Chapter IX
In the Halls of the Elvenking

Plot Notes B having done their work, Tolkien was able to resume writing the story at the point he had dropped it, probably having stopped at the beginning of the preceding school term and resuming in the next vacation.

As noted at the end of the preceding chapter, at this point in the manuscript there is a change in the kind of paper Tolkien used. By itself, this might not be enough to prove that a gap in composition had intervened between what are now Chapters VIII and IX of the book, but the presence of Plot Notes B, which cover precisely the material to which the next chapter was devoted, and Tolkien’s statement that there were two points where he stopped writing for nearly a year, make it clear that this marks the first of those two major breaks in the composition.

The text resumes on manuscript page 119 (1/1/9:1); as previously noted, on this new kind of paper Tolkien wrote only on the front (as opposed to front-and-back, his practice with the preceding sheets). Therefore henceforth 1 page = 1 sheet.

So they just stopped dead, or sat down, and waited. But Bilbo slipped on his ring; and that is why, when the elves bound the dwarves with ropes in a long line (one behind the other), and counted them, they did not bind or count the little hobbit. Nor did they hear or feel him trotting along behind the torch-light as they led off their prisoners into the forest. Each dwarf was blindfold, and none of them had any idea of the way they were taking; but Bilbo had tied his thread to a tree by the path, and was unwinding it all the way along.^TN1

At last it gave out. He had just time to fasten one end to a big stone and lay it beside an huge tree, when he saw that only a little way in front the torches had stopped. They had come to a wooden bridge, under which a dark river flowed swift and strong; and at the far end of the bridge on the other side of the water opened the dark mouth of a huge cave in the side of a steep slope of trees that ran down till their feet were in the stream.

Soon the elves and their prisoners began to cross the bridge. Bilbo did not like the look of the cave mouth, and for some time he hesitated; but in the end he scuttled over the bridge and was just in time to pass the gates of the Wood-elves Cavern before it closed behind them with a clang.

The passages were lit with torch light, and the woodelves sang as they marched along the twisting, crossing, and echoing paths. These were not like the goblin-cities: smaller, less deep underground, and filled with a cleaner air. In a great hall with pillars cut out of the living stone, the Elven-king sat on a chair of carven wood. On his head was [a] crown of red-berries, for the autumn was come again. In the spring he wore a crown of woodland flowers. In his hand he had a carven staff of oak.

The prisoners were brought before him, and he told his men to unbind them: ‘for they need no ropes <in> here’ said he, ‘there is no escape through my magic doors, for those who [know not >] are brought once inside’.

Long and searchingly he questioned the dwarves^TN2 about their doings and where they were going, and where they were coming from.^TN3 But they were surly and wd. not answer him, any more than Gandalf had. Indeed less; for they were angry at their treatment.

‘What have we done, O king’ said Balin,^TN4 the eldest left now Gandalf was gone; ‘Is it a crime to be lost in the forest, trapped by spiders; Are the spiders your tame beasts or your pets, if killing them makes you angry?’

[That made >] Asking such a question made him angry at any rate, for the woodelves think the spiders vile and unclean. ‘It is a crime to walk in my realm without leave’ said the king. ‘Do you forget that you were in my realm, using the road my people have made? Do you forget you twice^TN5 pursued and vexed my people in the forest, and roused the spiders with your riot and clamour? At least I have a right to know what brings you here. And if you will not tell me now, I will keep you here until you have learnt sense and manners’.

So he ordered the dwarves each to be put in different cells, and given [drink &] food, but not allowed to pass the doors of their little prisons, until one at least of them was willing to tell him more.

Poor little Bilbo – it was a weary long time he lived in that deep place, all alone and always in hiding, never daring hardly to take off his ring, hardly daring to sleep, even tucked away in the darkest and remotest corners he could find. For something to do, he took to wandering about the wood-king’s palace. Magic shut the gates, but he could sometimes get out, if he was quick. Companies of the wood-elves, sometimes with their king at their head would from time to time ride out [on >] to hunting, or to other business in the woods or the lands to the East.^TN6 Then if Bilbo was very nimble he could [nip >] slip out just behind them; though it was a dangerous business. More than once he was nearly caught in the doors as they crashed together when the last elf passed; yet he did not dare to march among them, because of his shadow,^TN7 and for fear of being bumped into and discovered. It was not often that he went out, because it was so difficult to get back[. If he >], and he did not wish to desert the dwarves; nor indeed did he know where in the world to go without them. Unless he kept up with the hunting elves all day – a hard and tiring task – he would somehow have to wander about miserably in the forest alone, until a chance of return came. Then he was very hungry, for he was no hunter. Inside the caves he could pick up a living of some sort by stealing food from store or table when no one was at hand. ‘I am like a burglar that cannot get away, but must go on miserably burgling the same house day after day’ he thought. ‘This is the dreariest and dullest part of all this wretched, tiresome, uncomfortable adventure! I wish I was back in my hobbit-hole by my own warm fireside, with the lamp shining.’^TN8

Eventually, however, Bilbo by watching and following the guards, and taking what chances he could, managed to find where each dwarf was. He found all their 12 cells in different parts of the underground palace, and soon he was beginning to know his way about quite well.

What was his surprise one day to overhear the guards talking, and to hear that there was another dwarf in prison too – in a specially deep dark place. He guessed, of course, that it was Gandalf. And he soon found out that he was right, though it was some time before he could manage to find the place [or >] when no one was about, and have a word with the chief dwarf.

Gandalf was too wretched to be angry any longer at his misfortune.^TN9 and he could hardly believe it when he heard one evening Bilbo’s little voice at the keyhole. Very soon [they >], however, he came to the other side of the door, and spoke long and eagerly with the hobbit outside.

So it was that Bilbo was able in secret to take Gandalf’s message to each of the other dwarves in prison, that the chief dwarf was there too, and that no one was to reveal their [business >] errand to the king – not yet, not till Gandalf gave the word. For Gandalf was determined not to ransom himself & his companions with promises of a share in the treasure, until all hope of escaping some other way had disappeared. The other dwarves were almost equally determined – they [knew >] feared the woodelves [share >] would claim all too big a share and the shares of each of them would suffer seriously. Often now they wished they had Bladorthin with them. Before he had always seemed to turn up to help them out of a fix, but now probably all the dark width of Mirkwood was between them. They hoped that one day he would turn up smiling and persuade the grim Elf-king, but they did not expect it. Nor did it happen. From this fix it was just purely Mr Baggins [entirely] on his own, who rescued them.^TN10

This is how it happened. Bilbo nosing and wandering about had discovered a very interesting thing. The great gates were not the only entrance to the [Caves >] Caverns. A stream flowed under part of the lowest caves and joined the main forest-stream a little further to the East, beyond the steep slope [in >] from which the main mouth opened.

Where this underground water came forth out of the hillside there was a water-gate. The rocky roof came down close to the water, and from it a portcullis could be dropped right to the bed of the stream to prevent anyone coming in or out that way. But it was often open for a good deal of traffic went out by the water gate; and if anyone had come in by it, he would have found himself in a dark rough tunnel leading only into the hill. But at one point the roof of the tunnel had been cut away and covered with great oaken trap-doors. These [were in the >] opened up into the king’s cellars. There were barrels and barrels and barrels; for the woodelves, and their king specially loved wine; but none grew in those parts,^TN11 and it was brought from far away, from their kindred in the south, or from the vineyards of men in distant lands. Hiding by one of the huge [> large] barrels Bilbo discovered the trapdoors and their use, and listening to the talk heard how wine came up the rivers or over land to the Long Lake and a town of men that had grown up there, built out on bridges far into the lake as a protection against enemies of all sorts and especially against the dragon of the Mountain.

From the Lake-town^TN12 it was brought up the Forest River. The barrels were often all just fastened together like big rafts and poled or rowed against the stream; sometimes they were piled on flat boats. When the barrels were empty they cast them through the trapdoors, opened the water-gate and out the barrels floated on the stream, bobbing along while they were carried by the current to a place where the bank jutted out far down the stream and near to the very Eastern edge of Mirkwood. There they were collected and tied together and floated back to Lake town which stood near the place where the Forest river ran into the Lake.

For a long time Bilbo used to think about this water gate, and wonder how [> if] it could be used for the escape of his friends. At last he had a desperate idea.

The evening meal had been taken to the prisoners. The guards were tramping away down the passages taking the torch-light with them leaving everything in darkness. Then Bilbo heard the king’s butler, bidding the chief of the guards goodnight. ‘And come down with me’ he said ‘and taste the new wine that has just come in. I shall be hard at work clearing the cellars of the empty wood [far into >] tonight; so let us have a drink first to help the labour’.^TN13

Bilbo thought at last the chance had come when his idea might be tried. He followed the butler and the chief of the guards, until he saw them sit in one of the cellars; and soon they began to drink the wine and to make merry. What luck favoured him here, I cannot tell. It must be potent wine to make a wood-elf drowsy. But this it would seem was the heady brew of the great gardens of Dorwinion in the warm South, not meant for his soldiers or his servants, but for the king’s feasts only, and for smaller bowls, not the butler’s jugs. Soon the chief guard fell asleep and not long after the butler put his head on the table and snored beside him.^TN14

Then in crept the hobbit, and soon the chief guard had no keys; but Bilbo was going as fast as he could, [though his bundle >] heavy though the great bunch seemed to his small arms, along the passages to the cells. His heart was in his mouth, in spite of his ring, for he could not prevent an occasional clink, which set him all a tremble.

First he unlocked Balin’s door and locked it again as soon as the dwarf was outside. Balin was most surprised, I can tell you, for Bilbo had yet said nothing about his idea. [He wanted >] Glad though he was to get out of his wearisome little stony room, he wanted to know what Bilbo was going to do and all about it.

‘No time just now’ said the hobbit. ‘You just follow me. We must all keep together, and not risk getting separated. [If you >] We all must go or none, and this is our last chance. If this is found out, we’ll never have another. Goodness knows where the king will put you then, with chains on hand and feet, probably, too’.

So he went from door to door until his following had grown to twelve; and they were none too nimble after their long imprisonment. Bilbo’s heart thumped every time they bumped into one another, or grumbled or whispered in the dark. ‘Drat the dwarvish racket!’ he said often to himself. Still nothing happened, and no one met them. As a matter of fact there was a great feast in the woods that night, ere the winter should come on; and in the halls above there was merrymaking too.^TN15

[The last >] At last they came to Gandalf’s dungeon, far down in a deep place, and fortunately [not far >] near to the cellars.

‘Upon my word’ said Gandalf, when Bilbo opened the door, and whispered to him to come out and join his friends, ‘upon my word the wizard spoke true, as usual. A pretty fine burglar you make it seems, when the time comes. I’m sure we are at all forever at your service, whatever happens after this. But what comes next?’

At last Bilbo felt the time had come to explain his idea, but he did not feel at all sure how the dwarves would take it. And he was quite right. They did not like it at all at first.

‘We shall be bruised and battered, or drowned, for certain’ they [said >] muttered. ‘We thought you had got some sensible idea, when you managed to get hold of the keys; but this is a mad notion’.

‘Very well’ said Bilbo very downcast, and also rather annoyed, ‘Come along back to your nice cells, and I will lock you all in, and we shall be all happy and comfortable, and as we were, and no harm done’.

The [mere] thought of it was too much for them. So in the end they just had to do as he suggested, because of course it was out of the question for them to try to find their way up into the upper halls, or to fight their way out of the gates that closed by magic.

Into the cellar they crept past the door through which the chief guard and the butler cd be seen still happily snoring with smiles upon their faces. There would be a different expression on the chief guard’s face next day; but before they went on Bilbo kindheartedly put the keys back on his belt.

‘That will save him some of the trouble’ he thought. ‘He wasn’t a bad fellow – and how it will puzzle ’em all too. They will [wonder >] think that we had a very strong magic indeed to pass between locked doors and disappear. Disappear! We have got to get busy very quick, if that is to happen.’

Balin was told off to watch the guard and the butler, and give warning if they stirred. There was little time to spare. Before long as Bilbo knew [the elves whose >] some elves were under orders to come down, and get the empty barrels through the trap-door into the stream. There they were already standing in rows in the middle of the floor waiting to be [stuffed >] pushed away.

