Chapter XII
Conversations with Smaug

The text continues on the same page as before (manuscript page 142, Marq. 1/1/13:1), with only a paragraph break to mark what would later become a new chapter. However, there seems to have been a pause in composition, probably quite brief, after the first sentence; with the words ‘At last Thorin spoke’ a new, darker ink and more deliberate and legible lettering begin.

The dwarves stood before the door and held long council.

At last Thorin spoke: ‘Now is the time for our esteemed Mr Baggins, who has proved himself a good companion on our long road, and a hobbit full of courage and resource far exceeding his size, and if I may say so good luck far exceeding the usual allowance; – now is the time for him to perform the service for which he was included in our company: – now is the time for him to earn his Reward’. You are familiar by now with Thorin’s style on important occasions. This cert. was one. But Bilbo felt impatient. [He >] By now he was familiar enough with Thorin and knew what he was driving at.

‘If you mean you think it is my job to go into the [open tunnel >] secret passage first O Thorin Thrain’s son,^TN1 may your beard grow ever longer’ he said crossly. ‘Say so at once and have done! I might refuse. I have got you ought of two messes already which were hardly in our original bargain,^TN2 and am I think already owed some reward. But somehow, I hardly think I shall refuse. Perhaps I have begun to trust my luck more than I used to in the old days (– he meant the spring before last, before he left his house, but it cert. seemed centuries ago –). But third time pays for all as my father used to say.^TN3 I think I will go and have a peep at once and get it over. Now who’s coming in with me?’

He did not expect a chorus of volunteers, so he wasn’t disappointed. Fili and Kili looked uncomfortable and stood on one leg. But the others frankly made no pretence about [> of] offering – except old Balin the look-out man, who was rather fond of the hobbit. He said he would come inside at least, and come a bit of the way, ready to call for help if needed. [One >] I can at least say this for the dwarves: they intended to pay Bilbo for his services, they had brought him to do a job, and didn’t mind letting the poor little fellow do it; but they would have all done their best at any risk to get him out of trouble if they could [> if he got into it], as they did in the case of the trolls the year before.^TN4

There it is: dwarves aren’t heroes, but commercial-minded; some are [thoroughly bad >] tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent enough people like Thorin and Co. if not [filled with >] over high-minded.

The stars were coming out behind him in a pale sky barred with black, when the hobbit crept through the enchanted doors,^TN5 and stole into the M[ountain]. It was far easier going than he expected. This was no goblin-entrance, nor rough wood-elf cave. It was a passage made by dwarves at the height of their wealth and skill: straight as a ruler, smooth-floored and smooth-sided, going [direct >] with a gently never-varying slope direct – to some distant goal in the blackness below. After a while Balin bade Bilbo “good luck”, and stopped, where he could still see the faint outline of the door, and by a trick of the echoes of the tunnel hear the rustle of the whispering voices of the others just outside.

Then the hobbit slipped on his ring, and warned by the echoes to [be >] take more than hobbit’s care to make no noise [> sound], crept noiselessly down down down into the dark. He was trembling with fear, but his little face was set and grim. Already he was a very different hobbit to the one that had run out without a pockethandkerchief from Bag-end long ago. He hadn’t had pocket hank. for a year. He loosed his dagger in its sheath, tightened his belt, and went on.

‘Now you are in for it at last, Bilbo B.’ he said to himself. ‘You went and put your foot right in it that night of the party, and now you’ve got to pay for it.^TN6 Dear me what a fool I was and am’ said the least Tookish part ‘I have absolutely no use for dragon-guarded treasures, and the whole lot could stay here for ever, if only I could wake up and find this beastly tunnel was my own hall at home!’

He did not wake up, of course, but went on still, and on, till all sign of the door behind had faded away. He was altogether alone. Soon he thought it was beginning to feel warm.

‘Is that a kind of glow I see on my right ahead down there?’ he thought. It was. As he went forward it grew and grew, and [> till] there was no doubting it. It was a red light, steadily getting redder and redder. Now it was undoubtedly hot. Wisps of vapour floated up and past him, and he began to sweat. A sound began to throb in his ears, a sort of bubbling – like a large cat [added: purring]^TN7 or like a big pot galloping on a fire. It grew to a most unmistakable gurgling snore of some great animal asleep somewhere in the red glow ahead.

It was this point that Bilbo stopped. Going on from that point was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterwards were as nothing compared to it. [Once he had made himself go on to the tunnel’s end nothing else se[emed] >] He fought his real battle in the tunnel alone, before [the d. >] he even really saw this <vast>^TN8 danger that lay in wait.

At last you can picture the tunnel ending in a square opening [> a opening of much the same size as the door above].^TN9 Through it peeps the hobbit’s little head. Before him lies the great bottommost [dungeon >] cellar or dungeon-hall of the ancient dwarves right at the Mountain’s root. It was nearly dark so that its great size could only be dimly guessed, but rising from the floor there was a great glow. It was the glow of Smaug.

There he lay, a vast red-golden dragon fast asleep. A thrumming came from his jaws and nostrils and wisps of smoke, but his fires were low in slumber. Beneath him under all his limbs and huge-coiled tail and about him on all sides stretching away across the unseen floors, lay countless piles of precious things, gold wrought and unwrought, gems and jewels,^TN10 and silver red-stained in the ruddy light.

Smaug lay with wings folded like an immeasurable bat; he lay partly on one side and Bilbo could see his underparts, and his long belly were crusted with gems and fragments of gold stuck into his slime with his long lying on his costly bed. Behind him where the walls were nearest, could dimly be seen coats of mail and axes swords and spears hung, and great jars filled with wealth only to be guessed at.^TN11

To say that Bilbo’s breath was taken away is to say too little. There are no words to express his staggerment.^TN12 He had heard tell and sing of dragon-hoards before,^TN13 but the splendour the lust the glory of such treasure had never before come home to him. His heart was filled and pierced with the desire of dwarves – and he gazed, almost forgetting the frightful guardian, at the gold, gazed and gazed for what seemed ages, before drawn almost against his will he stole from the shadow of the door, across the floor, to the nearest edge of the mound of treasure. Above him the sleeping dragon lay, a fearful [> dire] menace even in his sleep. He grasped a great two handed cup^TN14 as heavy as he could carry; and cast one fearful eye upwards. The dragon stirred a wing, opened a claw, the rumble of his snoring changed its note. Then B. fled. But the dr. did not wake – yet – but shuffled into other dreams of greed and violence, lying there in his stolen hall, while the little hobbit toiled back up the path. His heart was beating faster, and his hands shaking & a more fevered shaking was in his legs than when he was going down; but still he clutched the cup, and his chief thought was ‘Yes I’ve done it! This will show them. More like a grocer than a burglar indeed^TN15 – well we’ll hear no more of that.’

Nor did he. To do Balin justice he was overjoyed, [when he >] to see Bilbo again. Fill[ed] with [great delight > delight greater than >] delight as great as his surprise, and as great as his fear when he said goodbye. He picked Bilbo up indeed and carried him out to the open air. It was midnight. Clouds had masked the stars, and Bilbo sat gasping, taking pleasure only in the fresh air again, and hardly noticing the excitement of the dwarves, or how they praised him and patted him on the back, and put themselves and all their families for generations to come at his service.

A vast rumbling woke suddenly in the mountain underneath, as if it had been an extinct volcano that was suddenly [> unexpectedly] making up its mind to start eruptions once again.^TN16 The door was pulled nearly to, and blocked with a stone – they had not dared to risk closing it altogether – but up the long tunnel came the deep far echoes of a bellowing and a tramp that made the ground beneath them tremble.

Then the dwarves [stopped >] forgot their joy and their own confident boasts of a moment before, and cowered down in fright. Smaug was still to be reckoned with. It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your count if you live near him. Dragons may not have much real use for all their wealth, but they knew it to an ounce as a rule, especially after long possession: Smaug was no exception. He had passed from an uneasy dream in which a small warrior, altogether insignificant in size, but provided with a bitter sword, and great courage, figured most unpleasantly,^TN17 to a doze, and from a doze to wide waking. There was a breath of strange air in his cave. Cd there be a draught from that little hole? He had never felt quite happy about that hole, yet it was so small, but now he [liked it >]^TN18 did not like the look of it at all. He stirred and missed his cup. Thieves fire murder! Such a thing had not happened since he first came there. His rage passes description – the sort of rage that is only seen when folk that have more than they can enjoy, suddenly lose something they have had before but have never before used or wanted. His fire belched forth, the hall smoked, he shook the mountain’s roots. He thrust his head in vain at the little hole, and then coiling his length together, roaring like thunder underground he sped from his deep lair out through its great door, out and up towards the Front Gate.

To hunt the whole mountain till he [found >] caught the thief and burned and trampled him was his one thought. He issued from the gate, the water rose in fierce whistling steam, as up he soared into the air and settled on the mountain top in a spurt of flame. The dwarves heard the awful rumour of his flight. They ran and crouched against the rock walls of the grass terrace, <cringing> under the sides of boulders, hoping to escape the frightful eyes of the hunting dragon.^TN19 ‘Quick Quick!’ whispered Bilbo ‘the door the tunnel’. (So he saved their lives again) They crept inside the tunnel door and closed it as much as they dare. ‘Bombur and Bofur!’ cried Bifur their brother ‘They are down in the valley!’ ‘They will be slain and all our ponies and all our stores’^TN20 moaned the others. ‘You can’t let them be’ said Bilbo ‘without a struggle. Where are the ropes?’

It was a terrible time. The worst they had ever been through. The horrible sound of the dragon’s anger [added: was] echoing in the stony hollows far above; at any moment he might come down this side or fly whirling round; and there they were near the cliffs edge hauling like mad on the ropes. Up came Bofur and still all was safe; up came Bombur [added in pencil: puffing & blowing while the ropes creaked], and still all was safe; up came their [> some] bundles of tools and stores that had been left below – and danger came upon them. A whirring^TN21 roar was heard. A red light touched the points of standing rocks. The dragon was upon them.

They had barely time to get back in the tunnel. pulling and dragging in their bundles when Smaug came whirling from the North licking the mountain wall with flames,^TN22 beating his great wings with a noise like roaring wind.

His hot breath shrivelled the grass [in the >] before the door, and drove in through the crack and scorched them as they lay hid. Red light leapt up and black rock shadows danced. Then darkness fell as he flew south [> passed]. The [horses >] ponies shrieked with terror and galloped off for they were free. The dragon swooped & turned and hunted them.

