As before, the story continues without chapter break, in this case near the bottom of manuscript page 136 (1/1/12:1). This brief chapter is written quickly, with many abbreviations (‘R. Running’) and minor errors or omissions, which I have for the most part silently expanded or corrected. Perhaps significantly, it is a fairly clean text, with relatively few changes made in the course of composition; thanks to the brief sketch of these events in Plot Notes B (see pp. 362–3), Tolkien knew what he wanted to happen in this part of the story and seems to have simply concentrated on getting it down in full without for the moment worrying about details of phrasing.
They rowed right up it in two days’ <journey> and passed out into the River Running, and saw now the Mountain towering grim and tall before them. The stream was strong and their going slow. At the end of the third day some miles up the River Running they halted on the bank to their left, the West bank, and disembarked. Here a store of provisions and other necessarys was made, but no men would stay there so near the shadow of the Mountain.TN1
‘Not at any [rate] until the songs had come true’ said they. Still there was no need for any guard. The lands were wide and empty. Here they joined the horses that had been sent for them; and bade farewell to their escort. The next day packing what they could carry on horseback they set out, Bilbo riding with Balin on one horse, leading another heavily laden beside them; the others were ahead in single file, picking [added: out] a slow road. They made due North, slanting away from the River Running and drawing nearer & nearer to a great spur of the Mountain that was flung out Southward towards them.
It was a weary journey, and a quiet and stealthy one. There was no laughter or song, and the pride and hopes which had stirred in all their hearts (esp. Thorin’s) at the singing of the old songs by the lake had died away to a plodding gloom. They knew they were drawing near to the end of their journey – and that it might be a very horrible end. The land grew barren, though once, as Thorin said, it had been green and fair. There was little grass. Soon there were neither bush nor tree, and only broken stumps to speak of ones long vanished. They were come to the desolation of the Dragon, and they were come at the waning of the year.
They reached the skirts of the mountain without meeting serious danger, all the same. There was no sign of the dragon. The mountain lay dark and silent before them, and ever more above them. They made their first settled camp on the lowest slopes of the great southern spur – I have marked it on the copy of Thror’s map; as he did himself, though of course it was not there when Bladorthin had it.TN2 Before setting out to search the western slopes for the hidden door, on which all their hopes rested, Thorin sent out a scouting expedition to spy out the land to the east by the Front Gate. Bilbo went with them – and Balin and Fili and Kili. After a couple of days of silent journey they came back to the Running River, which here took a [?sudden >] great western turn and flowed towards the mountain, which stretched out great arms to meet it. The bank was rocky, tall, and steep here, and gazing out from the brink, over the narrow river, foaming and splashing over boulders, they could see in a wide valley shadowed by the mountain’s arms, the grey ruins far-off of ancient [?towers >] houses, towers, and walls.
‘There lies all that is left of Dale’ said Balin. ‘The mountain’s sides were green with woods then, and all this valley rich and sheltered.’ He looked both sad and grim as he said this: he had been one of Thorin’s companions on the day the Dragon came.TN3 They did not dare to follow the river much further towards the gate; but they went on until lying hidden behind a rock they could look out, and see the dark cavernous opening in a great wall between the mountain’s arms, out of which the water ran. And out of which too there was coming steam and a dark smoke. Nothing else moved in the waste, save the vapour and the river [> water], and every now and again a dark and ominous raven. The only sound was the sound of stony water, and every now and again a raven’s croak. Balin shuddered. ‘Let us return’ he said. ‘We can do no good here! And I do not like those dark birds; they look like spies of evil’.TN4
‘The dragon is still alive and in the halls under the Mountain then?’ said the hobbit. ‘Or I imagine so from the smoke’.
‘That doesn’t prove it’ said Balin; ‘though I don’t doubt you are right. But he might be gone [added: away] some time, and [> or] he might be lying on the mountain’s-side watching us [> keeping watch], and still I expect smokes and steams would come out of the gates because of the heat he leaves behind’.
With such gloomy thoughts, followed ever by croaking ravens, they made their weary way back to the others and the camp. A year and more had passed since they had been guests at the fair house of Elrond, in June; and now the summer of the year after was drawing to a bleak end, and they were alone in the perilous waste.TN5 They were at the end of their journey, but as far as ever it seemed from the end of their quest. None of them had much spirit left.
Now strange to say Bilbo had more than any of them. He would often borrow Thorin’s map and gaze at it, pondering the runes, and the message of the moon-letters Elrond had read.TN6 It was he who made them begin the dangerous search upon the western slopes for the secret door.TN7 They moved their camp to a long valley deeper and narrower than that one where stood the great gates of the River, but hemmed in with lower spurs. Two of these here [sprouted >] thrust forward West from the main mass of the mountain, great long ridges with steep sides, [that] fell ever downwards towards the plain. Here there was less sign of the dragon’s marauding feet, and there was grass for their ponies.TN8 From their second camp, shadowed all day by cliff and wall until the sun began to sink west towards the forest, day by day they toiled in parties seeking for paths up the mountain side. If the map was true somewhere high above the cliff at the valley head must stand the secret door, now their only hope. Day by day they came back weary to the camp without success.
