Chapter XIV
While the Dragon’s Away . . .

This chapter start is one of the very few marked as such in the original manuscript, with ‘Chapter XIV.’ written in ink at the top of manuscript page 159 (Marq. 1/1/15:7). This forms the verso of manuscript page 158: for the few remaining pages of the Second Phase manuscript (manuscript pages 158–167), Tolkien writes on both the front and back of each sheet, as he had done in the original Pryftan Fragment and the earlier parts of the Second Phase but unlike his practice from manuscript page 119 (the capture by wood-elves) onward, where he had written only on the front of each sheet.

This chapter underwent considerable revision and expansion when it was recast (as new Chapter XIII: Not at Home) to better fit its new place preceding the chapter describing Smaug’s death (original Chapter XIII, which now swapped places with it to become the new Chapter XIV: Fire and Water). Remarkably enough, a fair copy in manuscript exists of this chapter, titled ‘(Smaug is) Not at home’ (manuscript pages ‘a’–‘m’; Marq. 1/1/14:1–14), which serves as an intermediate text between the original Second Phase manuscript draft of this chapter (manuscript pages 159–65; Marq. 1/1/15) and the First Typescript version of the chapter (typescript pages 127–34; Marq. 1/1/63). I have not reproduced this fair copy manuscript, which belongs to the early part of Tolkien’s work on the Third Phase, because for most of its length it closely resembles the text of the First Typescript and thus of the published book, but in the Text Notes that follow I have noted the most significant changes between the manuscript and the fair copy, between the fair copy and the First Typescript, or between the typescript and the published book.

Their great foe was dead, and the hoard no longer had a keeper, but the dwarves did not know it. [Another danger was gathering about them, an army come > armies coming for the ransacking and plundering of the mountain palace. >] Nor would they have rejoiced had they known that the last great danger, the danger Thorin had dreaded all along, and which their silence before the Elvenking had not averted, was gathering about them – a host was marching up to ransack and plunder the halls of Thror. But they knew nothing of all this. They sat in the dark, and eventually silence fell round them. Little they ate and little they spoke. The passage of time they could not count, they scarcely dared to move, the whispers of their voices echoed and rustled in the tunnel. If they dozed they woke still to darkness and the silence going on unbroken.

At last after days [added: & days] <of waiting> as it seemed, when they were choked and dazed for want of air – it was but two [days >] nights and the day between in reality – they could bear it no longer. Almost they would have welcomed some sound of the dragon’s return below. In the silence they feared his cunning devilry, not knowing that he would never again return to his golden bed, but was lying cold as stone [upon the twisted >] twisted upon the floor of the shallows of the lake, where forever after his great <bones> could be seen in calm weather, [and >] amid the ruined pile of the old town, [but no >] if any one dared to cross the accursed spot.

At last heedless of noise they went back to the door only to find by their groping that all the outer end of the tunnel was shattered. Neither they nor the magic which it had once obeyed – even if they had known it – would open it again.

‘We are trapped!’ they say. ‘This is the end; we shall die here when our food is gone, or [choke >] stifle before that’.^TN1

And yet somehow Bilbo felt a lightening of the heart. The gloom and foreboding that had settled on him on the night of the dragon’s last assault was lifted. He felt as if a menace had departed [and] his courage returned (and trust in his proven and astonishing luck).

‘Come come!’ he said. ‘“While there’s life there’s hope,” as my father used to say, and “third time pays for all”.^TN2 I am going down the tunnel once more. I have been down twice when I knew there was a dragon at the other end, and I think I will risk a third visit, when I am no longer at all sure – and anyway <there> is no other way out of this.

‘If you will take my advice you will all come with me this time; but do be careful and as quiet as you can be. There may be no dragon, but then again there may be. I am not going to take unnecessary risks with Smaug any more’.

[Something >] In desperation they agreed, and Thorin was the first to creep forward by Bilbo’s side. Down down they went – but dwarves are not as good as hobbits when it comes to real stealth, and it was fortunate there was no listening ears at the far end of the echoing passage: the very puffing of their breath magnified in that place would have been enough for Smaug.^TN3 But no sound stirred below.

Near the bottom (as well as he could judge) Bilbo slipped on his ring again. But he scarcely needed it; the darkness was complete, and they were all invisible, with rings and without. So dark was it that Bilbo came to the opening unexpectedly put his hand on nothing, and stumbled forward and rolled headlong into the hall. There he lay still not daring to get up or even breathe. But nothing moved. There was not a gleam of light – unless far off, as his eyes [got >] stared fearfully into the blackness, he caught a pale white gleam. But certainly it was no spark of dragon-fire though the stench of the worm was still in the place, and it was hot and the taste of his vapour was on the tongue.^TN4

At length B. could bear it no more. ‘Confound you Smaug, you villain’ he said aloud. ‘Stop playing hide and seek. Give us a little light and eat me after if you must!’

Faint echoes ran about the unseen hall, but there was no answer. Bilbo got up, but he did not know in which direction to turn.

‘Something seems to have happened to Smaug, I do believe’ he said.^TN5 ‘Now I hope Oin or Gloin has got a tinderbox, or can make a light. Let’s have a look round before the luck turns!’

The dwarves were very alarmed when B. fell forward with a noise and were still frightened when they heard his voice, but Oin [> Gloin] was sent back as Bilbo asked to find some materials for light, if he could, among their goods near the upper end <of the> tunnel. Before long a little twinkle of light showed that he was returning with a small pine-torch alight and a bundle of others under his arm.^TN6

Bilbo took the little lighted torch, but the Dwarves would not yet use the others, but preferred to stop inside the tunnel and see what would happen first. As Thorin explained [he > B >] Mr Baggins was still officially their expert burglar and investigator. If he liked to risk a light that was his affair: they would wait for his report.

So they sat near the opening and watched. They saw him steal^TN7 across the floor holding aloft his tiny light – a little flickering patch of red in the blackness. Every now and again there was a glint at his feet as he stumbled upon some golden thing. The light [<rose?> >] grew smaller as he wandered away into the huge hall, then it began to rise dancing into the air. Bilbo was climbing the great mound of treasure. Soon he stood near the top, and from afar they saw him stoop but they did not know the reason.

It was the Gem of Girion,^TN8 for such Bilbo guessed it to be from the description of the dwarves. Ever as he climbed forward the same [pale >] white gleam had shone before him like a small globe of pallid light; now as he approached it was tinged with [a] flickering sparkle of red [>splintering beams] reflected from his torch. At last he looked down upon it, and caught his breath. It held his eyes and he gazed in wonder. It was a great white gem, that shone of its own light within, and yet cut and fashioned by the dwarves to whom Girion had given it,^TN9 it caught and splintered all light that it received into a thousand sparkles of dazzling white. It was a large gem and heavy, larger than the hobbit’s small hand – that was stretched out to it, drawn by its enchantment. Suddenly he stooped, lifted it and put it in his pocket.^TN10

‘Now I am Burglar indeed’ thought B. ‘ – but I suppose I must tell the dwarves what I have done. Yet they said I could take my share as I could [> pick and choose my own share] – and I think I would choose this, if they took all the rest. But it remains to be seen, if I have won my share at all yet’.^TN11

With that thought he went on. Down the mound he climbed, [and all round the walls he wandered >] and his spark was hidden from the watching dwarves. All round the walls he wandered, and they saw it dimly again in the distance, and then coming back [> Then they saw it red and far in the distance again].

On he went till he came to the great doors of the hall at the far side, and a draught of air nearly blew out his torch. He peeped through, shielding the flame with his hand, and caught a glimpse of vast passages, and stairs going up into the gloom.

Then a black shape flew [> swooped] <in the air> [> at him], brushed his hair; the flame flickered as he started, stumbled back, and fell. The torch dropped head downward & went out. ‘Only a bat I suppose and hope’ he said ruefully, ‘but now what am I to do.’^TN12

‘Thorin Balin!’ he cried out. ‘The light’s gone out. Some one come and help me!’ He didn’t like being lost in the dark so far away from the tunnel at all and for the moment his courage failed altogether.

Faintly from far off the dwarves heard ‘Thorin Balin!’ echoing and ‘help!’ ‘Now what on earth or under it has happened?’ said Thorin. They waited a minute, but no dragon-like noises came. ‘Come on one of you’ said Th. ‘strike another light. We must go and help Mr Baggins I suppose’.

‘It does seem our turn’ said Balin.

So when Gloin had lit a couple of torches they crept out^TN13 and went along the wall as hurriedly as they could; and before long they met Bilbo trying to feel his way round. They were very relieved to hear his account of what had happened, though what they would have said if he had told them at that moment about the gem of Girion I don’t know. The mere fleeting glimpses of the treasure which they had caught had rekindled all the fire of their hearts; and when the fire of the heart of a dwarf is kindled by jewel and gold his courage grows.^TN14 They no longer needed any urging of Bilbo’s. Both Balin and Thorin were eager now to explore, and willing to believe that at any rate for the present Smaug was not at home. Soon they had all the torches alight and all the party stole out of the tunnel and entered the hall which the dwarves had never [cancelled: again] entered since the days long ago [of] the dragon’s coming.

Once they had started the exploration they forgot fear and <caution>. They lifted old treasures from the mound and held them up in the light and felt them and fingered them. They took down mail and weapons from the walls and armed themselves.^TN15 Royal and princely Thorin looked in a coat of gold with a silver-hafted axe in his belt.

‘Mr Baggins!’ he said ‘Here is the first payment of your reward! Cast off your old coat and put on this!’ Then he put upon Bilbo a small coat of mail, <wr>ought for some elf-prince long ago.^TN16 It was of silvered steel,^TN17 [and pearls were <clustered> >] adorned with pearls, and a belt of pearls and crystals went with it. A light helm of figured leather strengthened within with hoops of steel, and studden about the rim with gems they set upon his head. An absurd desire to look at himself in a glass took hold of him: [He began to >] but he still kept his head more than the dwarves.^TN18

[He grew >] ‘Come!’ he said ‘we are armed, but what has any such armour availed against Smaug the Dreadful? The treasure is not yet regained. We are seeking not for gold but a way of escape. Let us get on.’

‘True, true’ said Thorin ‘ – and I will be your guide. Not in a thousand years shall I forget the ways of this palace.’ So now the dwarves covered their glittering mail with their old^TN19 cloaks and the helms with <their> hoods, and followed behind Thorin, a line of little torches in the Dark.