‘That’ll be the end of our poor beasts’ said Thorin. ‘Nothing can escape him once he sees it.’ They crept further down the tunnel, and there they lay and shivered till the dawn, hearing ever and anon the roar of the flying dragon grow and pass and fade as he hunted all the mountain sides. He guessed from the horses and from the tracks of the dwarves and their camps he had seen that men^TN23 had come up from the lake by the river and scaled the mountain side [<by> >] from the valley where the ponies had been, but the door withstood his searching eye, and the little walled bay kept out his fiercest flame; so that he hunted in vain, till dawn chilled his [fire >] wrath and he went back to his golden couch to sleep.

The dwarves even so [did not yet >] were not yet in the mood give up their quest; nor could they fly yet [added in pencil: had they wished]. The ponies were lost or killed, and they dare not march standing in the open while the dragon’s wrath was still burning. They grumbled as is the nature of folk at Bilbo, of course, blaming him for what they had at first so praised him – for bringing away a cup and stirring up Smaug’s wrath.

‘What else do you suppose a burglar is to do?’ said Bilbo ‘I was not engaged to kill dragons, that’s warrior’s work, but steal treasure. [if you >] Did you expect me to trot back with the whole treasure of Thror on my back!’

The dwarves, of course, saw the sense of this; and begged his pardon. ‘What do you propose we shd. do now, Mr Baggins?’ said Thorin politely. ‘Stay where we are by day and creep in the tunnel by night’ said the hobbit ‘– in the meantime I will creep down and see what the dragon is doing [> Smaug is up to], if you like’.

This was too good an offer to be refused. [So when evening came with as yet >] So Bilbo got ready for another journey in the Mountain. He chose daytime this time, thinking Smaug would not rest for long, nor stay indoors for many a night – if he was to be caught napping (figuratively speaking: Bilbo had no thought of [added: really] catching him, of course!) about midday was the most likely time.

All the same it was as dark as night-time in the tunnel. The light from the door – almost closed behind him – soon failed as he went down. So silent was Bilbo’s creeping that smoke on a gentle wind could hardly have beaten it, and he was inclined to feel a bit proud of himself as he drew near the lower door. The glow was very faint this time

‘Old Smaug is weary and asleep’ he thought. ‘[He’ll neither hear nor >] He can’t see me, and he won’t hear me. Cheer up Bilbo’.

Smaug certainly looked fast asleep, almost dead^TN24 and dark with scarcely a rumble or a snore, as Bilbo peeped from the entrance. He was just about to step out on the floor, when he caught a sudden thin piercing ray of red from under the lids of the dragon’s closed eyes [> the closed eyes of Smaug]. He was only pretending to sleep! He was watching the tunnel entrance.

Bilbo stepped back and [<?thanked> >] blessed the luck of his ring.^TN25 Then Smaug spoke.

‘Well thief – I smell you, and I feel your air. I hear your breath. Come along! help yourself again. There is plenty and to spare.’

‘No thank you O Smaug the tremendous!’ said Bilbo. ‘I did not come to take anything. I only wished to have a look at you and see if you were truly as great as tales say. I did not believe them.’

‘Do you now?’ said the dragon somewhat flattered, even though he did not believe a word of it.

‘Truly songs and tales fall short of the truth O Smaug chiefest and greatest of calamities’ said Bilbo.

‘You have nice manners for a [lying >] thief and a liar’ said the dragon. ‘You seem familiar with my name – but I don’t seem to remember smelling you before. Who are you, and where do you come from may I ask?’

‘[I am he <that> walks unseen. >] I come from under the hill, and under the hills my paths led. And through the air – I am he that walks unseen.’

‘So I can well believe’ said Smaug, ‘but that is hardly your name.’^TN26

[added in left margin: ‘I am the clue-finder the web-cutter the stinging fly, the’]

‘Lovely titles’ sneered Smaug.

‘[I am barrel-rider > I am friend >] I am he that buries his friends alive, that drowns them and [fishes them from water >] draws them alive from the water. I am come from the end of a bag, but no bag went over me.’ [added in left margin: ‘[Those are not >] These don’t sound so creditable’ scoffed Smaug.] ‘I am [barrel-rider >] the friend of bears and eagles. I am ring winner & luck wearer, and I am Barrel-rider,’ went on Bilbo.

[added, crowded in at end of paragraph: ‘That’s better’ said Smaug. ‘But don’t let your imagination run away with you.’]

This of course is the way to talk to Dragons if you don’t wish to reveal your name (which is wise), and don’t want to infuriate them by a flat refusal (which is also wise). No dragon can resist the fascination of riddling talk, and of wasting time trying to understand it. There was a lot here Smaug didn’t understand at all,^TN27 but he thought he understood enough and chuckled in his wicked inside – ‘Lake-men, some nasty scheme of those nasty pier <handling> lake men’ he thought ‘I haven’t been down there for an age and an age. I will soon put that right.

[Nor >] ‘Very well O Barrel-rider’ he said. ‘Perhaps “barrel” is your pony’s name. You may walk unseen, but you did not walk all the way. Let me tell you I ate six ponies last night, and shall [<soon> >] catch and eat the others before long. But I will give you one piece of advice for your good. Don’t have more to do with dwarves than you can help.’

‘Dwarves!?’ said Bilbo in pretend surprise.

‘[Yes >] Don’t <tell> me’ said Smaug. ‘I know the smell (and taste) of dwarf extremely w[ell] – no one better. Don’t tell me I can eat a dwarf-ridden pony – and not know it! You’ll come to a bad end, if you go with such friends Thief Barrel-rider. I don’t mind if you go back and tell them so from me.^TN28

‘I suppose you got a fair price for that cup last night – come now did you? Nothing at all! Well that’s just like them. And I suppose they are skulking outside, and your job is to do all the dangerous work, and get what you can when I’m not looking – for them? And you will get a fair share? Don’t you believe it. If you get off alive you will be lucky.’

Bilbo was beginning to feel really uncomfortable. Whenever Smaug’s roving eye, seeking ever for him in the shadows, flashed across him, he trembled; and an unaccountable desire to reveal himself and tell all the truth to Smaug would seize hold of him. He was coming under the dragon-spell;^TN29 but plucking up courage he spoke again.

‘You don’t know everything O Smaug the mighty’ said he. ‘Not gold alone brought us hither’.

‘Ha ha! you admit the “us”’ said Smaug ‘– why not say us fourteen and be done with it. I am very pleased to hear that you had other business in these parts, besides my gold. Perhaps you will then not altogether waste your time. I don’t know if it has occurred to you, but if you could steal all the gold bit by bit – a matter of a hundred years or so – you couldn’t get it very far. Not much use on the mountain side? Not much use in the forest? Bless me – had you never thought of the catch! A fourteenth share I suppose or something like – that were the term<s> eh. But what about delivery, what about cartage.’ And Smaug laughed. He had a wicked and [a] wily heart. He knew his guesses were not far out.

You will hardly believe it but poor Bilbo was really very taken aback. So far all their [> his] thoughts and energies had been concentrated on getting to the Mountain and finding the entrance. He had hardly even thought of how the treasure was to be removed, certainly never of how any part of it was to reach Bag-End Under Hill. Now a nasty suspicion began to cross his mind – had the dwarves forgotten this important point too, or were they, or were they laughing in their sleeves all the time? That is <the> effect dragon talk has on the inexperienced. Bilbo’s really ought to have warned him;^TN30 but Smaug had [added: rather] an overwhelming personality.

‘I tell you’ he said in an <effort> to keep his end up ‘that money [> gold] was no object or only a secondary one [> part].^TN31 We came over hill and under hill, by water and by wave and wind for revenge. Surely O Smaug the unassessably wealthy you must realize your success has made you some bitter enemies?’

Then Smaug really did laugh – A devastating sound which shook Bilbo to the floor, while far up in the tunnel the dwarves huddled together and imagined the hobbit had come to a sudden end.

‘Revenge’ he snorted and the red light lit the hall from floor to ceiling like scarlet lightning. ‘The King under the Mountain is dead and where are his kin that dare take revenge. Girion lord of Dale is dead and I have eaten his people like a wolf among sheep and where are his sons’ sons^TN32 who dare approach me. I kill where I wish and none dares resist. I laid low warriors of old and their like is not in the world today. Then I was young. Now I am old and strong, strong, strong – thief in the shadows’ – he gloated. ‘My armour is like tenfold shields, [my feet like >] my teeth are swords my claws spears, the shock of my tail a thunder bolt, my wings a hurricane, and my breath death!’^TN33

‘I have always understood’ murmured Bilbo in an astonished squeak ‘that dragons were tender underneath, especially in the region of the – er chest; but doubtless one so fortified has thought of that.’

The dragon stopped short in his boasts ‘Your information is antiquated’ he snapped. ‘I am armoured above and below; with iron scales and hard gems. No blade can pierce me.’

‘I might have guessed it’ said Bilbo ‘– truly there can be no equal of Smaug the impenetrable. [Nor any waistcoat >] What wealth to possess a waistcoat of fine diamonds!’

‘Yes it is rare and wonderful indeed’ said Smaug absurdly pleased. He did not know that Bilbo had already had a glimpse of his peculiar adornment & was only itching for a closer view. He rolled over ‘look’ he said ‘– what do you say to that.’

‘[Absolutely Perfectly dazzling >] Dazzlingly marvellous. Perfect. Flawless. Staggering.’ said Bilbo, but what he thought was ‘Old fool, and there is great patch in <the> left of his breast [> in a hollow of his left breast], [without >] as bare as snail out of its shell.’

‘Well really I must not detain you any longer’ he said aloud, ‘or hinder your much needed rest. Ponies take some catching, I am told after a long start. And so do burglars’ he added as a parting shot. Rather an unfortunate one for the dragon spouted flames after him, and fast as he ran up the tunnel, he had not gone far enough before the ghastly head of Smaug was [pressed >] thrust into the opening – no more would go – and fire and vapour pursued him and nearly overcame him.

He had been feeling rather pleased with his conversation with Smaug, but this [> his] mistake at the end shook him into better sense. ‘Don’t laugh at live dragons Bilbo my boy’ he said, & a sound remark too. ‘You aren’t through this adventure yet.’ That was equally true.

