Perhaps the most important misconception about the writing of The Hobbit, even more significant than its alleged lack of connection to the earlier legendarium (which is self-evidently false from the various allusions within the original manuscript, not to mention explicitly refuted by Tolkien himself in his first statement in print about the book after The Hobbit was published),1 is the claim that Tolkien abandoned the story unfinished in the early 1930s, only resuming work on it sometime in the summer or fall of 1936 at the prodding of a publisher. This claim was first advanced by Humphrey Carpenter in his authorized biography, and since all subsequent accounts derive from Carpenter’s, it seems best to examine his argument and assertions in some detail:
The writing of the story progressed fluently until the passage not far from the end where the dragon Smaug is about to die. Here Tolkien hesitated, and tried out the narrative in rough notes – something he was often to do in The Lord of the Rings but seems to have done only rarely in The Hobbit. These notes suggest that Bilbo Baggins might creep into the dragon’s lair and stab him . . . But this idea, which scarcely suited the character of the hobbit or provided a grand enough death for Smaug, was rejected in favour of the published version where the dragon is slain by the archer Bard. And then, shortly after he had described the death of the dragon, Tolkien abandoned the story. Or to be more accurate, he did not write any more of it down. For the benefit of his children he had narrated an impromptu conclusion to the story, but, as Christopher Tolkien expressed it, ‘the ending chapters were rather roughly done, and not typed out at all’. Indeed they were not even written in manuscript. The typescript of the nearly finished story . . . was occasionally shown to favoured friends, together with its accompanying maps (and perhaps already a few illustrations). But it did not often leave Tolkien’s study, where it sat, incomplete and now likely to remain so. The boys were growing up and no longer asked for ‘Winter Reads’, so there was no reason why The Hobbit should ever be finished.
—Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography, pages 179–80.
In addition to a great deal of information conveyed succinctly and clearly, this account unfortunately also includes a good deal of misinformation, details that Carpenter, who has to cover a great deal of territory in very little space, all of it without any prior scholarship on the point to guide him, got wrong, misinterpreted, or oversimplified. For example, while he clearly alludes to Plot Notes B & C, he takes no account of the first outline (page 229), the extensive Plot Notes A, the ‘little bird’ outline (Plot Notes E), Plot Notes F, nor the complicated evolution that produced the composite, multilayered document that is Plot Notes B/C/D/B. His account ignores one of the three major breaks in the book’s composition, discussing the ones at the end of Chapter I (that is, at the end of the First Phase) and early in Chapter XV (although failing to convey exactly where this break takes place) but not the break at the beginning of Chapter IX (at their capture by wood-elves, which like the other two is marked by a change of paper). Carpenter’s account is also unintentionally misleading to readers who do not know that Chapters XIII and XIV were later switched, so that in the manuscript the story continued for about another chapter and a half beyond Smaug’s death.
Similarly, there is no evidence known to me of these impromptu oral conclusions; certainly Tolkien never mentions them in any of his later recollections, nor are they alluded to in any of the memoirs by his sons that I have seen. Carpenter may be relying here on information he received directly from John and Michael Tolkien (whose evidence, while valuable, is demonstrably wrong on some points). It is more probable that, given his stage background2 and not having the benefit of the History of Middle-earth series before him with its many examples of Tolkien working out difficulties foreseen in upcoming sections through plot-notes before undertaking the actual writing of those chapters, Carpenter mistook the plot-notes as cues for an oral performance.
More importantly, there is no evidence to support Carpenter’s assertion that the concluding chapters ‘were not even written in manuscript’; indeed, such evidence as there is, is to the contrary. For my argument that we should take young Christopher’s words literally as an accurate description of the Third Phase text (129 pages of typescript completed by a 13-page ‘fair copy’ interpolation and the 45 pages of Third Phase manuscript) as it stood between January 1933 and summer 1936 (see page xx). As a refutation of the claim that the story was abandoned because the ‘Winter Reads’ ceased, see Note 16 to the commentary following Chapter XII for evidence that Tolkien’s sessions of reading aloud to his children were still ongoing at the time Tolkien was preparing The Hobbit for publication in the summer of 1936.
Tolkien himself contradicts Carpenter’s claim that the manuscript ‘did not often leave Tolkien’s study’ when he noted that ‘the MS. certainly wandered about’ (Letters p. 21); over the course of some three and a half years he loaned it not only to C. S. Lewis but at least three other people that we know of: Rev. Mother St. Teresa Gale (the Mother Superior at Cherwell Edge), his graduate student Elaine Griffiths, and a twelve-to-thirteen-year-old girl (possibly Aileen Jennings, daughter of a family friend who attended the same church; Aileen and her younger sister Elizabeth [later a moderately well-known poet] both received presentation copies from Tolkien as soon as the book was published),3 and there might of course have been others. The Inklings might count among their number: Tolkien noted that the story had been read to the group but did not specify when this occurred;4 certainly before publication, and it seems likely that it would have been during the period when Tolkien was preparing the book for publication in 1936 – that is, after Dagnall had returned the ‘home manuscript’ to him but before he sent the completed typescript to Allen & Unwin for official submission in early October 1936. And of course he proved quite willing to loan it to Dagnall herself, who clearly borrowed it in an informal capacity, whatever hope she might have been able to hold out to him of putting in a good word regarding the book with her employers.
In short, we should view the Third Phase text, and the final chapters of the book, as still part of the original two-to-three-year impetus of composition, written after a gap of no more than a year from where he left off, not as the return to an abandoned work that had languished untouched for three years or more. The very fact that Tolkien had in the meantime decided to go back to the beginning of the story and create the First Typescript – at 129 single-spaced pages a significant investment of time and energy for a ten-fingered typist like himself who carefully revised as he typed – is a testament to his faith in the story. Far from lying abandoned between the breaking off of the Second Phase and the drafting of the Third Phase, during that period all he had so far achieved of the story was in fact laboriously being put into legible form where it could be shared with others. The great differences between these final chapters and the early parts of the book are the result of internal development within the story, the working out of the twin complications Tolkien introduced late in the Second Phase. Tolkien’s decision to cut the Gordian knot of Bard’s legitimate claim to an indeterminate portion of the treasure versus Thorin’s inability to accept any negotiation or compromise that meant parting with any of the treasure because of his succumbing to dragon-sickness, and his decision to raise the stakes by re-introducing virtually all the creatures encountered earlier in the book into one grand melee, avoids the anticlimax of a long dénouement following the dragon’s death and creates a climax even more comprehensive and, ultimately, more satisfactory than the dragon-quest Bilbo had originally set out on.