Out [into the >] through the wide doors they went in single file. Dreading at every step to hear the rumour of Smaug’s return, for Bilbo’s words had recalled them only too well to their danger, they crept in single file into the passages <outside>. Though all was befouled [added: & <blackened>] with the dragon and all the old adornments rotten or torn away, Thorin knew every road and turn. They climbed long stairs, turned and went down <hollow> echoing ways, turned again and climbed yet more stairs, smooth carved and even in the long rock; and yet more stairs again, [Till Bilbo could go on no more. >] Up and up they went and met no sign or <word> of anything, save wild and fierce animal shapes,^TN20 and suchlike forms that slipped off into the shadows. At last Bilbo felt he could go on no more – the stairs were steep and high for him, although he alone was not carrying any <other> treasure than his armour.^TN21 The dwarves’ pockets were stuffed with gold & gems (for fear this shd be their only chance of gaining anything); and besides they had all the bundles of such foods as they had got into the tunnel to carry on their backs.

‘A little further still’ said Thorin. ‘We shall see the Day ere long. Cannot you feel the <sniff> of [> beginnings of] a new air?’

‘Come on [> along] Bilbo’ said Balin, taking his arm ‘ – if we get out safe and alive it will be due to you many times over; we cannot leave you here, nor can we wait.’ So as they had done in the goblins cavern they picked him up and carried him^TN22 forward, until suddenly the roof sprang high far above the waning light of their torches. Light came in from an opening in the roof. Pale and white, and more light from great doors at the far end, one of which was fallen on the ground, the other was hanging on one broken hinge.

‘This is the Great Hall of Thror, his hall of feasting and of council. And from the Gate it is not far off’ said Thorin.

They passed out again^TN23 and soon [cancelled: before them the great arch of the Front Gate shone – blackened and ruined but still <?standing> <?firm> at the <illegible> and <splendid> at the <illegible> >] a sound of water fell upon their ears. Out of a dark tunnel issued, a boiling water and flowed in a built channel beside their road. ‘There is the birth of the Running River’ said Thorin, ‘and it is hasting to the Gate. Let us follow!’

Round a wide turn they went and before them stood the [added: broad] light of day. A rising sun sent its light from the East between the arms of the mountain, and beams of gold came in and fell upon the floor. Before them was a great arch, still showing cunning work within, blackened and ruined & splintered as it was. They were come to Front Gate, and were looking forth to the East. A whirl of bats went up affrighted by their smoking torches which they had not put out. Their feet slipped upon the floors that were smooth and slimy with the passing of the great Dragon that had lived there long. The water rushed noisily past them [> below them] in its bed. They were dazzled by the morning light.

This paragraph and those that followed in the Second Phase manuscript were rearranged, rephrased, and expanded in the ‘fair copy’ (page ‘i’; 1/1/14:9), which has so many changes and crossouts in the course of writing that it here becomes essentially another draft, although still unusually legible by Tolkien’s standards. The First Typescript here represents a polished and slightly revised version of the fair copy text. Parts of this section were also revised again at the page proofs stage (Marq. 1/2/2: pages 248–50 plus rider to page 249), with Tolkien (an experienced proofreader) taking care that each revision took exactly the same amount of space as the line(s) it replaced so that necessary changes would only affect those specific lines and not force the resetting of subsequent pages.

I do not reproduce the details of these three intermediate stages here, since the fair copy revision essentially achieves the familiar text of the published book except for geographical details regarding the orientation of the Front Gate with the rising sun and the path to the outlying watch-post; the most significant of these revisions are covered in the Text Notes.

Fair indeed was the morning <clear> with a cold North wind upon the threshold of winter when they looked out blinded with the light after the days and nights of dark; and sweet was the feel of the air on Bilbo’s face. Far off he saw the ruins of Dale in the valley below, to which a long road wound down [added: <below> the stones], ruinous but still to be seen. On his right the clifflike bank of the Running River rose in the distance from which he and Balin had gazed. It was <only then> that he realized how hot the dragon’s lair had been;^TN24 and that smokes and vapours were drifting out of the Gate <water>head and up into the morning air – which struck him now keen and piercing chilly.

‘What are all those birds doing I wonder?’ he said to Thorin, pointing up to great clouds of them that were circling in the sky southward over the river, while ever more seemed to be gathering <beyond> them, flying up dark from the South.

‘There is something strange happening’ said Thorin. ‘The crows are all gathering as if after a battle, or as if a battle was afoot. I would give a good deal to know where Smaug is and what he is doing.’

‘One thing we must do at any rate’ said Bilbo ‘& that is get away from his Front Gate [as soon >] while we have a chance’.

‘My Front Gate’ corrected Thorin ‘ – still your advice is good. There is a place just beyond the Gate where [we can >] there used to be a bridge, and doubtless the river can anyway still be crossed, and there are steps beyond up the high South bank – and onto the long <Southern> Spur where [> under which] our first camp was made. [From there we may be able to find >] From there we can see far to South and West & East’.^TN25

‘More climbing!’ groaned Bilbo.

‘Your own advice!’ said Thorin. ‘We can have some food at the top.’^TN26

The bridge was broken of course but they easily forded it. When they reached at last the top of the steps, and the winding upward path beyond, they found they were on an old flat look-out post with a wide view. There was a rocky opening there – ‘steps lead down back into the mountain’^TN27 said Thorin ‘or used to [> once did]. We used to keep watchmen here ever in the old days. If only it had had a northern view we might have [added: been ready in time to] kept [> keep] out Smaug & all this adventure wd never have been necessary! Still here we can lay hid and see without being seen.’^TN28

They look [South >] West & there was nothing, nor East, and in the South there was no sign of man or dragon; but ever the birds were gathering.

The Second Phase text continues for another two manuscript pages, into what is now Chapter XV, but I halt here at the bottom of manuscript page 165, the spot Tolkien would later choose for his chapter-break.

TEXT NOTES

1 The opening paragraphs of this chapter were recast once the decision was made to make it precede, rather than follow, the account of Smaug’s death. Accordingly, these paragraphs were replaced by the following in the intermediate fair copy manuscript:

In the meantime the Dwarves sat in darkness and utter silence fell about them. Little they ate and little they spoke. They could not count the passing of time; and they scarcely dared to move, for the whisper of their voices echoed and rustled in the tunnel. If they dozed they woke still to darkness and to silence still unbroken.

At last after days and days of waiting, as it seemed, when they were becoming choked and dazed for want of air, they could bear it no longer. Almost they would have welcomed some sound from below of the dragon’s return. In the silence they feared some cunning devilry of his, but they could [not] sit still in hunger there for ever.

Thorin spoke: ‘Let us try the door’ he said. ‘I must feel the wind on my face soon or die. I think I would rather be smashed by Smaug in the open than suffocate in here’. So several of the dwarves got up and groped back to where the door had been. But they found that the upper end of the tunnel had been shattered, and blocked with broken rock. Neither key nor the magic it had once obeyed would ever open that door again.

‘We are trapped’ they groaned. ‘This is the end. We shall all die here!’

This passage was slightly revised, both in contemporary ink and later pencil, bringing it more into line with the typescript (which is here identical with the published text; cf. DAA.289), but I have given it here as it was originally written.

2 For ‘third time pays for all’, Tolkien’s (or, rather, Bungo Baggins’) variant on a traditional but now unfamiliar maxim, see Text Note 3 following Chapter XII on page 516. We now learn a second saying of Bilbo’s father, ‘While there’s life there’s hope’, a familiar proverb credited to the Roman orator Cicero [died 43 BC]. In its original form, appearing in a letter to his friend Atticus (Epistolarum ad Atticum, ix.10), the saying went ‘While the sick man has life, there is hope’.

From these two proverbs, we can conclude a few things about the elusive Bungo, about whom very little indeed appears in the legendarium. First, he shared either his son’s fondness for apt quotation or knack of coining proverbial sayings – cf. Bilbo’s ‘escaping goblins to be caught by wolves’, which Tolkien equates to the later ‘out of the frying pan into the fire’ (Chapter VI page 203), and ‘don’t laugh at live dragons’ (Chapter XII page 512), which in typescript became ‘never laugh at live dragons’ and ‘passed into a proverb’ (typescript page 128, Marq. 1/1/62:9; DAA.283). Furthermore, those sayings of his which Bilbo remembers reveal a sunny disposition; they are words of encouragement, the very opposite of the gloomy sayings ‘Sunny Sam’ the blacksmith is fond of airing in Farmer Giles of Ham (e.g., FGH expanded edition page 55). Secondly, he had the daring to court and marry Belladonna Took, who is not only ‘famous’ in her own right but ‘one of the three remarkable daughters’ of The Old Took, who himself seems merely a notable personality in The Hobbit but who we learn in The Lord of the Rings was in fact the ruler of his country at the time (i.e., the Took and Thain, a position held successively by Bilbo’s grandfather, uncle, and, at the time of the Unexpected Party, his first cousin, according to the genealogical tables in Appendix C of The Lord of the Rings) – an example of solid upper middle-class stock marrying old nobility. Finally, Bungo had a gift for satisfying creature comforts (Bag-End, which he planned and built, is an exceptional hobbit-hole, enviously desired by Bilbo’s and Frodo’s relations) and the foresight to plan for future comforts, having laid down wine of such excellence (Old Winyards) that was fully mature seventy-five years after his death (LotR.50 & [1136]).

3 This sentence was replaced in the fair copy by

. . . to real stealth, and they made a deal of puffing and shuffling which the echoes magnified alarmingly. Every now and again in fear Bilbo would stop and listen, but no sound stirred below.

This revision removes the reassurance that ‘no listening ears’ waited below and increases the suspense for readers who did not yet know Smaug was dead, which of course would now only be revealed in the following chapter.

4 At this point, there is a change in the handwriting, which becomes distinctly neater and more legible for the next three paragraphs (the last on manuscript page 160). The ink is also darker, and this same ink has been used to touch up some of the less legible words in the preceding paragraph. Clearly, this represents a pause in composition, but probably only a brief one, possibly no one than from one night’s writing session to the next.

5 This sentence was replaced in the fair copy with ‘“Now I wonder what on earth Smaug is playing at” he said. “He is not at home to day (or tonight, or whatever it is) I do believe . . .”’ (fair copy page ‘c’; 1/1/14:3), once again increasing uncertainty about Smaug’s inexplicable absence for the reader as well as the characters.

6 This paragraph serves as a good example of the sort of development parts of this chapter underwent, where the essential points change very little but their expression was expanded and polished. In both of the examples below I have indicated changes from the previous text in italics:

The dwarves, of course, were very alarmed when Bilbo fell forward with a bump into the dragon’s hall, and they were both frightened & surprised when they heard his voice. At first they did not like the idea of striking a light at all; but Bilbo kept on squeaking out for light, so [added: that at last] Thorin sent Oin and Gloin back to the goods they had saved at the top of the tunnel. Before long a little twinkle showed them returning, Oin with a small pine-torch [added: alight] in his hand, and Gloin with a bundle under his arm.