Inserted into the text at this point is a rider (manuscript page ‘151b’), seven paragraphs written on the back of the same page; the original page thereby changed from being ‘151’ to being broken between ‘151a’ (the two paragraphs before this point) and ‘151c’ (the rest of the page following it) by Tolkien. This full page of additional text must have been added by Tolkien after he had finished the chapter, or else he would not have needed to resort to the unorthodox numeration or have drafted this on the back of a sheet; as noted earlier, all this section of the story, from manuscript page 119 (the capture by wood-elves) to 167 (the scene on Ravenhill), was written only on the front of each sheet, rather than on front and back as had been the case before (with the bulk of the Second Phase, manuscript pages 13–118) and after (the Third Phase manuscript pages with new numeration 1–45 concluding the book). Since it introduces the idea of the thrush learning of the immediate threat Smaug now poses to Lake Town, the information that some of the men of Dale could understand bird-speech, and the essential detail of Smaug’s exposed weak spot, it must have been added after Smaug’s death scene on manuscript page 155 (1/1/15: 3), where none of these details initially appear, and at the same time as the paragraph added to the bottom of that page incorporating all those details (see page 549).

The afternoon was getting late when he came out again. The dwarves were all sitting on the ‘doorstep’ and were delighted to see him, and made him sit down and tell them all that had passed.

But Bilbo was worried and uncomfortable – he was regretting some of the things he had said and did not like confessing [> repeating] them. The old thrush was sitting on a rock near by with his head cocked on one side [added in margin: listening to all that was said] and Bilbo crossly threw a stone at him; but he only fluttered out of the way and came back.

‘Drat the bird!’ said Bilbo ‘I don’t like the look of him.’

‘Leave him alone’ said Thorin. ‘The thrushes are friendly – this is a very old bird, probably one of those that used to live here tame to the hands of my father and grandfather – they were a long lived and magical breed. The dwarves and the men of Dale used to have the trick of understanding their language and use them for messengers to fly to the Lake-town.’^TN34

‘Well he will have news to take there if he likes’ now said Bilbo. ‘Why what has happened?’ cried the dwarves ‘Get on with your tale’ So B. told them – and he [told them > confessed a fear that <his> >] confessed an uncomfortable foreboding that the Dragon might go hunting back to the Lake, since he must guess from their camps and the ponies how they had come. ‘O why did I ever say that about barrel-rider’ he groaned.

[‘Yes and why did you let him find out your way of escape?’ said they >] ‘Well you found out one useful thing at any rate’ Balin comforted him ‘ – the bare patch in old Smaug’s diamond waistcoat may come in useful yet.’ Then they fell to discussing stabs and jabs and weapons and the various dangers attending prodding a sleeping dragon.^TN35 [added in margin: and all the while the thrush listened, and at last as the sun sank towards the forest he flew away.] All the while as [evening drew > the sun went West >] the long shadows lengthened B. became more and more unhappy.

‘I am sure we are very unsafe here’ he said

The page of new material (‘151b’) ends here, and the text resumes with what had been the third paragraph on the original manuscript page 151, now marked by Tolkien ‘151 (c)’.

‘You had better look out’ said he – ‘[added: let’s go on &] close the door and risk being shut in. The dragon [> Smaug] will <begin> going out before long [added: now] and I am very mistaken if he doesn’t search this side of the mountain and break it bit by bit to find the outer entrance to the tunnel. What he doesn’t know about it he guesses.’

The delight of the dwarves at seeing him was overwhelmed in terror [> fear]. ‘What have you been saying’ they asked him; and though B. gave them as close an account of all his words as he cd. they were far from satisfied.^TN36

[All was now quiet, and >] [added in margin: Still the > The dwarves > The > When evening came on the dwarves took his advice as far as going inside the tunnel went.] But they delayed shutting the door – it seemed a desperate plan, and they were not willing yet to take the risk of cutting themselves off from the outer air with no way of escape except through the dragon’s very lair. All was quiet below at any rate.^TN37 So for a while they sat near the tunnel’s mouth and talked on.

Bilbo wished he cd. feel quite certain that they were being honest when they swore that they had never had any clear idea of what to do after the recovery of their treasure.

‘As for your share Mr Baggins’ said Thorin ‘I assure you we are more than satisfied with your professional assistance; and you shall choose it yourself, as soon as we have it! I am sorry we were so stupid as to overlook the transport problem – it is many years since the eldest of us were in these lands, and the difficulties have not grown less with the passing of time. But what can be done [added: for you] we will do it. For ourselves well that is our affair. We shall see when the time come.’

There they sat and the talk drifted on to things they remembered, that must now be lying in the hall below – the spears that were made for the armies of Bladorthin,^TN38 each with a thrice forged head, each shaft <bound> with cunning gold [; the shields >], but they were never delivered nor paid for; shields for warriors long dead; coats of mail gilded and silvered; [the great cup of Thror two handled gold cold-wrought out of >] the great golden cup of Thror, hewn and carven like birds and flowers <with> eyes and petals made of pearls; and most fair of all the white gem of Girion Lord of Dale,^TN39 which he paid for the arming of his sons, in coats of dwarf mail the like of which had never before been made. [added: of silver wrought the power and strength of steel] The white gem of Girion like a globe with myriad facets shining like water in the sun, like snow in starlight [> under stars] like silver in firelight, like rain on the moon. [< Shining like silver in firelight, like water in the sun, like snow under stars, like rain upon the moon (like Sirius upon Earth).]

[Their speech was interrupted by the >] All the while Bilbo was only half-listening. He was near the door with an ear cocked for any sound without, his other was listening to the dwarves, but over and beyond straining for any sound from far below. Evening fell and deepened and became uneasy. ‘Shut the door’ he begged them. ‘I fear that dragon in my bones. I like this silence less than the uproar of last night: Shut the door before it is too late’.

Something in his voice [made > moved >] gave the dwarves an uncomfortable feeling. Grumbling Thorin rose and pulled the door towards him ‘How can we close it’ he said ‘without bar nor handhold this side?’ He pushed the door and kicked [added: away] the stone that blocked the door. Then he thrust upon it and it closed with a snap and a clang. [They were shut >] No trace of a key hole was there left. They were shut in the Mountain. And not a moment too soon. A blow smote the side of the Mountain like a crash of battering rams made of forest oaks and swung by giants. The rocks boomed; stones fell on their heads. They fled far down the tunnel glad to be [added: still] alive, pursued by the roar without where Smaug was breaking the rocks to pieces smashing wall and cliff with his great tail till their little lofty camping ground, the thrush’s stone the scorched grass the narrow ledge and all disappeared in a jumble of smashed boulders, and an avalanche of splintered stone fell over the cliff into the valley underneath.

Smaug had left his lair in silent stealth and crept to the west of the mountain [a heavy floating slow >] floating heavy and slow in dark like a crow down the wind, in the hopes of catching somebody or something there, or of spying the outlet to the tunnel which the thief had used. This was his outburst of wrath when he found nobody and could see nothing, even where he knew the outlet must in fact be.

Still he was well pleased; he thought in his heart that he would not be troubled again from that direction; [or he would hear and have ample warning >] or would have ample warning of any hammering or tunnelling.

But in the meanwhile he had revenge of his own to wreak. ‘Barrel rider’ thought he ‘– your feet came from the water side, and up the water you came without a doubt. If you are not one of those men of the Lake, you had their help; and now you shall see who is King [> They shall see me and remember who is King under the Mountain].’ He rose in fire and went away South towards the Running River.

The text continues with only a line break before starting the account of Smaug’s attack on Lake Town, what is now Chapter XIV of the published book but was Chapter XIII of the manuscript version of the tale. Much later, when preparing the First Typescript, Tolkien added in pencil at this point (between the first and second paragraphs of manuscript page 153 [Marq. 1/1/15:1]):

Here insert ‘Not at home’

and at the same time added a chapter title – the first to appear in the manuscript:

Ch. Fire and Water

For more on the re-arrangement of the story that reversed the order in which the next two chapters appeared, see page 548.

TEXT NOTES

1 Note that the genealogy of the ‘text tradition’, with Thrain as Thorin’s father rather than his grandfather, is firmly in place; see the section of commentary entitled ‘Thorin, son of Thrain, son of Thror’ following Chapter X.

2 ‘two messes already’: Bilbo is referring of course to rescuing the dwarves (sans Gandalf/Thorin) from the Spiders of Mirkwood and also to freeing all the dwarves from the dungeon of the Elvenking.

3 This, the first of Bungo Baggins’ sayings recounted by his adventurous son in the Lonely Mountain chapters, is Tolkien’s adaptation of an actual medieval proverb occurring in line 1680 of the Tolkien-Gordon edition of Sir Gawain & the Green Knight (published in 1925, with a revised printing in 1930), where the phrase ‘þrid tyme þrowe best’ is placed in quotation marks and glossed ‘third time turn out best’ (SGGK pages 52 & 201). Tolkien’s note (page 109) slightly recasts it as an expression of hope rather than a statement of fact, ‘third time, turn out best’ and comments:

þrid tyme, þrowe best is a proverbial expression which is quoted also in Seven Sages 2062 ‘Men sais þe þrid time þrowes best.’ The modern equivalent is ‘third time pays for all’.

The Seven Sages of Rome [fourteenth century] is another Middle English romance, about twice the length of SGGK, preserved in the famous Auchinleck Manuscript; this is an English translation of a French original of seven misogynistic tales within a frame narrative. For Tolkien’s own commentary on the proverb as it appears in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, see his letter of 31st July 1964 to Jared Lobdell, quoted in Anderson’s Annotated Hobbit, page 267:

It is an old alliterative saying using the word throw: time, period (unrelated to the verb throw); sc. this third occasion is the best time – the time for special effort and/or luck. It is used when a third try is needed to rectify two poor efforts, or when a third occurrence may surpass the others and finally prove a man’s worth, or a thing’s.

Anderson also notes that Tolkien translates þrid tyme þrowe best as ‘third time pays for all’ in his own translation of Sir Gawain (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo, tr. JRRT, ed. Christopher Tolkien [1975; 1978]; stanza 67, page 66).

4 ‘the year before’: As elsewhere throughout the first draft, the extended time-scheme for Bilbo’s adventures with a longer journey through Mirk-wood and lengthy imprisonment by the elves is still in place. See also, for example, ‘He hadn’t had [a] pocket hank[erchief] for a year’ three paragraphs later or the reference to his journey having begun ‘the spring before last’ a paragraph earlier.

