The final group of texts associated with the 1960 Hobbit are concerned with distances and dates, particularly as they relate to time of travel between various points and to the phases of the moon. Primarily, Tolkien was concerned with four main points: (1) the date of Thorin & Company’s departure from Bag-End, (2) the date and place of their encounter with the trolls (with its associated phase of the moon), (3) the time of their stay in Rivendell (with its associated moon-phase on the eve of their departure), and (4) the timing of Durin’s Day. Through the changes incorporated into New Chapter I and New Chapter II, he had managed to bring some of these points into sufficient harmony to satisfy himself; the itinerary below beautifully lays out the specifics, along with many interesting hitherto unknown details about their journey. However, reconciling all of these points, and others that arose as a result of his revisions, ultimately proved impossible without even more radical alterations than he had already carried out, for reasons that will become evident in the material that follows.
These two sheets of single-spaced typescript, or three and a half pages of text [Ad.Ms.H.21–4], lay out with admirable clarity the day-by-day details of Bilbo’s first journey, from his rendezvous with the dwarves outside the inn in Bywater to their arrival in Rivendell. This document is later than New Chapter I and New Chapter II as they were originally typed, since the latter text is quoted from within it, but before some of the alterations and revisions to those documents.
The Hobbit.
Distances and itinerary of the journey from Bywater Inn to Rivendell. This has been altered to fit the more precise geography of the ‘Lord of the Rings’, the first Book of which covers the same ground. Also to make more credible and explicable Gandalf’s disappearance before the Troll-episode.
The maps in the L.R.TN1 have been taken as more or less correct and to scale. The scale of the large map is 1 centimetre to 50 miles. That of the Shire-map is not stated, but is approximately 9 times as large (1 millimetre to 5/9 of a mile). But note** in this map Bywater and its pool is somewhat too far east. There should be no houses of Hobbiton on the south side of ‘The Water’. Or rather none at the time of The Hobbit. At time of L.R. (‘Scouring of the Shire’) there should be a small block of ‘new houses’ to the right of the road-junction, ‘a mile beyond Bywater’; but none to the left.TN2 It was not more than a mile and a quarter from the footbridge just south of the Mill to the first houses of Bywater, among which was the ‘Green Dragon’ Inn.
The episode of the broken bridge (The Bridge of Mitheithel in L.R.) is inserted, to fit geography, which does not allow for any part of the East Road running beside a river. It also suggests, though this is not explained (unless perhaps in Ch. III)TN3 that Elrond exercised some supervision over the road and the territory between the Grey-flood and the Mountains. This makes it more credible that Gandalf should go in search of help, and should actually meet people from Rivendell. The Rangers are just mentioned, as a link with L.R. but not further explained.
As for the journey, before that point (the troll-meeting), the text of The Hobbit, Ch.II, obviously cannot be equated with the L.R., not even if based on the confused memories of Bilbo (who covered the road twice, to and fro).TN4 But fair speed of narrative is still needed, and even apart from competing with the L.R., no such detail as is given in the later book should be given. It is however impossible that Bilbo would have forgotten Bree, or that he should not have heard of it before:TN5 it was well-known in hobbit-history. Though he may not have heard the name of the Inn (which in the L.R. is evidently only known to and visited by people from Buckland and the neighbourhood of the Brandywine Bridge).
Bree is therefore just mentioned as a last stopping place before the real wilds began. The Last Inn (by the time of the L.R. called the Forsaken Inn: L.R. I 200)TN6 a day’s journey east of Bree is brought in to emphasize the growing desolation between Bree and the Grey-flood. But Weathertop is not mentioned; nor are the rivers Greyflood and Loudwater named.
Distances.
1. SHIRE. Junction of the Hill Road in Hobbiton and the main East Road to Brandywine Bridge: about 50 miles.
2. Brandywine Bridge to Bree (by road) 50 miles. +
+ called (L.R. I. 162) ‘not much [further] than a day’s riding’ but that refers to quick <journeys> on <unhampered> mounts.TN7
3. Wild. Bree Eastgate to ruined Last Inn about 20 miles
4. Last Inn to Weathertop (by road) 80 miles.
100 miles Bree to Weathertop.
5. Weathertop to Bridge of Mitheithel (by road) 110 miles
6. Bridge of Mitheithel to Ford of Bruinen about 80 miles
Bridge to point where Troll-fire seen: 20 miles.