Then Bilbo knew again in what direction the tunnel was. Quickly he trotted back and took the torch . . . (fair copy page ‘c’; 1/1/14:3).

This passage was revised in both contemporary ink and later pencil, and developed further in the first typescript:

The dwarves, of course, were very alarmed when Bilbo fell forward down the step with a bump into the hall, and they sat [added: huddled] just where he had left them at the end of the tunnel.

‘Sh! sh!’ they hissed, when they heard his voice; and though that helped the hobbit to find out where they were, it was some time before he could get anything else out of them. But in the end, when Bilbo actually began to stamp on the floor, and screamed out ‘light!’ at the top of his shrill voice, Thorin gave way, and Oin and Gloin were sent back to their bundles at the top of the tunnel.

After a while a twinkling gleam showed them returning, Oin with a small pine-torch alight in his hand, and Gloin with a bundle of others under his arm. Quickly Bilbo trotted to the door and took the torch . . . (typescript page 128; 1/1/63:2).

For all the additional detail and fleshing out of the scene, the most significant change here is the addition of the idea that a step down separated the secret tunnel from the vast chamber that Smaug had made his lair; no such step had been mentioned in the earlier descriptions of Bilbo’s two previous trips down the tunnel.

7 This highly suggestive word choice, coming as it does in the paragraph before he pockets the Gem of Girion and becomes ‘a burglar indeed’, survived into the intermediate fair copy text – ‘They saw the little dark shape of the hobbit steal across the floor . . .’ (page ‘c’) – but vanished thereafter; the First Typescript reads instead ‘. . . start across the floor’.

8 Here the manuscript reading, ‘the Gem of Girion’ (manuscript page 161; 1/1/15), survives into the fair copy as ‘the gem of Girion’ (fair copy page ‘d’; 1/1/14), which is then changed in ink to ‘the Arkenstone’. At some later time, probably at the time of the creation of the First Typescript, ‘Heart of the Mountain’ was added in pencil to the fair copy page alongside ‘Arkenstone’. The typescript reading (1/1/63:2) is the same as that of the published book: ‘the Arkenstone, the Heart of the Mountain’.

9 The original story, that Girion had given Thror the Gem in payment for the arming of his sons (see Plot Notes C), is reflected in the wording of the Second Phase manuscript here. Although this paragraph is developed and recast in the fair copy (so that it resembles the typescript and published texts), the phrase ‘the dwarves to whom Girion had given it’ remained, until it was struck out and replaced in faint pencil which seems to read ‘the dwarves who dug it from the mountain’s heart’ (fair copy page ‘d’; 1/1/14:4). In the First Typescript this has become ‘the dwarves, who had dug it from the heart of the mountain long ago’ (typescript page 129; 1/1/63:3), the reading of the published book (DAA.293).

10 This passage was carefully revised to establish the qualities of the Gem or Arkenstone, both physical (that is, its size and weight) and magical, carefully balancing hints of Bilbo’s being under the power of the wondrous stone versus his acting on his own volition when he takes and hides it. First, an addition to the original manuscript made the Gem somewhat smaller, so that ‘larger than the hobbit’s small hand’ became ‘larger than the hobbit’s small hand could close upon’ (manuscript page 161; 1/1/15). The passive tense of the Second Phase manuscript (‘the hobbit’s small hand . . . was stretched out to it’) was initially retained into the fair copy, which devotes its own paragraph to Bilbo’s taking the gem and becomes, for the moment, a new draft (albeit an unusually neat one) as Tolkien experiments with the phrasing:

[Suddenly Bilbo’s hand was drawn towards it. He >] Suddenly Bilbo’s arm went towards it, drawn by its enchantment. [He could scarcely lift it, for it was large and heavy. >] His small hand would not close over it, for it was a large and heavy gem; but he lifted it, shut his eyes, and put it in his largest pocket.

The typescript stays very close to this, only dropping one comma and substituting deepest for largest, apparently over an erasure. The phrasing of this final version – where Bilbo’s arm is ‘drawn by its enchantment’, but the actual passive tense has been removed, and ending in a string of simple active tenses (lifted, shut, put) – nicely captures the ambivalence of the passage.

11 For Thorin’s assurance that Bilbo could choose his own share, see their discussion near the end of Chapter XII (page 514), from manuscript page 151c:

‘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 . . .’

The line about Bilbo’s uneasy feeling over what he has just done first appears in the fair copy text, replacing the final sentence of the paragraph:

‘. . . I would choose this, if they took all the rest!’ All the same, he had an uncomfortable feeling that the picking and choosing had not been really meant to include this marvellous gem, and that trouble would still come of it.

12 Here and throughout the original Second Phase manuscript depiction of the scene in Smaug’s empty lair, Bilbo is much less panic-strickened than in the published account. We are told that ‘his courage failed altogether’, but the actual description of his actions, both here and in his earlier stumble in the dark on page 578–9, does not really bear this out – for example, Bilbo is already feeling his way along the walls when the dwarves finally strike a light in the original draft, whereas in the fair copy ‘his wits had returned as soon as he saw the twinkle of their lights’ (fair copy page ‘e’; 1/1/14:5). Many details added at the fair copy and First Typescript stages – e.g., the description of Bilbo’s shouts after the loss of his torch as ‘squeaking’, his peeping timidly through the great doors, ‘ruefully’ being replaced by ‘miserably’, et al. – all have the cumulative effect of diminishing Bilbo’s stature and courage throughout this scene, from the time he enters the dragon’s lair for a third time until the dwarves rejoin him there.

13 The fair copy text (fair copy page ‘e’; 1/1/14:5) adds ‘crept out, one by one,’ which marks a final appearance in the book of the Unexpected Party motif, which we have also seen in the troll scene, the arrival at Medwed and the Mirkwood bonfires scene along the way.

14 The effect that the sight of treasure has on dwarves shifts, from positive (‘his courage grows’) in the Second Phase manuscript to ambivalent (not just ‘bold’ but ‘fierce’, no longer ‘kindled’ but ‘wakened’)^† in the fair copy:

. . . when the fire of the heart of a dwarf is wakened by jewels and gold [> by gold and by jewels] he grows suddenly [fierce >] bold, and he may become fierce.

The typescript rearranges this slightly, and makes one significant addition:

. . . when the heart of a dwarf, even the most respectable, is wakened by gold and by jewels, he grows suddenly bold, and he may become fierce.

These changes were obviously made to match the evolving conception and introduction of the idea of dragon-sickness taking hold on Bilbo’s companions, which had been absent in the Second Phase story – cf. the mention of ‘respectable’ dwarves, a term specifically applied to Thorin & Company by Medwed (see page 234).

^† Implying it was already there, though dormant.

15 Added in hasty script in the bottom margin, and marked for insertion first following ‘in the light’ in the preceding sentence and then at this point:

They gathered gems in their hands & let them fall <with a sigh>. – and always Thorin sought from side to side for something he could not see. It was the gem of Girion <Thror’s> chief treasure, but he did not speak of it <again>.

This passage accords well with the conception of the dragon-sickness taking hold on the dwarves and especially Thorin, a plot-point not present when this chapter was first drafted (that is, in the Second Phase story). Accordingly, although there is no appreciable difference in ink, this marginal addition probably dates from the Third Phase and represents drafting for the intermediate fair copy manuscript, a transition between the original story and the familiar one that appears in the typescript and subsequently the published book.

The passage about Fili and Kili playing the harps (cf. DAA.295) entered as a hasty pencilled addition onto the fair copy (page ‘f’), appearing in more polished form in the First Typescript. Fili and Kili were obviously musical; back in the first chapter they had played fiddles (page 36) while it had been Gandalf (= Thorin) who played the harp; here they prove skilled at the harp as well.

16 Added in pencil, and thus appearing in the fair copy and typescript: ‘for some young elf-prince long ago’. This is possibly of significance, because it suggests that Tolkien might have conceived of the elves as somewhat smaller than human size when he originally wrote this passage. Initially, in his early ‘fairy poetry’ such as ‘Goblin Feet’ and ‘Tinfang Warble’ and in The Book of Lost Tales, Tolkien had thought of the elves as much smaller than human, but by the mid-1920s came to reject this and envisioned them instead as of similar stature to humans (as in the feys of medieval romance, legends of the Tuatha dé Danaan, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene).

17 This is of course the same suit of armor which will become Frodo’s mithril coat in The Lord of the Rings, but the idea of ‘mithril’ had not yet arisen. In Plot Notes C, this had been ‘gold & silver mail made like steel’ – that is, soft precious metals somehow hardened by dwarven craft to serve as protection. Tolkien may have changed this upon realizing that such armor would be so heavy that its wearer could hardly move (gold being almost as heavy as lead, and silver roughly twice the weight of iron) – cf. the similar change of Thorin’s armor from ‘a coat of gold’ (Second Phase manuscript and fair copy) to ‘a coat of gold-plated rings’ (First Typescript and published book).

Although it’s tempting to view The Hobbit’s ‘silvered steel’ as simply mithril under another name, the only thing that indicates that Bilbo’s armor is anything more than silver-plated steel here is the fact that it has not tarnished or disintegrated, as real silver does over time,^† and the same is obviously true of the many other silver objects in the legendarium – e.g. the Sceptre of Annúminas (already more than five thousand years old when Elrond surrendered it to King Aragorn; cf. LotR.1009 & 1080), the Elendilmir (that is, the silver circlet bearing the Star of Elendil, some three thousand years old), the horn from Scatha’s hoard presented to Meriadoc (‘wrought all of fair silver’ and at least a thousand years old; cf. LotR.1014, 1102, & 1123), and indeed the silver harpstrings Fili and Kili play (which we are specifically told are ‘magical’) – forcing us to conclude that Tolkien simply chose to ignore this detail of physics for aesthetic effect, since he preferred perishable silver to immutable gold.

^† Hence we have many more items of gold than of silver from ancient Egypt not just because silver was rarer than gold in the Nile valley but because gold does not oxidize and thus can survive for millennia unharmed, while silver tarnishes within a few years and eventually oxidizes away entirely over the course of centuries.

18 This simple statement is invested with ominous overtones in the fair copy version, which reads ‘All the same Mr Baggins kept his head more clear of the bewitchment of the hoard than the dwarves did’ (fair copy pages ‘f’ – ‘g’). Similarly, the reference to Thorin’s ‘recovering his wits’ when he replies, which enters in with the First Typescript, emphasizes the dweomer the dragon-gold casts upon the unwary.

