Chapter XIII
The Death of Smaug
As before, this chapter break was added at the time Tolkien created the First Typescript and divided the text of the original continuous manuscript into the familiar chapters of the published book. In this particular case, the new chapter began with what had been the third paragraph on Ms. page 153 (Marq. 1/1/15:1); between this and the preceding paragraph Tolkien inserted, in pencil, the directions:
Here insert ‘Not at home’
Ch. Fire and Water
Thus, the decision to flip what are now chapters XIV (‘Fire and Water’) and XIII (‘Not at Home’) – or XIII (‘Death of Smaug’) and XIV (‘While the Dragon’s Away’), respectively, in the original draft and this edition – was made at the same time that Tolkien determined where the chapter breaks would fall.
This chapter also marks the spot where, later, the First Typescript broke off and the point to which Tolkien returned when he began the Third Phase drafting that completed the work; see page 638.
The men of the Lake-town were [sitting on the quays >] mostly indoors for the wind was from the North and chill, but some were walking on the quays, and watching as they were fond of doing the stars shine forth from the smooth patches of Lake as they opened in the sky.
From their town the Lonely Mountain was screened by the low hills at the far end of the lake, through a gap in which the R. Running came down from the North. Only its highest peak could they see and they looked seldom at it, for it was ominous and drear even in the morning light. Now it was lost and gone, blotted in the dark.TN1
Suddenly it flickered back to view, a brief glow touched it and faded. ‘Look!’ said one ‘the lights again. Last night [they > I >] the watchmen saw them start and fade from midnight till dawn.TN2 Something is happening up there.’
‘Perhaps the King under the Mountain is forging gold’ said another. ‘It is long since he went North. It is time the songs began to prove themselves again.’
‘Which king?’ said another with a surly voice.TN3 ‘As like as not it is the marauding fire of the dragon – the only K. under the Mountain we have ever known.’
‘You are always foreboding gloomy things’ said the others ‘from floodsTN4 to poisoned fish’ they said. ‘Think of something cheerful.’
Then suddenly a great light appeared red and golden in the low place in the hills [> the northern end of the lake turned golden]. ‘The king beneath the Mountain’ they shouted. ‘“[The rivers golden run >] His wealth is like the sun, his silver like a fountain. [his gold like rivers run >] his rivers golden run.”TN5 The river is running gold from the mountain’ they cried, and everywhere windows opened and feet were hurrying. There was tremendous excitement and enthusiasm. But the surly fellow ran hot foot to the master. ‘The dragon is coming or I am a fool’ he cried: ‘cut the bridges; to arms to arms!’
[So it was that >] The warning trumpets were sounded and the enthusiasm died away. So it was that the dragon did not find them quite unprepared. Before long they could see him as a spark of fire speeding towards them, and not the most foolish doubted that the prophecies had gone somewhat wrong. Still they had a little time. Every vessel in the town was filled with water; every warrior armed, every arrow ready and the bridgesTN6 to the land were cast down and destroyed before the roar of Smaug’s terrible approach grew loud, [and the trees by the shore were >] and the lake rippled [red as] fire beneath his coming.
Amid the shrieks and wailing and the shouts of men he came over them, swept towards the bridges, and was foiled. The bridges were gone and his enemies were on an island in deep water – too deep and dark and cool for his liking: If he plunged therein a vapour and a steam wd rise enough to cover all the land with a mist for days, but the lake was mightier than he, it would quench him before he could pass through.
Roaring he swept by on the town. A hail of dark arrows swept up and snapped and rattled on his scales and jewels and their shafts fell back burning and hissing in the lake. No fireworks you ever imagined equalled the sight that night. Now the dragon’s wrath blazed to its height till he was blind and mad with it. He circled high in the air lighting all the lake; and the trees by the shore shone like copper and like blood with many [added: <dancing>] black shadows at the feet. Now he swooped through the arrow storm taking no heed [for >] to turn his scales towards his foes, seeking only to set their town a blaze. Fire leapt from thatched roofs and wooden beams [But being <hurriedly> >] drenched though they had been with water. Water was flung by hundreds of hands wherever a spark appeared. Back swooped the dragon. A swirl of his tail and the roof of the Great House crumbled; fire unquenchable leapt up. Another swoop and more house[s] [leapt in >] sprang afire or fell. [Men were taking to boats or leaping into the water >] Men were leaping into the water on every side; women and children were being huddled into <?crowded> boats in the market-pool. [Soon all >] Weapons were flung down. The Master himself was <?brung> to his gilded boat. Soon all the town would b<e> burned down to the lake. That was the dragon’s hope. They could stay in the boats till they starved, let them try to get to land and he would see. Soon he would set all the shoreland woods ablaze and wither every field and pasture. Just now he was enjoying such sport in town-baiting as he had not had for years.
