The goal of this chapter’s revision was not so much to flesh out the rather sketchy account of Bilbo and the dwarves’ journey from Bag-end to Rivendell, although it does do that, as to make it fit with the later, more detailed description of travelling over some of that same territory (between Bree and the Last Homely House) in The Lord of the Rings. As the late Karen Wynn Fonstad observed in The Atlas of Middle-earth [1981]:
The Troll’s fire was so close to the river that it could be seen ‘some way off,’ and it probably took the Dwarves no more than an hour to reach; whereas Strider led the Hobbits north of the road, where they lost their way and spent almost six days reaching the clearing where they found the Stone-trolls. Lost or not, it seems almost impossible that the time-pressed ranger would have spent six days reaching a point the Dwarves found in an hour . . . the two stories seemed irreconcilable.
—Fonstad, page 97.
As the ‘Timelines and Itinerary’ show, Tolkien was well aware of this problem, and Christopher Tolkien discusses in The Return of the Shadow (HME VI.203–4) how the 1960 Hobbit revisions would have redressed this dilemma. The fact that the 1966 third edition changes failed to do so is, I think, a persuasive bit of evidence that Carpenter is correct in stating that Tolkien did not have the 1960 material before him when he made those final changes to the text. Instead, he was almost certainly working from his memory of this material: the third edition introduces the stone bridge found in The Lord of the Rings, but since it is intact in this final authorized edition of The Hobbit (DAA.66) its presence only exacerbates the problem of the discrepancy in the time their respective journeys took.
In addition to more diminishment of Bilbo’s character – the hapless hobbit now cannot even keep track of what month it is – the new revisions firmly place Bilbo in Frodo’s world: to mentions of the Shire and Hobbiton and Moria in New Chapter I are now added another mention of Moria and references to the Prancing Pony at Bree and to the Rangers operating in the area around Rivendell (in fact, hunting down monsters like the trolls). The bridge across the Mitheithel (Hoarwell) upon which Glorfindel leaves a token for Strider (LotR.217) now appears in The Hobbit, but broken by trolls; clearly Elrond must have restored it sometime in the intervening years (see Tolkien’s note on Elrond’s maintenance of the road at the end of the New Chapter III fragment, on page 803).1
Small wonder, in the face of such specificity, that statements by the narrator such as ‘I don’t know what river it was’ (second edition page 42) vanish in the 1960 revision. In fact, all first person references by the narrator are excised from the text, along with all direct (second person) addresses by the narrator to the reader; Tolkien had come to feel that these were a stylistic flaw and removed them throughout.
What is surprising is that, even with all these changes, large sections of the story remained intact and indeed unaltered. For example, Tolkien had stated in 1954 that ‘I might not (if The Hobbit had been more carefully written, and my world so much thought about 20 years ago) have used the expression “poor little blighter”,2 just as I should not have called the troll William’ (JRRT to Peter Hastings, Sept 1954; Letters p. 191), yet aside from some additions at the beginning of the encounter the troll’s dialogue survived virtually untouched in this extensive 1960 recasting of the chapter, and the now-inappropriate names William (or Bill), Bert, and Tom were all retained.
One other long-standing point is resolved in this revision: the vexing question of why Elrond could read the writing on the swords but Gandalf could not. Now we are told that the runes are obscured by old dried goblin-blood; not until they are cleaned can the letters be seen. Presumably their hosts perform this task for them during their stay, and the scene of Elrond’s viewing the swords in Chapter III would probably have been slightly recast to incorporate a presentation of their newly polished swords.
We cannot know what else Tolkien would have added to the story, had the 1960 Hobbit or Fifth Phase continued beyond this point. Bilbo could not have met Arwen at Rivendell, for we know she was at that time in the middle of a decades-long visit to her grandparents, Galadriel and Celeborn, in Lórien. But did Bilbo’s lifelong friendship with Aragorn (then a ten-year-old living in Rivendell with his mother and being raised by Elrond) begin during his visit there, either on the outgoing or the return trip? Did Legolas Greenleaf fight in the Battle of Five Armies? Would more light have been cast upon the storm-giants of the Misty Mountains, or the source of Beorn’s enchantment, or would we have learned a little more about the elusive Radagast? Would the Spiders of Mirkwood have been made more horrific, à la Shelob, and the wood-elves absolved of all blame in their treatment of the dwarves? Would Balin’s visit in the Epilogue include some mention of his plans for Moria? And most importantly, would the Ring have been presented in more sinister terms throughout, with hints of its corruptive influence even on one such as Bilbo?
We will never know the answers to any of these questions. According to Christopher Tolkien, when his father had reached this point in the recasting he loaned the material to a friend to get an outside opinion on it. We do not know this person’s identity, but apparently her response was something along the lines of ‘this is wonderful, but it’s not The Hobbit’. She must have been someone whose judgment Tolkien respected, for he abandoned the work and decided to let The Hobbit retain its own autonomy and voice rather than completely incorporate it into The Lord of the Rings as a lesser ‘prelude’ to the greater work. When he briefly returned to it in 1965 for the third edition revisions, he restricted himself in the main to the correction of errors and egregious departures from Middle-earth as it had developed (e.g., the policemen of Chapter II; DAA.69) and left matters of style and tone alone. Thus the work begun in a flash of inspiration thirty-five years before – ‘in a hole in the ground lived a hobbit’ – saw periodic revisioning through several distinct phases over a period of thirty years (1930 to 1960), until in the last decade of its author’s life it reached the final form we know and love today.