Chapter XIX
The End of the Journey

As before, no break separated the paragraphs in the original manuscript (Third Phase manuscript page 38; Marq. 1/1/19:8), but Tolkien later inserted ‘Ch’ in pencil here to mark where he had decided that the final chapter should begin.

[So homesick was he that even the House of Elrond could not long delay him. He called there of course and spoke with the elves > It was already May and >] It was on May the 1st that he came back to that valley of the last homely house. Again it was evening and as he rode down beside the wizard the elves were still singing in the trees. As soon as Bilbo and Gandalf [came >] appeared they burst into song very much as before

Put in a song like the one on p 28.^TN1

The page which follows, providing a very neat handwritten copy of the poem that ultimately appeared here, was interpolated later, since all the remaining pages of the Third Phase manuscript that follow (Third Phase manuscript pages 39–45; Marq. 1/1/20:2–8) were later renumbered to accommodate the addition of a new page ‘39’ bearing the poem (1/1/20:1).

O where are you going,

so late in returning?

The river is flowing,

the stars are all burning!

O whither so laden

so sad and so dreary?

Here elf and elf-maiden^TN2

Now welcome the weary

Come, tra-la-la lally,

Come back to the valley

The stars are far brighter

than gems without measure,

The moon is far whiter

than silver in treasure;

The fire is more shining

on hearth in the gloaming

Than gold won in mining!

So cease from your roaming!

Come tra-la-lalley

come back to the valley!

The dragon is withered

His bones are now crumbled,

His armour is shivered,

his splendour is humbled.

Though swords shall be rusted,

and crown and throne perish,

with strength that men trusted

and wealth that they cherish

Here [grass] is yet growing

And leaves are yet swinging,

the white water flowing

and elves are all singing

Come tra la lally

come back to the valley^TN3

A warm welcome was made there in the house of Elrond. and [added: <there> were many] eager ears to hear the tale of all their adventures. Gandalf it was who spoke, for Bilbo was fallen quiet and drowsy; but every now and again he would open an eye and listen when some part of the story he did not know came in.

Written following the next paragraph but marked for insertion here, following ‘quiet and drowsy’:

Most of the tale he knew, for he told much of it to the wizard himself on the homeward way. But

So he learned that Gandalf had been to a council of good wizards; and that the Necromancer had been driven from his hold in the south of Mirkwood, and had fled to other lands. ‘The North is freed from that horror for many an age’ said G. ‘yet I wish he were banished from the world’. [cancelled: Also one thing that had often puzzled him was explained – the trolls had been traced by Elrond. They had plundered > been <buried>]^TN4

‘It would be well indeed’ he said [> said Elrond] ‘but I fear that will not be [> come about] in this age of the world, or for many after.’ After the tale of their journeys there were other tales, and yet more tales, tales of long ago, and tales of new things, and tales of no time at all: till Bilbo’s head fell on his chest, and he <snored> comfortably in a corner.^TN5

He woke to find himself in bed, and the moon shining through an open window. Below the elves were still singing.^TN6

[Song]

This instruction is written in pencil in the top margin of Third Phase manuscript page 40 [>41] (=1/1/20:3); the actual text of the poem appears on a separate sheet later inserted into the manuscript, as may be seen from its being given a sequence of page numbers (39 > 40 > 41):

Sing all ye joyful, now sing all together!

The wind’s in the tree-top the wind’s in the heather;

The stars are in blossom, the moon is in flower,

Bright are the windows of night in her tower!

Dance all ye joyful, now dance all together!

Soft is the grass, and let foot be like feather!

The river is silver, the shadows are fleeting,

Merry is Maytime and merry our meeting.

Sing we now softly, and dreams let us weave him,

Wind him in slumber and there let us leave him!

The wanderer sleepeth, now soft be his pillow!

Lullaby, lullaby, alder and willow!

Hush, hush, oak ash and thorn!

Sigh no more pine till the wind [that >] of the morn;

Fall Moon, dark be the land,

Hushed be all water, till dawn is at hand!^TN7

The original manuscript continued with Bilbo’s reaction to the elven singing:

‘Well merry people’ said Bilbo looking out. ‘What time under [> by] the moon is this? Your lullaby would wake a drunken goblin. Yet I thank you.’

‘And your snores would wake a stone dragon’ [they answered. ‘Yet for your >] ‘Yet we thank you’ they answered with laughter. ‘It is but midnight; and you have slept now since early evening. Tomorrow perhaps you will be cured of weariness.’

‘Maybe. A little sleep [goes >] does a great cure in the house of Elrond’ said he. ‘But I will take all I can get. Good night fair friends.’ And he went back to bed, and slept till late morning.

Weariness fell from him soon in that house and he had many a merry jest and dance^TN8 with the elves of the valley. Yet even that place could not long delay him now. He thought ever of his home.^TN9

In but [> After but] three days therefore he said farewell to Elrond and giving him many gifts of gold and receiving much he rode away on a fine morning with Gandalf.^TN10 But even as they left the valley the sky darkened behind them [> in the west] and wind and rain came up to meet them.

‘Merry is may time’ said Bilbo as the rain beat on his face ‘but <?our> back is to legends and we are coming home. I suppose this is a first taste of home coming.’

‘There is a long road yet’ said Gandalf.

‘[But >] Yet it is the last road’ said Bilbo.

Soon they reached the ford in the river with the steep bank and down this they slithered.

Gandalf did not like the look of the river.

The river was somewhat swollen, and as they plunged in soon came above their feet as they sat their ponies. They were but halfway across when Bilbo’s pony slipped on a stone and floundered into the water.^TN11

Soon they were over the ford and had left the wild behind. At each stage in the road Bilbo recalled the happenings of a year ago (which now seemed so [far >] long ago).^TN12 It was not long before they came to where they had laid the troll-gold [added: they had hidden]. ‘I have enough to last me my time’ said Bilbo. ‘[This had better be >] You had better take this Gandalf.’

‘Share and share alike’ said Gandalf ‘You may have more needs than you expect.’ So they slung the bags [> gold in bags] upon the ponies and after that their going was slow, for most of the time they walked.

But the weather soon mended & as it drew near to June became warm and hot. The land was green and fair about them.

And as all things come at last to an end even this story a day came when they came to the mill by the river and passed the bridge and came right back to Bilbo’s own door.^TN13

‘Bless me what is going on’ said he! For there was a great commotion and people were thick round the door and many were coming and going in & out – not even wiping their feet as Bilbo noticed with disgust.

If he was surprized they were more surprized still. He had arrived back in the middle of an auction! Nearly all his things had [added: already] been sold for little money or old songs and his cousins the Allibone Baggins^TN14 were busy measuring the rooms to see if their furniture would fit.

Bilbo in fact was ‘Presumed Dead’ and not everybody that said so was sorry to find the presumption wrong.

The return of Bilbo in fact created quite a [comm[otion] >] disturbance both under hill and across the water and was a great deal more than a nine days wonder.^TN15 The legal bother indeed lasted for months [> years]. It was a long time indeed before Mr Baggins was admitted to be alive, and even then, to save time, he had to buy back a lot of his own furniture. The Allibone Baggins never fully admitted it [added in pencil: that he was genuine], and at any rate they were never on speaking terms with him again.

Indeed Bilbo found he had lost <one> thing altogether – and that was his reputation.

[Nothing he > He was no longer res[pectable] >] It is true that for ever after he remained an elf-friend and had the honour of dwarves wizards and all such folk as ever passed his way; but he was no longer respectable.^TN16

Indeed he was held by all the hobbits to be ‘queer’ – except his nephews & nieces^TN17 on the Took-side and even they were not encouraged in the friendship by their elders.

I am sorry to say he did not mind very much. [His sw[ord] >] He was perfectly happy [> quite content]; and the sound of his own kettle on the hearth was ever after more musical than it had been in the quiet days before the unexpected party.^TN18 His sword he hung on the mantlepiece. His armour was arranged on a stand in the hall [added in pencil in left margin: till he lent it to a museum]. His gold and silver was large[ly] [> mostly] spent in presents both useful and extravagant and his [added: invisible] ring was chiefly employed when unpleasant callers came.^TN19

He took to writing poetry and visiting the elves and [<if> >] though many shook their heads and said ‘poor old Baggins’, and only few believed any of his tales, he remained perfectly happy to the end of his days and those were extraordinarily long.

At this point a line was drawn across the page and the rest of this manuscript page (Third Phase manuscript page 43 [> 44]; Marq. 1/1/20:6) cancelled. I give the original text here:

One day [when >] long long after

put in visit of Gandalf <here> news of dwarves

So the prophecy came true?

Yes of course – don’t disbelieve in them because you helped to bring them about.

To this is added in hasty pencil:

After all you don’t really suppose [that you contrived all your adventures and all your escape[s] >] that all your adventures and all your escapes were <contrived> by you do you [> by you yourself]. You are a very [added: fine] person Mr Baggins & I am very fond of you, but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all.

Thank goodness said Bilbo.

All this material, forming as it does the rough draft for the brief epilogue, was cancelled and replaced by an additional sheet (Marq. 1/1/20:7–8) of fair copy text (Third Phase manuscript pages 45 and 45 [> 46]) written in a very neat hand:

One day [> autumn evening] long afterwards Bilbo was sitting in his study writing his memoirs – he thought of calling them ‘There and Back Again’^TN20 – when there was a ring at the door.

It was Gandalf and a dwarf; and the dwarf was actually Balin.

‘Come in, come in!’ said Bilbo, and soon they were settled in chairs by his fire. If Balin noticed that Mr Baggins’ waistcoat was more extensive (and had real gold buttons) he [> Bilbo] also noticed that Balin’s beard was several inches longer, and his jewelled clothes [> belt] of great magnificence. They fell to talking of their times together of course, and Bilbo asked how things were going in the Lands of the Mountain. It seemed they were going very well.