Still a company of archers held their ground. Their captain was the surly man whose friends accused him of prophesying floods and poisoned fish. But [his >] Bard was his real name, a descendant as tales said of Girion lord of Dale. He shot with a great bow till all but one arrow was spent. The flames were near him, his companions were fleeing. He bent the bow for the last time.
‘Arrow’ he said ‘ – black arrow I have saved you to the last. I <ha>d you [from] my father and he from old. If ever you came from the forges of the true king of the Mountain go now and speed well.’TN7 The dragon swooped once more lower than ever.TN8 The great bow twanged. The black arrow sped [straight >] straight for the hollow by the left breast where his foreleg was flung wide. In it smote and vanished. barb shaft and feather. With a shriek that [cracked >] deafened men, felled stars and split stoneTN9 the Dragon [> Smaug] shot into the air, turned over, and crashed down from a height in ruin. Full upon the town he fell. His last throes splintered it to gledesTN10 and sparks. The lake roared in. A vast steam leapt up white into the sudden dark. And that was the end of Smaug and EsgarothTN11 and Bard.
The text breaks off here, about three-quarters of the way down the page (manuscript page 155; Marq. 1/1/15:3), indicating a pause in the composition. The last two words of this paragraph (‘and Bard’) were cancelled and replaced by ‘but not of Bard’. Probably at the same time, the rest of the manuscript page was filled with the following paragraph, which was marked for insertion before the preceding paragraph (that is, between ‘He bent his bow for the last time’ and ‘“Arrow” he said’):
Suddenly out of the dark something fluttered to his shoulder – he started, but it was an old thrush and it perched by his shoulder and it brought him news. Marvelling he found he could understand its tongue – for he was of the Dale race. ‘Wait wait’ it said ‘the moon is rising. Look for the hollow of the left breast as he flies and turns above you.’ The[n] Bard drew his last arrow from his quiver. The dragon was circling back, and the moon rose above the eastern shore and silvered his great wings.
This addition clearly dates from the same time as the extended rider (manuscript page 151b) given on page 513, inserted into the end of the preceding chapter, where the old thrush is given a larger role in the story than simply being a passive signifier that they have found the right snail-stone marking the Secret Door.
The next page following the death of Smaug (manuscript page 156; Marq. 1/1/14:4) is marked by somewhat neater writing and also slightly more yellowed paper, indicating that the next thirteen pages probably came from a similar but slightly different batch of unused students’ papers. Tolkien also starts further down the page than usual on this new sheet, leaving roughly enough room blank to have written another paragraph there, though in the end all he wrote were the words ‘A great fog’, which seem to have been partially erased. In both typescripts and the published book a blank line is skipped here to mark the break in the action.
A great fog
The moon [rises >] rose higher and higher, and the North wind grew loud and cold. It twisted the white fog upon the lake into bending pillars and hurrying clouds, and drove it off to the West to scatter in tattered wisps over the marshes before Mirkwood. Then the many boats could be seen dotted on the surface of the lake, and down the wind came the sound of the voices of the people of Esgaroth lamenting their lost town and goods and ruined homes. But they had really much to be thankful for, had they thought of it – which perhaps it was asking too much to expect them to do: [the dragon’s was at end, >] three quarters of the people of the town had escaped at least alive, and their woods, fields, pastures and cattle, and most of their boats remained undamaged; and the Dragon was dead, and at an end. What that meant they had not yet realized.
They gathered in sorry crowds upon the western shores, shivering in the cold wind. The first grumbles were for the Master who had left the town so soon, while still [defenders were >] some were willing to defend it.
‘He may have a good head for business – especially his own business – ’ some murmured, ‘but he is no good in a crisis!’ And th<ey> praised and lamented Bard and his courage.
‘If only he were not slain we would make him a king’ they said ‘Bard, [<King> >] the Dragon-shooter, of the line of Girion. Alas that he is lost!’
And in the very midst of their talk a tall figure stepped from the shadows. He was drenchedTN12 with water, his black hair hung wet over his face and shoulders; a fierce light was in his eyes.
‘Bard is not lost’ he cried. ‘I am Bard the dragon-piercer of the race of Girion. I dived from Esgaroth only when none else was left, only when the enemy was slain. I will be your king!’
‘King Bard, King Bard’ they shouted, and the master ground his chattering teeth, as he sat upon the ground.
‘Girion was Lord of Dale not King of Esgaroth’ he said. ‘In this lake town we have ever had masters elected from the old and the wise, and not endured the rough rule of mere fighting men. Let King Bard win [> take] back his own Kingdom – Dale is free, nor is more ruined now than Esgaroth. He has slain the slayer of his fathers and nothing hinders him. And those that like may go with him, though wise men will stay here and rebuild our town, and enjoy its richness and peace’.