From that point to Ford 60 miles.
7. Ford of Bruinen to entrance to Rivendell, about 22 miles.
The whole journey from Bywater in the Shire to Rivendell was about 412 miles. Time allowed: from morning of April 28 to evening of May 24th. That is, according to the Shire Calendar (followed but nowhere alluded to in The Hobbit),TN8 from Astron 28 to Thrimidge 24 inclusive: 27 days. That is an average of 16 miles a day. This is slow, but accounted for by leisurely pace at the beginning, and slow progress in the Wilds, especially before passing the Greyflood. But is clear that it could not be ‘June the first tomorrow’ (i.e. in Shire reckoning May/Thrimidge 30), as in text, p. 41, on the day of the troll-adventure. This is accounted for by Bilbo’s loss of reckoning, without the help of any calendar, during the 22 days of the journey up to that point. Hence new text: ‘Not what I call June, etc.’
| Itinerary. | |
| 1. April 28. | Spend night at the All-welcome Inn, at junction of the Northway and East Road (on Hobbiton side of Frogmorton). So-called because much used by travellers through the Shire, especially by dwarves on the way to Thorin’s home in exile, which was in the west-side of the Blue mountains (southern part, in Harlindon). None of this is mentioned in text, but The All-welcome Inn should be marked on the needed Shire-map in any new edition of The Hobbit.TN9 It has to be remembered that the East Road though it ran through the Shire was not the property of the hobbits: it was an ancient ‘royal road’, and they maintained the traditional duty of keeping it in repair and providing hospitality for travellers. This was of course profitable. It also provided their chief source of ‘outside news’. Dwarves were therefore not a rare sight on the East Road or in its inns (It would also appear that they were sometimes employed as roadmenders and bridge-repairers), but they seldom turned off it, and their appearance in a company in Bywater and Hobbiton must have caused a lot of talk.TN10 They cared very little about hobbits, and had little to do with them, except as a source of food in exchange for metal, or sometimes forged articles (knives, ploughshares, arrowheads, axe-heads and the like). The poorer sort (or Thorin’s folk in their earlier time of poverty) might accept employment, as masons and roadmakers for example. But they had the notion that hobbits were a slow stupid folk, with few artefacts, and simpleminded – because the hobbits were generous, never haggled, and gave what was asked. |
| 2. April 29. | Night at Whitfurrows. |
| 3. April 30. | Early start. They cross the Brandywine Bridge (about 12 miles from Whitfurrows) in the late afternoon, and camp by the road about 10 miles on from the B. Bridge. |
| 4. May 1. | They ride another 20 miles, taking their time, with longish halts and good meals (but only three), since there are still supplies ahead. |
| 5. May 2. | They reach Bree (another 20 miles). There they stay the night, and also purchase a good many supplies (including pipe-weed). |
| 6. May 3. | Early start. They enter the wild. They reach the Last Inn early in the evening, but are depressed at finding it deserted and go no further. [added in pencil: Another 20 miles.] |
| 7. May 4 to May 10: 7 days. | |
| Their progress is now very slow, owing to the badness and dangerousness of the road, esp. in the marshy region. They barely manage 12 miles a day, and by evening of May 10 have only reached Weathertop (80 miles from the Last Inn). They camp on its east side.TN11 This is not mentioned at all in text. | |
| 8. May 11 to May 18: 8 days. | |
| It was about 109 miles (for they started on the far side of Weathertop) to the Bridge of Mitheithel (over the Greyflood). By the evening of May 18 they had covered only 106 miles, and camped beside the road, on drier and rising ground, actually only about 3 miles from the Bridge, which could not be seen as it was in a deep narrow valley. In the night the weather took a bad turn. | |
| 9. May 19. | Wakened in the early morning by wind and rain, they make a hurried meal. Soon reach the top of the ridge and look down. Episode of the broken bridge. They get across Greyflood about 10.30 a.m. 3 miles. They make two foodless halts, at midday about 5 miles on from Bridge, and another (not mentioned in text) about 4. p.m.; and then go on till darkness. Say about 8.30 p.m. (sun-set about 8 p.m.) but the road was under dark trees.TN12 Ponies become more and more reluctant to proceed, so that in spite of improved road they are slow. Going from 1 p.m. to 4 and 4.30 to 8. (6 1/2 hours) they only cover about 17 miles.TN13 Episode of the Trolls occurs night of May 19, at a point about 25 miles from the Bridge. 55 miles to go to Ford of Bruinen. |