Bard had rebuilt a town in Dale and men had gathered to him from the Lake and from South and West, and all the valley had become tilled again and rich, and the desolation was now filled with birds and blossom in spring and fruit and feasting in autumn. And Lake-town had been refounded more prosperous than ever, and much wealth went up and down the Running River; and there was friendship in those parts between elves and dwarves and men. The Master had come to a bad end; for Bard had sent much gold for the help of the lake-people, and being of the kind that [is >] easily catches such disease he fell under the dragon-sickness and took it [> the gold] and fled with it, and died of starvation in the waste. ‘The new Master was [> is] of [more >] wiser kind,’ said Balin ‘and very popular; for of course he gets most of the credit of the present prosperity. They say that in his day the river runs with gold.’

‘Then the prophecies of the old songs have [accidentally >] come all right by [added: happy] accident,’ said Bilbo.

‘Of course!’ said Gandalf. ‘How else would they come true? Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies because you had a share in bringing them about yourself? After all you don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and all your wonderful escapes were managed by you yourself, do you? You are a very fine person, Mr Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world, after all.’

‘Thank goodness!’ said Bilbo and pushed over the tobacco-jar.^TN21

END

Roads go ever ever on

under [> over] rock and under tree

by caves where never sun has shone

by streams that never find the sea.

[R>] over grass and over stone

and under mountains in the moon

over snow by winter sown

and through the merry flowers of June^TN22

Roads go ever ever on

under cloud and under sun [> star],

But [never >] <foot> <?hath> never never gone

Beyond the seas to <?Gondobar>^TN23

[Yet feet that wandering have gone]

[turn at last to home afar.]

Eyes that [have >] fire and sword have seen

and terror walking in the wild^TN24

Look at last on meadows green

and trees and hills they long have known.^TN25

* * * * *

This represents the end of the composite typescript/manuscript of the completed story (i.e., the Third Phase) which Tolkien reached in December 1932 or, more likely, January 1933, loaning it to C. S. Lewis by February. For more on its ‘wander[ing] about’ over the next three and a half years, see page 635. For the well-known story of how the book came to Allen & Unwin’s attention and the subsequent stages that led to its acceptance and publication, see Carpenter (Tolkien: A Biography, pages 180–1), Anderson (DAA.12–13, including a facsimile of ten-year-old Rayner Unwin’s reader’s report on DAA.14), Hammond (Descriptive Bibliography, pages 7–8), and especially Elaine Griffith’s account.^TN26

It is probable, however, that this had not been Allen & Unwin’s first contact with Tolkien. The project which Dagnall travelled to Oxford to pick up from Griffiths on the day that she was persuaded by Griffiths, who had not actually yet done the promised work, to ask to borrow Professor Tolkien’s ‘frightfully good’ story rather than return to London empty-handed, was probably the Clark Hall Beowulf. This prose translation^TN27 had originally been published in 1901 by Swan Sonnenschein, a firm that had later [1911] merged with George Allen & Sons, which in turn had been acquired [1914] by young Stanley Unwin and renamed George Allen & Unwin. Although reprinted in 1911 and popular among students who wanted to avoid actually reading Beowulf in the original (an attitude Tolkien deplored), it now badly needed updating, and Stanley Unwin or one of his staff (e.g., Charles Furth) seems to have approached Tolkien to see if he would undertake the job (see Hammond, Descriptive Bibliography, page 296, who dates this contact to ‘probably in early or mid-1936).^TN28 Tolkien, who expresses a low opinion of Clark Hall’s translation in his own Prefatory Remarks to the eventual reprint (Clark Hall, page xv), declined the job (possibly because he had already translated Beowulf himself into both verse and prose) but with typical generosity seems to have recommended his former graduate student, Elaine Griffiths, for the job. Griffiths eventually proved unequal to the task (throughout her long career she published very little, concentrating her energies instead on teaching) and two years later the project reverted back to Tolkien, who passed it along to fellow Inkling Charles Wrenn; Wrenn completed the work within a year and the revised edition, with Tolkien’s essay on Old English prosody, appeared in 1940. An updated version followed in 1950 that was still being reprinted thirty years later (Hammond, page 299), though its longevity owes far more to the presence of Tolkien’s essay than the quality of Clark Hall’s translation or Wrenn’s notes.

The acceptance, publication, and success of The Hobbit quickly led to Allen & Unwin’s decision to publish more Tolkien: Mr. Bliss (with the proviso that he needed to redraw the pictures into a more easily, and cheaply, reproducible format), Farmer Giles of Ham (as soon as he could flesh out the volume with the addition of similar stories), and most of all a sequel to The Hobbit (as soon as he could write it). They probably envisioned the latter either as stories about Bilbo’s further adventures, rather like Lofting’s Dr. Dolittle books – to which Tolkien objected that ‘he remained very happy to the end of his days, and those were extraordinarily long’ (DAA.361) left very little wiggle room for further exploits (cf. Letters p. 38) – or else as a series of stories each about a different hobbit, which is in fact what they eventually got. In the event all these projects were delayed in their publication for many years, but within three months of The Hobbit’s publication in September 1937 Tolkien had begun work on ‘The New Hobbit’, which at one point he thought of calling The Magic Ring (a handwritten title-page bearing this title survives among the papers at Marquette, Marq. 3/1/2:2). Eventually the sequel, far from being the thinner repetition of Bilbo’s adventure he had feared (‘For nearly all the “motives” [i.e., motifs] that I can use were packed into the original book’ – Letters p. 38) was such an engrossing project that it took him fourteen years to complete, and picked up on all the unanswered questions from the earlier book – Gollum, the ring, the Necromancer, Moria, et al. (the chief exception being no mention of Beorn’s earlier history), as well as elements from The Lost Road, the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion, Tolkien’s ‘fairy poetry’, his scholarly work, &c., until it became the definitive masterpiece of his subcreated world.

More importantly from the point of view of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings turned out to be quite different from its predecessor, although clearly linked to it in story, style, and characters. And as his ideas developed Tolkien came to reject some of what was said in the original book, particularly in the crucial encounter with Gollum. Once he had established that Bilbo’s ring inspired possessiveness even beyond what the Arkenstone (and, earlier yet, the Silmarils) evoked, the idea that Gollum honestly intended to give Bilbo his ring when he lost the riddle-game became untenable. At first Tolkien decided to reveal in The Lord of the Rings that the account that appeared in The Hobbit was not what actually happened, and he had Gandalf recount the true story in the new book. Eventually, however, he realized that it would be a simpler solution if he could actually alter what was said in the first book, which would have the added benefit of not casting his earlier book into the status of unreliable narrative. Accordingly, in 1944 he drafted replacement text for a large portion of Chapter V: Riddles in the Dark, and in 1947 sent it off to Allen & Unwin to see if they thought inserting it into the next printing would be feasible. Due to a miscommunication (see Hammond, Descriptive Bibliography, pages 22–3, and Letters p. 120–4) Tolkien thought the publisher had decided not to make the change and so was taken by surprise when three years later in 1950 he was sent proofs for the next printing which incorporated his replacement text (Letters p. 141). This of course became the second edition of 1951, the form of the story that has been familiar to readers ever since. For the complete text of this new material Tolkien sent Allen & Unwin in 1947, the Fourth Phase of his work on the book, see the section beginning on page 729.

TEXT NOTES

1 Tolkien’s note to himself here refers to page 28 of the First Typescript (Marq. 1/1/53:3), corresponding to page 113 in Chapter III of this book. This is yet another piece of evidence that the First Typescript for chapters I through XII and part of XIV, replacing the bulk of the Second Phase text, already existed before the Third Phase manuscript was written.

2 Elf-maiden: This is the only reference to female elves within The Hobbit, aside from the (cancelled) mention of (Lúthien) Tinúviel.

3 The poem as we have it here is a fair copy obviously preceded by drafting that does not survive. It strongly resembles the version published in the book, the main variance being, as any comparison soon shows, that the three stanzas appear in reverse order in the manuscript from how they appear in the typescript and published book (the typescript text – 1/1/69:1–2 – being exactly that which saw print). Tolkien later numbered the stanzas from top to bottom ‘3’, ‘2’, and ‘1’ respectively in pencil in the left margin, indicating that the decision to reverse their sequence belongs not to the Third Phase but a somewhat later stage of work on the book, the period of the completion of the typescript (summer-autumn 1936).

Aside from the re-sequencing of the stanzas, Tolkien also made a few other changes. The line ‘Here is yet growing’ near the end I have treated as a miscopying from the lost draft for an intended ‘Here grass is yet growing’, since the line is otherwise short one syllable; in any case, Tolkien altered it in contemporary ink to read ‘Here grass is still growing’. In the final line (sans chorus) of the poem, ‘and elves are all singing’, he underlined the words are singing and wrote ‘are yet/ at their’ in the right margin. This I take as offering two variant revisions, so that instead of ‘and elves are yet at their singing’, which is euphonious but metrically irregular, he was weighing the respective merits of ‘and elves are yet singing’ versus ‘and elves at their singing’; comparison with the typescript and published book (DAA.[355]) show he decided upon the former.

In addition to these changes on the manuscript itself, between the fair copy manuscript and the typescript ‘So cease from your roaming’ (line 8 in the middle stanza) became ‘So why go a-roaming?’. The slight indentation of every other line was abandoned, and the chorus elaborated somewhat, especially in the final refrain. So that instead of ‘Come’ being repeated three times we instead get ‘Come! . . .’, ‘O! . . .’, and ‘With . . .’, followed in the last case with an additional flourish of fa-la-las.