The reference to Beorn’s refreshments (see DAA.296) also enters in at the fair copy stage; like Bilbo’s thoughts of Gandalf in Chapter XI, this allusion helps remind the reader of this character (who has not appeared since Chapter VII) and helps set up his return a few chapters later.

19 The word old is cancelled in the manuscript but restored in the fair copy, so I have retained it here.

20 We never gain any more information about what wild animals might be warily sharing the outer regions of Smaug’s lair than this brief reference. These ‘animal shapes’ became, in the fair copy, ‘furtive shadows’:

. . . no sign of any living thing, save furtive shadows that fled from the approach of their fluttering torches [> torches fluttering in the draughts].(fair copy page ‘g’; 1/1/14:7).

With the exception of one word changed in the typescript (‘save furtive shadows’ > ‘‘only furtive shadows’), this is the reading in the published book (DAA.296), so we never learn any more about these Gollum-like lurkers in Thror’s deserted halls.

21 This statement of course ignores the fact that Bilbo is carrying the Gem of Girion in his pocket; even though it had not yet gained the status it later reached of being worth ‘a river of gold in itself’ (DAA.326), it was nonetheless already the pre-eminent item of treasure within the hoard; cf. Chapter XII page 514 and Text Note 39 following that chapter. Compare the dwarves’ reasonable behavior here of taking as much of the treasure as they can manage on what may be their only chance before the dragon returns (and only after arming themselves and as a last action before leaving the treasure-chamber), not forgetting the more practical business of preserving their supplies and remaining food (another practical detail that vanished after the Second Phase manuscript), with their more greedful behavior in the published account, where they caress the treasure longingly – e.g. the inserted passage cited in Text Note 15 above and its fair copy analogue:

. . . they lifted old treasures from the mound and held them in the light, caressing and fingering them. They gathered gems and stuffed their pockets, and let what they could not carry fall back through their fingers with a sigh.

—fair copy page ‘f’ (1/1/14:6); cf. DAA.295.

22 This rather touching scene of Balin’s solicitude for the exhausted hobbit and the dwarves taking turns to carry him disappeared from the story, although it survived into the fair copy, which adds the detail ‘as in the goblin-caves, but now more willingly’ (fair copy page ‘h’; 1/1/14:8). The fair copy text also makes clear that one element of Bilbo’s exhaustion was the mail-coat: ‘he felt dragged down by the unaccustomed weight of his mail coat, and his head swam. He sat down and panted on a step.’ To this was added a hasty pencilled addition which seems to read ‘. . . of his mail coat, and the stone weighing heavy in his pocket.’ – that is, the idea that the Arkenstone itself was a heavy burden was still present. The typescript omits this entire passage.

For the weight of the gem, see Text Note 10 above; for the weight of the ‘silver-steel’ armor, see Text Note 17.

23 The grisly detail of this chamber being littered with the skulls and bones of Thorin’s people first appears in the fair copy (page ‘h’; 1/1/14:8):

They passed through the ruined chamber. Tables were rotting here and chairs overturned and decaying. Skulls and bones were upon the floor among flagones and bowls and broken drinking-horns [added: and dust].

Oddly enough, neither in the fair copy nor in any later text is there any mention of distress among the dwarves at the sight of their murdered and unburied kinsmen, or of their afterwards seeing to the remains. Perhaps, given the dwarven tradition of entombment (cf. Chapter XVIII and LotR.1113) and the pressing circumstances (with, so far as they knew, the murderer still on the prowl), Thorin & Company felt that being in stone chambers underground was burial enough until more formal arrangements could be made – compare, in The Lord of the Rings, Gimli’s grief at finding Balin’s tomb with his apparent unconcern about the bones of Ori and his companions lying scattered about the chamber (LotR.338–44).

24 In comparing how hot and stuffy it was inside Smaug’s lair with the chill outside, the fair copy text (page ‘i’; 1/1/14:9) specifies that it is not just cool but almost winter:

‘Well’ said Bilbo. ‘I never expected to be looking out of this door. And I never expected to be so pleased to see the first sun on a cold wintry morning as I am now. [Ugh! >] But the wind is cold!’

It was. A cold breeze from the North [> East], from the threshold of winter, [> A cold North-easterly breeze coming from the gates of winter] was slanting into the valley and sighing in the rocks. They shivered in the sun, after their long time in the stewing depths of the caves, yet the feel of the air was sweet upon their faces.

The change here from North first to East and then to North-easterly comes in order for the text to match the evolving map of the Lonely Mountain. In Fimbulfambi’s Map (see Frontispiece, plate one), the eastern spur of the mountain already had its slight southward curl at the end but this would not have blocked direct line of sight between the Front Gate and the rising sun in the east, especially since in winter the sun rises somewhat to the south of East. In the redrawn version, Thror’s Map I (Plate I [bottom]), the curl is less pronounced but the mountain’s arm is longer, so that it would have blocked the view directly to the east but still has a clear south-east view.

This is not the case with the third and final map, Thror’s Map II, which is printed in all copies of The Hobbit (for example, DAA.97). The map’s orientation has changed, so that East rather than North now appears at the top (in keeping with the tradition of medieval and renaissance maps, rather than our modern practice of putting north at the top). Here that arm of the mountain has shifted from just south of east (ESE) to stretch just east of south (SES), completely blocking the view to the east. Similarly, the newly lengthened matching arm with the watch-post by this point known as Ravenhill on its southernmost tip (and which forms the other wall of the little valley that gives Dale its name) blocks off everything to the west, so that the Front Gate now has a clear view only to the south. Hence in the final text written onto the page proofs the relevant passage reads:

. . . wind is cold!’

It was. A bitter easterly breeze blew with a threat of oncoming winter. It swirled over and round the arms of the Mountain into the valley and sighed among the rocks. After their long time in the stewing depths of the dragon-haunted caverns, they shivered in the sun.

Accordingly, since they could no longer see the sunrise, in another set of last-minute page proof corrections the rising sun became the misty sun, its light changed from red to pale, the sunbeams changed from ruddy gold to simply gold, and it has now become late morning (1/2/2: page 248) rather than dawn.

The changes from ‘wintry’ and ‘threshold of winter’ are interesting, since they seem to reflect the revised time-scheme of the published book, in which Durin’s Day fell on the last new moon before the onset of winter – i.e., no more than twenty-eight days before the solstice on or around December 21st, several days of which have already passed between the opening of the secret door and the dwarves’ arrival at the Front Gate. Bilbo and company thus reach the Front Gate in early to mid December, just a few days before midwinter, whereas in the original time-scheme where Durin’s Day falls on the first new moon of autumn it would be early autumn, sometime between the very end of September through mid-October. See page 481 for more on the unresolved difficulties created by the shift in timing.

25 This paragraph describing the lay-out of the valley was replaced by the following in the fair copy (page ‘j’), with Balin as the speaker:

‘Five hours’ march or so. But we can have a rest on the way. Do you see there on the right? There is the high cliff-like bank of the river that we looked out from when we first came here, Bilbo.^† Between that and this gate there used to be a bridge, and beyond it steps cut in the rock-wall that led to a path winding up on to the southern mountain-spur, above where our first camp was made.’

^† See page 472 in Chapter XI.

Aside from the usual polishing of phrasing and the changing of the first sentence to ‘Five hours march, I should think, as we are tired and it is mostly uphill’, this is essentially the text of the First Typescript and the original page proof. It was replaced by Tolkien’s emendations of the page proofs to:

‘Five hours march, I should think. It will be rough going. The road from the Gate along the left edge of the stream seems all broken up. But look down there! The river loops suddenly east across the Dale in front of the ruined town. At that point there was once a bridge, leading to steep stairs that climbed up the right bank, and so to a road running towards Ravenhill.^† There is (or was) a path that left the road and climbed up to the post. A hard climb, too, even if the old steps are still there.’

^† See page 618 and Text Note 4 for Chapter XV(a) for the first mention of Ravenhill in the manuscript.

26 The eight paragraphs of dialogue that replaced this simple two-line exchange first appear in the fair copy (from the middle of page ‘j’ to the top of page ‘k’). The fair copy is similar to the final text (see DAA.299–300), with the most interesting variant being a cancelled passage in Thorin’s reply:

‘Come come,’ said Thorin, laughing his spirits rising as he <thought> of his golden armour and his fists full of gems, and all the treasure yet to <?come> [> with the hope of treasure].

This passage comes at the bottom of an unnumbered cancelled page (replaced by fair copy page ‘j’) which forms the verso of fair copy page ‘k’.

27 This suggests that there might once have been a tunnel from the guardpost to the dwarven city in the mountain’s heart, as was the case with the secret tunnel on the western side. No such implication survives into the published text, but see Plot Notes E (pp. 626 & 627) for a stronger indication of this possibility.

28 This paragraph’s brief description of the journey from the Front Gate to Ravenhill, and their initial exploration of the old guard post, was greatly expanded in the fair copy (pages ‘k’–‘l’). In general the fair copy account closely resembles the typescript that followed aside from the usual small variations in phrasing and some reassignments of speeches: in the typescript Thorin’s speech regarding the watchpost is reassigned to Balin, while Balin’s reply is split between Dori and Thorin – although Balin’s original reply (‘“Small protection, if Smaug spots us, I fear” said Balin; “but we must take our chance of that. Anyway we can go no further to-day”.’) lacks Dori’s apprehensions – and a brief rejoinder from Bilbo is inserted to close the conversation.

Aside from one addition regarding cram (see part iii of the commentary to this chapter), the typescript carried over almost verbatim into the page proofs, but the paragraphs describing their journey to the outpost were carefully revised at the proofs stage to better match the geography of the valley containing the Front Gate and ruins of Dale as they emerged in the final version of Thror’s Map and also the various illustrations of the Lonely Mountain Tolkien made near the end of his work on the book. In particular, the altered course of the river results in shifting the ruins of Dale from the river’s right (eastern) bank in Thror’s Map I (Plate I [top]) and the painting ‘Smaug flies round the Mountain’ (Plate X [bottom]), to the river’s left (west) bank in several other drawings such as ‘The Lonely Mountain’ (DAA.273, H-S#136; see also H-S#134 & 135) and the final map (DAA.50 & 97); note also the contrast between the boulder-strewn eastern bank of the Running River and the floodplain bordered by cliffs on the western bank in ‘The Front Gate’ (DAA.256; H-S#130). I here give the changes made to this section of the proofs (corresponding to DAA.300) in tabular form:

• So on again they trudged along the northern bank of the river – to the south the rocky wall above the water was sheer and pathless > So on they trudged among the stones on the left side of the river – to the right the rocky wall above the water was sheer and pathless (the reading of the first edition; Douglas Anderson notes that Tolkien revised this line again in the 1966 Ballantine paperback edition; cf. DAA.300).