5 The plural is remarkable, but the manuscript clearly reads doors not door at this point. I suspect that as usual Tolkien was describing the scene as he happened to envision it, ignoring for the moment possible contradictions until he had committed the scene to paper and trusting to the next draft to iron out any inconsistencies, as in fact it did: the First Typescript (1/1/62:1) reads ‘door’, along with all subsequent texts.

6 Added in pencil (i.e., at the time of the creation of the First Typescript): ‘and now you’ve got to pull it out or pay for it.’

7 The idea that dragons purr is not Tolkien’s invention, but derives from Kenneth Grahame’s ‘The Reluctant Dragon’, a short tale originally published as part of Dream Days [1898] and later as a separate small book illustrated by Ernest Shepherd [1938], who is most famous for his work on Winnie-the-Pooh. Tolkien was conversant with Grahame’s work; see the commentary following the Bladorthin Typescript (pp. 45–6) and Note 3 on page 58 for more on Tolkien’s familiarity with, and admiration for, Grahame’s writings. It is characteristic of Tolkien’s eclecticism that he could combine in the figure of Smaug elements from sources as disparate as Grahame’s whimsical little tale, the grim Volsunga Saga, and the Book of Job (see Text Note 33 below).

8 This word is very difficult to read in the manuscript and might just as well be ‘worst’. ‘Vast’ is the reading of the First Typescript (1/1/62:2) and published book (DAA.270).

9 The sudden brief shift in perspective here to second person and present tense and then back again is anomalous and striking, but it persists through all subsequent versions of the passage (cf. DAA.270). The idea that the tunnel ended in a square opening was rejected at once, probably because he had already described the secret passage as ‘straight as a ruler, smooth-floored and smooth-sided, going . . . with a gently never-varying slope direct . . . to some distant goal in the blackness below’ and hence the exit should exactly match the entrance. The lower exit is not shown on Tolkien’s painting of Smaug’s chamber, ‘Conversation with Smaug’ (Plate XI [top]), but its size and shape can be guessed by comparison with the upper entrance shown in ‘The Back Door’ (Plate IX [top]), which is definitely taller than it is wide – i.e., rectangular, not square.

10 Although often used interchangeably, ‘gems’ here indicate carved precious stones, while ‘jewels’ are gemstones set in items of jewelry. Thus the ‘Gem of Girion’ (the later Arkenstone), ‘like a globe with myriad facets’ is correctly named, while the ‘five hundred emeralds green as grass’ that make up the ‘necklace of Girion’ (which makes its first appearance in a pasteover in the First Typescript; Marq. 1/1/62:11) are jewels.

11 This sentence was slightly revised to read ‘and here great jars stood filled with wealth . . .’ Compare the painting ‘Conversation with Smaug’ (Plate XI [top]), where several such jars, one marked with Thror’s rune (?), do indeed stand in an archway by the far wall. The two great jars in the foreground therefore probably stand against the near wall of the chamber, which would be out of our sight to the left; similar jars are probably hidden from our view behind the mound of Smaug’s treasure. See ‘The Dwarvenkings’ Curse’ in part i of the commentary following Chapter XIV (pp. 602–3).

12 See ‘The Only Philological Remark’, part iii of the commentary following this chapter.

13 Having spent months travelling on the road with dwarves, it would have been surprising if Bilbo had not ‘heard tell and sing of dragon-hoards’. For example, the dwarves’ first poem, ‘Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold’ – only ‘a fragment’ of which is set down in Chapter I – describes ‘many a gleaming golden hoard’ (page 37) and details of the wonderful things in them. Likewise, at Medwed’s house the dwarves tell ‘many stories . . . about gold and silver and jewels and the making of them’ (page 238), and at Lake Town the townspeople are full of songs and speculation about the King under the Mountain’s treasure (pp. 439–40). Also, of course, we know from his very first conversation with Bladorthin that Bilbo was already familiar, before he ever set out on the quest of Erebor, with stories about dragons (see page 31 and DAA.35); cf. his knowledge of their weak spot (‘“I have always understood” murmured Bilbo . . . “that dragons were tender underneath, especially in the region of the – er chest”’ [page 512]), which precedes the dwarves’ discussion of the best way to attack a dragon by more than a page [page 513].

14 The detail of the stolen cup is a homage to a similar scene in Beowulf; see part ii of the commentary following this chapter.

15 ‘More like a grocer than a burglar’: Dwalin’s dismissive words (spoken by Gloin in the published book) go all the way back to the Pryftan Fragment (see page 8), as does Bilbo’s reaction to them, his desire ‘to be thought fierce’, even if it meant travelling to a desert far to the east and fighting a dragon. Given that he is currently in the midst of the Desolation of the Dragon and soon to engage Smaug first in a battle of wits and then, according to Plot Notes C, to kill him, his earlier words have in a sense come true, and would have done so more literally had Tolkien stuck to his original outline.

16 In fact, from its shape, general topography, and isolation from other heights, the Lonely Mountain is almost certainly an extinct volcano; compare its outline with that of such real-world volcanoes as Mt. Rainier or Mt. St. Helens.

17 Note that this description, which is amusingly ironic in the published book, was written when the idea of Bilbo killing the dragon himself with his little sword was still Tolkien’s intention (see Plot Notes C). Hence, Smaug is in effect having a prophetic dream of his own approaching death here.

18 Added in left margin in cursive script and marked for insertion at this point: ‘of late he had half fancied he had caught the din of echo of a knocking sound from far above.’ This is marked for insertion at this point, but more properly goes at the end of the sentence, its corresponding placement in the published story.

19 The manuscript actually has ‘frightened’ here (‘the frightened eyes of the hunting dragon’; 1/1/13:4); I have supplied the reading ‘frightful’ from the First Typescript (1/1/62:4).

20 This sentence was slightly altered with the addition of the word ‘lost’ following ponies, then replaced by ‘They will be slain, and all our ponies too, and all our stores lost’ in the typescript (since the stores could not be ‘slain’). Note that in the next sentence in the manuscript it is Bilbo, not Thorin as in the published book, who makes the panic-strickened dwarves rescue their fellows. The paragraphs describing Thorin’s coolly taking command to leave no dwarf behind while sending Bilbo, Balin, and Fili and Kili into the tunnel (so that if worse comes to worse ‘the dragon shan’t have all of us’) first appear, without any surviving drafting, in the First Typescript (typescript page 118; 1/1/62:4), in exactly the words used in the final book (cf. DAA.274), except that Bifur at first refers to Bombur and Bofur as ‘My brothers!’, altered in ink to ‘My cousins’. See Text Note 34 following Chapter VIII for more about this change in their family relationships.

21 ‘whirring’: to make a continuous vibrating sound (OED). Note that this word falls within the portion of the OED upon which Tolkien worked during his time on the Dictionary staff in 1919–20, a decade before starting The Hobbit, although so far as we know ‘whirr’ was not one of the words which Tolkien personally researched; see Hammond, Descriptive Bibliography, page 278; Winchester, The Meaning of Everything, pages 206–8; and Lexicography and the OED: Pioneers in the Untrodden Forest, ed. Lynda Mugglestone, Appendix I (particularly pages 229–31). The best account of Tolkien’s time on the Dictionary, and his contributions to that vast ongoing collaborative project, can be found in The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary by Gilliver, Marshall, and Weiner [2006].

22 A new ink begins at this point, indicating at least a short break in composition. The same ink was also used to touch up some words in the preceding lines and make them easier to read.

23 Tolkien is probably not using the word in the generic sense here (cf. the exchange with Arthur Ransome discussed in Appendix IV); although Smaug knows dwarves are present (see page 510), he also believes that lake-men are with them, of whom the unseen ‘thief’ is one (ibid.). Had he captured and eaten all fourteen ponies,^† no doubt he would have been better informed about the composition of the intruders. Still, Smaug does know that there are fourteen individuals among the group camped on the mountain (‘why not say “us fourteen”’? and ‘a fourteenth share’, both page 511).

^† Apparently Thorin & Company have sixteen in the published book; contrast the manuscript account of their approach to the mountain described on page 471, where Bilbo and Balin are on the same pony leading a single pack-pony, with the account in the published book where Bilbo and Balin each lead a pack-pony and appear to be riding separate ponies themselves (DAA.255).

24 ‘almost dead and dark’: That is, his fires seem to have died down, leaving the room almost dark.

25 This line, which survives into the published book, is one more indicator that Tolkien did not, when writing The Hobbit, regard Bilbo’s ring as anything more than a harmless and useful treasure; the One Ring of the sequel cannot by any means be described as a luck-bringer. Cf. also Bilbo’s riddling description of himself, a few paragraphs later, as ‘luck-wearer’.

26 Bilbo’s conversation with Smaug evolved and expanded in the very act of writing; in the lines originally following this sentence, the dragon immediately confronts the unseen intruder with his knowledge that dwarves were involved:

Nor did you walk here unless > all the way here; unless you > let me tell you I ate six ponies last night, shall probably catch and eat the others before long. But never mind about your thirteen companions dwarves of course, don’t tell me! I know the smell and taste of dwarf; and they had left tokens enough on the ponies for me. But

All this was struck through and the dialogue expanded in the telling in order to allow Bilbo to spin out his riddles and pseudo-names alluding to his adventures so far. Similarly, the only significant nom de guerre is ‘barrel-rider’, since it sparks Smaug’s next remark (and determines the course of action that leads to his death); Tolkien twice wrote it and each time crossed it out, deferring it to the end of the passage.

Note that, like Odysseus (The Odyssey, Book IX), Bilbo refuses to tell his foe his real name (which, as Tolkien notes, is wise; cf. ‘Turambar and the Foalókë’, where knowledge of Túrin’s true identity enabled Glorund to beguile the headstrong human into abandoning those who depended upon him and instead rushing off onto a fool’s errand). Sigurd also at first refuses to tell the mortally wounded Fafnir his name in both Fáfnismál (stanzas 1–3) and Volsunga Saga (Morris, page 59); the compiler of the Edda interrupts the poem to prosaically state that ‘Sigurd concealed his name because it was believed in ancient times that the words of a man about to die had great power if he cursed his enemy by name’. Odysseus eventually does tell the Cyclops his true name, which brings down the curse of his long-delayed homecoming upon him; Sigurd likewise, after some hesitation (‘A wanderer named for a noble beast,/the son of no mother,/I had no father as other men do;/always I go alone’), tells the dragon his true name but seems to escape any death-curse from the dragon; it is the treasure itself, Fafnir warns him, that dooms the man who claims it (Fáfnismál, stanzas 9 & 20). Bilbo, wiser than both, never does tell Smaug his name^† but nonetheless reveals a little too much about himself (‘barrel-rider’), thus bringing doom down upon the Lake-men – although, given the dragon’s suspicions (page 508), he would sooner or later have attacked the town anyway.