4 These last two sentences were cancelled, leaving the second one (an attempt to pick up a loose thread from Plot Notes F) unfinished. The rest of the paragraph was extensively revised and supplemented with marginal additions until it read as follows:

So he learned that Gandalf had been to a council of many magicians and wise and learned men masters of lore and beneficial wizardry [> white wizardry]; and that the Necromancer had at last been driven from his hold in the south of Mirkwood, and had fled to other lands. ‘The North is freed from that horror for many an age’ said G. ‘yet I wish he were banished from the world’.

It is remarkable to find Tolkien using the word ‘magician’ in a favorable context; cf. his more usual negative associations with the term in On Fairy-Stories (OFS.15 & 49) and Letters (page 200), and indeed the phrase ‘magicians and’ was cancelled in ink. The presence of enough wizards and magicians to form a council is less surprising: Tolkien’s early work was filled with wizards, from The Book of Lost Tales’ Tû the wizard (‘Gilfanon’s Tale’, BLT I.232–3) to the Father Christmas Letters’ Man in the Moon, Father Christmas himself, and presumably Fr. Christmas’s Green Brother as well, to Roverandom’s same Man in the Moon, Psamathos Psamathides the sand-sorcerer, and Artaxerxes the wandering wizard. The idea that Middle-earth in the Third Age had only five wizards (Saruman, Gandalf, Radagast, and the two Blue Wizards of the east), none of whom are human, was like the concept of the Third Age itself a much later development; cf. HME VIII.64 & 67, the essay ‘The Istari’ in Unfinished Tales (UT.388–402), and ‘The Five Wizards’ (HME XII.384–5). Tolkien’s final thoughts on this ‘council of good wizards’ transformed it in The Lord of the Rings into the White Council, composed of three wizards (Saruman the White, Gandalf the Grey, and Radagast the Brown) and the most powerful of the Elves (Galadriel of Lothlórien, Elrond of Rivendell, Círdan of the Havens, and a few others who are not identified but probably included Glorfindel; cf. LotR.61, 267–8, & 376 and ‘Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age’; Silm.299–300).

Thus, while it is clear from the various Plot Notes that mere dramatic necessity required the wizard to leave Thorin and Company to their own devices for most of the second half of the story and that Tolkien had no particular idea of what the wizard was doing in the meantime (cf. Plot Notes A, page 296),^† Tolkien’s ultimate decision regarding what Gandalf had been up to evolved from a neat tying up of loose ends in the original Hobbit to have significant ramifications in the sequel. Ultimately, of course, it proved untrue (or at least premature) that ‘the North [was] freed from that horror for many an age’, since during the War of the Ring there was war in Mirkwood (‘long battle under the trees and great ruin of fire’ – LotR.1131), an invasion that occupied Dale (and presumably Esgaroth), and a second deadlier Siege of the Lonely Mountain that ended in the deaths of both the Lord of Dale and the King under the Mountain (ibid.), so it was not until the beginning of the Fourth Age some eighty years later, at the very end of Bilbo’s extraordinarily long life, that Gandalf’s prediction comes true.

^† He never does provide any explanation of the means by which Gandalf reaches the far side of Mirkwood; presumably, given his aversion to entering the forest itself (see page 243), he rode not through but around the great forest by the south once Sauron had been defeated.

5 Compare the account of the Cottage of Lost Play, wherein Eriol hears all the stories that were to make up The Book of Lost Tales (BLT I.13ff).

6 Changed in pencil to ‘Many elves were singing clear beside the river below his window’.

7 This earliest surviving text of the poem (‘Sing All Ye Joyful’) is a careful fair copy, clearly preceded by drafting that does not survive. Aside from changes in capitalization, punctuation, and indentation, all its lines are identical to the published version, but the sequence of the last four was shifted:

Sigh no more Pine, till the wind of the morn!

Fall Moon! Dark be the land!

Hush! Hush! Oak, Ash, and Thorn!

Hushed be all water, till dawn is at hand!

Their re-arrangement was a late change, since the original sequence occurs in both the continuation of the First Typescript (1/1/69:2–3) and the corresponding page from the Second Typescript (1/1/50:3), both made in 1936.

The only other notable feature of this poem is its reference to the moon being ‘in flower’. Rather than a poetical conceit of a piece with the flowering stars, this may be an allusion back to ‘The Tale of the Sun and Moon’, where the Moon was formed from the last blossom of Silpion the Silver Tree (BLT I.191).

8 It is perhaps an indicator of the change in Bilbo brought about by his adventures that whereas at the end of Chapter III he goes ‘to see the elves dance and sing’ (page 116), now he joins in with their dancing.

9 Added here in pencil are the words ‘B.’s first poem’. This refers of course to ‘Roads Go Ever Ever On’, which Tolkien apparently considered inserting at this point. For more on this, the third interpolated poem in this final chapter, see Text Note 13 below.

10 Added at this point, mostly in the left margin:

Each was on a pony and they led also a third [> another] laden with many things – including Bilbo’s little treasure chests.

This was apparently added to set up a scene a few paragraphs later wherein Bilbo’s treasure would be swept away during a river-crossing; see Text Note 11.

11 The three preceding paragraphs, which would have culminated in Bilbo’s pack pony losing the treasure in the rushing water (see the first line of Plot Notes F: ‘Bilbo’s treasure all lost on the way home’), were all cancelled in the manuscript (Third Phase manuscript page 41 [> 42]; 1/1/20:4). The word ‘pony’ is changed to ‘pack-pony’ in the last line, and there is a cancelled partial word, ‘wh’, after ‘the steep bank’; I suspect that Tolkien began to write ‘where’ – that is, where they had trouble with the ponies just before meeting the trolls on the outward journey. At any rate, this is clearly the same river described in Chapter II, as Tolkien makes explicit in the typescript: ‘They came to the river that marked the very edge of the borderland of the Wild, and to the ford beneath the steep bank, which you may remember’ (Marq. 1/1/69:3; cf. DAA.358). It may be significant that when Tolkien returned to re-envision The Hobbit in 1960, the first new scene he inserted into the story dealt with Bilbo’s troubles at a river-crossing; perhaps the idea of this abandoned scene stayed in his mind for the almost thirty years that intervened.

12 The one-year’s journey of the published book is finally unambiguously in effect, as opposed to the longer time-frame of the original (Second Phase) draft; cf. Bilbo’s remark about may-time a few lines earlier. ‘. . . so long ago’ was later altered to ‘ten <illegible> at least’; the illegible word does not look like years but might possibly be may[s] – i.e., that ten Mays rather than just one have passed since he was last here.

13 At the bottom of this page (Third Phase manuscript page 41 [> 42]; Marq. 1/1/20:4), immediately below this paragraph, Tolkien has added in hasty pencil

and could see the woods upon the Hill. The[n] Bilbo

stopped & said suddenly – the poem

‘Something is the matter with you Bilbo’ said G.

‘You are not the hobbit you were.’

And so they passed

– i.e., ‘passed the bridge and came right back to Bilbo’s own door’. The poem alluded to here (see also Text Note 9 above) is ‘Roads Go Ever Ever On’; see part v of the commentary following this chapter, beginning on page 723.

Note that it is still the Mill (clearly to be seen in the foreground of all Tolkien’s versions of the Hobbiton illustration; cf. Plate IV [top]), which is the landmark here and not the Green Man or the Green Dragon Inn.

14 The original name of Bilbo’s cousins, the Allibone Baggins, was altered to Sackville Baggins in pencil here and Sackville-Baggins (that is, with the hyphen) two paragraphs later; this change probably dates to the period of the book’s preparation for publication in 1936, and the latter form appears in the typescript (1/1/69:5). I am unable to explain the exact significance of ‘Allibone’, which probably originated not as part of their surname but in reference to a place (i.e., to distinguish between the Allibone Bagginses and the Bag-End Bagginses). Certainly it seems unlikely that Tolkien here was alluding to any real person with this name, such as Samuel Austin Allibone (a leading figure in the Sunday School movement and compiler of the Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors [1854 & 1871]), journalist and travel/nature writer Thomas Allibone Janvier [d.1913], or physicist T. E. Allibone (a much younger colleague of Rutherford), just as Sackville almost certainly derives not from the Elizabethan poet Thomas Sackville (A Mirror for Magistrates, Gorboduc) nor literary personality V. Sackville-West (a friend of Virginia Woolf’s) but rather is simply as T. A. Shippey points out a comic variant between sack and bag: Sackville vs. Baggins (The Road to Middle-earth, expanded edition [2003], page 72). Rather, I would argue that ‘Allibone’ is a variant of Alboin, the name Tolkien gave one of the two main characters in his time-travel story The Lost Road [circa 1936] in which one of the main characters states ‘at school . . . they call me All-bone’ (HME V.37). If so, its application to Bilbo’s stay-at-home relatives is deeply ironic, for Alboin is the sixth-century Lombardic equivalent of the Old English Ælfwine or ‘Elf-friend’,^† and it is Bilbo rather than his cousins who has earned such a title.

^† For more on Alboin the Lombard, a Germanic prince whose people gave their name to Italy’s Lombardy region, see Christopher Tolkien’s commentary on The Lost Road, HME V.53–5.

15 The very first page of the earliest draft of the sequel puts the matter nicely: ‘[Bilbo] had disappeared after breakfast one April 30th and not reappeared until lunchtime on June 22nd in the following year’ (HME VI.13). As an encapsulation of his hobbit neighbors’ point of view, this can hardly be bettered. According to the typescript of this final chapter (1/1/69:5) Bilbo returned home on June 2nd; this was changed to June 22nd in the page proofs (1/2/2: page 306).

16 The statement that among Bilbo’s visitors in later years were wizards (note the plural) remains even in the most recent texts of the published book although the later conception makes it extremely unlikely that Radagast or Saruman, not to mention either of the long-missing Blue Wizards, dropped by during the years following Bilbo’s return.