| 10. May 20. | Do not start until afternoon, say 3.30 p.m. Journey till 8 p.m. with one halt: about 4 hours in which they covered about 12 miles: 43 to Bruinen.TN14 |
| 11. May 21. | They go another [20 >] 18 miles. 25 from Bruinen. |
| 12. May 22. | ‘Fourth day from the Bridge’ (19, 20, 21, 22). The weather is clearing up, and the ponies are willing, but they are tired and short of food. They start late, and make a long midday halt. They have only covered about another 15 miles, when in the evening sunshine they see Bruinen gleaming. It is 10 miles away. They go no further that day, for they have passed out of the shadow of the Trollshaws, and feel safer. |
| 13. May 23. | They reach the Ford in the afternoon. Probably halting for midday meal on the west bank of the river, though that is not mentioned in text. Further progress is very slow in the heathland. They did not go on when the light failed, and halted when only about 10 miles further on. 12 miles to entrance to Rivendell. |
| 14. May 24. | Progress still slow and difficult. Nightfall was near when, after covering 12 more miles, they reached the head of the path down into Rivendell. |
The journey of 27 days is over
The typed text ends here about half-way down the fourth typescript page [Ad.Ms.H.24]. Beneath it is written the following penciled note:
But. It is said p. 62 that they stayed in Rivendell ‘at least 14 days’. On their last evening it is Midsummers eve if Shire calendar is used that is the Lithe of June. Next day after June 30th (our calendar July 1) On that day there was a broad crescent moon Sc. at or near FQuarter
The abbreviation ‘Sc.’, used here and elsewhere in Tolkien’s notes on phases of the moon, is short for scilicet, meaning ‘namely’ or ‘that is to say’.
As for ‘Lithe of June’, in the Shire Calendar three days fall between June 30th and July 1st. These ‘Summerdays’ are known as Lithe (the day after June 30th, known as the ‘June Lithe’ or ‘June 30+1’ as Tolkien expresses it in some of the notes below), Midyear’s Day (two days after June 30th, or ‘June 30+2’), and Lithe (the day before July 1st, three days after June 30th, or the July Lithe). Their presence, and that of the two days of Yule at midwinter (between December 30th and January 1st), enable the Shire Calendar to have twelve months of thirty days each (12 x 30 = 360, +5 midwinter/midsummer days).
TEXT NOTES
1 ‘L.R.’: That is, The Lord of the Rings. The ‘large map’ Tolkien refers to is the fold-out map of Middle-earth pasted in the back of The Fellowship of the Ring and also The Two Towers. The ‘Shire-map’ is the map labelled ‘A Part of the Shire’ appearing just after the Prologue (LotR.[30]). By ‘Book’ in the preceding paragraph Tolkien means of course Book 1, the first half of the first volume.
2 This sentence and the one before it (‘Or rather none . . . to the left’) are bracketed but not deleted; this passage may have been singled out because it relates to features of the locale that did not exist at the time of Bilbo’s story. See LotR.1041 & 1049. Note, however, that several such houses in fact appear on the Shire map printed in The Lord of the Rings, where in fact most of Hobbiton is situated south of The Water, with only a very few buildings (primarily those seen in Tolkien’s painting of The Hill: Hobbiton [DAA plate 1 (top), H-S#98]) north of the little river.†
† This feature is much clearer in the first edition, which prints this map in two colours (black for the river and houses, red for the roads).
3 An ink note over the parenthetical seems to read ‘no explanation <is> <there>’. See Tolkien’s note written on page ‘III.2’ just after the New Chapter III text broke off (Ad.Ms.H.33; see page 803), which may be Tolkien’s reminder to himself to insert such an explanation into the text of Chapter III, no doubt as something Bilbo would have learned at Rivendell had the recasting continued beyond this point.
4 Actually Bilbo covered it a third time after his spectacular departure from Hobbiton at the end of the Long-Expected Party, though by that time he had already written at least the earlier portions of his book; cf. LotR.247 for the journey and DAA.361 & LotR.119 for the book.
5 This sentence originally read ‘. . . impossible that Bilbo would have forgotten Bree, and very improbable that he had not heard of it before’.
6 The reference is to page 200 of volume one (The Fellowship of the Ring) of the first edition of The Lord of the Rings [‘L.R.’]; emphasis mine:
‘How far is Rivendell?’ asked Merry . . . The world looked wild and wide from Weathertop.