^† Note, however, that his having identified himself to Gollum (see page 155) led to much trouble in the sequel; see The Lord of the Rings Chapter II (‘The Shadow of the Past’) and Appendix B: ‘The Tale of Years’, as well as ‘The Hunt for the Ring’ in Unfinished Tales.

27 The typescript (1/1/62:7) adds, parenthetically, ‘(though I expect you do, since you know all about Bilbo’s adventures to which he was referring)’. In fact each self-assumed epithet alludes to one specific episode earlier in the book:

• I am he that walks unseen – because of his magic ring (Chapters V & ff). Note that the shadow which had given Bilbo such trouble in the early days of his possessing the ring – cf. the episode with the goblin guards at the end of Chapter V, or the care needed to keep the sharp-eyed elves of Mirkwood from spotting it (page 381) – is no longer mentioned in the scene with Smaug, probably because the lighting here is dim enough (apparently coming entirely from Smaug himself)^† that no shadows can be seen among the mirk, as had presumably been the case during his battle with the Mirkwood spiders.

• I come from under the hill – an allusion to the address of Bilbo’s home, given in the first surviving paragraph of the Pryftan Fragment as ‘Bag-end, Under-Hill’ (page 7); see also Tolkien’s drawing of the outside of Bilbo’s home, labelled ‘Bag-End, Underhill’ (DAA.46).

• and under the hills my paths led – the goblin-caves (Chapter IV). The typescript adds ‘and over the hills’ – i.e., the mountain-path (also Chapter IV, which in the First Typescript is given its now-familiar title, ‘Over hill and Under hill’ [1/1/54:1]).

• And through the air – when carried by Eagles (Chapters VI & VII).

• I am the clue-finder – this probably alludes to Bilbo’s finding the spider-thread and using it to guide his friends through the tangle of Mirkwood in Chapter VIII, since ‘clue’ originally meant a ball of thread, specifically the one used by Theseus to navigate the labyrinth (Concise OED Vol I, page 434, under the spelling ‘clew’). I am grateful to Anders Stenström for drawing this to my attention.

• the web-cutter – in his battle with the Spiders of Mirkwood (Chapter VIII).

• the stinging fly – Bilbo attacking the Spiders with his little sword; he calls himself a ‘naughty little fly’ in his spontaneous song ‘Lazy lob and crazy Cob’ (page 311) and the spiders refer to his little sword in terms they understand as ‘a sting’ (Chapter VIII). Later, of course, the sword would be given Sting as its proper name by Bilbo (DAA.208), but this would not occur until the First Typescript (see Text Note 23 for Chapter VIII).

• I am he that buries his friends alive – this might refer to Bilbo’s getting all the dwarves safely underground inside the secret tunnel just before Smaug’s attack the night before (Chapter XIII).

• that drowns them – i.e., Bilbo’s hiding the thirteen dwarves in the barrels thrown into the Forest River to escape the dungeons of the Elvenking (Chapter IX).

• and draws them alive from the water – by opening the aforesaid barrels upon the arrival at the Long Lake (Chapter X).

• I am come from the end of a bag – cf. the name of Bilbo’s home, Bag-End (Chapter I).

• but no bag went over me – Bilbo and Bladorthin were the only members of the expedition not to have bags thrown over their heads by the three trolls (Chapter II).

• I am the friend of bears – the visit with Medwed/Beorn (Chapter VII).

• and eagles – the rescue by Eagles, and brief sojourn in their eyries (Chapters VI & VII).

• I am ring winner – the riddle-contest with Gollum (Chapter V).

• & luck wearer – see the comment in Text Note 25 above about ‘the luck of his ring’, though we should also note that Bilbo was chosen as the lucky number (Chapter I) and that in the typescript version of Chapter VIII the dwarves come to recognize ‘that he had some wits, as well as luck, and a magic ring’ after he rescues them from the spiders (1/1/58:15; cf. DAA.217).

• and I am Barrel-rider – during the long, dark, cold ride down the Forest River in the first hours after escaping from the Elvenking’s halls (Chapter IX). It is ironic that Smaug quips ‘maybe “Barrel” is your pony’s name’, since at the time the narrator had likened Bilbo’s attempt to stay atop the barrel ‘like trying to ride without bridle or stirrups a roundbellied pony that was always thinking of rolling on the grass’ (page 387).

^† E.g., the chamber’s being completely dark the third time Bilbo enters it, in Smaug’s absence (see page 578).

Note that, unlike the actual riddles he had exchanged with Gollum, which rather resemble the riddle-contest in Heidrek’s Saga (see page 168), these here are all tests of knowledge, like the final, fatal ‘riddle’ Odin asks the giant in Vafthrúthnismál (see page 169), where the speaker deliberately refers to events about which his listener is ignorant. It may be significant that in Fáfnismál Sigurd questions the dying dragon, very much as Odin questions the giant in Vafthrúthnismál.

28 The typescript (1/1/62:7) adds the following sentence at the end of this paragraph, which enables us to know that Bilbo’s pony was one of the ones Smaug had eaten: ‘But he did not tell Bilbo that there was one smell he could not make out at all, hobbit-smell; it was quite outside his experience and puzzled him mightily.’

29 This sentence was altered to read ‘He was in grievous danger of coming under the dragon-spell’. Compare the Tale of Turambar, where the dragon’s eye held the hero motionless: ‘with the magic of his eyes he bound him hand and foot . . . and he turned the sinews of Túrin as it were to stone’ (BLT II.85–6), while the dragon’s voice beguiled him: ‘for the lies of that worm were barbed with truth, and for the spell of his eyes he believed all that was said’ (ibid., page 87).

30 Presumably the missing word should be something like ‘friends’: i.e., ‘Bilbo’s friends really ought to have warned him.’ The words ‘warned him’ were canceled in pencil and replaced by ‘put him on his guard’, a reading similar to that in the First Typescript and published book (‘Bilbo of course ought to have been on his guard’; 1/1/62:8 and DAA.281).

31 Added in top margin: ‘gold was only an afterthought with us.’

32 The apostrophe marking the possessive is absent in the lightly punctuated original; I have chosen sons’ over son’s here because two pages later in the manuscript Tolkien unambiguously refers to King Girion’s sons in the plural; see page 514 and also Text Note 6 for Plot Notes C.

33 Compare Smaug’s boasts (manuscript page 150), and also the description of Smaug’s attack on Lake Town that follows a few pages later (manuscript pages 154–155), with the description of the great dragon in the deeps in the Book of Job, chapter 41:

Can you draw out Leviathan . . . ?

Will he speak to you soft words? . . .

No one is so fierce that he dares to stir him up . . .

Who can penetrate his double coat of mail?

. . . Round about his teeth is terror.

His back is made of rows of shields,

shut up closely as with a seal.

One is so near to another

that no air can come between them.

. . . [H]is eyes are like the eyelids of the dawn.

Out of his mouth go flaming torches;

sparks of fire leap forth.

Out of his nostrils comes forth smoke,

as from a boiling pot and burning rushes.

His breath kindles coals,

and a flame comes forth from his mouth.

In his neck abides strength,

and terror dances before him . . .

His heart is hard as a stone . . .

When he raises himself up the mighty are afraid;

at the crashing they are beside themselves.

. . . [T]he sword . . . does not avail,

nor the spear, the dart, or the javelin.

He counts iron as straw,

and bronze as rotten wood.

The arrow cannot make him flee;

for him slingstones are turned to stubble.

. . . he laughs at the rattle of javelins.

His underparts are like sharp potsherds . . .

He makes the deep boil like a pot . . .

Behind him he leaves a shining wake . . .

Upon earth there is not his like,

a creature without fear . . .

[H]e is king over all the sons of pride.

Tolkien is reported by some sources to have worked on the translation of Job found in The Jerusalem Bible [first edition, 1966], in addition to his recognized role in translating Jonah; cf. Carpenter’s checklist of Tolkien’s publications (Tolkien: A Biography, page 274) and Tolkien’s letter to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer (letter of 8th February 1967; Letters, p. 378). Hammond cites a letter from the bible’s publisher stating that Tolkien ‘also worked on the Book of Job, providing its initial draft and playing an important part in establishing its final text’ (Descriptive Bibliography, page 279), but his role on that book seems to have been limited to reviewing an early draft by another translator. I am indebted to Wayne Hammond for this clarification. According to the Reader’s Guide, vol. two of Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond’s The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide [2006], Tolkien also did some work on Isaiah and probably Job as well, and was offered the Pentateuch or Books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, & Deuteronomy) as well as the historical books (Joshua, Judges, and 1st & 2nd Samuel), but ultimately had to decline because of the press of other work (Reader’s Guide pages 437–9).^† In any case, that work came many years after he had completed work on The Hobbit.

^† Tolkien was of course also familiar with the Jonah story professionally through its vivid and amusing fourteenth-century Middle English retelling in the same manuscript as (and universally believed to be by the same author as) Sir Gawain & the Green Knight and Pearl: the Gawain-poet’s adaptation is known as Patience.

34 ‘The dwarves and the men of Dale’ was changed in the manuscript to simply ‘The men of Dale’; otherwise, of course, some member of Thorin’s company might be expected to be able to talk to the bird. The motif of the dwarves’ special friendship with the Ravens of the Mountain may have originated by the displacement of this motif from the original thrushes to another breed of bird.

35 This sentence is replaced in the First Typescript by the passage essentially as it appears in the published book: ‘. . . they all began discussing dragonslayings historical, dubious, and mythical, and the various sorts of stabs and jabs and undercuts, and the different arts devices and stratagems by which they had been accomplished. The general opinion was that catching a dragon napping was not as easy as it sounded; and the attempt to stick one or prod one asleep was more likely to end in disaster than a bold frontal attack’ (1/1/62:10; cf. DAA.285). The latter sentence, of course, postdates the abandonment of the Bilbo-as-dragon-slayer plot from Plot Notes B & C which had probably still been in place when this chapter was written: originally, the discussion of how to kill a sleeping dragon would have been immediately relevant to the upcoming chapters.