‘We will have king Bard’ the people shouted. ‘We have had enough of the old men & money-counters’.
‘I am the last one to underpraise [> undervalue] Bard the Bowman’ said the Master warily, for Bard was standing near him fierce and grim, ‘and indeed his bravery tonight has made him the greatest benefactor the men of the Lake have known since the coming of the Smaug the unceasing Threat. But I don’t quite see why I get all the blame. Who stirred up the dragon, I might ask? Who got rich gifts of us and ample help, and led us to believe that old songs would come true? What sort of gold have they sent down the river? To whom should we send a claim for the repair of all our damages and the help [added: & comfort] of widows and widowers and orphans?’
Cunning words. For the moment people forgot the idea of a new king and [were >] turned their thoughts and anger to Thorin and his company. Their hate flowed up against them, and their words grew ever more wild and bitter. Some of those who had sung the old songs loudest were now [singing parodies of them >] heard loudly to suggest that the dwarves had deliberately sent the Dragon down upon them.
Added later in the bottom and left margin and intended for insertion at this point: ‘Fools’ said Bard. ‘And why waste hate on those unhappy creatures. They have doubtless perished in fire before Smaug came to us.’ But even as he spoke, the thought of the treasure of the Mountain came into his heart, and he fell silent, thinking of the Master’s words, and dr<eam>ing of Dale rebuilt, if he could find the men.
It was fortunate they [> that the lakemen] had something to discuss and to occupy their thoughts, for their night under the trees and in such rough shelter as could be contrived was miserable. Many [who >] took ill that night and afterwards died. Even Bard would have had a hard task in the following days to order them, and begin upon the rebuilding of the town, with such tools as were left in the huts upon the shore, if other help had not been at hand.
The spies of the woodelves had sent tidings of the dragon’s rousing [> dwarves’ north<ern> journey and of] to their King, and he was as astonished as the Master had been; but he too expected only a bad end for the dwarves [> yet he did not expect any other ending of their venture than their death in the jaws of Smaug]. When news of the rousing of the Dragon reached him, and of the fire upon the mountain tops, he thought that he had heard the last of Thorin Oakenshield.
Then came messengers telling him of the fall of Esgaroth and the death of Smaug. He knew then the time had come to move. ‘It is an ill wind that blows no man any good’ he said,TN13 for he too had not forgotten the legend of the hoard of Thror.
So he led forth all the host he could muster, a great army of [woode<lves> >] the bowmen and spearmen of the woodelves. Some he sent North towards the Mountain; some he bid bring all the supplies they could gather down the river to the lake. It was a long march, for he had not rafts enough for all his folk, but in seven days he came upon the shores, and the unhappy men were glad indeed to see him, and ready to make any bargain for his help.
That is how it happened that while many were left behind with the women and the children, busily felling trees and making huts along the shore, and beginning under the direction of the Master (and with the help of woodelves) the replanning and building of their <restore>d town, [all the bravest warriors but those of the king, >] many gathered under Bard and marched away North with the Elven king.
The chapter comes to an end at the bottom of manuscript page 158 (Marq. 1/1/15:6), as the scene shifts back to the activities of Bilbo and the dwarves at the Mountain; see page 577.
TEXT NOTES
1 This paragraph was preceded on the page by a paragraph of drafting. I transcribe this cancelled passage just as it appears in the manuscript, since it offers a good example of Tolkien’s seeking to visualize and properly describe a specific image – in this case, exactly what the people of Lake Town could see of Smaug’s distant attack on the Mountain when he destroyed the Secret Door (cf. page 515).
Suddenly a great light shone in the North and filled the low place in the hills which screened all but the top [> highest peak] of the lonely M. from the view. Though The highest peak of the Lonely Mountain was lost in dark – that was all they could see of it above the hills at the North end of the lake. Suddenly the low place in those hills through which came the R. Running from the North was filled with a great light, the Northern end
The Mountain flickered with a glow of light such as
The gap between the hills at the northernmost point on the Long Lake at the inflow of the River Running out of the Lonely Mountain past Dale mentioned here can just be seen in ‘Esgaroth’ (Plate VIII [bottom]), on the horizon in a direct line above the dwarf popping his head up out of the barrel; it is slightly more evident in the finished version of this drawing (‘Lake Town’; cf. DAA.244 & H-S#127).
2 ‘from midnight till dawn’: this corresponds exactly with the account in Chapter XII, where it is midnight when Bilbo emerges from the tunnel with the stolen cup (page 507) and Smaug immediately thereafter discovers the theft and flies out ‘[t]o hunt the whole mountain till he caught the thief and burned and trampled him’ (ibid.), scorching the mountain-side with his fiery breath ‘till dawn chilled his wrath and he went back to his golden couch to sleep’ (page 508).