But at last they found what they were seeking. Fili and Kili and the hobbit went back one day near to the [end of the >] Southern corner of the valley, and here scrambling up some loose rocks they came suddenly on what looked like rough steps. Following these excitedly they came upon traces of a narrow track, often lost, often found again, that wandered onto the top of the sunken ridge and brought them at last to a narrow ledge. This turned north and looking down they saw they were at the top of the [valley >] cliff at the valley head, looking down on their own camp below.TN9 Silently, clinging to the rocky wall on their right they went in single file along the ledge till the wall opened and they turned into a little steep walled bay, grassy floored, still and quiet. At its end a flat wall rose up at its lower part close to the ground as smooth and upright as man’s work, but without a joint or crack. No sign was there of post nor lintel nor threshold; no sign of bar or bolt or key. Yet they did not doubt they had found the door at last. They beat on it, and they pushed, they implored it to open, they spoke fragments of broken magic, and nothing stirred. At last tired out they rested before their long climb down.TN10
There was excitement in the camp that night. In the morning they prepared to move. Bofur and Bombur were left behind to guard the ponies and the stores. The others went down the valley, and up the newly found path, and so to the narrow ledge, along which they cd. have carried no bundles or packs, so narrow and breathless was it, with a fall of a hundred and fifty feet beside them. But each of them carried a coil of rope tight about his waist. And so they reached the little grassy bay.TN11
There they made their third camp, hauling up what they needed by <knotted> ropes. Down the same way one or two of the most active, such as Fili, would go back from time to time to the valley, [and tell the others > Bofur and Bombur > of what was >] and bring such news as there was, or take a share in the guard, while Bofur climbed to the higher camp. Bombur would not go. ‘I am too fat for such fly-paths’ he said. ‘I should [tread on a >] turn dizzy and tread on my beard and then you would be thirteen again!’ Some of them explored the ledge beyond the opening and found a way leading higher onto the mountain; but that way they did not dare to go far.TN12 Nor was there much use in it. All the while a silence reigned, broken by no bird or voice, nothing except the wind. They spoke low, and never shouted nor sang, for danger brooded in every rock.
Nor did they succeed in discovering the secret of the door, or where exactly it was in the flat face of rock. [added in margin: They had brought picks and tools of many sorts from Lake Town. But they soon gave up trying these on this part of the rock. Their handles splintered and jarred their arms with <illegible>, or the steel heads bent like lead. Mining work was no good at all.] Bilbo found that sitting on the doorstep [added: wearisome] – there wasn’t one of course, really, but they used to call the little grassy space between the door and the opening onto the cliff edge ‘the doorstep’ in fun, remembering Bilbo’s words long ago at the party in the hobbit-hole, that [they] could sit on the doorstep till they thought of something. And sit and think they did, or wandered aimlessly about, and glummer and glummer they became. Their spirits had risen a little, at the discovery of the path; but now they sank into their boots, and yet they wd. not give up and go away. The hobbit was no longer much brighter than the dwarves. He would do nothing but sit with his back to the rock-face staring away West through the opening over the cliff over the wide lands to the black wall of Mirkwood and the blue distances beyond in which he sometimes thought he cd. catch glimpses of the Misty Mountains.
‘You said sitting on the doorstep [added: & thinking] would be my job, not to mention getting inside the door’, said he, ‘so I am sitting and thinking’. But I am afraid he was not often thinking of the job, but of what lay beyond the blue distances, the western land and The Hill and his hobbit-hole under it. A large grey stone lay in the centre of the grass, and he stared moodily at it; or watched the great snails that seemed to love this little shut in bay with its rocky wall [> sides] crawl slow and stickily along the sides.
‘Autumn will be in tomorrow’ said Thorin one day.
‘And winter comes after autumn’ said Bifur.
‘And next year after that’ said Dwalin. ‘And our beards will grow till they hang down the cliff to the ground, before anything happens here.TN13 What is our Burglar doing for us! Seeing he has got an invisible ring and so ought to be a specially excellent performer, I am beginning to think he ought to go through the Front Gate, and spy things out a bit.’
Bilbo heard this – he was on the rocks up above the enclosure. ‘Good gracious!’ thought he ‘ – So that’s what they are beginning to think are they? What ever am I going to do. I might have known something dreadful would happen to me in the end. I don’t think I could bear to see the ruined valley of Dale again, and as for that steam<ing> gate –.’
That night he was very miserable and hardly slept. Next day the dwarves went wandering off in various directions. Some were exercising the ponies down below; some were on the mountain side. All day Bilbo sat gloomily in the grassy bay gazing at the stone or out West through the opening.TN14 He had a queer feeling that he was waiting for something. ‘Perhaps the wizard will suddenly come back to day’ he thought.TN15
He could see then a glimpse of the forest. As the sun turned west there was a gleam of yellow light upon its distant roof, going brown towards autumn. Suddenly [> At last] he saw the orange sun sinking towards the level of his eyes. He went to the opening and there pale and faint was a thin new moon above the rim of the earth. At that very moment he heard a sharp crack behind him. There on the [added: grey] stone in the grass was a large thrush, nearly coal black its pale yellow breast freckled with dark spots. Crack. it had caught a snail and was knocking it on the stone. Crack, crack!
Suddenly Bilbo understood. Forgetting all caution he stood on the ledge and hailed the dwarves, shouting and waving. Those that were nearest came tumbling over the rocks to him, wondering what on earth was happening, the others made for the path from the valley as fast as ever they could. You can just picture Bilbo standing now beside the thrushes’ stone, and the dwarves with wagging beards watching excitedly by the walls. The sun sank lower and lower. Then their hopes fell. It sank into a belt of red-stained clouds and disappeared. The dwarves groaned, but still Bilbo stood almost without moving. The little moon was dipping to the [river >] horizon. Evening was coming on. Then suddenly when their hope was lowest, a red ray of the sun escaped like a finger through a rent in the bars of cloud. A gleam of light came straight through the opening in the bay, and fell on the smooth rock face. [There was a loud crack >] The old thrush which had been watching from a high perch with beady eyes [& head] cocked on one side gave a sudden trill. There was a loud crack. A flake of rock split from the face and fell. A hole appeared suddenly about three feet from the ground.
Quickly trembling lest the chance shd fade [Thorin fitted >] the dwarves rushed to the rock and pushed. ‘A key a key’ said Bilbo ‘we need a key’.
‘But we have no keys’ said the desperate dwarves.
‘GandalfTN16 gave me my father’s map not keys of his’ said Thorin. ‘Gandalf –’
‘Gandalf!’ said Bilbo. ‘He gave us [> you] the troll-keys.TN17 Try them quick. You never know’.
Thorin stepped up and fitted [> put] in the only key that was small enough. It fitted it turned. Snap! and the sun gleam went out, the sun sank, and evening sprang into the sky. The moon was gone.
Now they all pushed together, and slowly a part of the rock-wall gave way. Long straight cracks appeared and widened. A door five feet high and three broad was outlined,TN18 and slowly without a noise swung inwards. It almost seemed as if darkness flowed out like a vapour from the mountain side; deep darkness in which nothing could be seen lay before their eyes, a mouth leading in and down.