17 Just as with the ‘lads and lasses’ whom Bladorthin/Gandalf encouraged to go off and have their own adventures, we hear very little about Bilbo’s nieces in the sequel; a few who would probably qualify for the title in the looser sense used in The Lord of the Rings appear or are referred to briefly (Caramella Took,^† Angelica Baggins, Melilot Brandybuck, Pearl Took^††) but play no role in the main story.

^† HME VI.15. fn">^†† Cf. Letters page 295.

18 This is the first usage in the manuscript of the phrase that would give its name to the first chapter of the book, but it had already occurred in the First Typescript for Chapter XI:

they used to call the little grassy space between the wall and the opening the ‘doorstep’ in fun, remembering Bilbo’s words long ago at the unexpected party in his hobbit-hole

—typescript page 113; Marq. 1/1/61:4.

19 At this point Tolkien started a new paragraph and wrote ‘It was one of his jokes to put it on and open the door and if’ but left the sentence unfinished and cancelled it. Cf. Bingo’s tricks with Farmer Maggot in early drafts of ‘A Short Cut to Mushrooms’ (HME VI.96–7 & 292–3).

20 This marks the first appearance of the phrase that later became the book’s subtitle.

21 In this final line ‘pushed over’ remained the reading in both typescripts (1/1/69:6 and 1/1/50:7), not being changed to ‘handed him’ until the page proofs (1/2/2: page 310), probably to avoid having readers think that Bilbo had accidentally knocked the jar over.

22 These four lines were re-sequenced by Tolkien, who wrote the numbers 3, 4, 1, and 2, respectively, in the left margin alongside them, shifting the lines to the order they have in the typescript version of this poem and the published book (DAA.359).

23 These last two lines, which seem to have formed the original conclusion of the poem, were cancelled in ink. The two lines that follow (‘Yet feet . . . to home afar’), which I have bracketed and slightly indented here to set them apart, are written in ink over pencil underwriting, indicating a pause in composition before these replacements were drafted. The final four lines that follow the replacement lines have no such underwriting.

Unfortunately, the two highly interesting cancelled lines – with their parallel of ‘never never gone’ for journeys not taken with the ‘ever ever on’ of those that are now coming to an end – are in parts nearly illegible; the final -h of <?hath> is particularly dubious. Similarly, the word or words that end the next line could also be read ‘find the bar’, which might be an allusion to the old notion of ‘crossing the bar’, made famous by Tennyson’s poem of the same name (‘Crossing the Bar’ [1889]), with its imagery of sailing beyond the world into eternity; Tolkien had already used similar phrasing in the final stanza of his poem ‘The Nameless Land’ [written 1924, published 1927]; cf. Text Note 20 following Chapter XVII (page 675) and HME V.100.

On the other hand, if I am correct in reading this final, nearly illegible series of ligatures as ‘Gondobar’, then we have here another reference to the city more commonly known as Gondolin, one of the great elven kingdoms of the legendarium, which had already been mentioned by Elrond in Chapter III. At first glance its reappearance here might seem rather unlikely, but this variant of the name was particularly associated with Tolkien’s poetry about voyaging to the Undying Land and glimpsing Tol Eressëa, as in the revised version of ‘The Nameless Land’ retitled ‘The Song of Ælfwine’, the two texts of which seem to date from circa 1936 and circa 1945, respectively:

O! Haven where my heart would be!

the waves that beat upon thy bar

For ever echo endlessly,

when longing leads my thoughts afar,

And rising west of West I see

beyond the world the wayward Star,

Than beacons bright in Gondobar

more clear and keen, more fair and high . . .

—‘The Song of Ælfwine’, 1936 version,

lines 51–58; emphasis mine^†

and the later version of ‘The Happy Mariners’ [circa 1940]:

O happy mariners upon a journey far,

beyond the grey islands and past Gondobar,

to those great portals on the final shores . . .

—lines 23–25; HME II.275.^††

^† See HME V.100–104.

^†† See also Christopher Tolkien’s commentary HME II.274 and HME V.104.

24 This line was partially cancelled and replaced by ‘And [terror >] horror in the halls of stone’, written at the end of the poem and marked for insertion at this point.

25 The text of this poem, which is given the pencilled title ‘Bilbo’s first poem’, appears on a separate piece of paper (1/1/31) meant to be inserted into the final chapter somewhere around page 690; Tolkien wrote ‘41’ in pencil in the upper right corner, making this the third ‘page 41’ in the Third Phase manuscript.^† Its actual placement wavered; first Tolkien thought to insert it just before Bilbo’s departure from Rivendell (see Text Note 9), then instead to give it on Bilbo’s doorstep (see Text Note 13). Ultimately it is given its final placement, just as Bilbo glimpses ‘his own Hill in the distance’, in the first typescript (1/1/69:4); cf. DAA.359. Given his uncertainty, I have thought it best to offer it here as an appropriate coda for the story as a whole.

^† The others being in the main Third Phase text just before the middle of the final chapter (numbered ‘40 > 41’; 1/1/20:3) and also the page bearing the inserted poem ‘Sing All Ye Joyful’ (numbered ‘<?top> 39 > 40 > 41’).

26 Griffiths’ (oral) account was initially broadcast as part of Ann Bonsor’s 1974 Radio BBC Oxford tribute to Tolkien (produced by Humphrey Carpenter), along with other memoirs of Tolkien by friends (e.g., Nevill Coghill) and family; a transcription of Griffiths’ contribution is reprinted in The Annotated Hobbit (DAA.12) and the original audiotrack was incorporated into Brian Sibley’s J.R.R. Tolkien: An Audio Portrait (BBC [2001]) as part of CD 1, track 12.

27 Not to be confused with Clark Hall’s ‘Metrical’ (verse) translation, published in 1914 and again in 1926 by Cambridge University Press.

28 That Allen & Unwin would contact an author they had never worked with before out of the blue like this to see if he was interested in undertaking a project for them was not unprecedented; coming across E. R. Eddison’s translation of Egil’s Saga (Cambridge University Press, [1930]), Stanley Unwin wrote to him asking if he would be interested in translating more sagas for Allen & Unwin. Engrossed in his own creative work, Eddison declined, but the episode shows Unwin’s willingness to seek out potential authors and scholars rather than wait for them to come to him. This correspondence is now in the Bodleian (Ms. Eng. Misc. e 456/1, fol. 123 & 124).

(i)
Dain son of Nain

One of the most appealing of all Tolkien’s dwarven characters, Dain of the Iron Hills plays a small but crucial role in The Hobbit, essentially stepping in to fulfill Thorin’s role after Thorin is no longer capable of doing so himself, first because he succumbed to dragon-sickness and then because of his death. That Thorin was to die was a late development, not present at all in the Second Phase: there is no hint of it in any of the Plot Notes, and clear indication to the contrary as late as Bilbo’s discussion with Thorin after the battle in Plot Notes D. Even when Tolkien concluded that Bilbo would be unable to resolve the crisis and lift the siege without a battle (Plot Notes F), the idea of bringing a dwarven army to the scene was one of the last plot-points to emerge: no such army is described as playing a part in the Plot Notes B/C/D sequence or Plot Notes E, and their listing among the seven forces present in Plot Notes F could mean just the thirteen members of Thorin & Company; in any case the word ‘dwarves’ on that list is circled in pencil, as if for removal or further development: Dain himself nowhere appears until the Third Phase. Like Bard (or, later, Arwen in The Lord of the Rings), Dain is a character Tolkien introduces abruptly to fill a specific plot-function – in this case, to bring a dwarven army to the fight at the Mountain – but with his usual keen eye to potentialities, once the character is present Tolkien makes good use of him. Nothing in fact anticipates Thorin’s death scene in the original manuscript until Gandalf actually ushers Bilbo into the dying dwarvenking’s tent, but once Tolkien had made the surprising decision to drive home the cost of victory with the tragic but heroic death of the second most important character in the book,¹ he needed someone else to fill Thorin’s role as the new King under the Mountain, dealing out treasure and restoring the lost realm so that the prophecies could come true.

In a sense, Dain is to Thorin as Faramir is to Boromir in The Lord of the Rings: the close kinsman who avoids the fall from grace of his elder. Even Gandalf at one point describes himself after his return as Gandalf the White as being Saruman as he was supposed to be (‘The White Rider’, LotR.516). It is easy, in retrospect, to forget Thorin’s or Boromir’s virtues even after their heroic deaths and dying renunciations of their misdeeds, but an unprejudiced reading of the First Phase and Second Phase Hobbit (and indeed the bulk of the published book, right up to the dwarves’ discussion of the treasure at the end of Chapter XII) shows Thorin as a capable leader, fair in his judgments, determined to leave none behind, and courageous (although not to the point of being willing to beard the dragon who destroyed his people in its lair). Dain is all this and more: Thorin as he is meant to be, who either because of the example of Thorin’s fall before him or more likely because of an unshakable bedrock of good sense and a lack of ofermod (again, cf. Faramir’s ability to avoid repeating Boromir’s mistakes) is able to resist the dragon-sickness. Dain deals out the treasure fairly, keeps his bargains, and establishes good relations with his neighbors – all the things Thorin should have done and that we like Bilbo expected him to do based on our experience of him prior to his glimpsing the dragon-gold. The good effects of King Dain’s reign are already apparent by the time of the Epilogue – a brief glance ahead ten years that enables us to see the fulfillment of Thorin’s dream to re-establish the Kingdom under the Mountain as a thriving dwarven haven for Durin’s Folk at peace with its neighbors and no longer surrounded by desolation – and Glóin in ‘Many Meetings’ (LotR Bk II Ch. I) gives a glowing report of their progress in the decades since.