3 This unpromising characterization marks the first appearance of Bard,† who will soon emerge as the hero of the coming battle. The description of his voice as ‘surly’ is distinctly unheroic; elsewhere the word is used of Ted Sandyman (‘The Scouring of the Shire’, LotR.1054) and Snaga the orc (‘The Tower of Cirith Ungol’, LotR.940). Within the published Hobbit itself, it appears only to describe the starving dwarves’ attitude when questioned by their elven captors in Mirkwood (page 380) – the same elves who had the night before ignored their pleas for food and left them to the spiders’ tender mercies.
There is certainly nothing in these paragraphs preceding the battle foretelling the heroic figure this as-yet-unnamed guardsman is about to become. In the First Typescript, surly has been replaced with grim (typescript page 127; Marq. 1/1/64:1), which conveys the same pessimism but leaves open heroic possibilities. Whereas ‘surly’ (which derives from Old French) usually means churlishly ill-humored, ‘grim’ (which comes from Old English) can mean not just fierce, cruel, or harsh but also determined or bold: in Beowulf it is used not just of Grendel (e.g., line 121) but of Wiglaf when he addresses his fellow guardsmen who deserted King Beowulf in his time of need (line 2860b); see commentary pp. 557–8.
† Unless this guard is the same character as the nameless guard captain who kept such a poor watch back in Chapter X; see Text Note 10 on page 444.
4 Tolkien originally wrote ‘from a fi<re>’ here but immediately changed it to ‘from floods’, perhaps in order to avoid anticipating the conflagration that erupts a few paragraphs later.
5 I have added the quotation marks here, since these lines would seem at first to be quoted from the poem in Chapter X (see pp. 439–40 and Text Note 14 on pp. 445–6), but not all of them actually occur there, nor in this sequence, either in the rough draft nor the final poem. We must either imagine that the Lake-men are garbling their own song a few weeks later or, more probably, that this is a part of the song not recorded earlier, where we are told ‘there was a great deal more of it’.
6 Note that Lake Town still has multiple bridges connecting it to the shore here and also in the accompanying First Typescript (1/1/64:1); cf. Text Notes to Chapter X, page 444.
7 An additional sentence appears in this passage in the First Typescript:
You have never failed me and always I have recovered you.
This addition, along with some polishing, thus achieves in the First Typescript the text that appears in the published book. For more on the rather curious motif of an arrow that is always recovered until one final shot when it fulfills its destiny, see the commentary on page 558.
8 Added in the left margin and marked for insertion at this point:
As he turned [added: and dived down] his belly glittered [with >] white with sparkling fire in the moon – but not in one spot.
For the role of moonlight in this scene, see the commentary on the picture ‘The Death of Smaug’, page 561.
9 The detail about Smaug’s death cry causing stars to fall from the sky, while striking, disappeared by the time the First Typescript was made, where this passage reads ‘. . . a shriek that deafened men, felled trees, and split stone’ (1/1/64:3). For a precedent elsewhere in Tolkien’s work of falling stars being caused by dramatic earthly events, see the Father Christmas Letters, where in the 1925 letter two stars ‘shot’ (i.e., became shooting stars) when North Polar Bear broke the North Pole, and a third ‘went red when [the] Pole snapped’ (Letters from Father Christmas, 1925 Letter, page 23).
10 ‘Glede’: a rare (dialectical) word more commonly spelled ‘gleed’ (Middle English glede, Old English gled), meaning a glowing coal or ember. Douglas Anderson notes (DAA.308) that the word occurs both in Beowulf and in Sir Gawain & the Green Knight, as well as in Tolkien’s translation of the latter (where it is once translated ‘coals’ and once left untranslated as ‘gledes’; cf. SGGK line 891 [Tolkien translation page 47] and line 1609 [Tolkien translation page 65]).
11 This is the first appearance of the name Esgaroth. For the probable meaning of this elven name for Lake Town, see pp. 561–2. Several letters at the beginning and end of the word have been re-written in a darker ink, and it is possible that the original reading here was Esgaron, the form of the name found in Plot Notes D; see page 569 and Text Note 7 on page 571.
12 This marks the point at which the First Typescript broke off in the ‘home manuscript’ that Tolkien circulated among his friends; the next page which followed in that composite text was the first page of the Third Phase handwritten manuscript. For an explanation of how these texts fit together, see the headnote at the beginning of Chapter XVb: King Bard on pp. 637–8. Note that when Carpenter says that ‘shortly after he had described the death of the dragon’ Tolkien broke off the story (Tolkien: A Biography, page 179), he is referring to the typescript. In fact, as the next two chapters show, Tolkien continued the story on past Smaug’s death for the rest of that chapter, all the following chapter (which now precedes it in the re-arranged published sequence), and well into the chapter that followed – or, in the published book, for twenty-one out of the remaining sixty-five pages of the story (in the pagination of the first edition, not counting illustrations).