The manuscript continues on the same page (manuscript page 142; 1/1/13:1), but after the next sentence (see page 504) the ink becomes noticeably darker, indicating at least a brief pause in composition.
TEXT NOTES
1 This store of provisions would later become important; see Plot Notes E (‘Little Bird’), a hasty half-page of notes describing Tolkien’s original conception of the Siege of the Mountain, page 626.
2 This ‘camp’ can be seen, in exactly the position described here, on Fimbulfambi’s Map (see plate one of the Frontispiece). It also appears on Thror’s Map I (Plate I [top]), which follows the earliest map very closely. However, it is probable that this and other details were added to Fimbulfambi’s Map long after the Pryftan Fragment was originally drafted, as part of the drafting for Thror’s Map I, and thus dates from the time the latter was created. The location of the camp does not appear on the final map (Thror’s Map II, DAA.97) that appeared in the published book.
Note that Bladorthin is still the name of the wizard here – that is, although ‘Gandalf’ had been dropped as the name of the chief dwarf before Chapter X was written, it was not immediately transferred to the wizard, although that would in fact occur later in this same ‘chapter’; see Text Note 16 below.
3 This is our first indication that Balin, like Thorin, is a survivor of ‘the day the Dragon came’. Taken altogether, his is perhaps the most eventful life of any dwarf on record, rivaled only by the great Dain Ironfoot. He was not only one of the few† who survived Smaug’s attack upon the Lonely Mountain and the destruction of the dwarven Kingdom there but almost certainly also fought in the Battle of Azanulbizar to avenge Thror’s murder, where the death rate among the dwarven combatants approached 50% (a casualty rate exceeding that of the Battle of the Somme) – not only did his father die there but Balin is mentioned as being among Thrain’s and Thorin’s company immediately after the battle (cf. LotR.1113). He accompanied Thrain on his ill-fated quest that ended with Durin’s heir imprisoned in the dungeons of the Necromancer (LotR.1114), fought alongside Thorin in the Battle of Five Armies (see page 672), and finally reconquered Moria for a time and reclaimed the crown of Durin himself (LotR.258 & 338–41).
All this is all the more remarkable because according to the family tree presented in ‘Durin’s Folk’ (LotR Appendix A part iii), Balin would have been only seven years old at the time of Smaug’s attack and thus an unlikely candidate to be a companion of the twenty-four-year-old Thorin. This is obviously too young to match the information given in The Hobbit by at least a decade and probably more; while it is implied that Balin must be younger than Thorin from a remark in Chapter IX (‘“What have we done, O king?” said Balin, the oldest left now that Gandalf [Thorin] was gone’ – cf. page 380 and Text Note 4 to Chapter IX), there’s no indication that they’re separated by more than a few years, nor any descriptions of Thorin to indicate that he is or looks old (unlike Balin, who from the first description of him on Bilbo’s doorstep is ‘a very old-looking dwarf’ with a white beard, and whose age is reinforced by the many references to him throughout the story as ‘old Balin’). By the official reckoning of The Lord of the Rings, Balin was thirty-six at the time of the Battle before Moria (when Dain, described as ‘only a stripling’, was himself thirty-two). He and his brother Dwalin – the latter not even born at the time of Smaug’s attack – must therefore have been among the youngest members of Thrain’s expedition, being at that time seventy-eight and sixty-nine respectively; compare Fili and Kili from Thorin’s group, constantly referred to as youngsters, who are eighty-two and seventy-seven respectively, and Gimli, who at sixty-two was considered too young to accompany his father Glóin on Bilbo’s adventure (‘The Quest of Erebor’, Unfinished Tales page 336 and DAA.376). At the time of his death in Moria, King Balin is officially two hundred and thirty-one, a respectable age considering that Thror, who is described as ‘old’ and ‘crazed perhaps with age’ (LotR.1110) is not that much older at the time of his murder (two hundred and forty-eight), nor is the ‘old’ and ‘venerable’ Dain (LotR. 245), whom Gandalf describes as being of a ‘great age’ (two hundred and fifty-one; LotR.1116). In fact, given the unlikelihood that he was only seven when the Kingdom under the Mountain fell or merely a dignified one hundred and seventy-eight at the time of Thorin’s quest (when Thorin, who is never described as old, is himself one hundred and ninety-five), Balin was probably at least two hundred and forty at the time of his death and possibly, if we discount the reference in Chapter IX, much older; Thorin, had he lived, would then have been two hundred and forty-eight, the same age as old Thror at the time of his murder. See also The Peoples of Middle-earth, HME XII.284–5 & 288 for more on dwarven longevity.
† In the original conception as described in The Hobbit, it is clear that very few indeed escaped Smaug’s attack, only Thror and Thrain (through the secret door) and ‘the few’ who like Thorin and Balin were outside at the time. When Tolkien revisited the history of the dwarves while constructing Appendix A of LotR, he greatly increased the number of survivors, stating (in contradiction to the account in The Hobbit) that ‘many’ of Thrór’s kin escaped, including not just his son Thráin and grandson Thorin but Thorin’s younger brother Frerin (later killed at the Mines of Moria) and his sister Dís (then only a child of ten, later the mother of Fíli and Kíli); furthermore, they were joined with ‘a small company of their kinsmen and faithful followers’ – the former including presumably Balin and his parents (Dwalin’s having not yet been born until two years later indicates that their unnamed mother survived the disaster, and his father Fundin being among Thrain’s company at the disastrous battle of Moria). A footnote adds that ‘It was afterwards learned that more of the Folk under the Mountain had escaped than was at first hoped; but most of these went to the Iron Hills.’ – LotR.1110.
4 Balin’s distaste and distrust for the ravens shows that the idea of the ancient friendship between the dwarves and the ravens of the mountain had not yet arisen – there being no reference to conversations with either ravens or crows in Plot Notes B, nor in Plot Notes C (which followed immediately upon the writing of this chapter). There is however a very important reference to a crow in the earliest draft of the moon-runes passage all the way back in the Pryftan Fragment, where the secret writing had read ‘Stand by the grey stone when the crow knocks and the rising sun at the moment of dawn on Durin’s Day will shine upon the keyhole’, but this had quickly been changed to a thrush (see page 22).