Some were wine barrels, and these could not be opened without a deal of noise, or easily secured again.^TN16 But among them were many others that had been used for bringing other stuffs of all sorts to the king’s palace. They soon found thirteen with plenty room enough for a dwarf each. In fact some were too roomy, and the dwarfs as they climbed in, thought anxiously of the shaking and bumping they would get inside. Bilbo did his best to find straw and such like stuff to pack them in as cosily as could be.^TN17 The last he had to stuff himself, and fasten on the lid. Soon twelve dwarves were packed. Gandalf^TN18 gave a lot of trouble, and turned and twisted in his tub and grumbled like a dog in a small kennel. Last came Balin, who now left his watch. Not a bit too soon. Bilbo had hardly finished fixing on his lid: when there came a sound of voices and lights. A number of elves came laughing and talking into the cellars, and singing snatches of song.

They had left a feast in one of the halls and were bent on returning as soon as they could.^TN19

‘Where is old Galion the butler’ said one. ‘I haven’t seen him at the tables tonight. He ought to be here now, to show us what is to be done.’

‘I shall be angry if the old slowcoach is late’ said another. ‘I have no wish to wait down here, while the song is up’.

‘Ha! ha!’ came a cry ‘here is the old villain, with his head on a jug’ Galion did not at all like being shaken and wakened; and still less being laughed at.

‘You’re late’ he said. ‘Here am I waiting and waiting while you fellows drink and enjoy yourselves and forget your tasks. Small wonder, if I fall asleep for weariness’.

‘Small wonder’ said they ‘when the explanation stands close to hand. Come give us a draught of the same, and we will fall to. No need to wake the old turn-key guard. He has had his share by the looks of it.’ So they drank once round and became mighty merry all of a sudden. ‘Save us Galion’ cried some. ‘You began your feasting early. You have stacked some full casks here instead of empty ones, if there is anything in weight’.

‘Get on with your job’ grumbled the butler ‘There is nothing in the feeling of weight in an idle toss-pot’s arms. Those are the ones to go and no others. Do as I say’.

‘[On > Well >] Very well very well’ they cried ‘On your own head be it, if you have the king’s best wine pushed into the river, for the lake men to make merry on for nothing; or his full buttertubs.’^TN20

Roll – roll – roll – roll.

roll-roll-rolling down the hole

Heave-ho Splash-plump

down they go! down they bump!

So they sang as first one [tub and then >] barrel then another rumbled to the dark opening, and was pushed off [with a >] into the dark water some feet below. Some were wine-barrels, or tubs really empty. Some were tubs neatly packed with a dwarf each. Down they all went together bump on top of one another, jostling in the water, bobbing away down the current and knocking against the walls of the tunnel.

It was at this point that Bilbo [wasn’t in >] saw the weak point of his plan. Very likely you have already thought of it, and are laughing at him; but I don’t suppose you would have done half as well yourself in his place. Of course he wasn’t in a barrel himself[; and so >]! It looked as if he would get left behind and lose his friends altogether (nearly all of them had disappeared through the dark trapdoor already) and have to stay lurking as a permanent burglar in the elf-caves for ever!^TN21 For even suppose he could have got out of the front-gates at once (which he couldn’t)^TN22 he had a precious small chance of [catching >] finding them all again before they came to the place where all the barrels were collected. Goodness knows, too, what would happen there, for he had not had time to tell the dwarves all he had learnt, or what his idea was of the best thing to do at that point.

The elves being very merry were beginning to sing a song round the river-door. Some had gone to haul on the ropes which pulled up the watergate ready to let out the barrels when they were all afloat below.

Down the swift dark stream you go

Back to woods you once did know

Leave the halls and caverns deep,

Leave the northern mountains steep,

where the forest wide and dim

Stoops in shadow grey and grim!

Float beyond the world of trees

Out into the whispering breeze,

past the rushes, past the reeds,

past the marsh’s waving weeds;

through the mist that riseth white

Up from mere and pool at night!

Follow follow stars that leap,

Up the heavens high and steep

[Through the >] Turn when dawn comes over land

over rapid over sand

South away and south away

Seek the sunlight and the day,

back to pasture back to mead

where the kine and oxen feed

Back to gardens on the hills

where the berry swells and fills

under sunlight under day

South away and south away

Down the swift dark stream you go

Back to <woods> you once did know!^TN23

Now the last barrel was being rolled to the opening. In despair poor little Bilbo caught hold of it, and was pushed over the edge with it. Down into the water he fell, splash!, in the cold dark water. He came up spluttering clinging to the barrel; but he could not climb on top of it, for every time he tried, it rolled round and ducked him under again.

He heard the elves still singing in the cellars above. Then the trapdoors went to with a boom, and their voices faded away. He was in the dark tunnel, [cold >] floating in icy water, all alone – for you can’t count friends that are all packed up in barrels, can you? Very soon a grey patch came in the darkness ahead. He heard the creak of the water gate being hauled up; and he found he was in the midst of a bobbing and bumping mass of casks and tubs all pressing together to pass through under the arch and out into the open stream. He had as much as he could do to prevent himself from being hustled and battered to bits. At last the jostling mass began to break up and swing off one by one under the stony arch and away away. He saw now that it could have been no good at all, if he had managed to sit on his barrel – there was no room to spare, not even for a hobbit, between the barrel and the stooping [> suddenly stooping] roof where the gate was.

Out they went under the overhanging branches of the trees on either bank. Bilbo wondered for a moment what the dwarves were feeling, and if a lot of water was getting inside their tubs. Some of the barrels that bobbed by him in the gloom seemed pretty low in the water; and he guessed these had dwarves inside. ‘I hope I [> we] put the lids on well’ thought he. But he was really far more anxious about himself. He was shivering with cold, and wondered if he would die of it, before the luck turned, and if he would be able to hang on much longer, even long enough for there to be a chance of getting near the bank, and slipping off onto dry land.^TN24

His chance came all right. The [eddy] current carried several barrels close <ashore> at one point, and there they stuck for a while against some hidden root. Bilbo took the opportunity to scramble up the side of his barrel while it was held firm against another. Up he crawled like a drowned rat, and lay on the top spread out to keep the balance as best he could; and wondered whether he wouldn’t be suddenly rolled off into the water again when they started. He did not have to wonder long. Soon they broke free and turn and twisted off down the stream again and out into the main current. He had a dreadful job to stick on, but he managed it. Luckily he was very light and the dwarf inside (actually it was Bombur) was fat, and probably too frightened to stir.^TN25 All the same it felt like trying to ride [a round-bellied >] without [cancelled: reins] bridle or stirrups a round-bellied pony that was always thinking of rolling on the grass.

So at last he came to a place where the trees on either side got thinner. The paler sky could be seen between them. The dark river opened out into a wider place and was joined by the main water of the Forest Stream flowing from [> past] the king’s great doors.^TN26 There was a pale sheet of water no longer overshadowed but with dancing and broken reflections of cloud and star upon it. Here the incoming water of the Forest River swept them all away to the North Bank, where [a long shore of >] a regular bay had been eaten away walled by a jutting cape of hard rock. There was a stony gravely shore, where most of the casks ran aground, though some went on to thump against the stony pier. But there were people on the look-out on the banks. All the barrels were poled and pushed together into the shallows; and there they were left till morning. Poor dwarves! Bilbo slipped off and waded ashore, and sneaked off to the huts by the water’s edge. He no longer thought twice about picking up a supper uninvited if he got the chance; he had been obliged to do it for so long; and he knew what it was now only too well to be really hungry not just interested in the dainties of a well-filled larder. He caught a glimpse of fire too, which appealed to him with his dripping and ragged clothes clinging to him cold & clammy.

There is no need to tell you of his adventures that night, for now we are drawing near the end of the journey, and the last great end of the adventure,^TN27 and we must be hurrying on. He was given away by his wet footsteps and the trail of the drippings and there was a fine commotion in the riverside village when he escaped with a loaf and flagon [> water-flask] and a pie which didn’t belong to him into the woods. He had to pass the night wet as he was, but the flagon helped him to do that; actually he lay <on> some dry leaves and dozed although the year was getting late and the air was chilly.^TN28

He woke with a sneeze! It was grey morning. There was a merry racket down by the river. They were making up a raft, and would soon be off down to the Lake. Bilbo sneezed again! He was no longer dripping, but he was cold all over. He scrambled down [as best he could >] as fast as his stiff legs would take him, and managed in the general business to get onto the mass of casks now all lashed together. Luckily there was no sun to cast awkward shadows.^TN29 There was a mighty pushing of poles, and a heaving and <illegible>^TN30 of men [> elves] standing in the shallow water.

‘This is a heavy load’ some grumbled. ‘They float too deep – some of these are never empty, I’ll swear’ said another. ‘Had they come ashore in the light we might have had a look inside’ they said. ‘No time now’ <said> the raft-men ‘Shove off.’

And off they went slowly at first until they passed the little point of rock fending off with their poles, and caught the main stream, and went swiftly off down down towards the Lake.^TN31

Once again there is no chapter break between what became the end of Chapter IX and the start of Chapter X, which in the manuscript is a simple paragraph break in the middle of a page (Marq. 1/1/11:1). Even in the First Typescript, where the book has already been divided into chapters, the chapters start more often than not in the middle of a page (this being the case for both the start and stop of Chapter IX; cf. 1/1/59:1 and 1/1/60:1). By contrast, the Second Typescript, for all its shortcomings (see p. xxiv), does start new chapters on fresh pages (1/1/39:1, 1/1/40:1, &c.).

The text of the story resumes on p. 435 of this book.

TEXT NOTES

1 At this point, Tolkien wrote in the left margin ‘not needed’. That is, he decided to drop the Theseus theme and omit all mention of the ball of spider-thread by which Bilbo navigated the dark maze of Mirkwood. Since this comment is written in pencil, it belongs to the period when he was creating the First Typescript.

This sentence was recast in the typescript to emphasize the hopelessness of the party’s situation when captured: ‘Each dwarf was blindfolded, but that did not make much difference, for even Bilbo with the use of his eyes could not see where they were going, and neither he nor the others knew where they had started from anyway.’ – that is, in the revised version of the story (see ‘The Enchanted Stream’), as opposed to the original where they were captured on the path.

Another typescript passage in the next sentence seems intended to paint the elves in a better light, more in keeping with their characterization in the final parts of the book: ‘the elves were making the dwarves go as fast as ever they could (of course they did not know how ill and tired their prisoners were)’ (typescript page 93^† ; 1/1/59:1–2). Similarly, in the typescript the king orders them unbound when he sees them ‘for they were ragged and weary’. The first of these two passages was changed in page proofs (Marq. 1/2/2 page 178) to ‘as fast as ever they could, sick and weary as they were. The king had ordered them to make haste.’, the reading in the published book.

^† This had originally been the bottom half of the original last page of the preceding chapter, but after the top half (now 1/1/30:5) was cut away the bottom half was renumbered from 92 to 93.

2 Tolkien originally wrote simply ‘He questions the dwarves’, then cancelled it and began the next paragraph with a new line. Note the use of present tense, which stylistically matches the Plot Notes more than the full text of the book.

3 This passage was recast slightly by an addition written in the upper margin and marked for insertion at this point: ‘. . . where they were going, and where they were coming from; but he did not tell them that Gandalf was also in his hands. The dwarves were surly and wd. not answer him . . .’

4 Originally another name was written before Balin’s, then completely blotted out, leaving a square of solid ink. Use of a light table and careful examination of the few surviving ligatures leads me to believe the cancelled name to be either Dwalin or Bifur; Bofur is also a possibility. Unfortunately, the obliteration is too nearly complete for any certainty.

This is the first time that we are told Balin is the oldest of all the dwarves after Gandalf, or indeed that Gandalf their leader is even older than Balin (described the first time Bilbo sees him as ‘a very old-looking dwarf’ (p. 32) and often referred to as ‘old Balin’. According to the House of Durin family tree (LotR.1117) – drawn up more than twenty years later and representing a different strata of the mythology – Thorin was 195 years old at the time of Bilbo’s journey and Balin 178; Dwalin, the next eldest of whom we have any record, 169.