13 This proverb, while undoubtedly venerable, hardly dates back to the Third Age of Middle-earth. The earliest recorded usage, an yll wynde that blowth no man to good, men saie, appears in Henry VIII’s time in John Heywood’s Proverbs [1546], along with such still-familiar phrases as no fire without some smoke, cart before the horse, more the merrier, penny for your thoughts, and hitteth the nail on the head. Shakespeare uses slightly different forms of it twice (Henry IV, Part II, Act V, scene iii, line 87; Henry VI, Part III, Act II, scene v, line 55), and it has remained in use down to the present day. The most familiar form today is the eighteenth-century one, ’tis an ill wind which blows nobody any good (cf. Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey [1768]).
As we have seen in Plot Notes C, the idea that Smaug would die during the attack on Lake Town rather than be stabbed by Bilbo while he slept on his bed of gold emerged suddenly. Since Bilbo was no longer to be the dragon-slayer, Tolkien had to either re-assign the role to an already existing character within the book, such as Thorin or Gandalf, or create a new one with very little preamble.1 Designating any other character already present as Smaug’s bane would simply shift the problem without solving it, since all the dwarves were at the mountain with Bilbo and no other character who had appeared so far on their journey could be re-introduced to fill the role without usurping too large a part in the story and taking attention away from the main characters.2
Tolkien’s solution was to introduce a new character to fill the necessary narrative role. Initially he planned to kill off this character as soon as his role of dragon-slayer was achieved: only two pages of manuscript separate his first appearance (manuscript page 153)3 and his death in the ruin of Esgaroth (manuscript page 155), crushed beneath the dragon’s fall. Before proceeding any further, however, Tolkien thought better of it and changed the line ‘And that was the end of Smaug and Esgaroth and Bard’ to ‘. . . the end of Smaug and Esgaroth but not of Bard’ (italics mine) – as significant a change within such a small space of words as he achieved anywhere within the book.
Having decided to keep Bard alive was a crucial decision that greatly affected the concluding section of the book. The chapters immediately following the death of Smaug (Chapters XIV-XVIII in this edition, XIII and XV-XVIII in the published book) have long been noted as strikingly different in tone from all that had come before.4 Initially, as we shall see, Tolkien’s sympathies in the next several chapters were to remain with Thorin and the dwarves and no rift between Bilbo and his companions had been contemplated (see especially the ‘little bird’ outline, i.e. Plot Notes E), with the elves and their allies being cast in a much more hostile light (capturing and wounding Fili, pursing Kili, shooting arrows at the friendly ravens bringing food to enable the besieged dwarves and hobbit to hold out, etc.). Before the introduction of Bard, none of the outsiders described in the Plot Notes who descend upon the mountain after Smaug’s death have any legitimate claim on the treasure there: certainly not the Elvenking who imprisoned the dwarves for months in solitary confinement merely for trespassing. Nor are the men of Lake Town, although certainly due generous recompense for all their aid in the dwarves’ time of need (much of their sorry state having been due to the elves’ mistreatment, it must be said), entitled thereby to any significant portion of Thorin’s inheritance. That the elves and Lake-men were in the wrong in their attempts to steal or extort Thror’s treasure and besiege his heir when he finally comes back into his own is shown by Bladorthin’s words and actions when the wizard finally reappears:
Blad[orthin] rebukes the besiegers . . .
A share of his part [Bilbo] gives to Lake-men, and to wood-elves
(though they may not deserve it).
— Plot Notes C (page 497, italics mine).
But the introduction of survivors from Dale changes this: it gives those who like Bard are descended from the Dale-folk a rightful claim to at least part of the hoard – albeit probably a relatively small part: it is after all the gold of the King under the Mountain that has lived on in Lake-folk song and legend and likewise ‘the legend of the hoard of Thror’ that brings the Elvenking marching at top speed, not any legacy of Girion. Now Thorin faces a rightful claimant to any wealth of Girion’s mixed into Smaug’s treasure, and one who furthermore also legitimately serves as spokesman for the Lake-folk’s claim for aid in time of need to reciprocate their own earlier generosity, plus a hero who by preventing Smaug’s return has done the new King under the Mountain a great service and deserves his own reward as the dragon-slayer (cf. Bilbo’s recognition of the essential fairness of Bard’s presentation of his three-part claim in the latter part of Chapter XV, the first new text in the Third Phase drafting, on page 648 & DAA.323). Significantly enough, it was just at the point where Tolkien would either have to reject some of these new elements, particularly Bard, because of the complications they introduced into his projected conclusion, or else have to find a way to incorporate them by changing that conclusion, that he broke off the Second Phase of composition, just as Bilbo and the dwarves learn of the approaching elven and human armies (see page 620).