Crows do appear in Plot Notes D, but it seems that there the dwarves overhear the carrion fowl speaking rather than meet with them (see page 571). Not until Tolkien comes to write the last few pages of the Second Phase manuscript, the first third or so of what became Chapter XV – the last bit of writing Tolkien completed before breaking off the Second Phase and returning to the beginning of the story to create the First Typescript – do the ravens finally appear, with such suddenness that Bilbo himself comments upon it (see page 618). It is possible that they first appeared in the lost drafting of which the only surviving fragment is the half-page upon the back of which Tolkien jotted down Plot Notes E (‘Little Bird’); at any rate, having introduced them as friends and allies of the dwarves, Tolkien initially projected the ravens of the mountain to play a larger part in the Siege; see page 626.
Since ravens appear in that later scene as much more sympathetic figures than those described here, Tolkien recast this passage in several stages to remove the incongruity. Thus ‘a dark and ominous raven’ becomes in the First Typescript ‘a black and ominous crow’ (1/1/61:2), while ‘every now and again a raven’s croak’ becomes ‘every now and again the harsh croak of a crow’, which in turn at some point after the Second Typescript was made is changed to ‘croak of a bird’ (ibid. & 1/1/42:2). However, just a few paragraphs later ‘followed ever by croaking ravens’ was changed to ‘by croaking crows and ravens’, which did not resolve the problem at all. This latter reading survived into the page proofs (Marq. 1/2/2 page 211), where the words ‘and ravens’ was deleted (and ‘above them’ inserted so that the following lines would not need to be reset), thereby achieving the wording in the published book.
5 Tolkien originally wrote ‘A year or more had passed since they had been guests at the fair house of Elrond, in June. The next . . .’ before striking out the last two words and replacing the period with a semicolon and continuing ‘. . . and now [added: the] summer of the year after was drawing to a bleak end’. Once again, we see the more leisurely timeframe of the original draft is still in place; rather than it only being five or six months since their setting out as in the published book, here it is fifteen months or more since Bilbo left his hobbit-hole.
In the First Typescript (1/1/61:2), this passage was replaced with
. . . made their weary way back to the camp. Only in June they had been guests in the fair house of Elrond, and though autumn was now crawling towards winter that pleasant time now seemed years ago. They were alone in the perilous waste without hope of further help . . .
See also Text Note 13.
6 In the text of Chapter II (page 116), these had read ‘Stand by the grey stone where the thrush knocks. Then the rising [> setting] sun on the last light of Durin’s Day will shine upon the key hole’. This is very similar to the revised text that appears on Fimbulfambi’s map; see page 22.
7 This sentence was originally followed by an unfinished sentence beginning ‘[One day they >] Day by day they would toil in small parties up the lower slopes and’; a revised form of this sentence appears later in the paragraph.
8 This is the point at which the ‘horses’ described in the final paragraph of the preceding chapter and the opening paragraphs of this chapter become instead ‘ponies’, in keeping with Thorin and Company’s two previous sets of mounts (cf. pages 89 & 131, and 241–3). Despite much equivocation in later chapters, where Tolkien would occasionally write ‘horses’ and then alter it to ‘ponies’, they remained ponies henceforth.
9 This passage seems to ignore the idea, stated back in Chapter VI, that Bilbo is afraid of heights; see page 209 and Text Note 32 for Chapter VI. Possibly we are meant to conclude that Bilbo has simply learned how to face his fears better after his experiences in Mirkwood.
10 Later Tolkien created a schematic drawing of the mountain to help clarify the relationship of the first camp, second camp, hidden high path, and grassy bay hiding the secret door; see Plate II [top]. The second camp seems to be displaced in this illustration from the position described in the text; since ‘looking down on their own camp below’ suggests it was directly below the cliff they were atop – i.e., nestled against the right-hand spur (that is, the more southernly of the mountain’s two short western spurs), not off on the other side of the valley below the left-hand (more northernly) spur, especially since they continue on past this point to reach the hidden bay at the head of the valley.
11 In the original (cancelled) drafting of this passage, the sequence of events was slightly more complicated:
Bofur and Bombur were left below with the ponies. The rest carrying all they could went back by the newly found path, and came to the narrow ledge. But they could not carry bundles nor packs along there – as [they >] they ought to have thought of before. But luckily they had <illegible> brought ropes, a long coil each [slung over their >] about their waists. With these they lowered their packs.
Bifur and Bomfur <sic>
Aside from the miscalculation of bringing baggage inappropriate to the route and the narrator’s unsympathetic comment thereon, and the curious portmanteau combination of Bofur’s and Bombur’s names, the only significant difference here from the published text is Tolkien’s apparent hesitation over whether Bifur or Bofur would be the dwarf who stayed below with Bombur.
12 Since Thorin & Company cannot explore the rest of this path for fear of exposing their presence to the dragon, we never learn anything more about where this path ultimately leads, though given the difficulty of building it, it must have some important purpose. Presumably it terminates in a lookout post at the mountain’s peak, also accessible from other paths – cf. the account of the Battle of Five Armies in Chapter XVII, where the goblins scale the Mountain from the north and hence are able to attack the defenders’ positions up against the spurs on either side of the river-valley, because ‘[e]ach of these could be reached by paths that ran down from the main mass of the Mountain in the centre’ (DAA.343).
13 The original concept of Durin’s Day coming on the first new moon of autumn, not the last, is still in place (see Chapter III, page 116). Accordingly, in the manuscript, this scene is envisioned as taking place just before the equinox, or around 21st–22nd September. By contrast, in the First Typescript this passage is replaced by ‘“Tomorrow begins the last month [> week] of Autumn” said Thorin one day. “And winter comes after autumn” said Bifur. “And next year after that” said Dwalin . . .’ (1/1/61:4). Similarly, the passage earlier in the chapter ‘. . . now the summer of the year after was drawing to a bleak end’ is replaced in the typescript by ‘. . . autumn was now crawling towards winter’ (1/1/61:2); see Text Note 5.