‘I don’t know if the Road has ever been measured in miles beyond the Forsaken Inn, a day’s journey east of Bree,’ answered Strider. ‘Some say it is so far, and some say otherwise. It is a strange road, and folk are glad to reach their journey’s end, whether the time is long or short. But I know how long it would take me on my own feet, with fair weather and no ill fortune: twelve days from here [Weathertop] to the Ford of Bruinen, where the Road crosses the Loudwater that runs out of Rivendell. We have at least a fortnight’s journey before us, for I do not think we shall be able to use the Road.’
—LotR.204.†
† = Page 200 of The Fellowship of the Ring in the first edition.
7 This passage is added in pencil in the top margin and marked as a note applying to this entry. The full passage cited here can be found on LotR.166.
8 Tolkien here introduces a new complication: the idea that all dates given in The Hobbit are really according to the Shire Calendar described in Appendix D of The Lord of the Rings (see LotR.1140–46). The Hobbit of course had not been written with the Shire Calendar in mind, as the latter had not yet been created when the story was published, and the decision here to adapt the story from one calendar to another would lead him into insoluble paradoxes: see section (iii) below, esp. Text Note 1 on page 828.
9 Added in left margin in pencil: ‘<Also> Thorin’s Dwelling’ – i.e., Thorin’s halls in exile in the Blue Mountains south of the Gulf of Lune should also appear. Since these lay well outside the Shire, Tolkien presumably means that they should be added to the large foldout map of Middle-earth.
10 This line harkens back to one of the texts of ‘The Quest of Erebor’, where Gandalf notes that ‘[Bilbo] did not know . . . the care . . . that I took so that the coming of a large party of Dwarves to Bywater, off the main road and their usual beat, should not come to his ears too soon’ (UT.335).
11 Here ‘east side’ was typed over an erasure; the phrase originally typed seems to have been ‘west side’.
12 The text here originally ran ‘and then go on till nearly night. Say about 8 p.m. (sun-set about that time). Ponies . . .’ All these changes are in ink, with ‘but the road was under dark trees’ in the left margin and marked for insertion at this point.
13 This sentence originally read ‘Going from 12.00 to 4 and 4.30 to 8.30 (7 1/2 hours) they only cover about 20 miles.’
14 The original version of the next few entries read:
| 11.May 21, 22. | 2 days. Each day they cover about 16 miles (36) and at night are only 7 from the Ford, which they cannot yet see. |
| 12. May 23. | In the morning after a short ride they see the Bruinen ahead and below them in another (less steep) valley. |
These were cancelled and replaced by separate entries for all three days giving a somewhat different account of their progress.
(ii)
Timetable from Rivendell to Lake Town
This single sheet of notes (Ad.Ms.H.13), written in ink on the back of an unused page taken from a ‘blue book’ (student’s exam booklet),TN1 extends the timeline and itinerary from Rivendell through Mirkwood to Thorin & Company’s departure from Lake Town. It thus forms a suitable companion piece to the more formal ‘Distances and Itinerary’ given as section (i) above, which focuses on the first stage of Bilbo’s journey (Bag-End to Rivendell), the part covered by New Chapter II and the fragment of New Chapter III. However, it is probably much earlier: all the page references here are to the first edition (i.e., pre-1951), and dates are given in the Gregorian calendar, not the Shire Calendar developed during work on The Lord of the Rings. Christopher Tolkien notes (private communication) that this same kind of paper was used for drafting portions of The Lord of the Rings pre-1944. So these notes may date from as early as the Fourth Phase. But since annotations with ball-point pens show that if so he was still carefully considering and updating them long afterwards, in the period of the 1960 Hobbit, and since they deal with the same concerns as all the material in this chapter, here seems the natural place to give them.
Hobbit Time table is not very clear.TN2
[Written in top margin in dark ink:]
Mirkwood is too small on map it must be 300 miles across
Adventure with Trolls night of 31 May/1 June. reach R’dell appar. about June 3rd. Leave on Midsummer morning: say June 24.
Long days after still climbing p. 66.