36 This paragraph was bracketed by Tolkien and marked for deletion, probably when the vast expansion represented by 151b replaced it.

37 As written, this sentence reads ‘All was no quiet below at any rate’; this might be a slip for ‘All was now quiet below . . .’

38 Only fourteen manuscript pages after it had been used as the wizard’s name for the last time (see page 472), ‘Bladorthin’ has here been reassigned to an elusive figure who appears only in this single sentence. The First Typescript (1/1/62:11) makes this ‘the great King Bladorthin (long since dead)’, about whom nothing is otherwise told; a sad relic for what had been the name of one of the story’s major characters.

39 The ‘Gem of Girion’ here makes its first appearance in the story, having been long anticipated in the Plot Notes (see page 364). Later this would be replaced by the Arkenstone, which would be given its own earlier history; see commentary following Chapter XIV. Similarly, the coats of mithril mail (although that term had not yet arisen and is in fact never used in The Hobbit), foreseen in Plot Notes C, also now appear in the narrative.

(i)
Tolkien’s Dragons

I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say ‘a green great dragon’, but had to say ‘a great green dragon’. I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language.

—JRRT to W. H. Auden, 7 June 1955 (Letters p. 214).¹

Few elements in Tolkien’s work have had as much influence on modern fantasy, the genre he himself essentially created, as his depiction of dragons. When Tolkien began writing, dragons had dwindled to whimsical fairy-tale creatures in the popular mind, treated more as figures of fun than the deadly menaces they had been in old legend. Even among scholars of those old legends, the feeling ran that dragons were pedestrian, unimaginative, and trivial, ‘the merest commonplace of heroic legend’ (W. P. Ker, The Dark Ages [1904]; quoted more in sorrow than in anger in Tolkien’s ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’ [1936], page 7). The great R. W. Chambers (Widsith [1912]) even lamented that the Beowulf-poet had given us a story about Grendel and the fire-drake when he and his fellow critics would have much preferred a melodrama of tangled loyalties at the Danish court above ‘a wilderness of dragons’ (quoted in ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, page 8).

There were, of course, notable exceptions to the general neglect; writers who fully appreciated the appeal and impact of what we may call dragons of the old school, such as Lord Dunsany (‘The Fortress Unvanquishable Save For Sacnoth’ [1907], ‘The Hoard of the Gibbelins’ [1912], ‘Miss Cubbidge and the Dragon of Romance’ [1912]) and Kenneth Morris (The Book of Three Dragons [1930]), but by and large the whimsical dragons of E. Nesbit (e.g., The Book of Dragons [1899] and ‘The Last Dragon’ [1925]) and above all Kenneth Grahame (‘The Reluctant Dragon’ [1898 and 1938]) had won the day. Tolkien, who considered dragons the quintessential fantasy creature (‘The dragon had the trade-mark Of Faërie written plain upon him. In whatever world he had his being it was an Otherworld’ – OFS.40), presented them so dramatically and successfully in his own work that he single-handedly reversed the trend of the preceding half-century and more, both in fantasy and in scholarship.²

Tolkien’s interest in dragons was life-long: he recalled in his Andrew Lang lecture that his favorite fictional world when growing up had been ‘the nameless North of Sigurd of the Völsungs, and the prince of all dragons . . . I desired dragons with a profound desire . . . [T]he world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril’ (OFS.40).³ In his 1965 radio interview with Denys Gueroult, he admitted to a fondness for these ‘intelligent lizards’:

[D]ragons always attracted me as a mythological element. They seem to be able to comprise human malice and bestiality together . . . a sort of malicious wisdom and shrewdness. Terrifying creatures.

Writing to Christopher Bretherton a few months earlier [1964], he described how in his youth he had been ‘interested in traditional tales (especially those concerning dragons)’ in addition to philology and metrics, before ‘[t]hese things began to flow together when I was an undergraduate’ (i.e., between 1911 and 1915; Letters, page 345). Indeed, so steeped in thinking about dragons was he that when as a child he found a fossil on the beach at Lyme Regis, he believed he had found a piece of petrified dragon.⁴ It is no wonder, then, that when he came to write his mythology he filled it with dragons.

Dragons are one of the most persistent features in Tolkien’s work, appearing in the Silmarillion tradition (Glorund the Golden, the ‘dragons of the north’ who destroy Gondolin, Ancalagon the Black), in both of his children’s tales that preceded The Hobbit (Roverandom’s Great White Dragon of the Moon and Farmer Giles of Ham’s Chrysophylax Dives) as well as in the Father Christmas Letters (cf. the 1927 letter, the full version of which appears in Letters from Father Christmas pages 32–4), in several of his poems (‘The Hoard’, ‘The Dragon’s Visit’), in his scholarly essays (‘On Fairy-Stories’ and particularly ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’), and of course in his art: in addition to his illustrations for The Hobbit, Roverandom, and the Silmarillion tales, all of which have some featuring dragons, see the dragon-drawings reproduced in Artist & Illustrator (H-S#48 & 49), only two out of a number of uncollected pieces. A dragon (almost certainly Smaug himself) can even be seen in one of the Father Christmas Letters, painted on the cave walls along with prehistoric beasts in the letter for 1932 (see Plate VI [detail] and Letters from Father Christmas, page 75), and a tiny toy dragon belonging to a monster child appears in one untitled miscellaneous sketch (H-S#77). A recognized authority on the subject who even lectured on dragons at Oxford’s Natural History Museum,⁵ Tolkien argued that, far from being a worn-out folktale cliché, dragons were eminently fitted to serve as the supreme challenge for any hero. Like the elves, whom he rescued from being treated as dainty flower fairies, Tolkien also redeemed the dragon and re-established it as the greatest of all fantasy monsters. There is a reason that the world’s pre-eminent role-playing game, which borrows liberally from folklore, mythology, legendry, and modern fantasy, is named Dungeons & Dragons rather than featuring any other monster in the title.

Turning from Tolkien’s theory to his practice, we can divide the dragons appearing in his work into essentially three groups. The first, and least important, are those who remain undifferentiated from one another in the background of the stories, although their deeds en masse may be of importance: the dragons of the north who destroy the dwarves’ settlements in the Grey Mountains (LotR.1124, 1109), the host of dragons who destroyed Gondolin (‘for dragons it was that destroyed that city many ages ago’ – cf. page 115), those dragons in Farmer Giles of Ham who consider ‘knights merely mythical’ but nonetheless remain in their lairs far from Giles’ land, the various lesser moon-dragons mentioned in Roverandom who wreak such havoc in the Father Christmas Letters when the Man in the Moon is temporarily absent (Letters from Father Christmas, 1927 letter), and of course the great host of winged dragons who nearly defeat the Army of the Valar in the final battle that once and for all ends the First Age. Although only described in general terms, these background dragons are important mainly because they provide a context, evidence that the few individual dragons with whom we meet are not the only ones of their kind but typical of the species.⁶

Secondly, there are those dragons who are merely a name (Ancalagon the Black, Scatha the Worm) or deed (the nameless cold-drake – that is, a flameless dragon – that forced Durin’s Folk to flee the Grey Mountains) but who are given no line of dialogue or any characteristic that would mark them as individual personalities. While we would naturally like to know more about all of these, even in their abbreviated state they too serve an important purpose in the legendarium. Every collection of real-world myths is of necessity incomplete; there is always some story that has been lost, some figure who is reduced to a bare name or fact (e.g., the Old English ‘Earendel’, the ‘recovery’ of whose myth sparked Tolkien’s creation of his legendarium). The inclusion of such figures, of obvious significance but shorn of all detail, helps make Tolkien’s created myth seem much more like those surviving mythologies painstakingly compiled by generations of scholars. For example, we are fortunate that the story of Wayland the Smith has survived (e.g., in the poem ‘The Lay of Völund’ [Völundarqviða], part of the Elder Edda), so that we do not have to puzzle it out from such allusive evidence as the illustration of one scene from the legend on the Franks Casket (cf. the frontispiece to Dronke, The Poetic Edda, volume II [1997]), but the once-popular story of his father Wade the Giant has been lost (cf. R. M. Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England [1952], pages 19–22). Similarly, we have lost the stories that once explained geographical features such as the chalk-figures now known as the White Horse of Uffington (which may in fact be intended to represent a dragon; cf. Paul Newman, Lost Gods of Albion [1997]), the Cerne Giant, or the Long Man of Wilmington, while image and story alike have vanished in the case of other hill-figures such as the Red Horse of Tysoe [destroyed 1800] or the pair of giants known as Gogmagog [destroyed in the 1660s] that once overlooked Plymouth harbour. In a chronicle or condensed account such as those represented by the appendices of The Lord of the Rings or the later parts of the 1977 Silmarillion there may be room for only the barest facts, but even here Tolkien makes sure that dragons are represented, including some that would be wholly unknown if we had only the major Silmarillion stories (e.g., the stories of Beren & Lúthien, Túrin, and Tuor) to go by or indeed the main story of The Lord of the Rings shorn of its Appendices.