This revised timeline as it appears in the published book introduces a major difficulty into the chronology by placing this scene in December (around the end of the second week in December, or 14th–15th December to be precise, if we assume the winter solstice occurs on or around December 21st). This hardly seems to allow enough time for the death of the dragon, the siege, and the battle to all occur and yet leave Bilbo time to travel to the far side of Mirkwood (by a more circuitous route) and celebrate Yule with Medwed/Beorn (see page 682, Chapter XVIII). Even if we were to assume ‘Yule-tide’ here corresponds not to Christmas but to the last day of the year, as in the later Shire-calendar (see Appendix D, LotR.1143), still we are told that Bilbo and the wizard on their return journey reached Beorn’s house ‘by midwinter’ – e.g., the solstice† – which cannot easily be reconciled with the statement here that Thorin & Company only gained entrance into the Mountain a week before, in the last week of autumn.
No such difficulty occurred in the original conception, of course, in which Durin’s Day fell near the beginning of autumn (e.g., late September), allowing more than three months for the events of the final chapters to take place.
† ‘Midwinter’ traditionally means not halfway between the solstice (circa 21st December) and the vernal equinox (circa 21st March) – that is, around Groundhog’s Day/Candlemas – but the day of the winter solstice itself, the shortest and darkest day of the year. Similarly ‘midsummer’ (cf. pp. 115–16 and DAA.95) means not the dog days of late July/early August but the longest day of the year, the day of the summer solstice (circa 21st June). This association is ancient; the OED traces it back for more than a thousand years. Essentially it dates back to a time when the year was divided into two seasons: summer (our spring and summer; the warm months of the year) and winter (our autumn and winter; the cold months of the year).
14 Given all the restless activity depicted in ‘The Back Door’ (Plate IX [top]), this sketch at first glance seems to be intended as an illustration for this scene, showing what Bilbo and the dwarves (some of whom are ‘out of shot’) were doing on Durin’s Day. But, on closer examination, it is clear that the scene presented is a composite, not a single moment in time. Apparently unseen by any of the characters, the secret door stands open, revealing a dark tunnel going down into the mountain. We see Bilbo sitting between the door and the rock, apparently watching a dwarf at work with a pick-axe on the bay’s wall who seems to be looking for the door in the wrong place (note that according to the text they couldn’t tell exactly where it was). In the background, higher up the mountain behind the door, we see two dwarves (no doubt the intrepid Fili and Kili) exploring the path’s higher reaches. In the foreground, a dwarf is just arriving up the high path to the right, a coil of rope slung over his shoulder, while to the left another carefully raises or lowers something by rope from the base camp. A third dwarf lies flat between them, looking straight down the cliff, his beard hanging down over the edge. There is no sign of the third ‘camp’ in the little bay, and more importantly the rock is not ‘in the centre of the grass’ as described in the text but off-center to the left. Tolkien originally called this drawing ‘The Back Gate’ to correspond to ‘The Front Gate’ (DAA.256; H-S#130) but changed the name to the more accurate ‘The Back Door’. See Plate IX [middle] for an unfinished companion piece to this drawing that shows the same scene facing west rather than east (that is, looking out from the secret door rather than looking towards it). While the rock outcroppings in these two companion pieces exactly correspond, ‘View from Back Door’ too omits the central thrush’s stone and, while it shows the setting sun, there is no sign of the new moon.
15 Unfortunately for Bilbo, the wizard’s return was still several chapters away (cf. the end of Chapter XVI) and in fact would not occur until well into the Third Phase manuscript; see page 663. This is the first reminder of the wizard since Chapter IX (the one in Chapter X having first appeared in the typescript) and reminds the reader of this off-stage character and so anticipates his eventual return.
16 This is the first appearance in text of Gandalf as the wizard’s name – appropriately enough, in the mouth of the character who had originally been named ‘Gandalf’ himself; earlier in this same chapter (see page 472 and Text Note 2 above) it had still been ‘Bladorthin’. After this scene the name ‘Gandalf’ only reappears once before the end of the Second Phase manuscript, near the end of Plot Notes D. When the name ‘Bladorthin’ next appears it has already been re-assigned to the long-dead King Bladorthin; cf. Chapter XII page 514. The directions set down in Plot Notes A (see page 293) to change several of the major characters’ names had now finally been carried out.
17 Cf. the end of Chapter II, where among the items in the troll’s lair they found ‘. . . a bunch of curious keys on a nail’ which they almost left behind, until Bladorthin notices them and decides to take them along at the last minute (page 97). Elrond in Chapter III had identified one of these as a ‘dwarf-key’, not a troll-key, and advised Gandalf (the dwarf) to ‘keep it safe and fast’, which he does by ‘fasten[ing] it to a chain and put[ting] it round his neck under his jacket’ (page 115), hence incidentally preserving it from confiscation when he is captured first by goblins and later by elves. Tolkien seems to have forgotten this detail, since he added a rider into the parting scene in Chapter VI where at the last minute Bladorthin remembers the key and gives it to Gandalf (see the additional text on page 244). This rider was probably added back into the manuscript of Chapter VII as a result of Tolkien’s note to himself in Plot Notes A: ‘Don’t forget the key found in troll’s lair.’ (see page 293). Here in the present scene it is clear that Gandalf is carrying not a single key on a chain but the whole ring of keys; Bilbo says the wizard ‘gave us [> you] the troll-keys’ (emphasis mine), and this is borne out by the statement that ‘[he] . . . fitted in the only key that was small enough’ (ibid.). Had Tolkien retained this plot-thread into the published book, he would have resolved these discrepancies, which are merely an artifact of the difficulty of keeping track of minor details in a complicated story composed in several distinct stages.
The idea that the key to the secret door was found somewhere along the journey survived into the First Typescript (1/1/61:5), where it is replaced by a pasteover (‘The key that went with the map’); this revision was done before the Second Typescript was made, since the latter incorporates the pasteover silently into its text (1/1/42:6).