That Thorin’s heir proves to be a new character, Dain, and not one of Thorin’s companions – say, his second-in-command Balin or perhaps Fili and Kili, already established as his great-nephews – might have surprised some readers among whom Tolkien circulated the original version of the story (e.g., C. S. Lewis), especially since Beowulf, which had a marked influence on the closing chapters, provided the parallel of an old king dying and being succeeded by a relatively unknown much younger kinsman. But the two young dwarves’ descent is through the female line, being the grandsons of Thorin’s sister (the sons of his sister in the published text and later family trees), whereas the patriarchal dwarves obviously trace the kingship through the male line; it is indeed possible that the deaths of Fili and Kili were added to the story during the typescript stage precisely to avoid such confusion. Then too whereas strict patrilineal descent became the norm during feudalism (with sometimes disastrous results when a small child inherited the throne and left a country with a decade or two of regencies while he grew up), in the ‘heroic’ cultures that preceded feudalism a closely-related capable adult male (brother, uncle, nephew) often succeeded instead of a son.² As Thorin’s first cousin,³ the battle-hardened Dain, who proved himself a loyal kinsman by coming at once to Thorin’s aid and who had already accomplished heroic deeds in killing Bolg’s father in the goblin war, is obviously an eminently suitable candidate to re-establish the Kingdom under the Mountain.

For all his importance to the resolution of the story, however, Dain remains almost entirely in the background, his words and deeds reported at second hand. Despite this, like so many of Tolkien’s ‘minor’ characters his personality and character come across clearly, revealing him as the most sensible and ultimately quite possibly the most fortunate of all Tolkien’s dwarves (with the exception of the legendary Durin and possibly also of Gimli Glóinson in his later career as described in the Appendices of The Lord of the Rings). We know he proves to be an excellent king and have already noted his fairness in sharing out treasure (the sine qua non for being a great king or ‘ring-giver’ according to the Anglo-Saxon heroic code – at least according to the surviving poetry);⁴ that his generosity and sense of fair-play go beyond merely keeping his word or fulfilling Thorin’s bargains is shown by his giving Bard the Necklace of Girion, clearly a fabulous treasure, above and beyond the one-fourteenth share that was supposed to settle Bard’s claim on the treasure. His chief defining characteristics seem to have been an unshakable practicality, a keen appreciation of his own limits, and willingness to aggressively defend a good cause. In the later story (‘Durin’s Folk’, LotR Appendix A part iii) he answers Thrain’s call to avenge Thror’s murder and fights heroically at Moria, killing Bolg’s father (clearly a great feat, even within the context of the original Hobbit, since Gandalf has heard of it) but stops short of over-reaching and prevents Thrain from re-claiming Moria since the peril that originally drove them from Durin’s halls remains (i.e., the Balrog). Similarly, within The Hobbit he comes at once to aid Thorin but does not hesitate to ally with the Elvenking and Bard when the goblins arrive, nor to drop old grudges and negotiate a fair peace after the battle. Later (LotR.257–8) he allows Balin to found his own dwarf-colony, despite his personal misgivings, which prove to have been fully justified. At one point Tolkien even considered making him the keeper of one of the dwarven Rings of Power (HME VI.398); although this proved to be only a passing thought it shows his high regard for the character. And Dain is wise enough to resist temptation when Sauron sends messengers with promises of Rings of Power and, unlike his ally King Brand, to realize that attempts to appease the Dark Lord are useless; instead he sends warnings to Bilbo and representatives to the Council of Elrond. One could argue that Gimli goes with the Fellowship not just as a representative of dwarves in general but as one of Dain’s folk, the people of Durin, in particular.

As Tolkien eventually developed him, Dain thus plays a large role in the history of his people throughout the last two and a half centuries of the Third Age, contributing in no small part to their survival into the Fourth Age through a remarkable career on a par with those of Thorin and Balin: fighting heroically at Moria when young and killing the leader of the goblin army, thus personally avenging Thror’s murder (‘held a great feat, for Dáin was then only a stripling in the reckoning of the Dwarves’ – LotR.1112), leading one of the namesake armies in The Battle of Five Armies (where victory enables him to re-establish the Kingdom under the Mountain with the survivors), and finally dying heroically in the War of the Ring fighting over the body of his fallen friend defending the Front Gate from Sauron’s armies (LotR.1116; ‘The Quest of Erebor’, Unfinished Tales, page 326). Even more important was his maintenance of a safe haven for Durin’s Folk first in the Iron Hills and then later in the Lonely Mountain, since we are told ‘It is because of the fewness of women among them that the kind of the Dwarves increases slowly, and is in peril when they have no secure dwellings’ (LotR.1116), especially when we juxtapose this with Thrain and Thorin’s group in the Blue Hills whose numbers were apparently few and increased only very slowly, a fact directly linked to the statement that ‘They had very few women-folk’ (ibid.1113), Thorin’s sister Dís being a rare exception.

Since we do not know how old Dain was supposed to be in the original story, we cannot say whether he like Thror, Thrain, Thorin, and Balin was a survivor of Smaug’s attack or whether he was born in the Iron Hills after the event; from the lack of any statement to the contrary it seems probable that in the original conception the Iron Hills settlement was founded by refugees from Erebor, whereas in the later story the colony in the Iron Hills had been founded by Thror’s brother (Grór) at the time the dwarves were driven out of the far North (i.e., the Grey Mountains) long before Dain’s birth (LotR.1109 & 1117), meaning that Dain was certainly born there and was still a small child (only three years old) when Smaug destroyed Thror’s nearby kingdom. In this later story, most of the survivors of the catastrophe join Grór in the Iron Hills (‘It was afterwards learned that more of the Folk under the Mountain had escaped than was at first hoped; but most of these went to the Iron Hills’ – LotR.1110), and it is clear that the Iron Hills settlement was the largest and most thriving community of the Longbeards, much larger than Thorin’s smaller halls in the distant Blue Hills. For example, Thorin dreams in ‘The Quest of Erebor’ (Unfinished Tales, page 322) of raising a dwarven army to reclaim his lost kingdom but is advised by Gandalf to take only a small trustworthy group, whereas in the original story there is nothing to contradict the conclusion that the Heir of Durin can only manage to gather a band of a dozen followers; by contrast Dain at short notice can bring five hundred warriors to the spot.⁵

Finally, there is the matter of Dain’s name, nomenclature always being important in Tolkien’s stories. Like the rest of The Hobbit’s dwarves (with the possible exception of Balin, already noted), Dain and his father both take their names from the Dvergatal; although they do not appear in all manuscripts of the Voluspá (see Dronke, pages 10 & 90) they are both in Snorri’s list (Prose Edda page 41). However, unlike most of these dwarf-names, Dain’s name also appears elsewhere, in a variety of different contexts and applications, some rather puzzling. Thus while we are told in Heidreks Saga⁶ that Tyrfing, a cursed sword which must kill somebody every time it is unsheathed, was made by the dwarfs Durin and Dvalin (i.e., Tolkien’s ‘Dwalin’), Snorri in the Skáldskaparmál tells a very similar story of a sword called Dainslaf (‘Dain’s heirloom’), used in the Endless Battle between Hedin and Högni (Prose Edda page 121);⁷ the sword’s title implies that ‘Dain’ was recognized in Norse lore as a famous dwarven maker of weapons. Oddly enough, another of the Elder Edda’s poems, the Hávamál,⁸ tells of another Dain who is the king of elves:

Odin for the Æsir [gods], Dain for the elves,

Dvalin for the dwarfs,

Asvid for the giants . . .

—Hávamál, stanza 143; Terry, Poems of the Elder Edda, page 31.

We are also told, in the Gylfaginning, that the World-Tree Yggdrasil has four harts living in its branches, named Dáin, Dvalin, Duneyr, and Durathrór (Prose Edda, page 45). By contrast, I have found no other references to Nain, a name which neither Dronke nor Young translates but which probably means ‘near’ (cf. E. V. Gordon, An Introduction to Old Norse, page 371), although it is certainly a remarkable coincidence that nain is actually the French word for ‘dwarf’ (e.g., cf. Madame D’Aulnoy’s 1698 fairy tale Le Nain Jaune, translated into English as ‘The Yellow Dwarf’). While the scattered references to Dain in the Old Norse sources do not seem to cohere into a single figure, someone who like Tolkien was creating a new mythology out of the incoherent fragments of lost myth⁹ might well have concluded that the original Dain had once been a figure of some significance, associated in some way with kingship and with those famous dwarves Durin and Dvalin, but whose story had been wholly lost.

(ii)
Bolg of the North

Bolg of the North plays a far less dramatic part in the Third Phase manuscript than will eventually develop in the typescript (see below) and final book. Nonetheless he is remarkable as one of only two goblins to gain the distinction of a name in the original edition of The Hobbit (if we exempt ‘The Great Goblin’ as a title).¹ The parallelism between ‘Bolg of the North’ and ‘Gondobad of the North’, when laid alongside Bladorthin’s earlier admonition that the North End of the Misty Mountains was ‘stiff with goblins, hobgoblins, and orcs of the worst description’ (page 244), suggests that Mount Gundabad might have been Bolg’s capital. In any case, like Morgoth’s forces in the earlier tales in the legendarium, the goblins of Bilbo’s time seem clustered in the north; only after their devastating defeat in the Battle of Five Armies do Bilbo and Gandalf, accompanied by Beorn, dare to take the northern route around Mirkwood.