5 Note that the Elvenking makes no reference to having had his own revel disturbed by the dwarves, for the very good reason that the ‘woodland king’ scene did not enter into the story until the First Typescript (see ‘The Enchanted Stream’, p. 354). Still, it is curious that he refers to the dwarves’ having ‘twice pursued and vexed my people’ when in all versions of the Mirkwood chapter they encountered the elusive elven feasters three times, not twice. This slip is rectified in the typescripts, which correctly refer to three times that the starving dwarves ‘pursue and trouble’ the feasters.

6 ‘other business in . . . the lands to the East.’: this phrase survived into the published book, but we never receive any explication of what that business might be.

7 his shadow: It seems worth emphasizing yet again that Bilbo’s ring has different powers from Frodo’s ring in the sequel, and cannot disguise his shadow when it makes the rest of him invisible. The image of Bilbo trapped inside the fortress of his enemies after a tricky gate closes behind him may derive at least in part from Chrétien’s Yvain: The Knight of the Lion, which vividly places its hero in similar straits.

8 At the end of this paragraph, Tolkien later added the following, writing in small letters to squeeze it into the available space:

He often wished [to >] that he cd. get a message for help/B

– that is, a message for help to Bladorthin, this having been the means whereby they were rescued in the projections sketched out in Plot Notes A, wherein Bilbo set forth to fetch aid.

The typescript contains a new sentence developing this thought, only to firmly reject it:

He often wished, too, that he could get a message for help sent to the wizard, but that of course was quite impossible, and he soon realized that if anything was to be done it would have to be done by his own small self.

The published book repeats this phrasing, except that at the end it substitutes ‘it would have to be done by Mr. Baggins, alone and unaided.’

9 The typescript adds ‘and was even beginning to think of telling the king all about his treasure and his quest (which shows how low-spirited he had become)’. In the original, even though imprisoned for much longer with no idea whether his companions had survived Gandalf showed no signs of yielding to his captor’s demands.

10 The typescript expands upon this passage:

For Thorin had taken heart again hearing how the hobbit had rescued his companions from the spiders, and was determined once more not to ransom himself with promises to the king of a share in the treasure, until all hope of escaping in any other way had disappeared, until in fact the remarkable Mr. Invisible Baggins (of whom he began to have a very high opinion after all) had altogether failed to think of something clever.

The other dwarves quite agreed when they got the message. They all thought their own shares in the treasure (which they quite regarded as theirs, in spite of their plight and the still unconquered dragon) would suffer seriously if the woodelves claimed part of it, and they all trusted Bilbo. Just what Gandalf had said would happen, you see. Perhaps that was part of his reason for going off and leaving them.

Bilbo however did not feel nearly so hopeful as they did. He did not like being depended on by everyone, and he wished he had the wizard at hand. But that was no use: probably all the dark distance of Mirkwood lay between them. He sat and thought and thought, until his head nearly burst, but no bright idea would come. One invisible ring was a jolly fine thing, but it was not much good among fourteen. But of course, as you have guessed, he did rescue his friends in the end, and this is how it happened.

—Marq. 1/1/59:4.

11 In the First Typescript (1/1/59:4) this became ‘was very fond of wine, though none grew in those parts’ – corrected in page proofs to ‘. . . though no vines grew’.

12 This sentence originally read ‘From the Lake Town it was brought on rafts, or else got floated up the Forest river that flowed also into the Lake which formed part of the course of the Running River’.

This part of the story marks the emergence of the name Lake Town. First the story refers merely to ‘the Long Lake and a town of men that had grown up there, built out on bridges far into the lake’. In the next sentence this settlement is referred to as ‘the Lake-town’, more as a common noun than a name. But by the end of this paragraph it has become a proper name as the phrase ‘to Lake town’ indicates. Remarkably enough, this name had appeared long before, in the very first stage of composition, when Tolkien used it as a label on the rough sketch-map incorporated into the Pryftan Fragment (see p. 19 and the Frontispiece). But when he came to write Plot Notes B he had either forgotten the name or chose not to use it; only now does it re-emerge. For a similar example of Tolkien proposing and then not using a name (at least, not for some time), see the opening of Plot Notes A.

13 The chief guard’s reply first appears in the typescript, in exactly the same words that appear in the final book; he is without dialogue in the original.

14 The typescript includes the detail that the drunken butler went on talking without noticing that his friend was no longer listening, as in the final book.

15 This end-of-autumn feast ‘ere the winter should come on’ (probably corresponding to the Celtic feast of Samhain, roughly the 1st of November in our calendar), is another indication of the extended time-line of the original conception. Far from having already arrived in Lake Town by the beginning of autumn (in time for a feast on Bilbo’s birthday, 22nd September, according to the much later chronology of The Lord of the Rings), they here escape from the elf-mound at the end of autumn.

For the theme of elves being taken unawares by intruders at festival time, see The Silmarillion (Silm.75, 242, & 248). This idea goes very far back in the mythology – cf. BLT 1.144 & 146 (Melko’s attack on Fëanor’s home and slaying his father during Manwë’s great reconciliation feast), BLT II.172 (Melko’s attack on Gondolin as they prepare to celebrate the dawn festival known as the Gates of Summer), and HME IV.153 (1930 Quenta: ‘and [Eärendel] came at a time of festival even as Morgoth and Ungoliant had in ages past’.

16 This sentence was originally preceded by ‘Into twelve barrels, twelve dwarves got. There was plenty of room’. The typescript version of the following sentence adds details of the ‘other stuffs’ that came in barrels: ‘butter, apples, and all sorts of things’.

17 This sentence was originally followed by ‘It was an anxious and a busy time. Soon twelve dwarves were packed. Last came Balin whom’. The spelling ‘dwarfs’ in the preceding sentence is clear in the manuscript (Ms. page 124; Marq. 1/1/9:6), replaced in the typescript by the more familiar ‘dwarves’ (Ts. page 98; Marq. 1/1/59:6).

18 This marks the last appearance of Gandalf the dwarf – as the late Taum Santoski remarked, Gandalf goes into the barrel but it is Thorin who emerges six manuscript pages later.

19 This line was originally followed with ‘The guard and the butler woke with the sound. Up they jumped with a start’.

The name Galion, in the next line, is significant, as he is the only elf named in The Hobbit (Elrond being half-elven, and the reference to Tinúviel not surviving into the published book). The name is probably Gnomish, composed of the elements gal-, or light (cf. the Gnomish Lexicon, page 37) – an element that also appears in the familiar names Galadriel (‘lady of light’) and Gilgalad (‘star-light’) – and -ion, here probably a patronymic suffix (cf. Salo, A Gateway to Sindarin, p. 165). If so, then it would mean something like ‘son of light’.

‘Galion’ was immediately preceded in the manuscript by another cancelled name, probably incomplete, which looks to have been Bong or possibly Bomg. I can make nothing of this, unless it contains the element bo(n), meaning ‘son of’ (Gnomish Lexicon, p. 23).

20 Tolkien originally began the next page with the line

‘Those are no wine casks there’ said Galion.

but he cancelled this, turned the page upside down, and began again with the elves’ song.

21 This quick glimpse of Bilbo’s possible fate is remarkably like what happened to Gollum, when ‘the goblins came, and he was cut off from his friends far under the mountains.’ (p. 156).

22 Deleted: ‘he had only the faintest notion of the direction of the Forest Stream’.

23 For the first rough draft of this poem, see Plot Notes B (pp. 364–5). Aside from the addition of punctuation and capitalization, the version here corresponds exactly to that published in The Hobbit, with two exceptions: the substitution of the word ‘cold’ for ‘high’ in line fourteen (‘Up the heavens cold and steep’), a change that first appears in the typescript, and the replacement of ‘woods’ – the reading in both typescripts – by ‘lands’ (‘Back to lands you once did know’) in the final line.

24 The typescript version of this passage reads ‘. . . able to hang on, and whether he should risk the chance of letting go and trying to swim to the bank’. This is notable not just for its realistic treatment of hypothermia (something everyone who, like Tolkien, lived through the era of the Titanic disaster and U-boat campaign of the Great War would have been familiar with) but because it plainly shows that the motif of Shire-hobbits being afraid of water and not able to swim was a late invention, belonging to The Lord of the Rings era, and not part of the original conception at all: Bilbo had shown no disquiet at riding in the little boat during the Enchanted Stream interpolation, and he is apparently at ease as no LotR hobbit would be in his stay at Lake Town, which would have struck one of the Shire hobbits of the later book as a profoundly unnatural and disquieting place. And of course no hydrophobe would conceive of a plan of escaping by barrel down an unknown river, much less be able to carry it out.

25 The detail that Bilbo rode atop Bombur’s barrel disappeared; the typescript recasts both this and the preceding sentence, replacing them with

. . . he had as bad a job as he feared to stick on; but he managed it somehow though it was miserably uncomfortable. Luckily he was very light and the barrel was a good big one and being a little leaky had shipped a small amount of water. All the same . . .

The first sentence was revised again sometime after the Second Typescript had been made (that is, probably at the time of revising the book to send it to the printer):

he found it quite as difficult to stick on as he had feared; but he managed it somehow . . .

26 The intended correction to change ‘the Forest Stream flowing from the king’s great doors’ to ‘. . . flowing past the king’s great doors’ either postdates the typescripts or else failed to get picked up by them and so does not appear in the final book (cf. DAA.237). Note, however, that this intended change would have made the text match the scene shown in the final picture of those doors (‘The Elvenking’s Gate’; DAA.224/H-S#121), which clearly depicts the water as flowing moat-like past the entrance, not issuing forth from it (a motif apparently displaced to the Lonely Mountain’s Front Gate; contrast Plate VII [bottom] with ‘The Front Gate’, DAA.256/H-S#130).

27 The manuscript page was revised to read ‘. . . drawing near the end of the Eastward journey, and the last & greatest end of the adventure’ – i.e., the and back again element of ‘there and back again’ seems suppressed at this point. This is the first of several remarks by the narrator about the story’s approaching end, which nevertheless remains farther off than it seemed, and doubtless further than the author anticipated, if we are to judge by the plot-notes.

28 Bilbo’s nefarious adventures in the raft-elves’ village were recast several times, first in the manuscript by the replacement of ‘flagon’ with water-flask on its first occurrence – though the second occurrence of ‘flagon’ remains unchanged in the next sentence, where it becomes all too clear it was not filled with water. By the First Typescript, the water-flask has become ‘a leather bottle of wine’ and it is the contents of ‘the bottle’ that enable Bilbo to sleep warmly, cold and wet as he is.

The pie Bilbo steals, by the way, is almost certainly a meat-pie – the original meaning of the word, according to the OED – rather than the fruit-pie that the word conjures up for modern American ears: marvellous as the elves may be, it’s unlikely they have a pastry-chef making dessert among their huts for the raft-workers; cf. the simple travel-food (bread, fruit, and wine) Gildor and his fellows share with Frodo in Chapter III of The Lord of the Rings. Even the great open-air feasts that lured Gandalf and company from the path are noted more for free-flowing drink and smell of roasting meat than for sweets or dainties; cf. DAA/.204.

Bilbo’s exploits in the typescript and final version are complicated by his catching a cold from his dunking: ‘. . . wet footsteps and the trail of drippings that he left wherever he went or sat; and also he began to sneeze, and whenever he tried to hide he was found out by the terrific explosions of his suppressed sneezes. Very soon there was a fine commotion . . .’ (1/1/59:10).

29 This paragraph appears in the typescript in slightly revised form that exactly achieves the text of the published book; the most significant changes are the splitting off of the final sentence to form the core of a short paragraph of its own and the addition to this sentence of the clause ‘and for a mercy he did not sneeze again for a good while’.

30 The corresponding word in the typescript and published book reads ‘shoved’, but the illegible word in the manuscript seems to begin with an l and to end with ly. Note also the indecision throughout this scene of whether the raft-workers were ‘men’ or ‘elves’, anticipating Arthur Ransome’s objection (see Appendix IV) and creating some confusion whether men from the Long Lake or servants of the elven-king are intended here.

