until he finds ‘a place of dense black shadow like a patch of night’. This was expanded in the typescript first to ‘a place of dense black shadow, black even for that forest, like a patch of night that had [not >] never gone away’ (Marq. 1/1/30:1), then that section of the page was cut away and new text pasted in its place: ‘. . . like a patch of midnight that had never been cleared away’ (Marq. 1/1/58:10), the same reading as in the published book (DAA.209). This reference to primordial night is probably a deliberate evocation of Ungoliant, the Spider of Night; cf. p. 328.

Having found his friends, he proceeds to rescue them as in the published book, with the exception that he forgets to tie off the string first and is thus forced to retrace the wild zig-zag course he took while dodging about mocking the spiders before he can once again find the main thread leading back to the forest-path. In this original conception, Bilbo’s revealing the secret of his ring to his fellow travellers was specifically tied up with the need for him to rewind the string beneath the eyes of the angry spiders, whereas in the published account it is so he can use it in his decoy mission to lure spiders away and improve their odds of escaping. The thread’s importance is stressed by the fact that Bilbo is ‘ready to collapse’ at the thought of having lost it; with its assistance, he succeeds in bringing his rescued friends back to the path.²⁴

That Bilbo and his friends regain the path has another significance. In the published book, when captured by the elves they are hopelessly lost in the woods, making ‘one last despairing effort’ to find the path before they die of thirst and hunger. The dwarves are not even sure of where they are or which way they are going, just ‘stagger[ing] on in the direction which eight out of the thirteen of them guessed to be the one in which the path lay’ (DAA.222). But in the draft, Bilbo and twelve of the dwarves are back on the path and on their way out of the forest when ‘waylaid’ by the wood-elves. They might indeed have ‘[fallen] down and died’ of starvation before reaching their goal, particularly given the dangers of the Marsh ahead, but the fact remains that they were ambushed while pursuing their quest, not while off on a disastrous tangent; this somewhat undercuts the element of rescue-by-capture in the final version.²⁵

Finally, we should note that this original version of events bears a striking similarity to another dwarven quest as Tolkien set it down some twenty-odd years later: the attempt of Thrain (as he was by then called) to regain his father’s hoard. The opening chapter of The Hobbit included a brief account of how after the death of the former King under the Mountain in the mines of Moria, his son, Gandalf’s father, ‘went away on the third of March a hundred years ago last Tuesday, and has never been seen (by you) since’. As Bladorthin tells Gandalf,

Your father went away to try his own luck with [the map] after his father was killed [in the mines of Moria]; and lots of adventures he had, but he never got near the Mountain.

– in fact, winding up a prisoner of the Necromancer (p. 73). Many years later, when drafting the section of Appendix A about Durin’s Folk, Tolkien returned to Thrain’s story to flesh out this episode with a few more details about the fate of the last bearer of one of the seven Rings of Power given to the dwarves:

Partly by the . . . power of the Ring . . . Thráin after some years became restless and discontented. He could not put the thought of gold and gems out of his mind. Therefore at last when he could bear it no longer his heart turned again to Erebor and he resolved to return. He said little to Thorin of what was in his heart. But with Balin and Dwalin and a few others he arose and said farewell and departed ([Third Age year] 2841) [from their homes in the Blue Mountains].

Little indeed is known of what happened to him afterwards. It would seem (from afterknowledge) that no sooner was he abroad with few companions (and certainly after he came at length back into Rhovanion) he was hunted by the emissaries of Sauron. Wolves pursued him, orcs waylaid him, evil birds shadowed his path, and the more he tried to go north the more he was driven back. One dark night, south of Gladden and the eaves of Mirkwood, he vanished out of their camp, and after long search in vain his companions gave up hope (and returned to Thorin). Only long after was it known that he had been taken alive and brought to the pits of Dol Guldur (2845). There he was tormented and the Ring taken from him; and there at last (2850) he died.

—HME XII.280–81.

The parallel passage in the final book differs only by slightly improved clarity and phrasing:

. . . the more he strove to go north the more misfortunes opposed him. There came a dark night when he and his companions were wandering in the land beyond Anduin, and they were driven by a black rain to take shelter under the eaves of Mirkwood. In the morning he was gone from the camp, and his companions called him in vain. They searched for him many days, until at last giving up hope they departed and came at length back to Thorin . . .

—LotR. 1114.

Had Bilbo and the twelve remaining dwarves somehow made it through Mirkwood (and although in desperate straits we know they are very near the eastern border), they could hardly have continued their original quest any more than Thrain’s companion did, though no outline continues the story in that direction to give a hint of what they might have done next: the capture by wood-elves had been foreseen as far back as the sketchy list of plot-points given back in Chapter VII (the First Outline, p. 229), although the means whereby the dwarves would escape remained undetermined for a long time (contrast the evolving ideas in Plot Notes A on p. 296 with Plot Notes B on p. 362). It is not unreasonable, however, to think the much later account of Thrain’s loss an extrapolation by Tolkien, an author fond of reusing favorite motifs, from a plot-thread not followed up on in The Hobbit. Both dwarven expeditions, after encounters with wolves and orcs, lost their leaders in Mirkwood (and not far from the edges of the woods in both cases), neither group knew where their leader had gone or who had taken him, each captive was imprisoned in a dungeon, and father and son were even carrying the same map at the time they were captured.²⁶

The one incongruity between this later account of Thrain’s loss in Appendix A and that given earlier in the opening chapter of The Hobbit is the fact that Thorin should have known far more about his father’s fate than seems to be the case, since two of Thrain’s companions from that earlier expedition, Balin and Dwalin, are among his own companions on this quest. Although a relatively minor point, this is still notable as one of the very few points where the two books fail to completely sync up, like Bilbo’s apology to Gloin at the Council of Elrond (see LotR.266 and also Text Note 36 following Chapter VIII).

(iv)
Bilbo the Warrior

Finally, we should also note a major threshold in Bilbo’s character development that occurs in this chapter. Although Bilbo acquires his knife quite early in the story (in the troll’s lair, near the end of what eventually came to be Chapter II), he does not use it in fight with the goblins (Chapter IV), or against the wolves (Chapter VI). He pulls it out but does nothing more than hold it ready during his encounter with Gollum (Chapter V).²⁷ Here in Chapter VIII he uses it to kill an enemy in self-defense, the spider having attacked first (an achievement which ‘made quite a difference to Mr Baggins. He felt a different person . . .’ – p. 309). That he is indeed ‘much bolder and fiercer’ is shortly borne out in the spider battle, where Bilbo attacks first, initiating combat to save his friends (specifically, Bombur) and kills great numbers of the giant spiders. This aspect of the hobbit’s character will see its fullest development in Plot Notes B; see p. 361ff.