Bard is an important figure for another reason: he represents a turning point in Tolkien’s legendarium. He is not the first of Tolkien’s human heroes, having been preceded a decade and a half before by Beren, Húrin, Túrin, and Tuor, but unlike these tragic and rather remote figures, his is a fortunate fate. A dispossessed heir, he lives to achieve unexpected victory over the surpassingly strong hereditary foe who had destroyed his homeland, re-establishes the kingship, and founds a dynasty that renews alliances with nonhuman neighbors and helps bring renewed prosperity to the region.5 In short, he is a precursor of Strider (Aragorn), who through his own efforts and the great deeds of others claims his ancestor’s throne and re-establishes his kingdom; all that is lacking is the love story (a relatively late element of Aragorn’s story; cf. HME VIII–IX). Bard is thus a pivotal figure, a turning point between the tragic figures of the First Age and the triumphant returning king of Volume III of The Lord of the Rings.
The sudden emergence of the unlikely hero, the one who dares to undertake some task or challenge which his apparent ‘betters’ shirk – as in, for example, the farmer who (twice) goes dragon-hunting in Farmer Giles of Ham or indeed Bilbo’s exploration of Smaug’s lair when Durin’s heir dares not enter – is of course a traditional fairy-tale motif, frequently matched with the subsequent discovery that the new hero is in fact a lost prince or noble heir. However, the primary external influence for Bard’s sudden emergence, aside from sheer narrative necessity, probably lies not in fairy tales but (as so often the case in the Smaug chapters) in Beowulf. When King Beowulf sets forth to fight the dragon that has burned down his royal hall, he brings along as companions eleven picked warriors but forbids them to take part in the battle, ordering them to stand back at a safe distance and serve as witnesses. But when it becomes clear that Beowulf is losing the fight, one of his companions springs into action. Heretofore merely one of eleven unnamed warriors, Wiglaf disobeys his king’s orders and rushes to the old man’s side; with his help, Beowulf is able to kill the dragon but is mortally wounded in turn. The dying king names Wiglaf as his heir, and it is he who takes charge of the disposition of the treasure and directs the construction of Beowulf’s barrow. The differences from The Hobbit are considerable, but the essential points are the same: (1) an anonymous guard is first named when he shows the courage to fight a dragon, (2) all his fellows lack the courage to do likewise and abandon their duty (either by deserting their posts in The Hobbit or in Beowulf by failing to fulfill their oaths to defend the king, as Wiglaf angrily upbraids his fellows), (3) the newly named hero turns out to be of royal lineage (Bard being the descendant of Girion king of Dale and Wiglaf the last of the Wægmundings, Beowulf’s kin; cf. Beowulf lines 2813–2816), and lastly (4) each becomes king as a direct result of his role in the dragon-slaying.
The motif of the Black Arrow both harkens back to the alliterative poems of the 1920s and ahead to the Númenórean blades in The Lord of the Rings. In ‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’, Beleg the Bowman carries a special arrow named Dailir,6 of which we are told
. . . Dailir he drew, his dart beloved;
howso far fared it, or fell unnoted,
unsought he found it with sound feathers
and barbs unbroken
—lines 1080–1083a (Canto II: ‘Beleg’) HME III.42.
When Beleg stumbles in the dark while rescuing Túrin and breaks this lucky arrow, injuring his hand in the process, the narrator makes clear this is an omen of disaster (ibid., lines 1187–1192; HME III.45), and indeed Túrin murders Beleg only minutes later in a tragic case of mistaken identity.
Bard is more fortunate, in that although his arrow too is ultimately lost, its final act is to exceed all hope by slaying his people’s greatest foe, with a sense that it perishes in the act of fulfilling its destiny. This is hinted at by Bard’s final words before that fateful shot: ‘If ever you came from the forges of the true king of the Mountain go now and speed well’; compare the narrator’s comment when Merry’s blade burns away after helping to slay the Witch-King of Angmar (that is, the Lord of the Nazgûl):
So passed the sword of the Barrow-downs, work of Westernesse [Númenor]. But glad would he have been to know its fate who wrought it slowly long ages ago in the North-kingdom when the Dúnedain were young, and chief among their foes was the dread realm of Angmar and its sorcerer king. No other blade, not though mightier hands had wielded it, would have dealt that foe a wound so bitter, cleaving the undead flesh, breaking the spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will.
—LotR.877–8.