18 Interestingly enough, these dimensions, which have remained in the text of the published book to this day (cf. DAA.266), do not match those set down on Thror’s Map: ‘Five feet high is the door and three may walk abreast’, a reading that goes all the way back to the Pryftan Fragment (see page 22 and the Frontispiece to Part One; italics mine) and remained remarkably stable through all iterations of the story. Granted that this ‘seems like a great big hole’ to Bilbo, and that dwarves are undoubtedly smaller than humans, still it seems unlikely that three dwarves could walk side-by-side in a passage only three feet wide.
(i)
The Desolation of the Dragon
The land grew barren, though once, as Thorin said, it had been green and fair. There was little grass. Soon there were neither bush nor tree, and only broken stumps to speak of ones long vanished. They were come to the desolation of the Dragon . . .
One of the more interesting bits of Tolkien’s dragon-lore, as presented in The Hobbit and elsewhere, is the idea that dragons are not only found in desolate places (like the ‘Withered Heath’ north of the Lonely Mountain),1 but that they make places desolate simply by dwelling in them. The connection between dragons and wastelands is ancient, going all the way back to the tannin (taninim) of the Bible, the great dragons who were named in Genesis as the first created beings.2 In most dragon-legends, however, the countryside surrounding the dragon’s lair is not described as desolate or destroyed. This is certainly not the case with Beowulf’s dragon, who until disturbed was sleeping peacefully in a barrow among the rich farms and fields of the Geatish lands. We might extrapolate and conclude that, once roused, if left unchecked he would eventually have reduced the kingdom to a wasteland as ruined as the moors surrounding Grendel’s mere,3 but the poem itself does not even hint at such an out-come. Nor does it apply to the most famous retelling of the St. George & the Dragon story, that found in Book I Canto XI of Spenser’s Faerie Queene [1590], where the dragon lives in paradisial surroundings (in fact, the land that was once Eden) that seem to have escaped his depredations relatively unscathed. Nor, to speak of Tolkien’s favorite dragon,4 do the Fáfnismál and the Reginsmál in the Elder Edda hint that the area around Fafnir’s lair is a barren wasteland, unless this is implied in its name, Gnitaheath (‘The Glittering Heath’). It seems rather that dragons live in remote and hence wild areas than that they have reduced their surroundings to ruination.
Tolkien, on the other hand, goes beyond this. For him, dragons don’t seek out wastelands to live in: areas become wastelands because dragons live there. This idea almost certainly derives from William Morris’s treatment of the Fafnir story, first in his translation (with Eiríkr Magnússon) of the twelfth-century Volsunga Saga [1870], then in his long narrative poem Sigurd the Volsung (in full The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs [1877]). Tolkien’s first introduction to this work came when he was still a child, through the juvenilized redaction published as the final story in Andrew Lang’s The Red Fairy Book [1890], ‘The Story of Sigurd’ (the only story in the volume adapted by Lang himself), which makes no mention of a desolation in its text though the accompanying pictures do suggest a barren, rocky landscape.5 The actual saga, which derives directly from the Sigurd poems in the Elder Edda but greatly expands upon them, with typical saga conciseness does not talk much about the landscape any more than do the highly elliptical poems but does at one point say that Fafnir lies ‘on the waste of Gnita-heath’ (Morris & Magnússon, page 44). That this ‘waste’ (i.e., wasteland) is unnatural is established not in the saga itself but by Morris’s expansion and adaptation of it into Sigurd the Volsung. In Morris’s development of the tale, when Fafnir’s brother Regin returns to his homeland long after being expelled by the greedy dragon, he finds all fallen into ruin and transformed into desolation:
And once . . .
I wandered away to the country from whence our stem did grow.
There methought the fells6 grown greater, but waste did the meadows lie,
And the house was rent and ragged and open to the sky.
But lo, when I came to the doorway, great silence brooded there,
Nor bat nor owl would haunt it, nor the wood-wolves drew anear.
—Sigurd the Volsung, page 98.
Long years, and long years after, the tale of men-folk told
How up on the Glittering Heath was the house and the dwelling of gold,
And within that house was the Serpent . . .
Then I wondered sore of the desert; for I thought of the golden place
My hands of old had builded . . .
This was ages long ago, and yet in that desert7 he dwells.
—Sigurd the Volsung, page 99.
In addition to Morris, the idea that dragons are bad for the surrounding countryside and, over time, reduce it to a desolate condition can also be found in various ballads and folktales, most notably ‘The Laidly Worm’ and ‘The Lambton Worm’. In one nineteenth-century version of the former, it is said of the Laidly Worm that
For seven miles east and seven miles west,
And seven miles north and south,
No blade of grass was seen to grow,
So deadly was her mouth.
—Jacqueline Simpson, British Dragons [2nd ed., 2001], page 59.
Similarly, the hero of ‘The Lambton Worm’ returns from a seven years’ absence to find ‘the broad lands of his ancestors laid waste and desolate’ and his aged father ‘worn out with sorrow and grief . . . for the dreadful waste inflicted on his fair domain by the devastations of the worm’ (‘The Wonderful Legend of the Lambton Worm’ [circa 1875]; reprinted in Simpson, British Dragons page 138). The same idea also appears in somewhat more whimsical form in the work of another of Tolkien’s favorite fantasy writers, Lord Dunsany, who has one of his heroes seek out
a dragon he knew of who if peasants’ prayers are heeded deserved to die, not alone because of the number of maidens he cruelly slew, but because he was bad for the crops; he ravaged the very land and was the bane of a dukedom.
—‘The Hoard of the Gibbelins’,
The Book of Wonder [1912], page 77.