31 For the ‘little point of rock’ which they must round before getting fairly underway in the main current, see Plate VIII [top] and also Tolkien’s painting ‘Bilbo Comes to the Huts of the Raft-elves’ (DAA plate II [bottom]; H-S#124); the point in question lies almost in the exact center of each picture but is more prominent in the coloured pencil sketch reproduced in this book. A slightly different depiction of the scene appears in his watercolour sketch for this scene (Pictures by Tolkien plate 13; H-S#122), where the point lies upstream of the little settlement (although the watercolour sketch is more accurate in showing Bilbo’s arrival at night, not at sunrise as in the final piece).

Once Tolkien had divided the book up into chapters, during the Third Phase of his work on the book, he either re-wrote what became the final lines of each chapter to end on a more dramatic note or inserted short chapter-ending paragraphs. In this case, he chose to do the latter, with the following paragraph first appearing in the typescript. Note the use of present tense, which associates it with the (well-informed though not omniscient) narrator’s voice rather than the story proper:

They had escaped the dungeons of the king and were through the wood, but whether alive or dead still remains to be seen.

(i)
The Vanishing People

With the wood-elves, we have finally come full circle to what, had this been one of the Lost Tales, would have been either the starting point or the core of the book. With the inversion of Tolkien’s invented races we have already discussed back in the commentary to the conclusion of Chapter I (see pp. 76 & 78), The Hobbit starts far from the elf-centric core of all Tolkien’s earlier works in the legendarium¹ (perhaps one reason why he was sometimes ambivalent about whether it was or was not part of the mythology). Bilbo’s story only comes to a sustained treatment of the elves mid-way through the book, and even then views them only from outside, and relatively briefly, before passing on. The flighty elves in the trees surrounding the Last Decent House (Rivendell) had been more like the fairies of Elizabethan and Victorian tales, a tradition Tolkien was probably first exposed to in Knatchbull-Hugesson’s Stories for My Children [1870] – see Letters pp. 407 & 453 – and himself contributed to in ‘Goblin Feet’ [1915], ‘Tinfang Warble’ [1914], and similar early poems during the era when that tradition reached its lowest ebb in Barrie’s Tinkerbell [1904] and Conan Doyle’s flower-fairies of the Cottingley Photographs [1920]. By contrast, the wood-elves harken back to a more sinister side of faerie belief, one dominant throughout the Middle Ages and surviving into at least the nineteenth and possibly early twentieth century in Ireland and the more isolated parts of Britain.²

Tolkien professed, in his Andrew Lang lecture (revised and expanded as ‘On Fairy-Stories’), not to be an expert in faerie lore,³ but this is simply typical modesty on his part, as the essay itself shows; his definition of ‘expert’ required exhaustive, comprehensive knowledge of all the publications in a field (cf. his Beowulf essay, which although well-researched includes his disclaimer against having read every book ever written about his topic). His interest in elves dates back at least to his undergraduate days⁴ and possibly much earlier – the wood-elves of Mirkwood display so many traditional traits ascribed to elves in folklore that it is clear Tolkien knew and directly drew on those folklore traditions.⁵ Although he chose not to draw from modern works such as Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter (published in 1924, only some seven years earlier, by an author Tolkien admired and who had heavily influenced his earlier work),⁶ even a cursory examination of traditional elf-behavior in folklore as described in Katharine Briggs’ A Dictionary of Fairies [1976] or in The Vanishing People: Fairy Lore and Legends [1978] shows that Tolkien had not chosen to call his Eldar ‘elves’ haphazardly but, like the cooks in his metaphor of the great Cauldron of Story (OFS.31), had picked and chosen from among the various strands of tradition with a fine, discriminating eye: his wood-elves are recognizably the elves of folk-lore belief.

Consider, for example, the elves of British folk-lore as described by Briggs. Among their characteristics was their ability to vanish from mortals’ sight in the blink of an eye (a characteristic Tolkien refers to pointedly early in ‘On Fairy-Stories’; cf. OFS.11); this feature is in fact one of the reasons Briggs calls her book The Vanishing People.⁷ In The Hobbit this is paralleled by the scenes where the elven feasters thrice disappear when all their lights are suddenly and simultaneously extinguished. In itself, this looks like a realistic rationalization of how the old legend might have started (‘Somebody kicked the fire’, p. 306), but an uncanny element remains: how to explain ‘hundreds of torches and many fires’ which on the one hand appear so suddenly that they ‘must have been lit . . . by magic’ (‘The Enchanted Stream’ p. 354), only to have all the lights disappear ‘as if by magic’ (Ch. VIII, pp. 306–7), all simultaneously snuffed out in an instant. These elf-lights seem to have something of the air of a will-o’-the-wisp about them; we have already been told that the feast thus illuminated had an ‘enchanting’ aroma (p. 353) that lured the travellers to stray from their way and meet disaster, and there are hints that the forest clearings are enchanted spots (e.g., elf-rings or fairy circles) – cf. a passage in the typescript when the spiders suddenly break off their pursuit of the fleeing dwarves as soon as the latter enter the fairy-ring:

The dwarves then noticed that they had come to the edge of a ring where elf-fires had been. Whether it was one of those they had seen the night before, they could not tell. But it seemed that some good magic lingered in such spots, which the spiders did not like . . .

—First Typescript 1/1/58:15; italics mine.

The motif of enchantment falling upon a mortal who steps into a fairy-ring, as happens to first Bilbo and then Gandalf (Thorin), also derives from traditional folklore: Briggs gives several examples, most of which involve the mortal joining briefly in a fairy dance (rather than, as here, a feast)⁸ only to discover that vast stretches of time had passed in what seemed mere minutes – cf. Bombur’s dream of ‘a great feast going on, going on for ever’ (‘The Enchanted Stream’ p. 352; emphasis mine).⁹ To have the hobbit or dwarves caught up in a tarantella would hardly have suited the solemn mood Tolkien had worked so hard to establish for the Mirkwood chapter; the substitution of enchanted sleep makes a reasonable equivalent but raises some interesting questions of its own. Bombur’s dream of enjoying a great feast while in fact he is slowly starving in an enchanted sleep, and Bilbo’s dream of joining the feast when he too is enchanted upon stepping into the elf-ring and is in fact not eating but lying sleeping on the ground, suggests that we are seeing here examples of what Tolkien in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ called ‘Faërian drama’:

If you are present at a Faërian drama . . . [t]he experience may be very similar to Dreaming . . . [b]ut in Faërian drama you are in a dream that some other mind is weaving, and the knowledge of that alarming fact may slip from your grasp . . . You are deluded – whether that is the intention of the elves . . . is another question. They at any rate are not themselves deluded. (OFS.49)

I take this to mean that what among the elves is a high art presents itself to mortal minds, like Bilbo’s and Bombur’s (and presumably Gandalf’s), as a dream. In short, those who fall under the spell of the elves’ enchantment are overwhelmed and can no longer distinguish fantasy from reality; they may even come to prefer the pleasant dream over the harsh reality:

‘I was having such a lovely dream,’ he grumbled, ‘all about having a most gorgeous dinner’.

‘Good heavens! he has gone like Bombur,’ they said. ‘Don’t tell us about dreams. Dream dinners aren’t any good, and we can’t share them’.

‘They are the best I am likely to get in this beastly place’ he muttered as he lay down beside the dwarves and tried to go back to sleep and find his dream again.

—First Typescript; see p. 354.

Casting people into a trance or sleep while they carried them off, as the elves do here with Gandalf, is yet another well-known fairy trick; Briggs cites a number of examples in her chapter ‘Captives in Fairyland’ in The Vanishing People (cf. page 104):

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.

—Chapter VIII, pp. 314–5.

Similarly, in Sir Orfeo, a thirteenth-century adaptation of the classical Orpheus story to fit medieval faerie-lore, Lady Heurodis (Eurydice) is first approached and claimed by the elves in her dreams, and only later carried off bodily; made to vanish in broad daylight when the elves come for her, disappearing ‘by magic’ (line 193) out of the middle of a circle of armed guards.¹⁰

The parallel to Sir Orfeo is significant, for while we cannot say that Tolkien was familiar with any specific folk tale about the elves in the more modern (nineteenth- and twentieth-century) collections cited by Briggs, he was intimately acquainted with medieval literature and seems to have drawn most of the inspiration for his elves from glimpses of elf-lore in works such as Sir Orfeo, The Mabinogion (more properly, The Four Branches of the Mabinogi; [fourteenth century]), the Lais of Marie de France [twelfth century], and the Breton lay ‘Lord Nann & the Korrigan’ [first recorded in the nineteenth century but embodying a legend that is presumably much, much older].¹¹ For example, Sir Orfeo not only has the association between elves and enchanted dreams and the motif of elven invisibility already mentioned, both of which fit very well with Tolkien’s wood-elves, but also contains another motif introduced into The Hobbit as part of the typescript expansion to the Mirkwood chapter (see ‘The Enchanted Stream’): the elven hunt. Elves were believed to be fond of hunting according to a very ancient tradition, and legends of trooping faeries, wild hunts, and the like are a constant feature of tales about the Fair Folk from the time of Walter Map (twelfth century) onward.¹² Orfeo, during the long years he spent searching for his abducted wife, sees the elven hunt from afar:

There often by him would he see,

when noon was hot on leaf and tree,

the king of Faërie with his rout

came hunting in the woods about

with blowing far and crying dim,

and barking hounds that were with him;

yet never a beast they took nor slew,

and where they went he never knew.

—Sir Orfeo, lines 281–288, pages 129–30.¹³

By contrast, Gandalf & company never see the elven hunt, but they hear it often, and are deeply disquieted by the sound:

. . . they became aware of the dim blowing of horns in the wood and the sound as of dogs baying far off. Then they all fell silent; and as they sat it seemed they could hear the noise of a great hunt going by to the north of the path, though they saw no sign of it.

There they sat for a long while and did not dare to make a move.

—‘The Enchanted Stream’, p. 350.

In the original draft of the Mirkwood chapter, Tolkien vividly evoked the sense of unease the travellers felt at the discovery that they were surrounded by an unseen people:

[T]he 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 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.

—Chapter VIII, p. 304.¹⁴

Here the elves are simply unseen rather than actually invisible, perhaps in another realistic rationalization of how the old legends started, but it is nonetheless remarkable that the dwarves could journey for weeks and weeks within earshot of the elves, travelling on the main elf-road through the forest, and simply happen not to encounter the elves all around them in all that time (or indeed that the elves would remain unaware of their presence until the dwarves enter their elf-circles on the night of the festivals, as seems to be the case).

Significantly, the dwarves first hear the sounds of the unseen hunt just after they have crossed over the enchanted stream; many traditional tales place a stream as the border between the mortal world and Faerie (cf. Briggs, p. 86), and we should note that another stream flows immediately before the gates of the Elvenking’s Hall which must be passed over by anyone entering the elf-mound (see plate VII [bottom]).¹⁵ As for the hunt itself, the dark stag shot by Gandalf shares the dark coloration of almost all the other Mirkwood fauna and may or may not be a normal animal; its ability to jump a stream more than thirty feet wide suggests otherwise, as does the exchange-of-misfortunes motif (see below). The white doe and her snowy white fawns encountered immediately afterwards are clearly faerie creatures: they appear suddenly (unlike the hart, whose hoofbeats the dwarves heard before it ran into view), glimmer in the darkness, and somehow avoid being hit by all the arrows fired by the dwarves (‘None seemed to find their mark’). Furthermore, white animals – specifically, white deer – are a well-known harbinger of faerie; encountering one is a sign that you have strayed out of our world into the borderlands of another realm. Thus, in ‘Lord Nann and the Korrigan’, the hero’s encounter with the perilous fairy comes about because he follows a white deer to her lair:

By the skirts of the wood as he did go,

He was ’ware of a hind as white as snow;

Oh, fast she ran, and fast he rode,

That the earth it shook where his horse-hoofs trode.

Oh, fast he rode and fast she ran,

That the sweat to drop from his brow began –

That the sweat on his horse’s flanks stood white;

So he rode and rode till the fall o’ the night.

When he came to a stream that fed a lawn,

Hard by the grot of a Corrigaun.