Thirdly and most importantly, we have those dragons who are presented with fully developed personalities, true characters in their respective works: Smaug, Glorund, Chrysophylax Dives (whose name simply means ‘Rich Treasure-Guardian’), and, to a lesser extent, the unnamed dragons appearing in ‘The Dragon’s Visit’, ‘The Hoard’, and Roverandom. Of these, Glorund (also known at various times and in various texts as Glórung [1926 ‘Sketch’], Glómund [1930 Quenta], and finally Glaurung [‘Grey Annals’, published Silmarillion]), the Father of Dragons, is the most purely malicious; devious in preferring to inflict misery rather than indulge in straightforward destruction, as when he enspells Túrin and Nienor rather than simply killing them. He is also the most powerful of all Tolkien’s dragons, save only Ancalagon the Black (of whom more later), and the one who has the most impact on the mythology, being not only deeply enmeshed in the Túrin story but fighting in two of the six great battles of Beleriand: the Fourth Battle, Dagor Bragollach (‘the Battle of Sudden Flame’; Silm. Chapter XVIII) and the Fifth Battle, Nirnaeth Arnoediad (‘[the Battle of] Unnumbered Tears’; Silm. Chapter XX) – incidentally, the only two in this sequence of battles which Morgoth won – as well as an earlier sally when he was ‘yet young and scarce half-grown’ (Silm. 116; cf. also Smaug’s having been ‘young and tender’ at the time of his descent upon Dale, DAA.282). Smaug can destroy a dwarf-kingdom and powerful human city at the same time, while Chrysophylax, though not overbold (FGH 25 & 58), twice routs the knights of the Middle Kingdom (‘all the King’s horses and all the King’s men’; FGH 59 & 72) and the green dragon of ‘The Dragon’s Visit’ handily destroys the entire village of Bimble Bay when provoked, despite the best efforts of its fire brigade.⁷ But Glorund is in a different league entirely: he leads balrogs into battle (Silm.151), destroys whole armies (‘Elves and Men withered before him’; Silm.192), lays waste one of the great elven cities of old (‘Glaurung came in full fire against the Doors of [Nargothrond], and overthrew them, and passed within’; Silm.213), and even commands orc armies and sets himself up as lord over his own realm under Morgoth’s overlordship (‘he gathered Orcs to him and ruled as a dragon-king’; 1930 Quenta, HME IV.129), rather like the much earlier Tevildo in ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’ and as Thû the Necromancer (i.e., Sauron) does from Wizard’s Isle (Tol Sirion) in ‘The Lay of Leithian’. And we should remember that these elven armies he opposed were not made up of wood-elves or wild-elves but Eldar; it takes Prince Fingon and a host of elven archers to repel him when he is still young and not yet at his full strength, and at his height he plays a devastating role in the Fourth and Fifth Battles and destroys the mighty Noldor of Nargothrond, a hidden city full of elven warriors, Finrod’s men, who are probably the peers of those three Elrond sends out much later against the Nazgûl (Glorfindel and two others; cf. LotR.226). In his ‘malicious wisdom’, piercing eye and hypnotic voice, nigh-unstoppable might, gloating possessiveness over treasure, and vulnerable underbelly, Glorund obviously served as Tolkien’s model for all the dragons who came after him, most especially Smaug, the greatest dragon of latter days (LotR.1109).

(ii)
Smaug the Magnificent

It is entirely in keeping with the ‘Children of Morgoth’ theme running throughout The Hobbit that, while Tolkien had established in the Silmarillion writings that dragons were created by Morgoth,⁸ Smaug by contrast is solitary and independent. Unlike Glorund, he comes alone when he descends upon the Mountain, much as do Chrysophylax Dives in Farmer Giles of Ham and the green dragon in ‘The Dragon’s Visit’. And although like his progenitor Smaug too sets himself up as a king over his usurped halls – cf. ‘They shall see me and remember who is King under the Mountain’ (page 515; cf. DAA.288) and ‘“Which king?” said [Bard] . . . “As like as not it is . . . the dragon, the only King under the Mountain we have ever known”’ (pages 547–8; cf. DAA.302–3) – his is a kingship in name only. Smaug is never seen commanding armies of orcs or following anybody’s command; he has no connection with the other scattered survivors of Morgoth’s minions who appear elsewhere in the book, such as the Necromancer, the goblins of the Misty Mountains, or the great bats of Mirkwood who later appear in the Battle of Five Armies (cf. Morgoth’s messenger-bats in ‘The Lay of Leithian’ Canto XI lines 3402–3408a [HME III.278–9] and Silm.178).

This represents a different conception not just from the earlier Silmarillion stories, in which all evil things were united under Morgoth’s command (although they also sought to advance their own interests, as when Glorund first serves Morgoth’s bidding by destroying Nargothrond and then indulges himself by claiming all its treasures), but also from the Lord of the Rings era that followed, where once again the various evil races and beings of Middle-earth are falling under the command of (or at least into allegiance with) a Dark Lord: as Gandalf says of Gollum, ‘Mordor draws all wicked things, and the Dark Power was bending all its will to gather them there’ (LotR.72). In short, at the time The Hobbit was written (1930–32), Tolkien seems to have conceived of Middle-earth as no longer having a Dark Lord since Morgoth’s fall. Morgoth’s taint remained, but the evil creatures that once served him no longer had any unified purpose. Not until the creation of the Númenórean material (The Lost Road [circa 1936] and ‘The Fall of Númenor’ [ibid.]; cf. HME V and see also The Notion Club Papers [circa 1944–6] in HME IX), shortly before The Hobbit’s publication, does the idea of Sauron (whom Tolkien in his 1965 radio interview described as Morgoth’s ‘petty lieutenant’) assuming Morgoth’s mantle as a second Dark Lord seem to have arisen. This latter concept obviously underlies The Lord of the Rings (as reflected in that work’s title), and later as part of his work to reconcile Bilbo’s world to Middle-earth as it had developed in the sequel Tolkien deftly re-envisioned The Hobbit by presenting Bilbo’s adventure as taking place during a lull in Sauron’s activities, just before the long-banished Dark Lord (quiescent or incognito since the loss of the One Ring at the beginning of the Age) reasserted himself, dropping his guise as ‘the Necromancer’ and reclaiming his title as Lord of Mordor (cf. ‘The Tale of Years’, Appendix B to The Lord of the Rings).

In the post-Lord of the Rings period Tolkien would even speculate on how Sauron might have made use of Smaug, had the dragon survived to the time of the War of the Ring. Gandalf believed him fully capable of destroying Rivendell and ravaging Eriador, including the Shire (‘The Quest of Erebor’, Unfinished Tales pp. 322 & 326). In fact, Bilbo’s sudden mental image while listening to the dwarves’ song during the unexpected party –

. . . in the wood beyond the Water a flame leapt up . . . and he thought of plundering dragons lighting on his quiet hill and setting it all in flames. Then he shuddered . . . (Pryftan Fragment, page 7)

– which almost dissuades him from going on the quest, becomes oddly prophetic when, a quarter-century after writing this passage, Tolkien decided that this is what would have come to pass had the hobbit not joined Thorin & Company and thus set in motion the chain of events that brought about the dragon’s demise before the War of the Ring.⁹ This is not to say that Smaug would have been under Sauron’s command as Glorund had been under Morgoth’s, any more than Shelob or Caradhras or the Watcher in the Water were, merely that Sauron would have been able to stir him up to new villainy that would surpass any destruction he wrought in his youth.

Thus, while clearly greatly influenced by Tolkien’s earlier portrayal of Glorund – who in turn had been inspired by what was for Tolkien the quintessential dragon, Fafnir the great, guardian of the Nibelung treasure, a foe killable only by the greatest of all saga-heroes, Sigurd Fáfnirsbane – Smaug is also quite distinct from the great foalókë of the First Age.¹⁰ One major cause of this divergence is that with Smaug Tolkien is drawing not just on his own legendry but also on another outside literary source, one which dominated his professional scholarship during the 1930s: Beowulf. Tolkien said in his Beowulf essay that there were only three great dragons in Old Norse and Old English literature: the Midgard Serpent (Miðgarðsormr or the Middle-earth Wyrm), Fafnir, and Beowulf’s dragon (‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, page 9). Fafnir, as we have already seen, became the primary model or inspiration for Glorund. The Midgard Serpent, whom Tolkien described as the fit adversary for the gods themselves rather than merely human heroes (it is foretold in Völuspá and the Prose Edda that in the battle after the destruction of the sun and moon, Ragnarök, he will slay and be slain by Thor, the greatest warrior of all the gods of Valhalla and most popular of all the Old English and Norse gods in pre-Christian times), found his analogue in Tolkien’s legendarium in Ancalagon the Black, the greatest of all the winged dragons, who almost won the day for the Dark Lord in the apocalyptic battle that ended the Elder Days (the Great Battle or War of Wrath; cf. Silm.251–2). Dragons play an important role in this ‘Battle of Battles’ from its very first appearance in the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ (HME IV.39); Ancalagon makes his first appearance in the revised (Q II) version of the 1930 Quenta (contrast HME IV.160 with IV.157) and also features in such later works as the ‘(Earliest) Annals of Beleriand’ ([circa 1930]; HME IV.309), the ‘(Later) Annals of Beleriand’ ([circa 1937]; HME V.144) and the ‘Conclusion’ of the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion (HME V.329). Ancalagon’s mythological significance within the legendarium, and his parallelism to the Midgard Serpent, were both significantly enhanced near the very end of Tolkien’s life through a few late [post-1968] references in Tolkien’s linguistic writings to ‘the prophecy of Andreth’ (a wise woman, one of the two main characters in Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, or ‘The Debate of Finrod and Andreth’, HME X.301–66), which foretells that ‘the Great Dragon, Ancalagon the Black’ was to return to fight in the Last Battle (Dagor Dagorath) when Morgoth returns from Outside to destroy the world at the end of time, where he was fated to be slain by Túrin, who would return from the dead for that final deed (HME XII.374–5).

The third of these great dragons, Beowulf’s bane, dominates the final third of the Old English poem just as Grendel dominates the first third (and just as Smaug dominates the final third of The Hobbit, even after his demise). Beowulf was a major source for both The Hobbit and the Rohan sections of The Lord of the Rings, and we need not explore all the parallels here – indeed, a book-length study has been devoted to just the influence of Beowulf on The Hobbit (Bonniejean Christensen’s Beowulf and The Hobbit: Elegy into Fantasy in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Creative Technique [dissertation, Univ. of S. Calif., 1969]), a whole chapter of which is devoted to elements of Beowulf’s dragon adapted to the Smaug chapters.¹¹ But the way in which Tolkien selected elements that fit what he needed for his story is instructive of his complex relationship with all his outside sources: he was neither a naive reader nor a passive borrower but transformed and remade what he chose to take (consciously or otherwise) from earlier authors.¹² For example, in both Beowulf and The Hobbit the dragon lairs in a hill or barrow where he guards ancient treasure for centuries, unmolested by any outsider, until stirred up by the theft of a cup from his hoard he embarks on an orgy of destruction which leads to the destruction of a nearby town and shortly thereafter his own death. But the Beowulf-dragon had discovered a hidden hoard and claimed it for his own, while Smaug, like the unnamed dragon in Tolkien’s poem ‘The Hoard’,¹³ steals his treasure and kills its previous owner(s); the Beowulf-dragon has as much right to the treasure as anybody, while Smaug’s ownership is tainted with blood from the start. So too the dragon’s arousal leads to the death of an old king (King Beowulf after half a century leading the Geats, old Thorin after a century as leading Durin’s folk in exile and soon after his becoming King under the Mountain) and the emergence of a young warrior who suddenly steps forward to become hero and then king (Wiglaf the Wægmunding, Bard the Bowman). But again the differences are many: Beowulf proudly orders his honor-guard to hold back and not interfere in the fight and is only saved from throwing his life away when one young warrior disobeys his command and rushes to his aid, helping him to kill the dragon; Thorin is surrounded by his closest companions when mortally wounded in one last desperate heroic sally. Beowulf’s dying thoughts are of the treasure he has won, but after his death his people bury it with him in his barrow; Thorin’s death-speech renounces greed and gold in favor of the virtues Bilbo embodies (see page 679 & DAA.348), and his treasure (sans Orcrist and the Arkenstone) is distributed among his people and their neighbors, enriching the land.