Building then from hints in Morris’s work and perhaps also influenced to some degree by ballad and folktale tradition, Tolkien places his great wyrms in ‘desolations’ or wastelands of their own devising. Dragon-made wastes appear in three of Tolkien’s works: in the story of Turin, in The Hobbit, and in Farmer Giles of Ham.8 Of these, ‘Turambar and the Foalókë’ [circa 1919], the earliest version of the Turin story, predates The Hobbit by more than a decade and probably had the most influence on the depiction of the Desolation of Smaug and the lands around the Lonely Mountain. In The Hobbit itself, the effect is rather understated – for example, with the exception of birds (crows, ravens, and the thrush) and some snails there is no mention of Bilbo and the dwarves encountering a single living creature once they leave the Lake-Men behind other than the ponies they brought with them. Instead we have a careful description of a landscape so desolate that the presence of grass in one protected nook (see pp. 473–4 & DAA.285) is cause for comment, a point made more forceful by the contrast between the ruins of Dale and the once-prosperous town of farmers and craftsmen who had lived there in the days before the dragon came; we know this barren valley (depicted in ‘The Front Gate’, DAA.256) was once fertile enough to grow food for both the town of Men and the entire dwarven community within the Mountain as well (DAA.55). Finally, although it adds little to these two accounts, Farmer Giles of Ham (which in its original form is roughly contemporaneous with the composition of The Hobbit, either immediately preceding or immediately following it)9 serves rather to confirm the pattern.
The Túrin story clearly sets a precedent: when Tinwelint [Thingol]’s band of would-be dragon-slayers warily scout out the area the dragon has made his own, they are appalled to discover that what had been ‘a fair region’ surrounding an underground city, a river-valley ‘tree-grown’ on one side and ‘level and fertile’ on the other, has been utterly ruined:
. . . they saw that the land had become all barren and was blasted for a great distance about the ancient caverns of the Rodothlim [Nargothrond], and the trees were crushed to the earth or snapped. Toward the hills a black heath stretched and the lands were scored with the great slots that that loathly worm made in his creeping . . .
Now was that band aghast as they looked upon that region from afar, yet they prepared them for battle, and drawing lots sent one of their number . . . to that high place upon the confines of the withered land . . .
—‘Turambar and the Foalókë’, BLT II.96–7.
Indeed, so destructive is Glorund the firedrake that when he later sets forth to seek out Turambar (Túrin), he leaves behind him so great a ‘path of desolation’ and broken trees that from afar off can be seen ‘that region now torn by the passage of the drake’ (ibid.103–4). When Túrin and his band seek him out for a final combat they see ‘a wide tract10 where all the trees were broken and the lands were hurt and scorched and the earth black’, and this scorched earth aspect of the dragon’s passage is so pronounced that it complicates their tactics: ‘not by day or by night shall men hope to take a dragon of Melko unawares . . . behold, this one hath made a waste about him, and the earth is beaten flat so that none may creep near and be hidden’ (ibid.105).
This is entirely in keeping with the account of the kinds of damage Chrysophylax Dives does as he moves across the Middle Kingdom:
• ‘He did a deal of damage in a short while, smashing and burning, and devouring sheep, cattle, and horses’ (FGH, page 25)
• ‘On the night of New Year’s Day people could see a blaze in the distance. The dragon had settled in a wood about ten miles away, and it was burning merrily. He was a hot dragon when he felt in the mood’ (page 28)
• ‘[In] the neighbouring village of Quercetum [Oakley] . . . [h]e ate not only sheep and cows and one or two persons of tender age, but . . . the parson too. Rather rashly the parson had sought to dissuade him from his evil ways . . .’ (page 30)
• ‘[A]ll too soon they . . . came to parts that the dragon had visited. There were broken trees, burned hedges and blackened grass, and a nasty uncanny silence.’ (pages 39–40)
Even closer is the description of the area around Chrysophylax’s lair:
. . . dragon-marks were now obvious and numerous.
They had come, indeed, to the places where Chrysophylax often roamed, or alighted after taking his daily exercise in the air. The lower hills, and the slopes on either side of the path, had a scorched and trampled look. There was little grass, and the twisted stumps of heather and gorse stood up black amid wide patches of ash and burned earth. The region had been a dragons’ playground for many a year.
—Farmer Giles of Ham, page 58.11
Finally, we have one dragon-haunted region which is never described directly but which links the dragons of The Silmarillion with those of The Hobbit. For it seems likely that the Withered Heath,12 from whence Smaug came, was originally none other than the ruined land known by many names in the various Silmarillion texts, including the Blasted Plain (‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’, HME III.49 & 55), Dor-na-Fauglith (‘the Land of Thirst’; ibid.), the Black Plain (‘The First “Silmarillion” Map’; HME IV.220 and the colour plate ff), and ultimately the Anfauglith (translated as ‘The Gasping Dust’; cf. ‘The Grey Annals’ and ‘The Wanderings of Húrin’, HME XI). Not only does the Withered Heath lie in a similar geographical position, north of the Grey Mountains just as the Land of Thirst had lain north of the highlands of Hithlum and Taur-na-Fuin (which, as we have seen elsewhere, is associated with Mirkwood; see page 20), but Tolkien actually describes Dor-na-Fauglith as ‘withered’ and ‘the heath’ (‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’, lines 1054 and 1068 respectively; HME III.41 & 42). Close comparison of the respective locations of Taur-na-Fuin and the Thirsty Plain on the earliest Silmarillion map (HME IV) with the Wild Wood and Withered Heath on Fimbulfambi’s Map (Frontispiece, plate one) reveals just how close the two were in initial conception. Moreover, whereas in the earliest versions of the tale this seems to be simply an arid volcanic region (cf. the Túrin poem and also the 1926 ‘Sketch’), starting with the 1930 Quenta (written about the same time Tolkien began writing The Hobbit) it is definitely depicted as a destroyed land, once fair and green13 but now scorched bare, blackened and lifeless (‘burnt and desolate’, ‘burned . . . to a desolate waste’; HME IV.101 & 105).
As we have seen, by its very name, the Withered Heath must be a similarly destroyed land – and we have no less an authority than Jacob Grimm for associating heaths with dragons; he notes in Teutonic Mythology (Stallybrass translation, vol. II page 689) that one of the old names for a dragon was lyngormr (lyng-ormr, that is ‘ling-worm’ or heath-dragon, ling being another name for heather). Furthermore, we are told that dragons first arose inside Morgoth’s fortress of Angband beneath Thangorodrim in the Iron Mountains just to the north of the burned plain of Bladorion, and Gandalf the dwarf is quite definite that the Withered Heath is where dragons come from: ‘Over here is the Wild Wood and far beyond to the North, only the edge of it is on the map, is the Withered Heath where the Great Dragons used to live’ (Pryftan Fragment, page 9). In the manuscript continuation of the Bladorthin Typescript (that is, the first few pages of the Second Phase), the link between ‘some dwarves [being] driven out of the far north’ and coming to the Lonely Mountain and the presence of dragons is already implicit:
There were lots of dragons in the North in those days, and gold was probably running short there with the dwarves flying south or getting killed, and all the general waste and destruction dragons make going from bad to worse.