On map R’dell is about 50 miles direct to top of the range or pass. Make it more? going <will be> slow and actual distance possibly twice as far as forward distance. Say 100 at 10 miles per day, 10 days. They therefore reach Cave of Goblins on night of July 4th. Summer is getting on down below – haymaking p. 67.TN3
Adventure with Goblins takes 3 days. night before night before last. p. 102. They assemble therefore on July 7th
Adv. with wargs night July 7/8.
Reach Beorn afternoon July 8
Depart 3 days later. July 11th (p. 141)
Take 4 days riding to the Forest Entrance (p. 142)
Enter Forest therefore 15 or 16 July.
Ages and ages p. 148 They reach Enchanted River (which is about 1/2 way to Elvenking’s hall). And after they have gone on again about as long leaf falls suggesting autumn is coming on p. 153. The Forest is largely dark and they are laden – later carrying Bombur. But must allow at least an average of 12 miles per day. Say 12 days to Enchanted River. 144 miles. July 28th.
12 days to adventure with Spiders.
144 miles. August 9thTN4
[total] 288 [miles]
Weary long time in King’s Hall. say 3 weeks.TN5 Aug 30th. Reach Lake Town about Sept 2/3.
9 days gap
We know Bilbo’s Birthday Sept 22 was at Lake Town. They were there about 24 days. Birthday would come after 10 days. Leaves about October 6th?
Reach Lake town on 8th. Stay 10 days. Sept 18.
______________________________
Rivendell must be further off.TN6 Reach Cave about July 9th. Therefore enter Forest 21 July. Forest journey must be 300 miles (150 each) and take about 25 days. 15 August. [cancelled: leave King’s Halls 5 Sept.]
[Text continued in left margin:]
Taken prisoner on 16 August. Escape <9th> Sept.TN7 Reach L.T. 12th Sept. B. <illegible>TN8 Sep 22. Leave <about> 6th of October.
[Added in margin in green ink:]
Use Hobbit Calendar as in L.R.TN9
In this time-table, Tolkien attempts to retroactively apply a scale to the Wilderland map published in The Hobbit but is not able to do so consistently. If the distance from Rivendell to the Cave of the Goblins atop the Misty Mountains pass (about an inch and a half on the Wilderland map)TN10 is 50 miles (as the crow flies, 100 miles of actual travel), then the route Thorin & Company wound up taking through Mirkwood (three and a half inches) cannot equal 300 miles but is more like 175 miles (the last part of it in barrels), meaning the dwarves averaged only about six miles a day before their capture. The large Middle-earth map,TN11 while different in scale, faithfully reproduces the proportions of the earlier map in their overlapping sections: here their route through the dark forest measures about 31/2 cm (roughly 13/8 inches), which again equals about 175 miles by the scale Tolkien decided on in the ‘distances’ typescript given as section (i) above. By contrast, Gimli in The Lord of the Rings as one of the Three Walkers managed to travel roughly the same distance in only five days (albeit as an epic feat under much better conditions, spurred on by both competition from Man and Elf and the desperate necessity to rescue his friends).
Or to pick a less extreme example, Dain and his company of dwarves from the Iron Hills arrive within a very short time – clearly only a matter of daysTN12 – from the time Thorin sent Roäc to summon them. The Iron Hills are not shown on the Wilderland Map in The Hobbit, being off the edge of the map to the east, and thus more than one inch [= about 35 miles] away. We are not told exactly where Dain’s halls are within the Hills, but since the Hills themselves are clearly nearby, the Wilderland Map leaves it plausible that Dain is easily within the distance of a rapid forced march. But applying this part of The Hobbit’s story to The Lord of the Rings immediately creates difficulties. According to the Middle-earth Map in The Lord of the Rings, we can see that at their nearest point, the Iron Hills are double the distance from the Lonely Mountain that Rivendell is to the top of the mountain-pass; at their furthest point they are seven times that distance. Since we know the latter distance to be at least fifty miles, then Dain had to travel somewhere between a hundred to three hundred and fifty miles to come to Thorin’s aid (the latter if coming from the far eastern side of the Hills), after having first taken at least some time to gather and equip his troops. Furthermore the fact that Thorin & Company are heavy-laden cannot be a significant factor, for we are told within The Hobbit itself of Dain’s army that
They had brought with them a great store of supplies; for the dwarves can carry very heavy burdens, and nearly all of Dain’s folk, in spite of their rapid march, bore huge packs on their backs in addition to their weapons.
—DAA.337.