Also in the Third Phase, we learn more about the famed goblin-dwarf war, although the full story has to wait until ‘Durin’s Folk’ (specifically LotR.1110–13). That it was fought to avenge the death of Thror was already clear from Thorin’s comment in Chapter I that the ‘goblins of Moria have been repaid’ as he considers going after the Necromancer to exact similar vengeance for Thrain (page 73). It is not yet revealed that Moria is an ancestral dwarven city overrun by goblins, and on the whole it seems likely that this idea had not yet arisen when Tolkien was working on The Hobbit; he may have conceived of Moria at this time as simply a goblin stronghold, probably mines worked by those unfortunates who have been captured and made slaves by the goblins (a fate Bilbo and the others narrowly escaped thanks to Bladorthin’s timely intervention). Certainly similar mines were an omnipresent threat to the elves of Beleriand in early versions of the legendarium: Flinding bo-Dhuilin (known in the published Silmarillion as Gwindor of Nargothrond) is one example of the terrible changes wrought by long captivity in ‘the mines of the north’ (cf. ‘Turambar and the Foalókë’ [BLT II.78–79], ‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’ [HME III.36], the 1926 ‘Sketch’ [HME IV.29], the 1930 Quenta [HME IV.124], Silm.207, et al.). All we know for certain is that the goblin-dwarf war took place more than a century ago (page 73), was famous (Bilbo expects Bard and the Elvenking to have heard of it – page 662) and that the Battle of the Mines of Moria was a significant encounter in that campaign, since it was there that Dain killed Bolg’s father (page 670) – although we could probably also have guessed this from the fact that ‘Moria! Moria!’ is one of the battle-cries of Dain’s dwarves when they attack Bolg’s goblins.² Finally, we can reasonably conclude that the dwarves must have won the war, since Thrain, Thorin, and Dain all survived and Bolg’s father did not; more significantly, Thorin considers that it settled the score over his grandfather’s death (which would not have been the case with a dwarven defeat or even stalemate). In the later development of the Moria story, the battle was made more devastating for both sides (Thorin’s brother, Dain’s father, and Balin’s father all died there, and Thrain was permanently disfigured – LotR.1117 & 1112), and the mortality so high as to make it unlikely that a significant portion of the forces Dain brings with him a century and more later in answer to Thorin’s call could be survivors of that battle (or that many, if any, of the goblins now facing them were veterans of the same combat).

Magol

One of the most interesting things about Bolg is of course his name, which is neither Norse (like the dwarves’) nor Sindarin/Noldorin (like most of the other personal and place names within The Hobbit). Instead, it comes from one of Tolkien’s minor invented languages, called Mago or Magol, about which little is known other than that at one point Tolkien considered making it the Orkish language, only to reject this idea. In that tongue, bolg is an adjective meaning ‘strong’ (Magol document, page 3) – an eminently suitable name for a great goblin-chief.³

However, it may be significant that another similar name, later identified as Noldorin, is given to an Orc leader in ‘The Lay of Leithian’ and the 1930 Quenta. This Boldog⁴ was a captain whom Morgoth sent to raid Doriath to capture Lúthien; his importance may be guessed not just from the fact that he is one of only two orcs (the other being Bolg) named in the legendarium before The Lord of the Rings. Even more significantly, originally Morgoth had ordered Thû (the Necromancer; the later Sauron) to undertake that mission (‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’, HME III.16 [lines 391–394] & 117 [lines 763–766]), which in slightly later parts of the legendarium was reassigned to Boldog instead:

A captain dire,

Boldog, he sent with sword and fire

to Doriath’s march; but battle fell

sudden upon him: news to tell

never one returned of Boldog’s host,

and Thingol humbled Morgoth’s boast.

—‘The Lay of Leithian’, lines 3670b–3675

– HME III.288.

In fact, Beren and his elven companions, trying to enter the Dark Lord’s land disguised as orcs, claim to be part of Boldog’s host when captured and questioned by Thû (ibid., lines 2121–2136; HME III.229). That Boldog’s raid was no minor skirmish but a major battle is indicated by the account in the 1930 Quenta:

Assaults . . . there were on Doriath’s borders, for rumours that Lúthien was astray had reached Angband. Boldog captain of the Orcs was there slain in battle by Thingol, and his great warriors Beleg the Bowman and Mablung Heavyhand were with Thingol in that battle.

—HME IV.113.

A synopsis for the unwritten cantos of ‘The Lay of Leithian’ adds still more details:

Thingol’s army meets with the host of Boldog on the borders of Doriath. Morgoth has heard of the beauty of Lúthien, and the rumour of her wandering. He has ordered Thú and the Orcs to capture her. A battle is fought and Thingol is victorious. The Orcs are driven into Taur-na-Fuin^† or slain. Thingol himself slays Boldog. Mablung Heavyhand was Thingol’s chief warrior and fought at his side; Beleg was the chief of his scouts. Though victorious Thingol is filled with still more disquiet at Morgoth’s hunt for Lúthien.

— HME III.311.

^† Mirkwood; cf. page 20.

Obviously, Bolg in The Hobbit cannot be the same character as Boldog in the Silmarillion stories contemporary with its drafting (since the latter is killed by Thingol), but the parallel is interesting. Perhaps significant in this context is a late note [circa 1960] Tolkien wrote on the name ‘Boldog’ in which he stated that ‘it is possible that Boldog was not a personal name, and either a title, or else the name of a kind of creature: the Orc-formed Maiar, only less formidable than the Balrogs’ (X.418). That is, according to this line of thought, evil Maiar in Morgoth’s service sometimes incarnated themselves into orcish form in order to command orc troops, and ‘boldog’ was the generic term for these, no more individualized than, say, Nazgúl. For more on Maiar incarnating themselves as super-orcs (‘orcs of the worst description’, perhaps?), see commentary on page 138.

Orcs

Finally, there is the question of whether Bolg was a normal goblin, despite his rank as leader of the goblin-horde, or something more. The original Third Phase text offers no clues on this point, but the account of the Battle of Five Armies as developed in the typescript that followed does, and suggests that he was in fact an Orc, not merely a goblin (cf. in a later account the contrast between the rather puny goblins of the Misty Mountains against the much more dangerous Orcs of Mordor – not to mention Saruman’s Uruk-hai – in LotR.467–8, 472, 473–4). Thus in the typescript and published book, the core of the goblin army around which it rallies after the elf-dwarf-human alliance stems the first onslaught is ‘the bodyguard of Bolg, goblins of huge size with scimitars of steel’ (typescript 1/1/67:6, DAA.343; contrast page 671 of this book). Similarly, Thorin’s charge fails when he comes up against Bolg’s honour guard: ‘Thorin drove right against the bodyguard of Bolg. But he could not pierce their ranks . . . The bodyguard of Bolg came howling against them, and drove in upon their ranks like waves upon cliffs of sand’ (DAA.344). Later Bilbo learns that after Thorin fell, presumably because of injuries inflicted by Bolg’s guard if not Bolg himself, Beorn arrives and attacks like an unstoppable force: ‘He scattered the bodyguard, and pulled down Bolg himself and crushed him. Then dismay fell on the Goblins and they fled in all directions’ (typescript 1/1/68:2–3, DAA.349–50; contrast pp. 679–80 in this book).

The clear distinction between Bolg and his guard on the one hand and the average goblin of the horde on the other certainly carries over into the description of the Battle of Moria in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings, where it is said of his father that Azog ‘was a great Orc with a huge iron-clad head, and yet agile and strong. With him came many like him, the fighters of his guard’ (LotR.1112). Thus the preponderance of evidence, though indirect, shows that Bolg in The Hobbit is far more than a mere goblin – in fact an Orc in all but name.

(iii)
The Battle of Five Armies

As we have seen in the various Plot Notes, Tolkien’s original idea was to have the Lonely Mountain chapters end with the Siege of the Mountain, where Thorin & Company (aided by the ravens) would be besieged by the wood-elves and lake-men until Bilbo and Gandalf could negotiate a peaceful ending to the impasse. This would then have been followed on Bilbo’s return journey by the unnamed battle I have dubbed for ease of reference ‘the Battle of Anduin Vale’, which did not involve the dwarves but ‘goblins of the Misty Mountains’ and their allies the wargs, versus the wood-elves (with whom Bilbo goes to battle, armed in his elven mail), ‘the men of the woods’ (e.g., the wood-men dwelling on the western side of Mirkwood, described back in Chapter VI), ‘men . . . from the south’ (presumably the kin of the wood-men, who are said to have moved into the area from the south – page 205), and ‘Beorn Medwed’ leading ‘a troop of bears’.¹ Conspicuous by their absence are the Eagles; more startling to readers familiar with the published story is the absence of any mention of the dwarves, Thorin and Company having remained in the east and Dain not yet having entered the story. Since this battle is said to take place ‘in the west’, it is no surprise that most of the participants are those associated with what later came to be known as the Vale of the Anduin: goblins, wargs, wood-men, and Beorn-Medwed (from Chapters IV, VI, & VII), plus the wood-elves from deeper in Mirkwood (Chapters VIII–IX). Hence the great climactic battle in the original conception (maintained throughout the Second Phase manuscript)² did not take place at the Lonely Mountain at all but somewhere between the Misty Mountains and Mirkwood; only with the advent of the Third Phase did Tolkien reach the decision to transform the stand-off at the Mountain into a dramatic all-out battle, which in turn necessitated the addition of Dain’s five hundred dwarves.