• After going for a short distance eastward along the cliff top they came on a nook sheltered among rocks and there they rested for a while > After going a short way they struck the old road, and before long came to a deep dell sheltered among the rocks; there they rested . . .

• After that they went on again; and now the path struck southwards and left the river, and the great shoulder of the south-pointing mountain-spur drew ever nearer. Soon the narrow road wound and scrambled steeply up > After that they went on again; and now the road struck westwards and left the river, and the great shoulder of the south-pointing mountain-spur drew ever nearer. At length they reached the hill-path. It scrambled steeply up.

One interesting detail that should be mentioned here is that the Second Phase manuscript describes the southern arm of the mountain as ‘the long Southern Spur’. However, on Thror’s Map I (Plate I [top]), the arm of the mountain pointing directly south is rather short, certainly shorter than the two eastern arms extending towards the Iron Hills. By contrast, on the published map (DAA.50) the southern arm is much longer. It is certain that the published map (Thror’s Map II) did not exist at the point when Tolkien drafted this chapter, so the description here of the southern spur being ‘long’ could mean that this draft served as an intermediate stage in its extension.

Finally, the last page of the fair copy (page ‘m’; 1/1/14:14) includes a single short paragraph that was moved to the start of the next chapter when the First Typescript was created, bridging the time-difference between these two chapters now that their original sequence had been reversed and the new Chapter XIV made into essentially one long flashback:

Now you will be wondering as much as the dwarves about Smaug and it is time to tell you. You must go back to the evening when the Smaug had burst forth in rage, two days before [cancelled: the end of].

(i)
Dragon-sickness (‘The Hoard’)

[T]he last great danger, the danger Thorin had dreaded all along, and which their silence before the Elvenking had not averted, was gathering about them – a host was marching up to ransack and plunder the halls of Thror.

While greed over the dragon’s treasure was to play an important part in the climax of the story from the earliest draft, as we see from the preceding text and also Plot Notes C & D, Tolkien’s original intent was to portray this as essentially an external force acting upon Thorin & Company from outside. Bilbo’s uncharacteristic behavior of pocketing the Gem of Girion for himself and hints of disagreement between the hobbit and the dwarves about how best to handle the crisis of being besieged by angry lake-men and greedy, calculating elves aside, there are no indications whatsoever in the Second Phase materials that Thorin or any of the other dwarves succumb to the dragon-sickness of lusting after ‘gold upon which a dragon has long brooded’ (page 648). In fact, a passage from Plot Notes D suggests the opposite, and that their silence before the Elvenking had not been anxiety over splitting the treasure but

. . . because dwarves understood better than all others the power of the greed of gold and fear therefore more certainly to <?extend> it.

The wisdom of this reticence is shown by the unedifying scramble for the treasure that ensues immediately following Smaug’s death among the lake-men, enraged by their losses and deliberately stirred up into a blood frenzy by the Master (to deflect attention from his own inglorious behavior during the defense of their city), and by the wood-elves’ king’s plan to coolly seize the treasure with no better claim to it than the goblins of the Third Phase text have, namely because he shows up with an army large enough to take it.

Thus although the idea of the dragon-sickness bringing together rival claimants for the treasure was already the motivating factor for the projected climax in the final pages of the Second Phase text, resolving that crisis in the unwritten chapters, had Tolkien proceeded according to his original plan, would have been a relatively straightforward matter of dealing with a wholly external threat (the besieging armies). All this was to change when the second of the two great complications that derailed the Second Phase narrative entered the text:¹ the idea that Bilbo’s companions would themselves succumb to the ‘dragon-sickness’ more strongly than any other group present, whereas he himself would be able to throw off the ‘bewitchment’ and ‘enchantment’ of the dragon-hoard and thus take actions that would estrange him from his trusted companions of the last year and more,² and even ultimately place him on the opposite side of the coming battle, which could no longer be averted. The great moral complexity of the published book’s final chapters and its bittersweet resolution were thus an innovation of the Third Phase; the original Second Phase ending would have been much more of a piece with the bulk of the book that preceded it – full of incident but morally unambiguous.

Given the heavy influence of the Túrin and Sigurd stories throughout the ‘Lonely Mountain’ section of The Hobbit, it is no surprise that they played an important role here as well. But as is usual with Tolkien, he was careful and creative in his borrowings, and here the Fafnir legend exerts much less influence over The Hobbit than it does over the earlier Túrin’s story and Tolkien’s borrowings are mainly from his own earlier unpublished work (as would henceforth be the case with all his subsequent work, from The Lord of the Rings onward). The theme of cursed treasure had been a powerful narrative thread in The Book of Lost Tales (especially in the tale of ‘The Nauglafring’ or Necklace of the Dwarves) and no doubt owed much to the story of Fafnir’s and Sigurd’s treasure (also known as Andvari’s Hoard after its original owner, or the Gold of the Nibelungs, or Das Rheingold, depending on which version of the legend one consults). The Völsungs’ treasure on the one hand (in Germanic and Norse myth) and the gold of the Rodothlim, the Silmarils, and indeed the One Ring on the other (within Tolkien’s legendarium) indiscriminately bring doom to all their owners one by one, although a few (like Bilbo, Beren, and Eärendel) escape the curse’s full effects.

So strongly did this theme appeal to Tolkien that it inspired one of his finest poems, ‘The Hoard’ (ATB poem #14), earlier known as ‘Iúmonna Gold Galdre Bewunden’ – a title (‘ancient gold, entangled with enchantment’) which itself laid equal emphasis, in two metrically balanced Old English half-lines, on the gold and on the spell or curse it was under (see Note 13 following Chapter XII). The poem tells of a wonderful treasure of gold and silver and jewels owned successively by elves, a lone dwarf, a dragon, and a hero who becomes a king, all of whom perish miserably, leaving the hoard in the end lost forever, buried in a grassy mound. Furthermore, the poem makes clear that all but the original owners are chained to the hoard, possessed by their own possession. Tolkien explicitly drew a connection between ‘The Hoard’ and the Túrin/Nauglafring legend in his Preface to The Adventures of Tom Bombadil [1962], where he assigned the poem’s authorship to Bilbo (who after all knew a thing or two about possessive possessions – cf. the first chapter in both Book I and Book II of The Lord of the Rings [‘A Long-Expected Party’ and ‘Many Meetings’, respectively] – but who had not been created as a character until at least seven years after this poem had first appeared in print!) during his years at Rivendell and said ‘it seems to contain echoes of the Númenorean tale of Túrin and Mim the Dwarf’ (ATB page 8). This tale is told in its fullest form in The Book of Lost Tales in the two stories ‘Turambar and the Foalókë’ (BLT II.69–143) and even more in ‘The Nauglafring’ (BLT II.221–51). We have already briefly touched on the Nauglafring story in Chapter IX (see ‘The King of Wood and Stone’, pp. 412–13), but the extraordinary degree to which the Rodothlim’s treasure blights all who come into contact with it, a fate narrowly averted by most of the various claimants in The Hobbit, deserves revisiting, since the earlier story seems to have acted as a template underlying our tale.

The treasure’s original owners, the Rodothlim elves (who in later forms of the legend became the Noldor of Nargothrond, Finrod Felagund’s people), were destroyed by Glorund and his goblin [Orc] army, largely because of the arrogance and ofermod of Túrin before the battle. After his victory, Glorund claims all the treasure for himself and uses it for his bed, just as Smaug will later do with the wealth of Girion’s and Thror’s people:³

all the mighty treasure that [the Orcs] had brought from the rocky halls and heaped glistering in the sun before the doors he coveted for himself and forbade them set finger on it, and they durst not withstand him, nor could they have done so an they would . . . (BLT II.85).

. . . the dragon gloated upon the hoard and lay coiled upon it, and the fame of that great treasure of golden vessels and of unwrought gold that lay by the caves above the stream fared far and wide about; yet the great worm slept before it . . . and fumes of smoke went up from his nostrils as he slept (BLT II.87–8).⁴

As in The Hobbit, a small group later dares to venture into the dragon’s territory to see if they can gain the treasure, but in the earlier tale these are not any survivors of the dragon’s attack but an outside group, a picked band of wood-elves⁵ sent by Tinwelint the elvenking, who is frank about his motivations:

Now the folk of Tinwelint were of the woodlands and had scant wealth, yet did they love fair and beauteous things, gold and silver and gems . . . nor was the king of other mind in this, and his riches were small . . .

Therefore did Tinwelint answer: ‘. . . it is a truth that I have need and desire of treasury, and it may be that such shall come to me by this venture . . .’ (BLT II.95).

In the event, the expedition ends in disaster and achieves nothing besides stirring up the dragon and exposing Nienóri, Túrin’s sister, directly to the dragon’s curse.⁶ Some time later, after Glorund’s death at Túrin’s hands far to the north (see commentary following Chapter XIII), the treasure passes into the keeping of Mîm the dwarf, who is here a figure of much greater stature than the petty-dwarf of the same name in the published Silmarillion (Silm.202–6 & 230). Indeed in the early tale Mîm is almost a Durin figure, called ‘Mîm the fatherless’, whose slaying is one of the factors that cause the dwarves of Nogrod (the Nauglath) and those of Belegost (the Indrafangs, a name later applied to Thorin’s kin) to unite in a war of vengeance ‘vow[ing] to rest not ere Mîm was thrice avenged’ – a situation strongly reminiscent of the seven kindreds of the dwarves uniting to avenge the death of Thror, Durin’s heir; cf. pp. 73 & 782 and LotR. 1111. Mîm’s warnings to Úrin of the Woods (the later Húrin, Túrin’s father, who comes with a band of elven outlaws to carry off the treasure), are very much in keeping with the ideas expressed more than a decade later in Plot Notes D:

. . . one only dwelt there [in the caves of the Rodothlim] still, an old misshapen dwarf who sat ever on the pile of gold singing black songs of enchantment to himself . . . when those Elves approached the dwarf stood before the doors of the cave . . . and he cried: ‘. . . Hearken now to the words of Mîm the fatherless, and depart, touching not this gold no more than were it venomous fires. For has not Glorund lain long years upon it, and the evil of the drakes of Melko is on it, and no good can it bring to Man or Elf, but I, only I, can ward it, Mîm the dwarf, and by many a dark spell have I bound it to myself’ (BLT II.113–14; italics mine).⁷