Fonstad observed that doubling the scale on the Wilderland map found in The Hobbit would resolve many difficulties (Atlas of Middle-earth, page 97), and it is clear that Tolkien himself had arrived at the same realization long before from the note he added at the top of this manuscript page. That would not however have fixed the problem of the speed of Dain’s travel versus the slowness of Thorin’s journey; only by redrawing the map to make Mirkwood much, much wider could he have resolved the problem of how long it took Bilbo and his companions to travel though the forest. Here then we come to an example – not the last – of a solution (doubling the map scale to make Thorin & Company’s travel time more credible) that would in turn create a new problem (doubling the distance Dain’s five hundred dwarves travel in much less time), something that proved endemic in the 1960 Hobbit (see below) and no doubt played a part in the project’s abandonment: a story written without a specific timetable simply could not in the end be fitted within a fairly narrow time frame without radical alteration of either the existing maps or the time-references and description of scenes within the published text.
TEXT NOTES
1 Actually, a large (8½ by 5½ inch) fragment of such a page, with ‘Prifysgol Cymru’ (i.e., University of Wales) in the upper left corner and the header ‘DEGREE EXA[mination]’. Tolkien worked for many years as an external examiner for other universities, and one of the side benefits was the opportunity to accumulate a supply of scrap paper from unfilled booklets.
2 This line is written in pencil at the top of the page.
3 Above ‘haymaking’, Tolkien has written harvest in red ball-point pen. This is a reference to Bilbo’s gloomy prediction regarding their slow rate of travel: ‘down below . . . haymaking is going on and picnics. They will be harvesting and blackberrying, before we even begin to go down the other side at this rate’ (first edition, page 66; DAA.101).
4 The original numbers in this passage are overwritten in darker ink, but seem to have originally read
Say 10 days to Enchanted River. 120 miles. July 26th.
12 days to adventure with Spiders.
144 miles. August <5th>
The final date is largely obscured by the overwriting but seems to be ‘5th’, where one would have expected to see instead ‘August 7th’.
5 Note that here an imprisonment that had once been meant to last for months (from fall to spring – cf. Plot Notes A) has now shrunk to a mere three weeks – just enough time, one would think, for the dwarves and Bilbo to recover from their privations before becoming restless to press on with the next stage of their journey, and the same amount of time he now intended for them to spend in Lake Town.
6 The rule across the bottom of the page preceding this sentence indicates that Tolkien had reached a decision and that what followed stood apart from and would modify what came before (in this case, supplanting their dates).
7 The number for the day of the month has been overwritten in ink, obscuring whatever date originally stood here.
8 The illegible word here might be presents; it is certainly not ‘birthday’.
9 This final instruction added to the page is written with a green ball point pen and thus dates from relatively late in Tolkien’s life (post-LotR), probably added when he revisited this material as part of his work on the Fifth Phase/1960 Hobbit. It would also soon involve Tolkien in difficulties over the story’s chronology; see section (iii) below, specifically Text Note I on page 828.
10 Here I use the map appearing as the back endpaper of the second edition (thirteenth printing, 1961), the earliest printing of the map available to me, since my reference copy of the first edition (3rd printing, wartime edition of 1942) lacks the maps. The proportions, however, hold true to any copy of the book including the map; cf. DAA.[399], which is reduced by about one-third, so that from Rivendell to the Mountain is about one inch, the distance across Mirkwood roughly two inches, and so forth.
11 Here I use the fold-out map in the first edition, first printing The Fellowship of the Rings as my standard for reference.
12 We know Dain’s trip was very rapid, since less than a month passed between Durin’s Day (the beginning of the last moon of autumn) and Bilbo’s arrival at Beorn’s Hall on the far side of Mirkwood in time for Yule.
(iii)
The Timeline Revisited (moons taken into consideration)
These two sheets [Ad.Ms.H.19–20] contain three pages of text, the second sheet having been rotated ninety degrees and folded in half to divide it into two side-by-side half-pages: .20a (left) and .20b (right); the writing comes to an end about halfway through the last half-page. The text is written in ink and legible for the most part but a few lines have faded into illegibility; I indicate illegible words and passages with ellipses (. . .). Several sentences in this text are bracketed by Tolkien, but here I think it was not because of dissatisfaction with the bracketed material but rather for emphasis, to highlight those passages and make those points stand out for when he came back to put this material to use in the intended continuation of the Fifth Phase Hobbit. In order to avoid confusion with brackets added editorially, I have substituted double parentheses ((thus)) for authorial brackets in this section. Also, to improve readability, I have replaced some marks Tolkien used as shorthand: thus ... has been replaced by ‘therefore’, > by ‘to’ and in some places a slash (/) separating two numbers by ‘to’ where I thought the results might otherwise be mistaken for a fraction (e.g., ‘3/4 days’ is here printed as ‘3 to 4 days’ where that was Tolkien’s intent). I have left the following of Tolkien’s abbreviations in place: ‘H’ for The Hobbit, ‘L.R.’ or ‘LR’ for The Lord of the Rings, ‘SC’ for Shire Calendar (for the month, day, and day of the week), and ‘SR’ for Shire Reckoning (for the year).