The grass grew thick by the streamlet’s brink,

And he lighted down off his horse to drink.¹⁶

Around 1930 – that is, about the same time that he started writing The Hobbit, or no more than a year or so before he was working on the Mirkwood chapter – Tolkien wrote his own version of this traditional poem, eventually published in 1945. Called ‘The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun’ (the names in Breton simply mean ‘Lord’ and ‘Lady’), Tolkien’s poem not only includes but expands the episode of the white doe:

Beneath the woodland’s hanging eaves

a white doe startled under leaves;

strangely she glistered in the sun

as she leaped forth and turned to run.

Then reckless after her he spurred;

dim laughter in the woods he heard,

but heeded not, a longing strange

for deer that fair and fearless range

vexed him, for venison of the beast

whereon no mortal hunt shall feast,

for waters crystal-clear and cold

that never in holy fountain rolled.

He hunted her from the forest-eaves

into the twilight under leaves;

the earth was shaken under hoof,

till boughs were bent into a roof,

and the sun was woven in a snare;

and laughter still was on the air.

The sun was falling. In the dell

deep in the forest silence fell.

No sight nor slot of doe he found

but roots of trees upon the ground,

and trees like shadows waiting stood

for night to come upon the wood.

—‘The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun’

[1945 version], lines 259–282.

Many of the elements in the Enchanted Stream scene in The Hobbit are here, albeit used very differently: the strange white hind, the fruitless hunt (as also in Sir Orfeo), the eerie laughter in the dark wood, even (in lines 69–76 and 151–155) the enchanted water that, when drunk, brings disaster upon the intruder.¹⁷ Similarly, in Marie de France’s ‘Guigemar’, the first in her collection of twelve Breton lays, her titular hero is out hunting one day when

Guigemar saw a hind with a fawn;

a completely white beast,

with deer’s antlers on her head.

Spurred by the barking of the dogs, she sprang

into the open.

Guigemar took his bow and shot at her . . .

—The Lais of Marie de France tr. Rbt Hanning & Joan

Ferrante [1978], ‘Guigemar’, lines 90–94.

In Guigemar’s case, his shot does strike and mortally wound the deer, but he is unable to enjoy the meat because the arrow rebounds and injures him grievously as well; if there were any doubt that the ‘completely white’ hind with antlers like a stag were magical, they disappear when she speaks, laying a curse upon him for wounding her. Perhaps an echo of this appears in The Hobbit, when Bombur is stricken at the exact moment Thorin shoots the stag. Finally, in the Welsh tale ‘Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed’, the First Branch of the Mabinogi, Pwyll meets with misfortune while hunting a deer, although in this case it is not the deer but the hounds who are hunting it who are white:

. . . of all the hunting dogs he had seen in the world, he had never seen dogs the colour of them: the redness of the ears glittered as brightly as the whiteness of their bodies.

—The Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh Tales,

tr. Patrick Ford [1977], page 37.

Naturally enough, since these particular hounds (the cwn annwn) belong to Arawn, King of Annwn, the Welsh Otherworld (which is conceived of as both Faerie and the Land of the Dead, depending on who is telling the story, rather like the faerie realm in Sir Orfeo).¹⁸ White hounds also appear in Tolkien’s ballad ‘Ides Ælfscýne’ (‘Lady Elven-fair’), his own version of the belle dame sans merci legend which appeared in Songs for the Philologists [1936] but had been written at Leeds sometime in the first half of the 1920s as part of the Scheme B Songbook, where the narrator describes his beloved’s unearthly homeland:

þær gréne wæs grund, ond hwít hire hund,

ond gylden wæs hwæte on healme

This passage may be translated as

There green was the ground and white her hound

And golden was the wheat in the fields [or: on the stalk].¹⁹

Even the horses being ridden by the elvenking, his knights, and damsels in Sir Orfeo were ‘snow-white steeds/and white as milk were all their weeds’ [i.e., clothes] (lines 145–146), as is the horse (‘her milk-white steed’) upon which the Queen of Elfland takes Thomas Rhymer away with her after their tryst under the Eildon tree (Child Ballad number 37, text A, stanza six); according to some versions of the story, the two deer she sent years later to recall Thomas to Elfland were white as well. Note the repeated insistence not just on whiteness as a feature of creatures native to Faerie but on the strange intensity of the whiteness, which glimmered (The Hobbit), glistered (‘The Lay of Aotrou & Itroun’), or glittered (The Mabinogi). And once again we have the motif of a fruitless hunt that leads the hero into danger – the deer Pwyll is hunting is actually killed before his pack reaches it by a strange pack of white hounds, whom he drives from the kill, thus deeply offending their lord, the King of the Underworld. Pwyll does not feast on deer-meat any more than Guigemar or Bilbo’s companions, but instead rather than bear Arawn’s enmity he willingly enters Faerie at Arawn’s bidding to take the faerie king’s place for a year and, at the end of that time, kill Arawn’s great enemy and rival – a deed he accomplishes so chivalrously that he thereafter to the end of his life bears the cognomen Pwyll Pen Annwfn (‘Pwyll, Head of Annwn’).

Pwyll enters Faerie willingly, in order to make good on a debt he has incurred, and perhaps for this reason comes back safely in the end to his own world and time, winning the friendship of the Faerie King in the process and, shortly afterwards, a faerie bride of his own, the Lady Rhiannon. More often, those who enter Faerie do so unwillingly or unwittingly, like Lady Heurodis in Sir Orfeo, Lord Nann in the old ballad, or the many prisoners carried off by the fairies – Briggs not only mentions many similar tales in passing but devotes an entire chapter to the topic (The Vanishing People, pages 104–17), as does Jacob Grimm in Teutonic Mythology (volume three, chapter XXXII). And this in turn brings us to Tolkien’s final major borrowing from fairy tradition in his depiction of the wood-elves: the theme of imprisonment within an elf-mound.

For although Tolkien never calls it by that name, the Elvenking’s Halls in many ways fit the folktale descriptions of an elf-mound or fairy hill. A number of the hills so identified in the British isles are barrow-mounds, and it is perhaps significant that in several of the pictures he drew of the scene Tolkien gave the entrance to the Elvenking’s Halls a lintel gate (trilithon) such as those found on many real-world megalithic tombs.²⁰ Even without the neolithic associations, that Tolkien’s wood-elves live in caves (as did the elves of Doriath and Nargothrond in The Book of Lost Tales and other stories in the Silmarillion tradition) may be yet another of his realistic touches rationalizing fairy mythology: many of the traditional tales feature a cave as the entrance into a fairy realm or, in at least one famous case, out of the fairy realm into our world.²¹ The Tuatha dé Danaan, the fairy-folk of Ireland whose martial prowess seems to have been Tolkien’s main model for the great warrior-elves of the Quenta Silmarillion (and who were to have featured in an unwritten chapter of The Lost Road [1936]; cf. HME V.77–8),²² were so closely associated with the elf-mounds or fairy hills that they came to be more commonly known as aes sidhe or daoine sidhe, both literally meaning ‘the people of the fairy hill’, until sidhe shifted from its original meaning of ‘elf-mound’ to mean the elves themselves (as in the anglicized banshee, or bean sidhe: ‘woman of the sidhe’, faerie-woman). The sidhe were thought to live within the hollow hills, a conception that no doubt gave rise to the modern idea that fairies were smaller than humans in size, but in earlier lore these were simply the entrances to the Otherworld, as in Sir Orfeo, where the hero follows the faerie ladies when they enter an elf-mound:

with right good will his feet he sped,

for stock nor stone he stayed his tread.

Right into a rock the ladies rode,

and in behind he fearless strode.

He went into that rocky hill

a good three miles or more, until

he came into a country fair . . .

—Sir Orfeo, lines 345–351.²³

One universal feature of elf-mounds, whatever else was believed about them, was the difficulty of escaping from one once inside – cf. the Elvenking’s words (p. 380): ‘there is no escape through my magic doors, for those who are brought once inside’, a point later re-affirmed by Bilbo’s experience (‘Magic shut the gates’, ibid.).²⁴ One motif often tied into this, as old as the myth of Persephone, is the idea that anyone who eats fairy food becomes trapped in fairy-land and cannot thereafter escape; Briggs recounts several tales of visitors being warned not to eat fairy-food, in at least one case by someone who had already done so and become trapped herself who prevents her beloved from sharing the same fate (‘The Fairy Dwelling on Selena Moor’, British Folk-Tales and Legends [1977; rpt. 2002], pages 181–4). It is therefore striking that The Hobbit contains no trace of this motif: the starving dwarves (and the hobbit as well) eat the elven food as soon as it is offered and suffer no ill effects whatsoever; in fact, it saves them from starvation and does not hinder their eventual escape in any way.²⁵

That eventual escape – originally after months of captivity, reduced in the published version to a matter of weeks (see the calendaric reckonings accompanying Tolkien’s notes for the 1960 Hobbit, p. 823) – comes after ‘a weary long time’. In the folk-tales, those few captives in fairy-land who do succeed in escaping almost always do so by one of two means. They are either rescued by someone outside the elf-mound or fairy-circle – an idea Tolkien toyed with in Plot Notes A, as we have already seen, but ultimately rejected – or they escape on their own by means of a trick. Tolkien adopted the latter solution, and so far as I can discover the idea of escaping in barrels was his own invention;²⁶ there is nothing like it in the traditional literature, and it may be taken as a typical intrusion of practical hobbitry into the elven-dwarven impasse created by stubbornness, arrogance, and an unwillingness to let go of ancient history.

Out of these motifs, drawn together from scattered passing references in various medieval tales and some of their more modern descendents (e.g., the ballads) – all the record we have left of a once-widespread belief system now recoverable only through imaginative reconstruction of such remaining hints – Tolkien created a seamless and satisfactory whole. To borrow Verlyn Flieger’s analogy, the individual pieces of elf-lore that have by chance and good luck survived but shorn of their original context are rather like broken pieces of ancient stained glass, retaining their striking evocative quality but their original pattern lost; Tolkien has taken these fragments and reassembled them, ‘remounting, as it were, the stained glass into a new window’ (Interrupted Music, page 131).

(ii)
The Three Kindreds of the Elves

Just as Tolkien’s depiction of the elves in The Hobbit draws both on traditional medieval elf-lore and his own legendarium, so too do his larger groupings encompass both the old division between the lios-alfar and the svart-alfar, the light elves and the dark elves of Scandinavian myth, on the one hand²⁷ and his own myth of the threefold division of the Eldar into the Light-elves, the Deep-elves, and the Sea-elves (or, as they are known in The Silmarillion, the Vanyar, the Noldor, and the Teleri – Silm.53) on the other. Both these divisions underlie the passage from the manuscript on p. 315 already briefly discussed in Text Note 40 to Chapter VIII:

. . . most of [the wood-elves] are descended from the ancient elves who never went to the great FairyLand of the west, where the Light-elves, and the Deep-elves (or Gnomes) and the Sea-elves lived, and grew fair, and learned and invented their magic and their cunning craft and the making of beautiful and marvelous things.

This passage was greatly expanded in the First Typescript:

Are the wood-elves wicked? Well, not particularly, or indeed not at all, though they have their faults, and they don’t like strangers. It is quite true that they are rather different from other elves; for most of them, as well as the few elves that live in hills and mountains, are descended from those of the ancient tribes of the elves of old who never went to the great Fairyland of the West, where the Light-elves and the Deep-elves (or Gnomes) and the Sea-elves lived for ages and grew fair and wise and learned and invented their magic and their cunning craft in the making of beautiful and marvellous things, before they came back into the Wide World. Here the wood-elves lingered in the twilight before the raising of the Sun and Moon, and afterwards they wandered in the forests that grew beneath the sunrise. They loved best the edges of the woods from which they could escape at times to hunt or to ride and run over the open lands by sun or moon or star; though after the coming of Men they took ever more and more to the gloaming and the dusk.