Thus the twin motifs of dragon-haunted gold bringing bad luck and a dwarven claim to immunity from the dragon-sickness were established very early on in the legendarium (although in the end both would be almost entirely reversed; see below). Glorund’s hoard, doubly cursed by the dragon-sickness and Mîm’s dying curse upon it – the one attracting people irresistibly to the gold and the other striking down those who give in to its allure and claim it – brings disaster to all its subsequent owners: the outlaws who carry it away (slain by the wood-elves), the wood-elves and Tinwelint himself (slain and their realm overthrown by angry dwarven smiths cheated of their payment for recasting the gold into treasures), the victorious dwarves (who fall to fighting among themselves over the treasure and are ultimately ambushed and killed by Beren’s green elves), and even Tinúviel (i.e., Lúthien, whose second, human, life is cut short by the Nauglafring Beren gives her, the only piece of treasure he retained).⁸ And although ‘The Nauglafring’ stresses Mîm’s curse as the chief agent at work in the betrayals and murders that follow (cf. Christopher Tolkien’s comment on BLT II.246), the dragon-sickness is also definitely at work:

Now came Gwenniel [Melian] to Tinwelint [Thingol] and said: ‘Touch not this gold, for my heart tells me it is trebly cursed. Cursed indeed by the dragon’s breath, and cursed by thy lieges’ blood that moistens it, and the death of those they slew; but some more bitter and more binding ill methinks hangs over it that I may not see’ (BLT II.223).⁹

Over and over again the tale stresses the unnatural power that sight of this gold has over the actions of those who come into contact with it: ‘he [Tinwelint] might not shake off its spell’ (BLT II.223), ‘the spell of the gold had pierced [Ufedhin’s] heart’ (ibid., page 224), ‘by reason of the glamour of the gold the king repented his agreement’ (ibid., page 225), ‘he [Narthseg] was bitten by the gold-lust of Glorund’s hoard’ (ibid., page 231). Late in the Tale, Gwendelin [Melian] reaffirms the complex nature of the curse, including ‘the dragon’s ban upon the gold’ (BLT II.239), while it is explicitly stated that the elf-on-elf battle wherein the Sons of Fëanor kill Dior, Beren’s son, and destroy the green-elves’ kingdom is not only because of their remorseless pursuit of the Silmaril but also ‘nor indeed was the spell of Mîm and of the dragon wanting’ (BLT II.241).

Perhaps this long and complicated story offers a salutary lesson into what might have happened had Bilbo and the wizard not intervened: the dwarves in possession of the dragon-treasure slain by the men of Lake Town, who in turn might soon have found themselves at odds with the wood-elves over its distribution, if the earlier story is any guide. Dragon-treasure has a way of arousing treachery and setting allies at each other’s throats. Even within the Sigurd story, the hero’s first act after slaying the dragon is to murder his foster-father, Regin, who had taught him how to kill Fafnir but was now expressing remorse over the deed (Fafnir having been his own brother before his transformation into a dragon after killing their father and stealing the entire treasure for himself). In words that sound remarkably like internal paranoia, the birds warn Sigurd that ‘Regin [is] minded to beguile the man who trusts him’ (i.e., young Sigurd himself): ‘Let him [Sigurd] smite the head from off him then, and be only lord of all that gold . . . not so wise is he if he spareth him, whose brother he hath slain already . . . Handy and good rede to slay him, and be lord of the treasure!’ (Morris & Magnússon, pages 64–5).

Luckily, Smaug’s hoard is not cursed to the same degree: the dragon-sickness is there, but not the additional death-curse. It’s true that the dwarves cursed Smaug himself (‘[we] sat and wept in hiding and cursed Smaug’ and ‘. . . we still mean to get it back, and bring our curses home to Smaug’ – Chapter I (c), pp. 72–3), but it is specifically the dragon that they curse, not the treasure itself (which was, after all, their own). Then too there is the curse inscribed on the treasure-jar in the painting ‘Conversation with Smaug’ (see Plate XI [detail] and commentary below), but this would not apply to Thorin & Company, who are Thror and Thrain’s rightful heirs, nor Bilbo, who is their contracted representative. Despite the later devlopment of the ‘dragon-sickness’ theme in the Third Phase and published book, relatively few succumb to it: Bilbo (very briefly), Thorin himself (who heroically throws off its influence during the Battle of Five Armies and dies free of it), most of Thorin’s fellow dwarves to a lesser degree, and the Master of Lake Town at some later date. Ultimately, in fact, Thror’s recovered treasure brings prosperity and peace to the region in the hands of those who can resist the dragon-sickness: Dain (who renews the Kingdom under the Mountain) and Bard (who re-establishes and rebuilds Dale and eventually extends his realm all the way down to include the rebuilt Lake Town); those who cannot resist meet with personal disaster but their fate has little effect on others (e.g., the Master of Lake Town’s death from starvation does not harm Esgaroth’s thriving recovery). This forms a stark contrast with Tolkien’s models: the Völsung hoard is lost (knowledge of its location perishing with the execution of Sigurd’s murderers), as is the gold of the Rodothlim (which Beren casts into the river, since it is tainted with all the injustices and murders committed over its possession), and also the treasure guarded by Beowulf’s dragon (which is promptly buried once again, this time in Beowulf’s barrow, and does his people no good whatsoever). Tolkien here creates a near-catastrophe followed by a happy ending appropriate to a fairy-story, in keeping with his ideas of eucatastrophe (cf. OFS): our hero may himself not wind up with a river of gold, but that gold is used instead of hoarded and makes his world a better place, so that in the end ‘prophecies do come true, after a fashion’.

Such Mighty Heaps of Gold

Curiously enough, for all the mentions of the vastness and splendour of Smaug’s hoard, relatively little space is devoted to describing it, and most of that is added in the expanded account of the dwarves reveling in their recovered treasure in the fair copy and First Typescript. Bilbo’s awe at first seeing it robs him of all descriptive power, while the account of his later climbing the treasure-mound is almost casual, and the manuscript’s description of the dwarves’ exploration is more practical than sensuous, describing their choice of arms and armor and only then loading up on the most portable precious items (jewels and gemstones). To find a verbal portrait of such a hoard, a true Scrooge McDuck moment, we must go all the way back to The Book of Lost Tales and its description of the hoard of the Rodothlim:

. . . such mighty heaps of gold have never since been gathered in one place; and some thereof was wrought to cups, to basons, and to dishes, and hilts there were for swords, and scabbards, and sheaths for daggers; but for the most part was of red gold unwrought lying in masses and in bars. The value of that hoard no man could count, for amid the gold lay many gems, and these were very beautiful to look upon . . . (BLT II.223).

After the great dwarven craftsmen have laboured for months at it, the hoard’s beauty and splendor are exponentially increased:

. . . in silken cloths, and boxes of rare woods carven cunningly . . . Cups and goblets did the king behold, and some had double bowls or curious handles interlaced, and horns there were of strange shape, dishes and trenchers, flagons and ewers, and all appurtenances of a kingly feast. Candlesticks there were and sconces for the torches, and none might count the rings and armlets, the bracelets and collars, and the coronets of gold; and all . . . subtly made and . . . cunningly adorned . . .

A golden crown they made . . . and a helm too most glorious . . . and a sword of dwarven steel brought from afar that was hilted with bright gold and damascened in gold and silver with strange figurings . . . a coat of linked mail of steel and gold . . . and a belt of gold . . . a silver crown . . . [and] slippers of silver crusted with diamonds, and the silver thereof was fashioned in delicate scales, so that it yielded as soft leather to the foot, and a girdle . . . too of silver blended with pale gold. Yet were these things but a tithe of their works, and no tale tells a full count of them (BLT II.226–7).

The gem of the collection, quite literally, is the Nauglafring itself:

Gems uncounted were there in that carcanet of gold, yet only as a setting that did prepare for its great central glory, and led the eye thereto, for amidmost hung like a little lamp of limpid fire the Silmaril of Fëanor, jewel of the Gods (BLT II.228).

This imbalance was more than rectified with the inclusion, beginning with the first American edition of 1938, of Tolkien’s painting ‘Conversation with Smaug’ (Plate XI [top]), which not only shows the treasure-hoard in all its glory but is full of specific detail from the text.¹⁰ First and foremost there is Smaug himself – clearly a favorite of Tolkien’s, whom he illustrated more times than any other character in the entire legendarium – red-gold and resplendent, looking very sly and self-satisfied in a smiling crocodilian way, the very picture of ‘malicious wisdom’. The Arkenstone also draws the eye, shining brightly from the very peak of the treasure-mound. The emerald necklace, the Necklace of Girion (which arose in the Third Phase text when the Arkenstone became too precious for the old story of Girion’s having given it to Thror in exchange for his sons’ armour to remain credible – see pages 364 & 496), stretches between Smaug’s head and tail. Directly below the Arkenstone can be seen a two-handled cup, no doubt just like the one Bilbo made off with on his first venture into the dragon-lair; horns, swords, shields, helmets and at least one crown, bowls, goblets, chests, many, many gems, and of course a mort of gold and silver coins, along with a few less identifiable objects,¹¹ make up the rest of Smaug’s bed. Bilbo’s mail coat and accompanying cap can be seen on the far wall, above Smaug’s folded wings, along with a pair of spears that might be a relic of the spear with which Bilbo was to kill the dragon in Plot Notes B (page 364) but which along with the shields and spears seen to the right is more probably the ‘mail and weapons’ with which the dwarves arm themselves. The ‘great jars’ standing along the walls ‘filled with wealth only to be guessed at’ are here as well (see commentary below). Even the bats who later extinguish Bilbo’s torch (not to be confused with the more bloodthirsty bats who accompany the goblin army) and the passage up are included, as is of course Bilbo himself (who, Tolkien noted, was much too large in proportion – Letters p. 35). The one element remarkable for its presence here when nothing in the text so much as mentions it are the dwarven bones that lie scattered about, many of them alongside the sword, axe, shield, or helm that all too obviously failed to avail them against the dragon. The only feature of the hoard specifically mentioned in the text which this picture fails to include are the golden harps with silver strings that so delight Fili and Kili; doubtless these were hung on the walls to the left or right outside our field of view.

The Dwarvenkings’ Curse

Among the most interesting details of this painting is the inscription on the massive treasure-cup in the lower left (see Plate XI [detail]). The words are English but the alphabet used is Tolkien’s Tengwar except for the initials at the bottom, which use the same Old English runes employed for Fimbulfambi’s Map (Frontispiece to Part One) and Thror’s Map I (Plate I [top]). It is unusual for Tolkien to combine both writing systems in a single illustration but not absolutely unprecedented; see the title page for The Lord of the Rings itself, with runes at the top (this time in Tolkien’s own runic arrangement, which he called the cirth) and continuing in Tengwar at the bottom. Tolkien nowhere translates the writing on the cup and the inscription is partially obscured by the ladder, but the missing ligatures can be restored with confidence:

A literal transcription, with vowels indicated by diacritical marks in the original enclosed in parentheses and restored letters obscured by the ladder given in italics, reads as follows:

G(O)LDTHR(O) R THRA(I)N

AK(E)RST B (E) THE TH (E) F

TH [ror] TH [rain]

– that is, ‘. . . gold [of] Thror [and] Thrain . . . accursed be the thief’, signed with the initials of THror and THrain. Note that this is only half of the full inscription, since the writing encircles the jar and we cannot know what appeared on the far side.