Some two decades later Tolkien made it explicit with the story of the cold-drake killing Thror’s father and younger brother (‘Durin’s Folk’, LotR.1109): ‘there were dragons in the waste beyond [the Grey Mountains]; and after many years they became strong again and multiplied, and they made war on the Dwarves, and plundered their works’.
The name ‘Withered Heath’ dates back to the very earliest stage of the story, appearing on Fimbulfambi’s Map in the Pryftan Fragment, immediately to the north of the Wild Wood (Mirkwood); the Grey Mountains seem not to have arisen yet. By contrast, on Thror’s Map I (which seems to have accompanied the original submission of the story to Allen & Unwin) it is off the map to the north, as indicated by an arrow next to the words ‘To the North lie the Grey Mountains beyond which is the Withered Heath’. In short, it has become one of the four framing features, along with the Iron Hills to the east, Long Lake to the south, and Mirkwood the Great to the west, all surrounding the central area that was once the dwarf-kingdom (‘Here of old was the land of Thrain14 King under the Mountain’) but is now the dragon’s realm (‘Here is the Desolation of Smaug’). Thror’s Map II, the final version published in the book, is even more explicit in its linkage of the dragons and Heath: ‘Far to the North are the Grey Mountains & the Withered Heath whence came the Great Worms’ (italics mine). On the final version of the Wilderland Map used in the published book, the label ‘Withered Heath’ is inserted into a long narrow valley between the two eastern arms of the Grey Mountains, this vale being marked with similar hatching to that used to indicate the Desolation of Smaug. We should note, however, that this was a late change; on the version of the Wilderland Map that had accompanied Tolkien’s original turnover to Allen & Unwin (Plate I [bottom]), ‘Withered Heath’ is simply the land north of the low line of hills which are the Grey Mountains, with no indication of how far into the distance off the map it might extend – a depiction in keeping with the original conception.
Finally, we should note one curious feature of the Desolation of Smaug which the earlier Wilderland Map calls attention to, also prominent in Tolkien’s picture of the Front Gate (DAA.256; H-S#130): the curious fact of Running River arising in the dragon’s lair. In one sense this could merely be verisimilitude – most caverns are carved by underground rivers, after all, and its presence suggests that the dwarves expanded upon caves that were already there to create their underground kingdom, just as Gimli later does early in the Fourth Age at Aglarond (LotR.1118). However, it is worth noting that throughout world mythology dragons are associated with water – specifically, with springs, wells, and similar spots where streams and rivers begin (cf. Simpson, British Dragons, pages 48–50).
There on the grey stone in the grass was a large thrush, nearly coal black, its pale yellow breast freckled with dark spots . . . it had caught a snail and was knocking it on the stone . . . The old thrush, which had been watching from a high perch with beady eyes & head cocked on one side, gave a sudden trill (pp. 475–6).
. . . The old thrush was sitting on a rock nearby with his head cocked on one side . . . (page 513).
. . . [T]here was the old thrush, perched on a stone; and as soon as they looked towards him he flapped his wings and sang; then he cocked his head on one side as if to listen, and again he sang, and again he listened.
‘I believe he is trying to tell us something’ said Thorin . . . (page 618).
It is entirely characteristic of Tolkien that, even though he nowhere identifies the specific type of thrush that Bilbo, Bard, and the dwarves encounter, nonetheless he provides enough details of its appearance and behavior to make that identification certain. Out of the many thrush species native to England, the Lonely Mountain thrush is clearly a song thrush (T. philomelos),15 a species particularly noted for its diet of snails and its habit of crushing their shells on a rock. Many song thrushes in fact choose a favorite rock as their ‘snail anvil’ and return to it again and again, making the clue on Thror’s Map a plausible application of real-world avian behavior to the fantasy story. Song thrushes are also, as the name suggests, noted singers, whose voices can carry a half-mile, and often hold their head to one side as if listening (possibly in fact listening for prey such as earthworms beneath the soil).
The size and coloration (not to mention longevity) of the Lonely Mountain thrush indicates that he is an exceptional individual, but then Thorin does identify him as a member of ‘a long lived and magical breed’ (page 513). It seems very likely that Thror and Thrain set this particular thrush, one of those who ‘came tame to the hands of my father and grandfather’, the duty of watching the secret door so that others could use the instructions on the Map to find the secret door, should neither Thror nor Thrain return (as indeed through ill fortune proves to be the case). While there is a widespread tradition of helpful birds in folk and fairy tale, mythology and medieval romance, here Tolkien seems to be drawing on Celtic legendry, particularly the Welsh tale Culhwch and Olwen (the oldest surviving Arthurian story, found in The Mabinogion, and a tale with which we know Tolkien was familiar; see page 194), which depicts a bird performing the same innocuous action over and over for vast lengths of time – perhaps significantly, an ouzel or blackbird, depending on the translation16 (each being another member of the thrush family, T. torquatus and T. merula respectively).
Initially the thrush existed merely to indicate the correct spot from which to find and open the secret door, but Tolkien later expanded his role in two crucial respects, first to bring the all-important information to Bard of Smaug’s weak spot (in interpolations to Chapters XII and XIII), and then to introduce the dwarves to Roäc and so bring them news of Smaug’s downfall (Chapter XVa). Somewhat curiously, the thrush disappears from the story after this point; presumably he either withdraws from the ensuing chaos of claims and counter-claims or else aligns himself with Bard, just as the ravens align themselves with Thorin and the dwarves, and hence is absent from our point-of-view character’s perspective for the remainder of the Lonely Mountain chapters. In any case, he remains an extremely minor character without whom the major events of the story could not occur – a perfect example of the ‘small hands turning the wheels of the world’, as Tolkien put it.17