—1/1/30:3–4, rejected ending to the First Typescript.²⁸

There are two hierarchies of division here: first between those elves who went to Faerie (or Elvenhome, as Tolkien elsewhere calls it) and those who stayed behind, then a threefold division among those elves who set out on that great journey. But the actual situation is much more complicated than this, with many subdivisions and ever-evolving names. For example, the third group Tolkien mentions in The Hobbit, the Sea-elves, became divided between those who actually crossed the sea and reached Elvenhome (the Teleri) and those who remained behind in Beleriand with Thingol (the Sindar or Grey Elves); this latter group became the wood-elves of our story – cf. the reference in the first sketchy outline to the dwarves’ ‘capture by the Sea elves’ (p. 229), meaning the wood-elves of Mirkwood.²⁹ Similarly, the term ‘Dark Elf’ was sometimes applied to those who refused the summons (the Dark Elves of Palisor; cf. BLT I.232–7 & 244) and sometimes to also include those who set out but fell by the wayside along the way (e.g., the Green Elves of Ossiriand), the Ilkorindi (i.e., ‘Not of Kôr’, the great elven city in Elvenhome known in later stages of the mythology as Tirion upon Túna); cf. page 112 of The Silmarillion, where Caranthir son of Fëanor refers (insultingly) to Thingol, the Lord of Beleriand, as ‘this Dark Elf in his caves’.³⁰

The interrelationship between the various groups of elves was one of the most complex elements in Tolkien’s work, especially since each of these divisions had linguistic ramifications (cf. The Lhammas or ‘Account of Tongues’ [circa 1937], HME V.167–98). Philologist that he was, Tolkien was deeply interested in this aspect of elven history and returned to it over and over throughout his long years of work on the legendarium. Its essentials – the aforementioned twofold division of the elves – remained unchanged, but the names of the various groups were subject to constant change, along with other individual elements within that pattern. For example, the Three Kindreds, the People of the Great Journey (LotR.1171) here called the Light-elves, Deep-elves, and Sea-elves were known in The Book of Lost Tales [1917–1920] as the Teleri, the Noldoli (or Gnomes), and the Solosimpi (or Shoreland Pipers), respectively (BLT I.115, 119). By the time of the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology,’ these had become the Quendi or Light-elves, the Nodoli or Deep-elves (also known as Gnomes on account of their wisdom),³¹ and the Teleri or Sea-elves (known in Valinor as the Solosimpi) (HME IV. 13). This same terminology carried over into the form of the Silmarillion that was most current when Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, the 1930 Quenta (HME IV.85), and he was clearly thinking of the passage in either the ‘Sketch’ or the 1930 Quenta when drafting this line in The Hobbit, since those names had already been superceded by the time of the book’s publication – in the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion the Three Kindreds are the Lindar (the High Elves, no longer the ‘Light-elves’ of The Hobbit), the Noldor (the Deep Elves, also still known as the Gnomes), and the Teleri (the Sea Elves, here called the Soloneldi in Valinor) (HME V.214–5).³²

By contrast, those elves who were lost along the road were originally known as the Lost Elves or the Shadow Folk (BLT I.119) and later as the Ilkorindi (1926 ‘Sketch’, 1930 Quenta) or the Dark Elves (1930 Quenta). By the time of the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion, those lost along the way are known as the Lembi (‘the Lingerers’).

Finally, the detail of the woodland king’s golden hair, which only enters in with the typescript, is interesting, given Tolkien’s later statements that of the three kindreds of the elves it was the First Kindred or Vanyar (the Light-elves of p. 315) who are golden-haired, not the Third Kindred or Teleri (the Sea-elves); see Douglas Anderson’s commentary in The Annotated Hobbit (DAA.206) and Christopher Tolkien’s commentary in The Peoples of Middle-earth (HME XII.77 & 82). It is not known, however, at what point Tolkien made that decision, and there is some evidence that he originally conceived of the Second Kindred or Noldor (the Deep-elves) as golden-haired: in the genealogies meant to accompany the ‘(Earliest) Annals of Beleriand’ [early 1930s] they are referred to as Kuluqendi or ‘Golden-elves’ (HME V.[403]); the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion includes ‘the Golden’ as one of their many descriptors (HME V.215) and Christopher Tolkien notes (BLT I.43–4, HME XII.77) that the passage in Appendix F of the first edition of The Lord of the Rings describing the Eldar (the Three Kindreds of the High Elves) as dark-haired, ‘save in the golden house of Finrod’ (i.e., the character known as Finarfin in the published Silmarillion and more recent editions of The Lord of Rings [cf. LotR.1171]: Galadriel’s father not her brother, some of whose children were golden-haired because of his Vanyar mother), was written as a description of the Noldor (the Second Kindred) before being applied to the Eldar as a whole. It’s possible the final determination that only the Vanyar (the First Kindred) were golden-haired actually postdates The Lord of the Rings: the earliest example cited by Christopher Tolkien dates from 1951, after The Lord of the Rings was finished but before its publication.

This still does not explain why the Elvenking, who is clearly neither one of the Light-elves (Vanyar) nor the Deep-elves (Noldor) but of the Sea-elves (the Sindar, or Teleri of Middle-earth) should be golden-haired. However, there is already precedent for golden-haired Sindar in Tolkien’s earlier writings: in the A-text of ‘The Lay of Leithian’, written in August 1925, Lúthien herself is described as golden-haired (lines 10–16, HME III.157; see ibid. page 150 for the date). It is only in retrospect, then, after Tolkien had decided to restrict golden hair to a specific branch of the Eldar, that the problem of accounting for individual elves with gold hair who were not members of that specific group arose. Therefore we need not concern ourselves over the apparent violation of a rule or restriction that did not exist at the time this passage was written.

In any case, given the freedom which Tolkien allowed himself when drawing from his mythology in The Hobbit in this earliest draft (e.g., the application of ‘Fingolfin’ as a goblin name on p. 8), it’s unreasonable to expect a strict consistency with his earlier material, especially given the fluid, shifting nature of details and concepts within that corpus. Tolkien often seems to have described scenes as he initially visualized them and worked out the details to make them consistent with the rest of the tale afterwards (e.g., contrast p. 90 with p. 828): in this case, ‘golden-haired elf-lord’ was a motif he decided to use when inserting this interpolation into The Hobbit and he did so, very effectively.

(iii)
The King of Wood and Stone

If Tolkien’s wood-elves as a whole harken back to folklore beliefs about ‘the Fair Folk’, then in his depiction of the Elvenking he is drawing on a specific modern literary source: his own unpublished writings.³³ Certainly there are striking similarities between the Elvenking’s halls and the caves of the Rodothlim, a shy and fugitive people who in the later evolution of the mythology became the elves of Nargothrond:

. . . in the mountains there was a place of caves above a stream, and that stream ran down to feed the river Sirion, but grass grew before the doors of the caves, and these were cunningly concealed by trees and such magics as those scattered bands that dwelt therein remembered still. Indeed at this time this place had grown to be a strong dwelling of the folk . . . long ere [Túrin and his companion] drew nigh to that region . . . the spies and watchers of the Rodothlim (for so were that folk named) gave warning of their approach, and the folk withdrew before them, such as were abroad from their dwelling. Then they closed their doors and hoped that the strangers might not discover their caves, for they feared and mistrusted all unknown folk of whatever race, so evil were the lessons of that dreadful time.

Now then Flinding and Túrin dared even to the caves’ mouths, and perceiving that these twain knew now the paths thereto the Rodothlim sallied and made them prisoners and drew them within their rocky halls, and they were led before the chief, Orodreth.

—‘Turambar and the Foalókë’ [circa 1919],

BLT II.81–2.

While the wood-elves’ dwelling [circa 1931] is not described as being located in mountains, it otherwise strongly resembles the Rodothlim’s lair, being ‘a great cave’ alongside a river that ‘ran from out of the heights of the forest’; these heights are also described as ‘the highlands’ (p. 315) and ‘a steep slope’ (p. 379). Like the Rodothlim, the wood-elves initially flee before the intruders (at the three feasts), only to waylay and capture the trespassers the next day and bring them before their king for judgement. But aside from their dwelling the Rodothlim are not a very close parallel to the wood-elves: we are told the former are so industrious that ‘there the ancient arts and works of the Noldoli [Deep Elves] came once more to life . . . There was smithying in secret and forging of good weapons, and even fashioning of some fair things beside, and the women spun once more and wove, and at times was gold quarried privily in places nigh . . . so that deep in those caverns might vessels of beauty be seen in the flame of secret lights’ (BLT II.81). By contrast, we are specifically told that the Elvenking’s treasure is small because his people ‘neither mined nor worked metal or jewels, nor did they trade, nor till the earth more than they could help’ (see below). Also, the wood-elves do not share the Rodothlim’s aversion to marching off to war, as we shall see in later chapters, although admittedly this was a slightly later development.

A much closer parallel to the wood-elves can be found in the woodland realm of Doriath, located in the heart of a dark forest known for its impenetrability, a place where most travellers get lost and perish miserably. Like the elven kingdom in Mirkwood, Doriath is a realm of the Sea Elves (the Teleri), not the Deep Elves (the Noldoli or Noldor) as had been the case with the Rodothlim of Nargothrond. At the heart of Doriath lies their stronghold, Menegroth (‘The Thousand Caves’), which can only be reached by crossing a guarded bridge over a stream that runs just past its gates – or, as The Book of Lost Tales put it, describing a scene strikingly like the one depicted in one of the illustrations for The Hobbit (DAA.224): ‘his halls were builded in a deep cavern of great size, and they were nonetheless a kingly and a fair abode. This cavern was in the heart of the mighty forest of Artanor [Doriath] that is the mightiest of forests, and a stream ran before its doors, but none could enter that portal save across the stream, and a bridge spanned it narrow and well-guarded’ (‘The Tale of Tinúviel’, BLT II.9–10).³⁴

Furthermore, the wood-elves of Mirkwood are great archers, who can ‘hit a bird’s eye in the dark’; indeed, their extreme skill with the bow is so well known that the dwarves promptly and prudently surrender on the spot when faced with wood-elves armed with bows. Similarly, the most renowned warrior of Doriath was Beleg of the bow (also called Beleg the Bowman, the character known in The Silmarillion as Beleg Strongbow), Túrin’s closest friend after whom the second canto of ‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’ is named (HME III.29–48). The bow is also the weapon most associated with the Teleri of Eldamar, those of the Third Kindred who had immigrated to Valinor, with which they defend themselves against the Noldor during the Kinslaying (Silm.87).

The strongest parallel between Doriath and the wood-elves’ realm, however, is the Elvenking himself, who strongly resembles one of the most famous characters in the legendarium: King Thingol Greycloak, ruler of the woodland realm of Doriath and high king of the Elves of Beleriand. It is said in the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion that his name was ‘held in awe’ by the Lords of the Noldor (Fingolfin, Fingon, Maidros/Maedhros, and Inglor/Finrod) [HME V.266]. Thingol is unique in that he is a major character in not one but two of the ‘great tales’ that form the heart of the Silmarillion: ‘The Lay of Leithian’ (the story of his daughter, Lúthien Tinúviel, and her mortal lover Beren) and the story of the children of Húrin (as loyal foster-father to Túrin the Hapless). He is also one of the original elves, one of those who began life in Cuiviénen, the lost elven Eden far to the east of what we know as Middle-earth, and one of the three who travel to Valinor as representatives of their people. He thus became the leader of one of the three great divisions of the Eldar, the Sea Elves (see above), in their migration half-way across the world towards Elven-home. He is the only one of the Children of Ilúvatar to marry one of the Ainur or angels, Queen Melian, and ultimately became either ancestor or close kin to many of Tolkien’s other important characters – for example, he is Elrond Halfelven’s great-great-grandfather.³⁵ Later legends, not yet written at the time The Hobbit was drafted, would make him great-uncle to Galadriel (the most powerful elf depicted in The Lord of the Rings) and her brother Finrod Felagund (the first elf to befriend humans and perhaps the most appealing character in The Silmarillion), and the direct ancestor of the kings of Númenor and hence of Gondor and Arnor as well, including Aragorn/Strider.

Given the fluid nature of the unpublished myths, where Tolkien was willing to play around with concepts and occasionally contemplate major changes in the legends, we should ask the obvious question: is the elven-king Bilbo meets Thingol himself or an entirely new character closely modelled upon him – an analogue, as it were? The answer seems to be both: just as the status of The Hobbit itself hovered in Tolkien’s mind between being part of the legendarium and standing apart from it, so too within the book the identification of the elvenking straddles both options and cannot conclusively be resolved either way. Even after Tolkien eventually, towards the end of work on The Lord of the Rings, committed to the decision that the wood-elf king was a separate character, he never fully reworked the original story to completely support that decision.