This text clearly postdates the ‘Distances and Itinerary’ document given as section (i), since it refers to it and to the rewritten version of Chapter II (New Chapter II), but it was probably written at about the same time.
The Hobbit
The times and distances of the journey from Hobbiton to Rivendell are in great confusion, and it is difficult to make sense of them. But it is important to do so, if possible, owing to the L.R., which covers same ground in more detail. The ‘moons’ too are out of order – but this cannot be tolerated, since Durin’s Day and the incidence of New Moon is integral to the plot.
Something, of course, could be done by attributing inaccuracy to Bilbo’s memory. ((This would need a note in some future edition.))
The calendar used must evidently be the Shire Calendar ((though that is not and need not be alluded to)).
Fixed points that cannot be altered are the following
1. By calculation from H p. 35 [added: 21 April] ‘100 years ago last Thursday’ – since weekday-date relation did not change in SC. – The Unexpected Party occurred on Wed. 27 April SC, 1341 SR Start of journey therefore 28 April (morning) SC.TN1
2. By L.R. Map distance from Hobbiton to Rivendell by road was approx 412 miles. From Troll-place to Ford of Bruinen [50 >] 60 miles; ((from Ford to head of path down into Rivendell 20 miles: 80 miles from Trolls to Rivendell)).
3. Company left Rivendell on Midsummer Day (= in SC. June 30 + 2) The Moon on the previous day (Lithe: June 30 + 1) was a broad silver crescent: therefore 3 to 4 days old. NM must have been June 27/28.
NB This fits tolerably well with later narrative. For if NM occurred on June 28 it would next occur on July 23 [29, 30, Lithe, Mid Year, Lithe] = 5 days + 23 = 28.TN2 <Next> since all months have 30 days: on Aug. 21, on Sept. 19, October 17th. There is probably time for the events after Bilbo’s Birthday (Sep 22) in Lake Town before the discovery of the Key-hole – Durin’s DayTN3
___________________________________________________________
It is said (p. 62) that the Dwarves &c. stayed at least 14 days in Rivendell. As they departed on Midsummer’s Day, they must therefore have arrived on June 17th <about> at earliest, say, June 15 [added: or late on 17].
Question is (1) how did they take April 3 days, May 30 [days], June 15/17 [days] = 48/50 days in journey of 412 miles = an average rate (on ponies mostly) of only 8 1/2 miles (or a little more or less) per diem?
At any rate on day before the Troll-adventure (it being 80 miles only from that point to Rivendell) it cannot have been only May 30th. ((Bilbo says ‘tomorrow it will be June 1st’)).
The itinerary worked out in ‘revision’ of The HobbitTN4 is well enough in itself but it brings the company to Rivendell in 27 days on May 24 without regard to Moons!
? Something must be said about halts etc. esp. Bree, Last Inn ((later The Forsaken Inn)).
<Ponies> very reluctant after Bree & Last Inn. <most of the time> they had to be led.
The Bridge of <?Mitheithel> is broken . . . It was here . . . Ponies had be led . . .TN5
As for moons: if the moon was new on June 28 it would be New on June 1st, approx. but is said to be waning p. 42 and yet get . . . <soon> after dark like a NM or early crescent.TN6
? Say young and thin or *wandering ((because of the <hurrying> clouds))
If, however, they arrived in Rivendell <by> June 15/17 after a journey of 80 miles (slow and wary, and in the heathland very slow) of say 6 days – not much more than 13 miles a day! – they would be at Troll-place on June 9/11: 8 to 10 days after NM. June I and the moon would have <appeared> full – be in the wane – but would rise late at night!