Once again Beowulf may have contributed something to the idea of a weapon that achieves its goal but then perishes: in the battle with Grendel’s dam, Beowulf finds that the sword he has brought cannot harm the monster, but he is able to slay her and to cut off Grendel’s head with an ancient sword he finds within her lair. This ealdsweord eotenisc (Beowulf line 1558a; literally, ‘old entish sword’) then melts away (lines 1606b–1609), leaving only the hilt behind (1614b–1617). In any case, like Bard himself in the original draft, the Black Arrow is no sooner introduced than it fulfills its role in slaying the seemingly invulnerable dragon and leaves the story.
The great moment that would at first seem to be the climax of the entire book and the fulfillment of Thorin & Company’s quest is remarkable because when it comes it not only occurs ‘off-stage’ so far as the main point-of-view characters are concerned7 but it comes five-sixths of the way through the book, not in the last or even penultimate chapter, and what follows is far from dénouement. Indeed Smaug’s sudden and permanent removal, while essential to any ‘happy ending’ for the story, immediately complicates the situation and leads to the tangle that takes another six chapters to resolve.
Unlike the traditional methods of dragon-slaying proposed in the Plot Notes but ultimately rejected, which derive primarily from the Sigurd legend and his own Glorund story, so far as I have been able to discover the method Tolkien chose for slaying The Dragon is unprecedented in fairy-tale, English folktale, or Old English/Old Norse lore. The closest parallel seems to be classical: the Eleventh Labour of Hercules, where in some forms of the story the demigod slays Ladon, the Dragon of the Hesperides, with an arrow or arrows in order to gain the Golden Apples it guards. Most stories seem to hold with the author of Job that arrows or darts are no good against a dragon’s armor (Job 41.26–29; see Text Note 33 following Chapter XII), and, a few humorous folktales aside, traditionally only hand-to-hand combat has seemed sufficiently heroic for such an epic encounter. Simpson notes that while many dragons are described or depicted as winged, most storytellers and artists ignore this capacity for flight once battle is actually joined:
. . . it is indeed only in literature, in Spenser’s Faerie Queene that one can find a fully thought-out, detailed, visualized, blow-by-blow account of how a duel between an armed knight on horseback and a flying, fire-breathing dragon with claws and a spiked tail might be expected to unfold. In particular, Spenser makes good use of the dragon’s power of flight.8
—British Dragons, page 75.
Tolkien’s account does not involve an armored knight, but it is complex, combining as it does the traditional motif of a dragon’s weak spot (specifically the soft underbelly of the Sigurd/Fafnir legend, already seen in Glorund) with the Beowulf-dragon’s fiery breath none can withstand (also present in Glorund; cf. BLT II.85, ‘with the power of his breath he drove Túrin from those doors’) and a tactically wily wyrm who uses his power of flight to attack foes on what is essentially a manmade island surrounded by deep water. Furthermore, Smaug has learned from his ancestor’s mistake and armored himself so that a lurking assassin cannot ambush him (as Sigurd did Fafnir and Túrin Glorund). He does not know that there is a fatal weak spot in his ‘jeweled waistcoat’, but even so had he not lost his head to pride (allowing Bilbo to inspect his armaments) and to anger in the heat of battle he could have guarded against even that possibility.9 The description of Smaug’s attack – ‘the dragon’s wrath blazed . . . till he was blind and mad with it . . . taking no heed to turn his scales towards his foes’ (italics mine) – implies he is so sinuous and serpentine (as indeed the illustrations bear out) that he could with care have kept his vulnerable belly turned away from his foes on each strafing pass. After all, he must have done so in his initial assault on Dale and Thror’s halls, since at that time he lacked the embedded gemstones against which presumably even the Black Arrow was of no avail (‘then I was young and tender’ – DAA.282; italics mine).
We are fortunate that Tolkien illustrated this dramatic scene;10 even though he left the picture unfinished it is full of interesting details (see Plate XII [top]), from an alternate view of Lake Town (viewed more from the south rather than in the westerly published view [DAA.244] or in the slightly earlier variant thereof [‘Esgaroth’, Plate VIII bottom]) and the Lonely Mountain looming ominously on the horizon like an erupting volcano (cf. Tolkien’s [earlier] Thangorodrim and [later] Mount Doom in the backgrounds of his pictures of the vale of Sirion [H-S#55] and the Barad-dûr [H-S#145], respectively) to the dragon himself in his death agonies. Smaug is much yellower here than in the companion picture ‘Conversation with Smaug’ (Plate XI [top]) – in the text he is always described as ‘red-golden’ (cf. page 506) – but this may simply be an accident of the picture’s having been left incomplete. Most notably of all, Tolkien annotated this picture, suggesting that he at one point thought of offering it as a guide to another artist, perhaps at the time Houghton Mifflin suggested hiring an American artist to illustrate their edition (cf. Hammond’s Descriptive Bibliography page 18).11 These annotations show that Tolkien drew a scene as he visualized it and only then worried about reconciling it to what he written and also his extreme precision in getting those details right during the revision stage:
left margin: The moon should be a crescent: it was only a few nights after the New Moon on ‘Durin’s Day’.12
lower left corner: Dragon should have a white naked spot where the arrow enters.
bottom margin: Bard the Bowman shd be standing after release of arrow at extreme left point of the piles.