To understand, then, exactly how the wood-elf king in The Hobbit relates to the earlier stories, it is necessary (as so often) to make the mental effort to exclude from our minds knowledge of what Tolkien later resolved while working on the sequel, or that subsequent layer created as much as twenty years afterwards will prevent us from seeing clearly what he was doing at the time he created the character – that is, when writing the story of Mr. Baggins’ adventures as a stand-alone work deriving in varying degrees from his already voluminous writings about Middle-earth. Seen in this light, while the Elvenking strongly resembles King Thingol in general, the evidence for and against the identification is contradictory. Two elements Tolkien goes out of his way to include in the narrative support the argument that the two kings are one and the same, while two unstated facts argue against it because of the dissonance they would create between things we know to be true of Thingol that do not appear to apply to the Elvenking.

The first passage that strengthens the identification between the Elvenking and Thingol Greycloak is Tolkien’s mention of the three kindreds of the elves (see part ii of this chapter’s commentary, starting on p. 405 above). This places the wood-elves within the context of the old mythology, and we should not overlook the precision of Tolkien’s phrasing that most of the wood-elves are descended from ancient elves who never went to ‘the great FairyLand of the west’. In fact, only one Sea-elf in the whole legendarium ever visited Valinor and returned to live in Middle-earth, this being the figure originally known as Linwë Tinto (BLT I.106), then Tinwë Linto (ibid., pages 130–1) or Tinwelint (‘The Tale of Tinúviel’, BLT II.8), then from ‘The Lay of Leithian’, onwards as King Thingol. It’s possible that this is an oblique allusion to the idea, expressed in the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’, that some of the Gnomes (Noldor) returning to Middle-earth ‘take service with Thingol and Melian of the Thousand Caves in Doriath’ (HME IV.23).³⁶ It cannot, as it might first seem, be an early form of the idea presented in The Lord of the Rings that Sindar (grey-elf) lords settled among and ruled over Silvan (wood-elf) populations, since those rulers would be Sindar like Celeborn who had never left Middle-earth. Given the Elvenking’s general similarity to Thingol, it seems far more likely then that this passage is a deliberate allusion to Thingol.

Thingol’s story is even more explicitly evoked in the account of the old enmity between the dwarves and the elves (p. 315):

. . . [the wood elves] 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!).

The original ending to the first typescript of the Mirkwood chapter (1/1/30:4) expands upon this somewhat:

. . . they did not love dwarves and thought he was an enemy. In ancient days they had had wars with some of the dwarves whom they accused of stealing their treasure. It is only fair to say that the dwarves gave a different account and said that they only took what was their due, for the elf-king had bargained with them to shape his raw gold and silver and had after refused to give them their pay. If the elf-king had a weakness it was for treasure, especially for silver and white gems, for though his hoard was rich yet he had not as great a treasure as other elf-lords of old, since his people neither mined nor worked metal or jewels, nor did they trade, nor till the earth more than they could help. All this was well known to every dwarf, though Thorin’s family³⁷ had had nothing to do with the old quarrel I have spoken of.

This in turn is followed closely in the revised ending of the Mirkwood chapter (1/1/58:17), which, in addition to a few small revisions of punctuation and phrasing, achieves the text of the published book:

. . . though his hoard was rich, he was ever eager for more, since he had not yet as great a treasure as other elf-lords of old³⁸ . . . All this was well known to every dwarf, though Thorin’s family had had nothing to do with the old quarrel I have spoken of. Consequently Thorin was angry at their treatment of him, when they took their spell off him and he came to his senses; and also he was determined that no word of gold or jewels should be dragged out of him.

(compare DAA.220).

This quarrel is clearly an allusion to the Lost Tale known as ‘The Nauglafring: The Necklace of the Dwarves’, the last of the tales (in terms of the cycle’s internal chronology) to be written out in full (BLT II.221–51). This story changed greatly in its details and tone but remained consistent in its overall outlines from The Book of Lost Tales through ‘The Sketch of the Mythology’ into the 1930 Quenta, the last completed version of the tale.³⁹

The 1926 summary of the tale runs thusly:

Húrin and outlaws come to Nargothrond, whom none dare plunder for dread of the spirit of Glórung [the dragon] or even of his memory. They slay Mîm the Dwarf who had taken possession and enchanted all the gold. [After transporting it to Doriath] Húrin casts the gold at Thingol’s feet with reproaches. Thingol will not have it, and bears with Húrin, until goaded too far he bids him begone. Húrin wanders away . . .

The enchanted gold lays its spell on Thingol. He summons the Dwarves of Nogrod and Belegost to come and fashion it into beautiful things, and to make a necklace of great wonder whereon the Silmaril shall hang. The Dwarves plot treachery, and Thingol bitter with the curse of the gold denies them their reward. After their smithying they are driven away without payment. The Dwarves come back; aided by treachery of some Gnomes [that is, Noldor or Deep Elves] who also were bitten by the lust of the gold, they surprise Thingol on a hunt, slay him, and surprise the Thousand Caves and plunder them. Melian they cannot touch . . .

[On the return journey to their homelands] The Dwarves are ambushed at a ford by Beren and the brown and green Elves of the wood, and their king slain, from whose neck Beren takes the ‘Nauglafring’ or necklace of the Dwarves, with its Silmaril. It is said that Lúthien wearing that jewel is the most beautiful thing that eyes have ever seen outside Valinor. But Melian warned Beren of the curse of the gold and of the Silmaril. The rest of the gold is drowned in the river.

But the ‘Nauglafring’ remains hoarded secretly in Beren’s keeping . . .

—‘The Sketch of the Mythology’ [1926] HME IV.32–3.

Besides prefiguring all the trouble that will erupt later in The Hobbit over Smaug’s hoard, and the curse of possessiveness that falls upon Thorin in the end, this passage clearly describes the same quarrel which lay between the wood-elves and our dwarves in The Hobbit: dwarves hired to shape silver and gold (the Book of Lost Tales version stresses the amount of unwrought gold in the hoard; cf. Note 38) for an elvenking who then refuses them payment, an ensuing war, and lasting bitterness over the whole incident, with each side nursing grudges as to the rightness of their cause – the ‘(Later) Annals of Beleriand’, which are associated with the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion, goes so far as to claim ‘and there hath been war between Elf and Dwarf since that day.’ If we were to go by Tolkien’s later writings in The Lord of the Rings and published Silmarillion then in the account in The Hobbit the elf-king who bargained with the dwarves to shape his raw gold and silver and the elf-king of the next sentence who had a weakness for treasure are two separate people (Thingol and Thranduil, respectively), but this is clearly untenable: nothing in Tolkien’s prose here justifies the assumption of a complete shift in antecedent between identical nouns used as the subjects of two consecutive sentences. Moreover the phrase ‘as other elf-lords of old’ clearly implies that our Elvenking is himself one among their number, not a newcomer of latter days but directly involved with the elf-dwarf wars of ancient days.⁴⁰ In short, there can be no doubt that here Tolkien is stating it was the same king of the wood-elves whom Bilbo meets who had quarreled and warred with the dwarves long ago, events that the Silmarillion tradition unequivocally ascribes to King Thingol. Furthermore, in a letter written many years later Tolkien explicitly said that this particular passage in The Hobbit is a reference to ‘the quarrel of King Thingol, Lúthien’s father, with the Dwarves’ – JRRT to Christopher Bretherton, 16th July 1964; Letters p. 346.

This very identification, however, raises the first of the two disconnects between Thingol and the Elvenking that form the major objections to the possibility that the two characters might be one and the same at different points in Middle-earth’s history. A key part of Thingol’s legend was the account of his death at the hands of the dwarves he had cheated, the sudden and shameful death of one of the greatest of all the elves over a petty quarrel. If our Elvenking is Thingol, then how can he still be alive at the time of our story? Either Tolkien has removed the quarrel from the Thingol legend and given it to a new character, modifying it so that the chief elven protagonist survives, or he is making the same modification while leaving Thingol as its protagonist, thus extending Thingol’s story forward into a much later era and setting aside the old account of Thingol’s death and the destruction of Doriath. That he was willing to recast his stories in ways with far-reaching consequences we know from other evidence, a prime example being his decision no more than five years earlier between the original and revised versions of the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ to change Beren from an elf to a human (HME IV.23–5).

And indeed there is already precedent for ambiguity over Thingol’s fate (or Tinwë Lintö/Tinwelint as he was then called) within The Book of Lost Tales itself. The story of the Nauglafring near the end of the collection recounts his violent death (offstage in the narrative, while on one of the hunts so beloved of the wood-elves – BLT II.231–2), yet in the section of The Book of Lost Tales that describes the origins of the elves and their coming to Valinor (‘The Coming of the Elves and the Making of Kôr’), we are told ‘yet ’tis said [Tinwë] lives still lord of the scattered Elves of Hisilómë [Hithlum, later a region in northwest Beleriand], dancing in its twilight places with Wendelin [Melian] his spouse’ (BLT I.115) – that is, that according to this version of the story Tinwelint/Thingol is still alive at the time Eriol the narrator is being told the story in the early fifth century AD.

Unfortunately, none of the later versions of the legendarium recount the story of Thingol’s death and the fall of Doriath, all breaking off incomplete before this point (see Note 39). So what evidence we have for Tolkien’s intentions regarding the latter parts of the Silmarillion cycle must derive from sources such as the ‘(Later) Annals of Beleriand’ [c. 1937] and ‘The Tale of Years’ ([c. 1951]; cf. HME XI.345), which recount the old story of Thingol’s death at the hands of the dwarves in almost the same terms as in the the ‘(Earliest) Annals of Beleriand’ [c. 1931]. In essence, then, between the time The Hobbit is drafted and its unexpected publication, and indeed well into the drafting of The Lord of the Rings,⁴¹ we seem to have two competing traditions: one in which Thingol dies as in the old story (the Annals) and one in which the issue is left open (The Hobbit). Since both existed at that time only in unpublished manuscripts, it’s impossible to say which of the parallel traditions was more definitive; The Hobbit’s version was certainly the first to reach print and might thus be thought to be more authoritative, yet it was at least partly superseded by the later account of the elvenking in The Lord of the Rings.

The second disconnect is an absence rather than a presence: namely, that there is no Faërie Queen at the Elvenking’s side in Mirkwood. As great a figure as Thingol himself is in the legendarium, he is just as famous for his wife (and daughter) as for his own deeds, just as King Arthur is ultimately more famous for the deeds of the knights of his Round Table than for his own exploits (aside from the realm-establishing feat of drawing the sword from the stone). Thingol’s daughter Lúthien Tinúviel is the fairest creature that ever walked the earth, and his wife Melian of Valinor (Wendelin/Gwendeling/Tindriel the fay in the earliest versions of the story) of another order of being altogether, as high above Thingol as Lúthien is above Beren (or Arwen above Aragorn). It is Melian’s power that protects the woodland realm of Doriath from its enemies, just as Galadriel later protects Lothlórien in The Lord of the Rings. Such a figure could hardly escape Bilbo’s notice during the weeks and months he was forced to lurk within the wood-elves’ halls and ‘go on burglaring’, yet no queen is mentioned, either by the side of the woodland king in Bombur’s visions and the description of the third great feast that followed in the Enchanted Stream interpolation, nor anywhere in this chapter’s account of the wood-elves’ halls. We can only infer her existence indirectly from much later evidence, long after the time of our book: the fact that in The Lord of the Rings we are told the Elvenking has a son, Legolas, who becomes one of the Fellowship of the Ring. If Tolkien’s projected rewriting of our story in 1960 had proceeded as far as the Mirkwood chapters, we might have been able to discover whether he intended to bring Legolas into Mr. Baggins’ story (after all, in the light of later knowledge we can say he would almost certainly have been present at the Battle of Five Armies); there is no sign of it in the admittedly sketchy notes that survive. But even this would hardly have resolved the question of what was in Tolkien’s mind almost thirty years earlier when he wrote The Hobbit, since by that later date he was committed to the decision that Thingol and the Elvenking were two different characters.