Having ultimately decided upon a battle at the Lonely Mountain, initially Tolkien was in great uncertainty as to just who its participants would be. The name ‘Battle of Five Armies’ first appears in Plot Notes F, along with a marginal addition that seems to represent Tolkien’s attempt to decide on which of the forces present counted as an ‘army’:

1	2	3	4	5
woodelves,	dwarves, TN3	eagles,	men,	bears,	goblins	wolves
					6	7

From this, it seems rather that seven armies actually took part and the battle took its name from the five allies who oppose the forces of darkness (perhaps a distant precursor of the later Five Free Peoples who oppose Sauron in The Lord of the Rings: ents, elves, dwarves, men, and hobbits). We do not know for sure that ‘men’ here means only the Lake-men nor that ‘dwarves’ means Dain’s army and not just Thorin & Company’s heroic charge, but both seem likely. The plural in ‘bears’ implies that the idea of Beorn-Medwed’s troop of bears is still present, but by the time Tolkien came to write the Third Phase text describing Beorn’s role in the battle (which is then expanded upon in the typescript) the great were-bear had become solitary, as he remained in the published text. Neither the bats nor the sole hobbit are taken into account, apparently having negligible effect on the outcome; rather more surprisingly, the wizard is also omitted, while the ravens of the mountain (whom we might expect to battle the bats) make no appearance in any account of the battle, whether draft or outline.

Eventually Tolkien would determine that the five armies who gave the battle its name were the elves, the dwarves, the men, the goblins, and the wargs; the eagles and Beorn, while significant, did not really qualify as an ‘army’ per se.³ Still, it is interesting that between the forces listed in the last page of Plot Notes B, in Plot Notes F, and in the Third Phase draft, almost all those Bilbo had encountered on his journey out were projected to be caught up in the grand climactic battle: only the trolls (who had been turned to stone), the storm-giants (who luckily for all concerned – cf. Farmer Giles of Ham – seem to have few dealings with others or to come down from their mountains), Gollum (who, according to the sequel, actually belatedly did make the journey seeking ‘Baggins’ in hopes of recovering his Ring; cf. LotR.70–71), and the spiders of Mirkwood (who clearly never range far from their own territory) are absent.

Herefugolas & Wœlceasega

The idea of re-introducing some of the races and creatures who had appeared earlier in the story into the battle at the end (whether that battle took place at Erebor or west of Mirkwood), specifically the wolves and the eagles, may have a philological inspiration; if so it would be just another example of elements in The Hobbit arising out of Tolkien’s professional work as an Anglo-Saxon scholar (he was, after all, at the time holder of the Rawlinson and Bosworth chair as Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, one of the most prestigious academic posts in Old English in the world). In his edition of the Old English Exodus, a spirited retelling in heroic alliterative verse of the Biblical story, Tolkien includes notes on the words herefugolas (literally, ‘battle-birds’) and wælceasega (‘chooser of the slain’ i.e. carrion-picker).⁴ He notes the ancient and pervasive association in Old English heroic verse of wolves, ravens, and eagles (The Old English Exodus [1981], page 49), all eaters of carrion who are attracted to battlefields and all of whom he believed to be present in the scene thus described.⁵ In these notes, he is careful to distinguish the carrion-pickers (wælceasega – a kenning for ravens) from the closely related wælcyrige, a word better known in its Old Norse form, valkyrie, ‘derived partly from the actual carrion-birds of battle, transformed in mythological imagination; partly from the necromantic practices of female followers of Odinic magicians’ (ibid., page 50). There are certainly no such followers at the Battle of Five Armies (but see below), but the association of ravens with wolves and with eagles may have turned Tolkien’s mind back to earlier parts of the story and made him decide that rather than defusing one conflict only to follow it up with another, he could bring that traditional cluster of creatures together, along with others Bilbo had faced on his journey as enemies or allies to the Mountain itself, elevating the Siege into the great climactic battle of the book and expanding its scope beyond a merely local squabble into a great regional conflict that will decide the fate of that part of the world for years to come.

Bats as ‘Children of Morgoth’

Finally, there are the bats, whose presence adds a note of horror to the proceedings. Indeed, the verbal image of them darkening the sky ‘like a sea of locusts’ was so vivid that Tolkien began a black, white, and red drawing of the scene (Plate XII [bottom]), although he did not complete it. That these are no ordinary bats is clear – for one thing, real-world bats are shy around people and only bite when grabbed and panic-strickened (in fact, they act exactly like the bats inside Smaug’s lair, seen in Plate XI [top], who rather than swarming the solitary hobbit only bother him by accidentally making him drop his torch when he startles one). And of course blood-drinking ‘vampire’ bats are a very small sub-group (only three out of the eleven hundred known species of bats drink blood; two of those prey on birds, not mammals, and all three lap blood oozing from wounds rather than suck it) found only in Central and South America, certainly not part of the fauna of England (past and present) upon which Tolkien based almost all the other animals appearing in The Hobbit. Like the spiders of Mirkwood, the other conspicuous exception to Tolkien’s general practice, these are clearly not natural animals but evil creatures in animal form, corresponding to real-world bats as wargs do to wolves. They are in fact yet another of the Children of Morgoth, who nowhere else take center stage but had lurked around the edges of the legendarium from ‘The Lay of Leithian’ onward.⁶ For example, when Lúthien casts down Thû’s tower,

   bats unclean

went skimming dark through the cold airs

shrieking thinly to find new lairs

in Deadly Nightshade’s branches dread.

—lines 2805b–2807; HME III.254

and Thû himself flees in bat-form:

A vampire shape with pinions vast

screeching leaped from the ground, and passed,

its dark blood dripping on the trees;

. . .   for Thû had flown

to Taur-na-Fuin, a new throne

and darker stronghold there to build.⁷

—lines 2816–2818, 2820b–2822; HME III. 254–5.

Not long afterwards Lúthien herself assumes bat-form in order to sneak into Thangorodrim in disguise:

   a batlike garb

with mighty fingered wings, a barb

like iron nail at each joint’s end –

such wings as their dark cloud extend

against the moon, when in the sky

from Deadly Nightshade screeching fly

Thû’s messengers.

—lines 3402–3408a; HME III.278–9.

These references to Thû’s taking bat-form and Lúthien adopting the disguise of a great bat (specifically alluded to as an ‘evil fay’) also appear in the 1930 Quenta (HME IV.111–12), the form of the legendarium most closely associated with the original Hobbit, and were retained into the published Silmarillion (Silm.175, 178–9), in a text largely derived from the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion (HME V.295).

Within The Hobbit itself, the unnatural behavior of the bats (who although they do sometimes flock in great numbers are not carrion-eaters and thus would not follow an army as crows or ravens often did) was accentuated. Not only do they blot out the sun when they descend into the valley but ‘swirled about the heads and ears of elves and men’, adding to the chaos and confusion of the scene. Tolkien later (in the typescript, 1/1/67:5–6) added details that make the bats much more sinister, such as the bat-cloud’s ‘filling them with dread’ as it whirls above the defenders, or most notably later in the battle when the bats ‘fastened vampire-like on the stricken’.

One other example of bats allying with goblins to stage an attack very slightly postdates The Hobbit, having been written in December 1933, but is so nearly contemporaneous and so striking that it deserves special mention here. In the 1933 Father Christmas Letter, Fr. Christmas awakes to see a goblin looking in his window, despite the fact that that window faces out above a cliff several hundred feet high. He realizes that this ‘meant there were bat-riding Goblins about – which we haven’t seen since the goblin-war in 1453’. The goblins of the Father Christmas Letters are smaller than human-size (as are the elves whom we see in combat with them in this same letter’s illustrations), but still these must have been extremely large bats, larger than any existing in the real world. The bat-messengers of Morgoth in the legendarium, such as Thuringwethil (‘the messenger of Sauron’, whose name means ‘Woman of Secret Shadow’; Silm.178), were clearly of more or less human size, but these might have been were-bats rather than actual animals however enhanced since Lúthien can assume Thuringwethil’s form and flying ability by putting on her ‘bat-fell’ (literally a bat-skin or bat-hide). We cannot tell exactly how large the bats accompanying Bolg’s army were, but between the manuscript and the published book Tolkien did change the description of the bats in western Mirkwood from ‘big’ to ‘huge’ (Chapter VIII) and those fastening on the fallen became not merely bats but ‘great’ bats (Chapter XVII). At any rate, they were certainly not large enough for goblins to ride or to combat eagles (in either of which cases they would have counted as an ‘army’ in themselves), and mainly served to darken the sky (thus providing cover for the sun-shy goblins), to prevent effective arrow-fire from the elves (who are, after all, legendary archers), and disconcert and dismay the defenders – at all of which they succeeded all too well.

(iv)
‘The Halls of Waiting’

‘Farewell o gracious thief’ said Thorin. ‘I go now to the halls of waiting to sit beside my fathers until the world is renewed. The goblins have slain me. Since I leave now all gold and silver and go where it is of little worth, I wish to part in friendship with you, and would take back my words and deeds at the Gate.’

— page 679; cf. DAA.348.

This passage, with its interesting glimpse into the dwarven afterlife (or at least the dwarves’ beliefs about what would happen to them after death), was completely without parallel in the legendarium when it was first written. Nothing so marks the distance between Tolkien’s initial conception of the dwarves as set down in The Book of Lost Tales¹ and dwarves as presented in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as this disagreement over their fate. From very early on in the legendarium the divergent fates of Men and Elves were a key part in the story: humans who die depart from the world and do not return; their souls leave Arda (Creation) altogether, whereas elves travel to the Halls of Mandos in Valinor to wait until they can be re-incarnated. Dwarves initially fit into neither of these categories – the occasional references in The Hobbit to ‘Mortal Men’ and the extremely long lifespans indicated for dwarves (Thrain having gone away a hundred years ago, many of Dain’s band being hale and hearty veterans of a war that took place well before that, Thorin and Balin remembering events that the 153-year-old raven is too young to have experienced first-hand, the elvenking’s threat to imprison Gandalf/Thorin for a hundred years before questioning him again) show they are not exactly mortal, or at least have a lifespan far, far beyond human years. As all readers of The Lord of the Rings know, Tolkien had his own definitions of mortal and immortal: ‘Mortal Men’ are ‘doomed to die’ (LotR ring-verse) because they have a finite lifespan and eventually die of sheer old age, unlike dragons (who ‘live . . . practically for ever, unless they are killed’ – DAA.55; cf. page 72) and elves (on the battlefield ‘lay . . . many a fair elf that should have lived yet long ages merrily in the wood’ – DAA.344; cf. page 672). Tolkien’s elves are ‘immortal’ in that they do not die of age, disease, or natural causes, although they can be killed; as Tolkien says in his 1965 radio interview with Denys Gueroult, their life-spans extend to the habitability of this planet and ‘longeval’ might have been a better choice than ‘immortal’ as most understand the term.² And even if killed, elves are re-incarnated with the same memories, personalities, and (apparently) appearance, so that death is for them a temporary state, an interruption of their ‘serial longevity’ (Letters p. 267).