Tolkien’s debt to Beowulf, and the way he drew on (and played off of) the older work when making something new, are best revealed in three specific details. First, the cup which Bilbo steals from Smaug’s lair (page 506) is a precise match for the cup (Old English wæge) which a thief steals from the dragon’s lair in Beowulf (line 2216). Just as in The Hobbit, the thief in Beowulf manages to enter the dragon’s lair stealthily, steal the jeweled cup, and escape. Second, whereas Bilbo is ‘Mr. Lucky Number’, included in the quest specifically so that Thorin and Company will not number thirteen (page 9), Beowulf chooses to confront the dragon with eleven picked warriors, forcing the nameless thief who had stolen the maðþum-fæt (‘treasure-cup’) to guide them to the spot as the thirteenth of their company. Third and perhaps most significantly, Tolkien felt that dragons in medieval literature suffered from being too abstract and not individual enough: ‘draconitas rather than draco’, as he put it in his Beowulf essay (page 15) – i.e., representing ‘dragon-ness’ in an allegorical sense rather than just being a ‘plain pure fairy-story dragon’ (ibid., page 14). Leslie Kordecki, in Tradition and Development of the Medieval English Dragon [dissertation, 1980], notes that early medieval stories concerning dragons tend to portray them as living, breathing creatures, whereas later stories often reduce them to mere symbols vanquished by the sign of the cross, and Tolkien himself distinguished in his dragon lecture between ‘the symbolic dragon’, such as the one fought by St. George, and ‘the legendary dragon’, which he greatly preferred. Tolkien’s allegiance and approval are wholly reserved for ‘dragon [as] real worm, with a bestial life and thought of his own’ (Beowulf essay, pages 14–15), albeit being willing to allow him to be invested with a certain amount of symbolism as an embodiment of ‘malice, greed, destruction’ (ibid., page 15). His most significant change that transforms Beowulf’s bane into Smaug is granting the latter individuality, indeed a ‘rather overwhelming personality’. Unlike the Beowulf dragon but like Fafnir, Smaug speaks; indeed, he has a highly individualistic turn of phrase that combines sarcasm with arrogance (‘You have nice manners, for a thief and a liar’); his manner of speaking establishes him as an even more striking character than Glorund, one of the most vivid in The Hobbit despite the fact that he only appears in two chapters out of nineteen. It’s hard to disagree with Christensen’s judgment, made nearly four decades ago, that in Smaug Tolkien creates ‘a “real” dragon unsurpassed in medieval or modern literature’ (Christensen, page 121).

For the present, I defer discussion of Smaug’s death until the commentary following Chapter XIII and a look at his hoard until Chapter XIV.

(iii)
‘The Only Philological Remark’

In his comments on the proposed blurbs for the dust-jacket of The Hobbit that accompanied his 31st August 1937 letter to Allen & Unwin, Tolkien remarked that

The only philological remark (I think) in The Hobbit is on p. 221 (lines 6–7 from end): an odd mythological way of referring to linguistic philosophy, and a point that will (happily) be missed by any who have not read Barfield (few have) and probably by those who have.

—Letters p. 22.¹⁴

In the original manuscript, the specific passage in question reads

To say that Bilbo’s breath was taken away is to say too little. There are no words to express his staggerment. (page 506)

However, in the First Typescript this has been expanded:

To say that Bilbo’s breath was taken away is no description at all. There are no words to express his staggerment, not even in the language of the pithecanthropes which consisted (we are told) largely of exclamations.

—typescript page 117, Marq. 1/1/62:3; italics mine.

This reading was preserved in the Second Typescript and represents the text as it was originally submitted to Allen & Unwin. However, the passage changed again in the page proofs, when ‘left’ was added to the first part of the second sentence to fill up a shortfall in the typeset line and the rest of that sentence cancelled and replaced:

. . . no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.

—1/2/2: page 221; italics mine.

This achieves the reading of the first edition (page 221), which has remained unaltered ever since (cf. DAA.271).

Tolkien nowhere elucidates just what the underlying ‘point’ to which he refers might be, nor why only those familiar with Barfield’s thought might grasp it, but his use of the nonstandard ‘staggerment’ does draw attention to the passage and suggests the essential point: that Bilbo cannot put what he feels at that moment into words. Quite literally, words fail him, falling short of the reality of the experience.¹⁵ Barfield’s theory (perhaps best expressed in his books Poetic Diction [1928] and Unancestral Voice [1965]),¹⁶ that the history of language serves as a record of the evolution of human consciousness, is complex and subtle, and its application to Bilbo’s experience here is not immediately obvious. An essential element of Barfield’s theory, however, lies in his belief that nineteenth-century philologists such as Max Müller were entirely in error when they supposed that early humans had simple languages with small vocabularies in which all the words represented simple, concrete things, although they could be applied metaphorically to abstract concepts – for example, that the same word might be used for ‘wind’ and ‘breath’ (cf. Latin spiritus), and by extension figuratively to ‘soul’ or ‘life-force’ (modern ‘spirit’). Barfield completely disagreed, arguing instead that in such languages a single word expressed a concept which we in later days cannot conceive of as a whole: hence in the more modern form of that language the ‘breath of life’ becomes respiration, the feeling of an outside force entering you becomes inspiration, the life-force within becomes spirit, and so forth, all thought of as distinct and separate things, whereas in the earlier language the ancestor-word had meant all these and more. Or, to pick another example, the O.E. word mod (the direct ancestor of our modern word mood) puzzles most students who try to learn Old English, because it seems to mean so many different things: heart, mind, spirit, temper, courage, arrogance, pride (cf. Clark Hall, A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary [4th ed., 1962], page 239). Thus in his translation of a passage from ‘The Battle of Maldon’ in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, Tolkien translates mod as ‘spirit’, while in the essay ‘Ofermod’ which accompanies his verse-play he translated the compound ofer-mod not as ‘too much spirit’ but as ‘overmastering pride’ or ‘overboldness’ (the latter a fair approximation of the original meaning of Tolkien’s own surname, we might note, i.e. tollkühn = ‘foolhardy’ [Letters p. 218] or ‘rashbold’ [The Notion Club Papers, HME IX.151]).

While the ‘ancient semantic unity’ Barfield postulates may never have existed – after all, anyone learning a foreign language soon discovers that a similar phenomenon exists whenever we try to translate one language into another; we find some word which can be approximated by a cluster of words in one language but not exactly matched to any one word, since the concept it reflects doesn’t exist as a whole in the other language (hence the popularity of the modern American word ‘okay’, which has been adopted into daily use in a number of unrelated languages around the world, such as Japanese) – Tolkien was wholly sympathetic at any rate to the idea that ancient languages could express more, in fewer words compact with meaning, than modern-day tongues. Such a concept fit in perfectly with his legendarium, where the Elven languages of Sindarin and Quenya are semantically rich despite having a relatively small recorded vocabulary (something already true of them in their earliest forms, as Gnomish and Qenya respectively). Tolkien’s respect and admiration for the past meant he was wholly free of what Lewis called ‘chronological snobbery’;¹⁷ he takes pains, for example, in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ to defend so-called ‘primitive’ peoples (footnote to OFS.27; see also OFS.39) and revolutionized Beowulf criticism by preferring and defending the aesthetic choices and literary judgments of the author, who had lived a thousand years or more before, above those of the critics of his own day (‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’). Furthermore, from a very early stage of the legendarium the idea was already ensconced that humans were originally without language and learned how to speak from the elves:

At the rising of the first Sun the younger children of earth [= humans] awoke in the far East . . . They meet Ilkorindi [Dark-Elves] and learn speech and other things of them, and become great friends of the Eldalië.

—1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ (HME IV.20).

Similar statements appear in the 1930 Quenta (HME IV.99) and 1937 Quenta Silmarillion (HME V.246), and there seems little doubt that this is the ‘mythological way’ to which Tolkien refers in his letter to Allen & Unwin: like his later conception of the ents (LotR.489 & 494),¹⁸ Tolkien initially conceived of humans as being without speech until they learned language from the elves (whose own name for themselves, Quendi, means simply ‘the Speakers’ – LotR.1171). And that language, once they acquired it, was not halting or primitive but full of meaning, subtlety, and beauty.

Finally, there is Tolkien’s rather surprising use, in the typescript version of this passage, of the precise scientific technical name pithecanthropus. The term was first proposed by Ernst Haeckel, a disciple of Darwin, in 1866, just seven years after the publication of On the Origin of Species [1859]. Haeckel theorized that, if humans and apes truly shared a common ancestor, then there must once have existed an ancestral form which would combine human and ape characteristics, a ‘missing link’ which he called pithecanthropus alulus: ‘speechless ape-man’. Several decades later, when Eugène Dubois discovered fossils of early humans that seemed to match Haeckel’s prediction, he named his discovery pithecanthropus erectus (‘upright ape-man’ [1894]) – more popularly known as ‘Java Man’. Today, Dubois’ discovery is classified with ‘Peking Man’ [discovered in 1928ff] as homo erectus, along with the recently discovered hobbit-sized homo floresiensis. Significantly, not only is Tolkien’s terminology correct in the contemporary usage of the time, but the skepticism expressed by his parenthetical ‘which consisted (we are told) largely of exclamations’ makes it clear that he is well aware of the second part of Haeckel’s proposed name, alulus or without language. Rather than enter into the paleoanthropological debate on just when humans acquired language (cf. for example Johanson & Edgar, From Lucy to Language [1996], page 106), Tolkien provided a mythological answer within his subcreated world, of mankind born mute (alulus) but then acquiring full-fledged language from our forerunners and sibling-race, the Elder Children or elves.