The only possibility that would unite both traditions would be if Thingol did indeed die in the fall of Doriath but then later returned to Middle-earth after a suitable time in the Halls of Mandos.⁴² Since elves experience serial immortality, it is quite possible in Tolkien’s metaphysics for us to encounter in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings an elf who died during events in the First Age, spent time in the Halls of Mandos, was re-incarnated with the same personality and memories, and then returned to Middle-earth during the Second or Third Age. In fact, we have one specific example in the person of Glorfindel, Elrond’s chief advisor in Rivendell, who dies fighting a balrog during the retreat from Gondolin near the end of the First Age (‘The Fall of Gondolin’, BLT II.194; Silm.243) yet re-appears in Middle-earth before the end of the second millennium of the Third Age (LotR.225–6; HME VI.214–5 & HME XII.377ff).

It might be argued that if the Elvenking in The Hobbit were indeed a figure returned from death then Tolkien would have drawn attention to this fact in some way, but the example of Glorfindel shows this is not necessarily the case; the same could be true of any elf we meet in The Hobbit. However, while entirely possible in terms of what we know to be true of the elves, one nonetheless cannot help feeling that it would be a coming down in the world for Thingol Greycloak, one of the most renowned elves of the First Age, to return to a diminished realm, sans wife and daughter, his original home sunk beneath the waves in lost Beleriand, his kingdom reduced to the wood-elf realm in Mirkwood. Glorfindel clearly had unfinished business drawing him back into the mortal world.⁴³ Thingol has no such motive; having only stayed in Middle-earth originally because of Melian, it seems unlikely that he would have left Valinor a second time without her. Instead, this sense of diminishment may be part of the very reason Thingol and the Elvenking ultimately did become separate characters. As Thingol grew in majesty and wisdom and stature during the long evolution of the legendarium – a process reaching its apotheosis in Narn i Hîn Húrin (cf. Unfinished Tales, page 83) but already well underway in ‘The Lay of Leithian’ (cf. Note 34) – the simple wood-elf king that had been Tinwelint became buried under the weight of glory; re-creating him in the person of the Elvenking enabled Tolkien to recapture something much more like the original character, regaining a quality that had been lost in the ennoblement of Thingol and one which made him much more suited to the role he was to play in The Hobbit.

In the end it seems clear that when he wrote The Hobbit Tolkien drew on the old story (which was, after all, unpublished and likely to remain so), changing it as he did so, to make the material more suited to his new purpose. But he left his options open as to whether the Elvenking was a new character or an old familiar character appearing in a new story, slightly altered to fit his new surroundings. In time he decided that the Elvenking was indeed a new character and gave him a name (see part iv below) and (sketchy) history of his own, but this decision postdated the publication of The Hobbit, probably by more than a decade, and he never went back and re-wrote the key passage in The Hobbit to distinguish what was now the analogue from the original. Thus to this day we are left with two contradictory accounts of which elvenking was responsible for provoking the elf–dwarf war, the one in the Silmarillion tradition and the other within The Hobbit.

(iv)
The Name ‘Thranduil’

The Elvenking is never named within The Hobbit; like the Mayor of Lake Town (who never does acquire a name), he is always simply referred to by title throughout. Not until The Lord of the Rings is he given a name, Thranduil, and made father of the elven member of the Fellowship, Legolas Greenleaf. Even in The Lord of the Rings most of what we learn about him comes from Appendix B: ‘The Tale of Years’; he never actually appears in the main story. His name is not easily explicated but seems to be in early Sindarin (that is, Gnomish/Noldorin, later rationalized as a dialectical form), and to contain the same element as the place-name Nargothrond:⁴⁴ Narog + othrond, ‘fortified cave by the river Narog’ [Salo, p. 386; HME XI.414]. The thrand/(o)thrond element, meaning fortified cave (ost + rond), fits very well with the character as described in The Hobbit, where the chief thing we know about him is that he’s a king dwelling in a cave; the –uil or -duil suffix might relate to dûl (hollow), but more likely links to drui, drû (‘wood, forest’) [Gnomish Lexicon, page 31]. If so, a possible gloss would be ‘(One who lives in) a (fortified) cave in the woods’.

(v)
The Wine of Dorwinion

It must be potent wine to make a wood-elf drowsy. But this it would seem was the heady brew of the great gardens of Dorwinion in the warm South, not meant for his soldiers or his servants, but for the king’s feasts only, and for smaller bowls, not the butler’s jugs. Soon the chief guard fell asleep and not long after the butler put his head on the table and snored beside him.

—p. 383.

The presence of wine from Dorwinion in the Elvenking’s halls is yet another piece of circumstantial evidence demonstrating the affinity in Tolkien’s mind between the elves of Mirkwood and those of Doriath, Thingol’s people, since such wine appears in only two of Tolkien’s works, The Hobbit and ‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’ [begun circa 1918], and both times in connection with wood-elves. In the alliterative poem, Beleg the hunter gives this same wine to Túrin and his companions after he finds them lost in the woods of Doriath:

  ... their heads were mazed

by the wine of Dor-Winion    that went in their veins,

and they soundly slept ...

—‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’,

lines 229b–231a; HME III.11.

Furthermore, we are told that this wine

... is bruised from the berries    of the burning South –

and the Gnome-folk know it,    and the nation of the Elves,

and by long ways lead it    to the lands of the North.

—ibid., lines 225–227.
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That this wine would stupefy starving human travellers is no wonder, but its potency is also testified by its effect on Orgof, one of Thingol’s high-ranking thanes (the figure known as Saeros in the published Silmarillion); it is when he is ‘deep drunken’ (line 484) on this same ‘wine of Dor-Winion that went ungrudged/in their golden goblets’ (lines 425–426a) that he taunts Túrin, resulting in his own death. These two incidents are the only two times in Tolkien’s work when he describes an elf becoming drunk, and it can hardly be an accident that the same wine (potent indeed) was involved in both cases.

Unlike many names in The Hobbit, Dorwinion seems easy to explicate: Dor, land (as in Gondor, Mordor, Dorthonion); winion, wine: Wine-land or Vinland. David Salo (A Gateway to Sindarin, page 374) considers it a mixed Sindarin-Welsh form (Welsh gwin, wine) but it might as easily be taken as a case where Sindarin’s inspiration in real-world Welsh has been less assimilated than usual; many similar instances are cited in An Introduction to Elvish, Jim Allan et al., pages 49–50. However, against this we must set a late linguistic essay Tolkien wrote glossing names in The Fellowship of the Ring, in which he gave a completely different explanation for the name:

In the Hobbit all names are translated except Galion (the Butler), Esgaroth, and Dorwinion. Galion and Esgaroth are not Sindarin (though perhaps ‘Sindarized’ in shape) or are not recorded in Sindarin; but Dorwinion is Sindarin meaning ‘Young-land country’.

Above the gloss he has later written in pencil ‘or Land of Gwinion’. The Gnomish Lexicon gives gwinwen as a word meaning ‘freshness’ (Parma Eldalamberon XI.46), with gwion being one of the words meaning ‘young’ (ibid.42). The glosses given above, while authorial, postdate the creation of these names by decades and so may be afterthoughts rather than definitive explanations. But if they do indeed reveal what was in Tolkien’s mind when he first created the name – that is, if Dorwinion in fact meant ‘Land of Youth’ rather than ‘Wine-land’ when Tolkien first created the name – then here he is deliberately drawing on Celtic (specifically Irish) myth. Not only is Tir na nÓg (‘The Land of Youth’) one of the most famous of the Celtic otherworlds that could be reached through imrama (voyages into the mythic West), but it was one that particularly interested Tolkien, who intended to devote a chapter of the unfinished The Lost Road [1936] to ‘a Tuatha-de-Danaan story, or Tir-nan-Og’ (HME V.77), having already mentioned it in his 1924 poem ‘The Nameless Land’, where he describes Tol Eressëa:

Than Tír na nÓg⁴⁵ more fair and free,

Than Paradise more faint and far,

O! shore beyond the Shadowy Sea,

O! land forlorn where lost things are,

O! mountians where no man may be!

—lines 49–53; HME V.99–100.

If these associations were present from an early date, it would explain the unusual potency of the wine from this magical land – compare Dunsany’s Gorgondy, the wi`ne of the gnomes; so potent that drinking it can kill even a hardened sailor outright (‘The Secret of the Sea’; The Last Book of Wonder [1916]), so superlative that it surpasses all other wines and its taste can lure a man into fatal risks to gain more (‘The Opal Arrow-Head’ [1920], collected in The Man Who Ate the Phoenix [ 1947]).

If Dorwinion indeed means ‘The Land of Youth’, then we would expect there to be only one such enchanted land in all the world. On the other hand, if it simply means ‘Wine-land’, that name could plausibly be applied to more than one country. Are we justified in considering the Dorwinion referred to in the Túrin story as the same land referred to in The Hobbit? Certainly Tolkien does seem to have re-used the name at least once, when he included in the final paragraph of the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion a reference to ‘the undying flowers in the meads of Dorwinion’ as part of Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle (HME V.334); while this fits in perfectly with the ‘Land of Youth’ gloss it cannot at the same time be accommodated to Dorwinion’s mention in the alliterative poem and The Hobbit – however precious and potent the wine drunken in Menegroth and the Halls of the Elvenking, it certainly had not been imported all the way from Elvenhome. Moreover, in the revised version of The Lay of the Children of Húrin [circa 1923], it specifies that this wine reaches Doriath by way of dwarven traders:

  ... berries of the burning South–

the Gnome-folk know it,    from Nogrod the Dwarves

by long ways lead it    to the lands of the North

for the Elves in exile    who by evil fate

the vine-clad valleys    now view no more

in the land of Gods.

—lines 539–544a, HME III.111.

These two references could be reconciled if we assume that the vine-clad valleys of Valinor were known as Dorwinion, as per the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion, and the elves of Beleriand applied the name to a quite distinct wine district in Middle-earth in memory of that other Dorwinion, but it seems far more probable that Tolkien simply re-used the name in this section of the Quenta Silmarillion (which is more closely related to the 1930 Quenta than most of the 1937 text; see Note 32 on p. 429). By contrast, I think the two Dorwinions referred to in the alliterative poem and the wood-elf chapter of The Hobbit are one and the same, that Tolkien borrowed the name and concept entire from the old lay and that, given the geographical flexibility of lands ‘off the map’ to the south, the same referents would serve.

Dorwinion does not appear on any of Tolkien’s Beleriand maps (see ‘The First “Silmarillion” Map’, HME.[219]–234), nor on the Wilderland map accompanying The Hobbit (see DAA.[399] and the maps on Plates I and II), nor on the large fold-out map of Middle-earth published with volumes one and two of The Lord of the Rings. However, it does appear on Pauline Baynes’ version of the Middle-earth map published in 1970, at the mouth of the River Running on the north-west shore of the Sea of Rhûn (in the exact same spot where the label ‘Sea of Rhûn’ appears on Tolkien’s own map, drawn for him by his son Christopher). This is one of a number of new names Tolkien provided Baynes for her map in 1969, not all of which were placed correctly, as noted by Christopher Tolkien (Unfinished Tales, pages 261–2),⁴⁶ but in this case we can confirm its placement thanks to the same unpublished late linguistic essay already cited, in which Tolkien comments that Dorwinion ‘was probably far south down the R. Running, and its Sindarin name a testimony to the spread of Sindarin: in this case expectable since the cultivation of vines was not known originally to the Nandor or Avari’.⁴⁷ In any case, its placement here, even if in accordance with Tolkien’s instructions, is a late accretion and almost certainly not what he intended at the time he wrote The Hobbit, when the surrounding geography was as yet undetermined; on Baynes’ map, Dorwinion is no further south than the Necromancer’s tower (Dol Guldur) and roughly equal to the southern edge of the Wilderland map – hardly ‘in the warm South’ (a location more like the later Ithilien would seem to be more in keeping with Tolkien’s original conception, given his descriptions of the latter’s climate in The Lord of the Rings).