(ii)
The Arkenstone as Silmaril

The evolution of the Gem of Girion into the Arkenstone of Thrain, the Heart of the Mountain and supreme treasure of Durin’s line,¹² was a gradual process throughout the latter parts of Tolkien’s work on the Second Phase story from Plot Notes B on, until it finally reached its now-familiar form in the Third Phase texts. Initially invented to serve as a portable one-fourteenth share of the hoard to give the lie to Smaug’s insinuation that the dwarves knew all along that Bilbo could never carry away his fair share, its value and allure were greatly increased with each iteration, until instead of Bilbo’s designated portion it became the one item from the hoard Thorin most wanted to reclaim (DAA.326) and, in an ironic reversal, the one item he would have forbidden Bilbo to take.

In the original conception, the Gem of Girion is so named because it was given by Girion, King of Dale, to the dwarves of the Lonely Mountain in payment for the arming of his sons; we are never told how it came into Girion’s possession. And just as a new character had to be introduced to fill the role of dragon-slayer once Tolkien decided it strained credulity to have little Bilbo in that role (Bard, whom Tolkien economically made the heir of Girion, thus opening up new plot-threads and possibilities even as he resolved one issue), so too the elevation of the ‘Gem of Girion’ into the Arkenstone led to the introduction of the Necklace of Girion to assume some of the plot-elements no longer suitable for the original item as it had evolved. For example, it is no more plausible that a human king would surrender a wonder like the Arkenstone for his son and heir’s armor, however finely wrought, than that Gollum’s grandmother gave away Rings of Power as birthday-presents (LotR.70), and the stories had to be changed to match the later conceptions. It is interesting, given the other echoes of the old ‘Nauglafring’ story in this cluster of chapters, that having split the Gem of Girion into two items, Tolkien chose to make this new item a necklace, since the Nauglafring itself had combined a wondrous necklace with a fabulous gem.

In the new conception, as represented by the First Typescript and associated Third Phase manuscript(s), the Arkenstone was found by dwarves and had never been owned by men. The account of its discovery in fact appears in the same piece of text that introduces the Necklace of Girion:

. . . the necklace of Girion, Lord of Dale, made of five hundred emeralds green as grass, which he gave for the arming of his eldest son in a coat of dwarf-linked rings the like of which had never been made before, for it was wrought of pure silver to the power and strength of triple steel. But fairest of all was the great white gem, which the dwarves had found beneath the roots of the Mountain, the Heart of the Mountain, the Arkenstone of Thrain.¹³

Obviously, since in the revised story this gem had never been owned by Girion, the old name ‘Gem of Girion’ had to be replaced. The choice of Arkenstone is significant, since in other writings Tolkien was making at the same time he was using a variant of this same name as a term for the Silmarils themselves, forging a link between the Jewels of Fëanor and the Arkenstone of Thrain in the legendarium.

Thus, in the ‘(Earliest) Annals of Valinor’, the entry for the Valian Year 2500 (that is, the equivalent of 25,000 solar years from the time the Valar entered Arda), reads:

About 2500 the Noldoli [Noldor] invented and began the fashioning of gems; and after a while Fëanor the smith, eldest son of Finwë chief of the Noldoli, devised the thrice-renowned Silmarils, concerning the fates of which these tales tell. They shone of their own light, being filled with the radiance of the Two Trees, the holy light of Valinor, blended to a marvellous fire (HME IV.265).

This work is associated with the 1930 Quenta and only very slightly later in date – that is, contemporaneous with Tolkien’s work on The Hobbit (HME IV.262). And among the very earliest work Tolkien did on the Annals (ibid., page 281) was an Old English version by Ælfwine/Eriol, the frame narrator of The Book of Lost Tales, in which the entry given above is translated thusly:

MMD Hér þurh searucræftas aþóhton and beworhton þá Nold-ielfe gimmas missenlice, 7 Féanor Noldena hláford worhte þá Silmarillas, þæt wæron Eorclanstánas (ibid. 282).

Literally translated, this remarkable passage reads:

[The Year] 2500. Here through cunning craft/artistic skill the Noldor elves devised (‘a-thought’) and created (‘be-worked’) many gems, & Fëanor the Noldor lord wrought the Silmarils, that were precious/holy stones [Eorclanstánas or ‘Arkenstones’].

Furthermore, in a later draft of the same work in Mercian dialect, the fictional translator ‘Ælfwine of Ongulcynne’ (Elf-friend of England) lists the three parts that make up ‘The Silmarillion’ – The Annals of Valinor, the Annals of Beleriand, and the Quenta – noting ‘and þes þridda dæl man éac nemneð Silmarillion þæt is Eorclanstána gewyrd’, which translates as ‘and this third part is also named “Silmarillion”’; that is ‘[the] history/fate [of the] Precious/Holy Stones’ (HME IV.291). The equivalent Eorclanstána = Silmarils also appears in Ælfwine’s Old English translation of part of the ‘Annals of Beleriand’, which date from about the same time as the complementary ‘Annals of Valinor’:

Morgoþ . . . genóm þá eorclanstánas Féanóres . . . ond þá eorclanstánas sette he on his isernan helme [‘Morgoth . . . stole the silmarils of Fëanor . . . and the silmarils he set in his iron crown’].

—HME IV.338.

The idea that the Arkenstone could be a Silmaril, or was at least somehow linked to the Silmarils in Tolkien’s mind, has additional support from the philological roots of the word. As Jacob Grimm pointed out back in 1844, there was little stone-lore in Teutonic mythology, but foremost among what he discovered he cites the ‘time-honoured myth’ of the holy iarkna-steinn of the Elder Edda, listing the Old English equivalent (eorcan-stân) and postulating Gothic (áirkna-stáins), and Old High German (erchan-stein) forms (Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, tr. Stallybrass [1883]; vol. III page 1217).¹⁴ Furthermore, within the Edda, the term is at one point applied to gems made by craft, not natural stones.¹⁵ In Old English, the most famous usage of eorcanstan occurs in Beowulf (line 1208a), where it appears under the variant spelling eorclanstanas; interestingly enough, it is used there to describe a wonderful jeweled necklace of gold and gems given to Beowulf by Queen Wealhtheow (Hrothgar’s consort).¹⁶ Tolkien’s source, however, may have lain not in Beowulf but in Cynewulf’s Christ – the same work from which he took the name ‘earendel’ (line 104) some twenty years earlier – where earcnanstan (‘precious/holy stone’) appears in line 1194 as a metaphor for Christ [cf. Gollancz’s edition, pages 100–101, and Cook’s edition, pages 45 & 200]. This is made somewhat more likely by the spelling found in Cynewulf’s poem, and the fact that words in Old English which began with eor- (eorl, eorth, eornoste) generally became ear- in modern English (earl, earth, earnest), whereas words beginning ear- typically became ar- (e.g., earc > ark [= Noah’s Ark]). Alternately, rather than modernization of the Old English, ‘Arkenstone’ as it appears in The Hobbit could represent an anglicization from the Old Norse. It is, after all, a dwarven stone and hence should have a dwarven name, and all the names Tolkien gives the dwarves in The Hobbit (this being several years before the creation of a distinctive Dwarven language, e.g., Khuzdul), from Fimbulfambi to Dain, are Old Norse.

One element worth stressing that would link the Arkenstone even more closely with the Silmarils is the implication of the eorcan element in its name. Although usually translated simply as ‘precious’ (that is, highly valuable) and generally applied to any gemstone (e.g., at various times to topaz, opal, and pearl), Grimm stressed that the Gothic equivalent airkna meant rather ‘holy’, and was so used in the Gothic translation of the New Testament (the oldest surviving document in any Germanic language). G. H. Balg (A Comparative Glossary of the Gothic Language, 1887)¹⁷ goes further, linking airkns to the Greek argos or ’apyós (‘bright’) and Sanskrit arjuna (‘bright, pure’).¹⁸ The Silmarils are referred to over and over again in the legendarium as the ‘holy jewels’, who burn evil-doers (such as Melkor the Morgoth, Karkaras/Carcharoth, Maidros/Maedhros and Maglor) at the touch. We have no way of knowing if the Arkenstone shares this same power, since within our story it never comes into direct contact with any evil-doer (or, if we do assume it shares this characteristic with the other Silmarils, then its failure to scorch Bilbo is a testament to the integrity of his intentions and the rightness of his action in purloining it, concealing it from Thorin, and giving it to Bard as a hostage for the dragon-slayer’s due portion of the treasure). Certainly, although like Beren’s Silmaril the Arkenstone inspires fierce possessiveness in all who behold it, so that not even Bilbo can give it up without a pang, it seems nonetheless pure and innocent (again, like the Silmarils); no pejorative or sinister terms are ever employed in describing it (not even the obvious one within Tolkien’s moral lexicography, ‘precious’, a word never applied to the Arkenstone within The Hobbit). Like the Silmarils in the main branch of the legendarium, and unlike the One Ring in the sequel, the Arkenstone inspires greed but is not itself malicious in any way:

‘The Arkenstone! The Arkenstone!’ murmured Thorin in the dark, half dreaming with his chin upon his knees. ‘It was like a globe with a thousand facets; it shone like silver in the fire-light, like water in the sun, like snow under the stars, like rain upon the Moon!’

—First Typescript, pasteover on typescript page 125 (1/1/62:11).