Ultimately this picture did not appear in the first edition of The Hobbit, either redrawn by Tolkien or adapted by another hand, but it was published in Tolkien’s lifetime as the cover of the second British paperback edition of The Hobbit (Unwin Books, trade paperback [1966]). In this publication the bottom of the illustration was trimmed slightly, cutting off those annotations, but the scrawled title ‘Death of Smaug’ did appear in the center of the drawing, along with the annotation concerning the moon to the far left (wrapped around on the back cover); the sharp-eyed could even catch the arrow on the bottom spine indicating where Bard stood, although there’s no way they could have known its significance.13 Tolkien himself was diffident about using this unfinished piece: with typical humility,14 he wrote to Rayner Unwin: ‘I am in your hands, but I am still not very happy about the use of this scrawl as a cover. It seems too much in the modern mode in which those who can draw try to conceal it. But perhaps there is a distinction between their productions and one by a man who obviously cannot draw what he sees’ (JRRT to RU, 15th December 1965, Letters p. 365; italics mine). The final phrase is significant: Tolkien’s chief concern is to capture the inner vision and convey to us in image as well as in words a scene from his story and his subcreated world.
This name is clearly Elvish, either Sindarin (Noldorin) or a dialect thereof; cf. Esgalduin (originally Esgaduin),15 the river that flowed past the door of Menegroth (‘the Thousand Caves’), King Thingol’s halls in Doriath. The simplest explanation is to assume that ‘Esgaroth’ and ‘Lake Town’ essentially say the same thing in different languages, and there is some support for this if we take the –roth element,16 whose primary meaning is ‘cave’ (generally in the context of fortified cave-dwelling or underground city), as also having the more general meaning of ‘dwelling’ and could thus plausibly be extended to mean ‘town’. Unfortunately, no such simple equivalence can be found for esga-. The river-name is not translated within the alliterative poems, and the only gloss I can find that Tolkien ever offered for it comes in ‘The Etymologies’ [1937–8, written to accompany the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion]. Under the root ESEK- comes the following entry:
Ilk. esg sedge,17 esgar reed-bed. Cf. Esgaroth Reedlake, because of reed-banks in west.
—HME V, page 356.
This gloss is straightforward and clear, but unfortunately it is also certainly an afterthought. For one thing, Esgaroth is clearly not the name of the Lake, as this entry would indicate, but of the town itself: cf. the label on the published version of Thror’s Map: ‘In Esgaroth upon the Long Lake dwell Men’ (DAA.97; emphasis mine); perhaps Tolkien might have been misled by glancing at the final Wilderland Map (DAA.[399]), where the name ‘Esgaroth’ appears directly below the name ‘Long Lake’, and momentarily become confused and taken this to be another name for the same feature. Furthermore, this translation offers no explanation at all relating –roth to ‘lake’. Finally, the Esga- element is clearly the same element that had appeared long before [circa 1918] in the river Esga(l)duin. In the Noldorin Word-lists, the oldest of which is contemporary with the name’s first appearance (Parma Eldalamberon XIII [2001] page 133), esk, esg appears (ibid., page 143) and is glossed ‘sharp upstanding rock in water’ (e.g., a carrock – see page 265), apparently deriving from the esc/aisc (meaning ‘sharp point, sharp edge’) of the still earlier Gnomish Lexicon [circa 1917]; Parma Eldalamberon XI page 31. Combined with our earlier hypothesis that –roth could mean city, this provides a hypothetical but satisfactory gloss for ‘Esgaroth’: city standing in or rising up out of the water, perhaps with a suggestion of pilings like reeds.18
Finally, as already noted during our discussion of the name ‘Dorwinion’ (see page 418), years later Tolkien wrote regarding Elven names in The Hobbit that ‘Esgaroth . . . [is] not Sindarin (though perhaps “Sindarized” in shape) or . . . not recorded in Sindarin’. Given its obvious affinities to Gnomish and Noldorin (the earlier forms of Sindarin within the real-world sequence of Tolkien’s invented languages), I take this to mean that the name no longer fit Sindarin as he saw it at this late date and hence had to be relegated to a dialectical or aberrant form. But just as he clearly changed his mind several times regarding the name’s meaning (see above), there seems little doubt that Esgaroth was Sindarin (i.e., Noldorin) when the name was created, like all the other Elven names in The Hobbit, although some were later disowned or orphaned, like Esgaroth and Girion. Unfortunately, Tolkien does not translate the name in this passage, in the end leaving us with no acceptable authorized gloss.