With the dwarves, in The Hobbit and subsequent works Tolkien created a third alternative. The early legendarium texts, in which dwarves play a relatively minor part, do not address the question of what happens after dwarves die, making Thorin’s dying words (written in December 1932 or January 1933) the first time this issue had been addressed. Oddly enough, several years later (circa 1937), when Tolkien inserted several references to the dwarves’ fate in various component texts that he hoped would go together to make up The Silmarillion (cf. HME V.167 & 202 and HME IV.284), his comments flatly contradict what had already been stated in The Hobbit and instead harken back to the Book of Lost Tales and 1930 Quenta. These new legendarium texts, written from an elvish point of view, suggest that dwarves are soulless and simply cease to exist upon death:

Dwarves have no spirit indwelling, as have the Children of the Creator [i.e., elves and men], and they have skill but not art; and they go back into the stone of the mountains of which they were made.

—‘(Later) Annals of Beleriand’, HME V.129.

Similar comments are made in the Lhammas (HME V.178), and the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion agrees that dwarves ‘return unto the earth and the stone of the hills of which they were fashioned’ (HME V.273). This is clearly an allusion back to Old Norse lore which we have already touched on back in the commentary following Chapter II (see Note 9 on page 109), particularly the fate of the dwarf Alvis in the Elder Edda, who is turned to stone at the end of the Alvíssmál. It also clearly cannot be reconciled with Thorin’s dying words, and it was not long before the Quenta Silmarillion text was altered to bring it into accord with the concept alluded to in The Hobbit. The revised QS text reads

the Noldor believed that the Dwarves have no spirit indwelling . . . and that they go back into the stone of the mountains of which they were made. Yet others say that Aulë cares for them, and that Ilúvatar will accept from him the work of his desire, so that the Dwarves shall not perish.

—HME V.146; emphasis mine.

This is remarkable as the first instance³ of the older legendarium being altered to match Bilbo’s story; the newly published book clearly has gained an authority over as-yet unpublished material within what had till then been the more venerable main lineage, just as The Lord of the Rings would later gain authority over both, requiring further work on The Hobbit that became the Fourth Phase and Fifth Phase (the 1947 Hobbit and 1960 Hobbit, respectively). Further development of the ideas suggested in Thorin’s dying speech appears in The Lord of the Rings’ Appendix A (‘Durin’s Folk’), where it is noted that ‘strange tales’ of the dwarves’ origins are told ‘both by the Eldar and by the Dwarves themselves’ (LotR.1108), one of which is the idea ‘that there are no dwarf-women, and that the Dwarves “grow out of stone”’ (LotR.1116) – so that what was once an authoritative statement is now dismissed as a ‘foolish opinion’ (ibid.). We also now meet with the story of Durin the Deathless (Durin I), who has been reincarnated five times (Durin II–VI) and has one remaining incarnation yet to come (‘Durin VII & Last’; LotR.1108 & 1117); although each body dies, his time between lives is referred to as ‘sleep’ (‘Till Durin wakes again from sleep’ – LotR.334).

A full explication of Thorin’s words, if any was needed, had to wait until the Later Quenta [circa 1951], which magisterially embraces and places into harmony all the previous discordant thoughts on the subject:

[The Dwarves] live long, far beyond the span of Men, and yet not for ever. Aforetime the Noldor held that dying they returned unto the earth and the stone of which they were made; yet that is not their own belief. For they say that Aulë cares for them and gathers them in Mandos in halls set apart for them, and there they wait, not in idleness but in the practice of crafts and the learning of yet deeper lore. And Aulë, they say, declared to their Fathers of old that Ilúvatar . . . will . . . give them a place among the Children in the End. Then their part shall be to serve Aulë and to aid him in the re-making of Arda after the Last Battle.

—HME XI.204.

With the exception of the passage about the dwarven spirits’ activity during the period after their deaths – which seems to me to harken back to glimpses of the busy swart-álfar in some Norse sources, such as Snorri’s Prose Edda – this corresponds exactly with Thorin’s words, and provides the final clue of what he and the others will be waiting for: a challenge truly worthy of their skill, the chance to rebuild the world (Arda Marred) the way it should have been.⁴

(v)
Bilbo’s First Poem

The decision to incorporate not one, not two, but three poems into the final pages of the story not only fleshed out the brevity of this part of the book (even with three poems inserted into the text, the final chapter is still one of the shortest) but marked a return to the lighter mood of the early chapters after the sadness of Thorin’s death. We are told that ‘it was very long before [Bilbo] had the heart to make a joke again’ (page 679), and although we are told in passing that Yuletide was ‘warm and merry’ at Beorn’s house (page 682), not until after the elves’ second song are we shown that Bilbo has fully recovered, making ‘many a merry jest and dance’ (page 690). The inclusion of these songs also re-asserts a stylistic feature of the first half of the book: prose interrupted at unpredictable but frequent intervals by verse – a highly characteristic feature of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that sets them apart from all Tolkien’s other work. Of the twenty-three poems in the published book, all but four occur in the first ten chapters, and only one of those chapters is altogether without a song (Chapter II).¹ The addition of the poems thus helps create a sense of ‘back again’ by paralleling a stylistic reversion with Bilbo’s return to familiar regions.

Of these three poems, the first is more or less a continuation in much the same spirit of the elves’ song in the trees back in Chapter III. The sense that the song has gone on all the time Bilbo has been away juxtaposed with its now incorporating details from Bilbo’s adventures highlights the mix of timelessness and time’s passing that is characteristic of Rivendell throughout The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; it also reinforces the message that life goes on. The next poem is notable chiefly for the exuberance of its opening stanzas (particularly the striking image of the lights in the night sky as ‘windows of Night in her tower’), which segue into the lullaby of the second half. But it is the third poem, ‘Roads Go Ever Ever On’, which is most notable: a celebration of both the allure of possibilities of unending travel and the joy of homecoming by someone whose journeys are now ending.

Roads go ever ever on,

Over rock and under tree,

By caves where never sun has shone,

By streams that never find the sea;

Over snow by winter sown,

And through the merry flowers of June,

over grass and over stone,

And under mountains in the moon.

Roads go ever ever on

Under cloud and under star,

Yet feet that wandering have gone

Turn at last to home afar.

Eyes that fire and sword have seen

And horror in the halls of stone

Look at last on meadows green

and trees and hills they long have known.²

Poems about roads and wanderlust and homecoming (‘there and back again’, as it were) are of course not uncommon: the very first line of the very first published poem of the legendarium began ‘I am off down the road’, and the same poem’s second half with ‘I must follow’ (‘Goblin Feet’, in Oxford Poetry 1915, page 64); the same volume contained fellow T.C.B.S. member G. B. Smith’s poem about a Roman road, probably Smith’s best poem and his most Tolkienesque piece:

This is the road the Romans made,

This track half lost in the green hills,

Or fading in a forest-glade

’Mid violets and daffodils.

The years have fallen like dead leaves,

Unwept, uncounted, and unstayed

(Such as the autumn tempest thieves)

Since first this road the Romans made.’³

A much closer parallel, however, to Bilbo’s poem is E. F. A. Geach’s ‘Romance’, which appeared in the same book as a reprint of ‘Goblin Feet’ (in fact, on the very next page following Tolkien’s poem):

Round the next corner and in the next street

Adventure lies in wait for you.

Oh, who can tell what you may meet

Round the next corner and in the next street!

Could life be anything but sweet

When all is hazardous and new

Round the next corner and in the next street?

Adventure lies in wait for you.⁴

Geach’s poem, while different in expression from Bilbo’s, nonetheless nicely anticipates its spirit and also that of two similar poems in the sequel, ‘The Road Goes Ever On’ (see below) and the hobbits’ walking song:

Still round the corner there may wait

A new road or a secret gate,

And though we pass them by today,

Tomorrow we may come this way

And take the hidden paths that run

Towards the Moon or to the Sun.

—The Lord of the Rings, page 91.

Similarly, Martin Simonson has pointed out how another of Tolkien’s fellow Georgian poets, Edward Thomas (sometimes known as ‘the English Frost’ from his friendship and affinities with his American contemporary, poet Robert Frost, who outlived him by almost half a century) seems to anticipate Tolkien’s poems in his own aptly-titled ‘Roads’:

Roads go on

While we forget, and are

Forgotten like a star

That shoots and is gone

The next turn may reveal

Heaven: upon the crest

The close pine clump, at rest

And black, may Hell conceal

Often footsore, never

Yet of the road I weary

Though long and steep and dreary

As it winds on forever⁵

In the end, whatever his inspirations for ‘Roads Go Ever Ever On’, once it was in existence it offered a prime example of Tolkien once again being his own most important source through creative recycling of earlier material. For the most significant poem that resembles ‘Roads Go Ever Ever On’ is of course Tolkien’s own ‘The Road Goes Ever On’, which essentially provides a third and final stanza to the earlier poem, recited by Bilbo when he finally takes to the road again (LotR.48) and also by Frodo when he at length sets off on his own adventure (LotR.86–7):

The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with eager feet,

Until it joins some larger way,

Where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say.⁶