The original description of the Gem of Girion as a bright, shining jewel, a globe with many facets (pp. 514–15), which shone of its own light yet catches and magnifies all light that falls on it (page 579), sounds remarkably like Tolkien’s descriptions of the Silmarils. Unfortunately we cannot compare them in detail, because for all their importance to the story Tolkien only rarely describes the Silmarils themselves, and then more in terms of their effect on the viewer than in appearance. For example, the earliest account of their creation (BLT I.128) lists the materials Fëanor assembled – the sheen of pearls, phosphorescence, lamp- and candle-light reflected through other gems, the half-colours of opals, and the all-important Light of the Two Trees – but aside from their radiance the only specific detail about their appearance is that ‘[he gave] all those magic lights a body to dwell in of such perfect glass as he alone could make’, implying that they were clear.¹⁹ Although we are told Fëanor started by acquiring ‘a great pearl’ we could not even tell from this account whether the Silmarils were smooth or faceted (the pearl cannot have provided the actual body for the first Silmaril, since he has only one such pearl yet makes three Silmarils before he runs out of materials). References in the alliterative poems to ‘fair enchanted globes of crystal’ (‘The Flight of the Noldor from Valinor’, lines 139b-140a; HME III.135) and ‘thrice-enchanted globes of light’ (‘The Lay of Leithian’, line 1642; HME III.212) imply a smooth sphere, but the descriptions of them in the 1926 ‘Sketch’ (HME IV.14) and 1930 Quenta (e.g., HME IV.88) are too cursory to provide any details beyond that they shine with their own inner light. Not until the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion, which of course postdates The Hobbit and hence the Arkenstone, do we learn that ‘all lights that fell upon them . . . they took and reflected in marvellous hues to which their own inner fire gave a surpassing loveliness’ (HME V.227), implying that they had facets that refracted incoming light. Compare Bilbo’s first sight of the Arkenstone as ‘a small globe . . . that shone of its own light within . . . cut and fashioned by the dwarves . . . it caught and splintered all light that it received’ (page 579; emphasis mine). It thus seems that some of the most characteristic features of a Silmaril’s appearance familiar to us from the published Silmarillion²⁰ – that it magnifies incoming light and that it splinters this light like a magnificent prism – derive not from the direct line of descent (BLT > ‘Sketch’ + alliterative poems > 1930 Quenta + earliest Annals > 1937 QS + later Annals > later QS + final Annals) but first appeared in the description of the Arkenstone in The Hobbit and from there were imported back into what had been the ‘main line’ of the legendarium. This does not prove, of course, that the Arkenstone is a Silmaril, but it does show that not only was the description of the Gem of Girion based upon the Silmarils but that it in turn influenced the way the Silmarils were described henceforth.

If however the Arkenstone is indeed a Silmaril, the question arises: which one? Is there any way to reconcile the presence of a Silmaril within the fabled Hoard of Thror with what is said of the Jewels of Fëanor elsewhere in the legendarium? It is out of the question that it might be a ‘fourth Silmaril’, since all accounts from The Book of Lost Tales onwards are unanimous that Fëanor made only three and could never repeat his achievement, but might one of the Three have found its way hence? The answer, just as with the identification of the Elvenking with Thingol Greycloak, is both ‘yes’ and ‘no’.

The fate of the Silmarils is not addressed in The Book of Lost Tales, aside from the one rescued by Beren and Tinúviel and later incorporated within the Nauglafring, which according to Tolkien’s outlines for the unwritten ‘Tale of Eärendel’ was lost in the sea when Elwing drowned.²¹ Tolkien himself left the fate of the other two an open question, jotting ‘What became of the Silmarils after the capture of Melko?’ in his notebook, and Christopher Tolkien observes: ‘. . . the question is itself a testimony to the relatively minor importance of the jewels of Fëanor’ at the time (BLT II.259; see also BLT 1.156). The matter was not addressed until Tolkien came to write the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’, where Elwing’s Silmaril is still lost at sea, while of the two recovered from Morgoth’s crown one is stolen by Fëanor’s son Maglor the minstrel who, finding that the holy jewel burns him, ‘casts himself into a pit’ – presumably with the Silmaril, since the next sentence states ‘One Silmaril is now in the sea [i.e., Elwing’s], and one in the earth [i.e., Maglor’s]’ (HME IV.39). The third is claimed by Maidros the maimed, Fëanor’s last surviving son, but the Valar deny his right to it because of the Fëanoreans’ many evil deeds and grant it instead to Eärendel, who with Maidros’s aid finds Elwing and transforms her from a seabird back into her own form again: ‘thus it was that the last Silmaril came into the air’ (HME IV.41). As Christopher Tolkien observes (HME IV.201–2), this was shuffled about in the 1930 Quenta: first (QI) Elwing’s is still lost in the sea ‘whence it shall not return until the End’ (HME IV.150), while Maidros and Maglor seize the other two (IV.158). Both are scorched by the holy jewels: Maglor throws himself and his jewel ‘into a yawning gap filled with fire . . . and the jewel vanished into the bosom of the Earth’ (IV.159), while Maidros throws his to the ground and kills himself (IV.158) and his Silmaril is reclaimed by Fionwë the Valar’s herald; this text breaks off just before the jewel was presumably given to Eärendel (IV.164). The revised version of the 1930 Quenta (QII) has Elwing surviving and bringing her Silmaril to Eärendel (IV.153), who sails the night sky with the Silmaril on his brow (IV.164), while Maidros ‘cast himself into a gaping chasm filled with fire’, taking his Silmaril ‘into the bosom of the Earth’, and Maglor ‘cast [his] . . . into the sea’ (IV.162); this idea was retained, in much the same words, in the Conclusion to the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion (HME V.331) except that here instead of simply stating that the three Silmarils came to rest in ‘sea and earth and air’ (HME IV.40 & 165),²² as had been the case in the three earlier versions (1926 ‘Sketch’, 1930 Quenta, and revised 1930 Quenta), they now ‘found their long homes: one in the airs of heaven, and one in the fires of the heart of the world, and one in the deep waters’ (HME V.331), words that would be carried over verbatim into the published Silmarillion four decades later (Silm.254).

Thus while to us, thirty years after the posthumous publication of The Silmarillion, it seems inevitable that the three jewels would be lost beyond recovery – in fact, an addition to the revised 1930 Quenta is explicit on this point, stating that ‘the Silmarils . . . could not be again found, unless the world was broken and re-made anew’ (HME IV.163) – in 1931–2 when Tolkien created the ‘Gem of Girion’ or in late 1932 when he was writing about the Arkenstone in the Third Phase text of The Hobbit, this was most definitely not the case. Despite the sense of finality in the passage just quoted, Tolkien had in fact at that point changed his mind four times in the previous fifteen years about the holy jewels’ fate, all in a series of unpublished works that remained in flux and were each to be replaced by a new version of the story. There is no way any observer at that time could have told that this one point would henceforward remain relatively fixed within the Silmarillion texts; the one constant had been that the story ended with all three of the jewels remote and inaccessible. Just as the sword of Turgon King of Gondolin had somehow survived the fall of his city and found its way through the ages into that troll-lair and hence Bladorthin/Gandalf’s hands, it is thus more than possible that Tolkien was playing in The Hobbit with the idea of having one of Fëanor’s wondrous Jewels re-appear, no doubt the one that had been thrown into a fiery chasm and lost deep within the earth – which is, after all, exactly where the dwarves find the Arkenstone, buried at the roots of an extinct volcano. As with his borrowings regarding Tinwelint’s quarrel with the dwarves in ‘The Nauglafring’ for the chapter about the wood-elves and their king’s ‘old quarrel’ with the dwarves, Tolkien drew on his legendarium without committing himself: it was a one-way borrowing in which elements from the 1930 Quenta and Early Annals found their way into The Hobbit but that ‘unofficial’ usage did not in turn force changes in what Tolkien was still thinking of as the main line of the legendarium. By avoiding the use of the word silmaril and instead using the ingenious and agreeable synonym Arkenstone (Eorcanstán), Tolkien got to draw on his rich homebrew mythology, which by the early 1930s had developed a remarkable depth and sophistication, without worrying what the effect of his new story would be on that mythology (and hence could blithely include such statements as ‘indeed there could not be two such gems, even in so marvellous a hoard, even in all the world’). It was probably this idea of one-way borrowing to which Tolkien referred when, on occasion, he denied that The Hobbit was part of his mythology (e.g., Letters pp. 215 & 346). Not until the publication, and success, of The Hobbit called for a sequel did the new side-line of Middle-earth’s story displace the old legend of the war against Morgoth as the main story of the legendarium and the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings require the older stories to be rewritten and revised with the published chronicles in mind.

(iii)
A Note on Cram

The first mention of cram appears in the First Typescript (typescript page 133; 1/1/63:7); the line about its being made by the Lake-men is added there in ink at some point before the corresponding passage in the Second Typescript (1/1/44:8) was created, and it was taken up into the page proofs and published book. Douglas Anderson notes (DAA.300) that Tolkien gave ‘cram’ an Elvish derivation in ‘The Etymologies’ (which seems to have been mostly written in late 1937 and early 1938, or at least five years after this part of the First Typescript):

KRAB- press. N[oldorin] cramb, cram cake of compressed flour or meal (often containing honey and milk) used on long journey.

—HME V.365.

This is however almost certainly an afterthought on Tolkien’s part, like the entry there regarding ‘Esgaroth’ (see the commentary following Chapter XIII on page 562). Not only would it be extraordinary for the Noldorin (Sindarin) and English words to be so similar in both form and meaning – the elvish meaning being due to the ingredients being pressed together and the Old English ancestor (crammian) of the modern-day familiar word ‘cram’ meaning to squeeze in or stuff, itself in turn deriving from an Indo-European root (*grem-) meaning ‘to press or compress’ – but Tolkien explicitly states in a draft passage for The Lord of the Rings that

Cram was, as you may remember, a word in the language of the men of Dale and the Long-lake . . . Bilbo Baggins brought back the recipe – he used cram after he got home on some of his long and mysterious walks. Gandalf also took to using it on his perpetual journeys . . . (HME VI.177; emphasis mine).

Furthermore, the entry regarding the Elvish root KRAB- and its derivation cram is a later addition to ‘The Etymologies’ (HME V.365), and neither appears in the earlier Noldorin, Qenya, or Gnomish material (cf. Parma Eldalamberon volumes XIII, XII, and XI), whereas the Lord of the Rings passage just cited was written before the summer of 1938 (cf. HME VI.214) and may predate it. Indeed, the passage in The Lord of the Rings Book III Chapter VIII: Farewell to Lórien (written sometime after August 1940 – cf. HME VII.271 & 267) makes it clear that this hardtack is called ‘cram’ by the men of Dale and dwarves (i.e., in the human language of the North) whereas the elves of Lórien have no direct knowledge of cram and call their trail rations by the Sindarin name lembas (= literally ‘journey-bread’; HME XII.404):

‘I thought it was only a kind of cram, such as the Dale-men make for journeys in the wild,’ said [Gimli].

‘So it is,’ [the elves] answered. ‘But we call it lembas or waybread, and it is more strengthening than any food made by Men, and it is more pleasant than cram, by all accounts.’

—LotR.389.

Thus it seems certain that Tolkien’s final decision was to have cram be a ‘Mannish’ word, just as it had been in its original appearance, and the proposed Elvish etymology was simply a mooted alternative that was quickly abandoned.