The journey from Trolls to Bruinen needs lengthening in some way.TN7
Here we see problems introduced in the work Tolkien had already accomplished in the Fifth Phase begin to complicate the revision process, something that no doubt helped contribute to the Fifth Phase’s abandonment. Here the specific problem is that by bringing Bilbo to Rivendell two weeks earlier than had been the case in the original Hobbit, he has taken a problem already present in the text and made it worse. Specifically, if the moon is a thin crescent in the evening sky on Midsummer Eve – that is, just a few days after the New Moon – and if they spent two weeks in Rivendell (DAA.93), then it would have been a gibbous moon – that is, a moon a few days past fullTN8 but more than half – at the time of their arrival. Bilbo sees just such a moon on the night of the troll-adventure, but that takes place several days before their arrival, when the moon should actually have been Full or rapidly approaching Full (and hence not ‘waning’). And while Tolkien had at one point considered having time pass differently or not at all within elven enclaves (cf. HME VII.353–5, 363–5, and ‘Note on Time in Lórien’ in HME VII.367–9), he had firmly rejected this idea by the time of the published Lord of the Rings. It was an important part of Tolkien’s legendarium that the story took place in the imagined past of the real world – as he wrote to Forrie Ackerman, ‘The Lord of the Rings . . . takes place in the Northern hemisphere of this earth: miles are miles, days are days, and weather is weather’ (JRRT to Ackerman, June 1958; Letters p. 272). And, one might add, moons are moons; cf. Tolkien’s modest boast, in his interview with Denys Gueroult that ‘I don’t think the moons rise or are in the wrong place at any point in [The Lord of the Rings]’ (1965 BBC radio interview), a feat he only achieved during the book’s revision by drawing up many-columned sheets listing where each character was on each day of the story.TN9 No such charts exist for The Hobbit, since its narrative never split into multiple storylines following different sets of characters, but in the Fifth Phase Tolkien decided to treat its text with the same rigour, and the materials given below in sections (iv) and (v) probably represent the rough notes from which he could have generated such a chart correlating date, moon-phase, and action.
TEXT NOTES
1 That is, since the story is purportedly set down by Bilbo, it must use the Shire Calendar. Unfortunately, Tolkien failed to notice that Thursday, 21st of April is a date that cannot occur in the Shire Calendar, where the 21st always falls on a Friday (see Appendix D of The Lord of the Rings). It is probably for this reason that Fonstad silently shifts the Unexpected Party from Wed. 27th April and their departure on Th. 28th April to 26th April (= Wednesday) and 27th April (= Thursday), respectively in The Atlas of Middle-earth (page 98). Thus preservation of the ‘comic precision’ (see page 750) of ‘a hundred years ago last Thursday’ and ‘Gandalf Tea Wednesday’ on the one hand and the much later decision to adapt the story to the Shire Calendar on the other set up a paradox: either Bilbo’s adventure began on Thursday the 28th or the story was using the Shire Calendar, but both could not be true.
2 All these dates were shifted by one day, the passage having originally read:
. . . if NM occurred on June 27/28 it would next occur on July 22/23 [28, 29, 30, Lithe, Mid Year, Lithe] July 1 = 7 days + 21 = 28.
More importantly, here and elsewhere in this material (see pages 826, 827, 832 & 834) Tolkien is treating the moon’s cycle as if it lasted exactly twenty-eight days, rather than the actual twenty-nine-and-a-half of the real world’s lunar cycle. My thanks to Tolkienian astronomer Kristine Larsen for drawing this to my attention.
3 Below this sentence Tolkien drew a line across the page, as if marking the beginning of a new section – i.e., shifting from the timetable after their departure from Rivendell back to their arrival and the events preceding it.
Note that the reference to a new moon on 19th October and the statement that ‘There is probably time’ between Bilbo’s birthday (three days after the previous New Moon, which fell on 19th September just before the start of autumn) and ‘the discovery of the Key-hole’ suggest that Tolkien here is thinking of Durin’s Day as falling on the first new moon of autumn, as in the original manuscript, rather than on the last new moon before the start of winter as in the published book. This would have solved the problem of Dain’s too-rapid relief expedition and Bilbo’s amazing rate of progress on the first stage of the return journey, but it would also have required the re-writing of several descriptive passages vividly conveying the rapid onset of winter; see Text Note 2 following section (iv) below.
4 This is a reference to section (i) above [Ad.Ms.H.21–4], which therefore already existed when Tolkien drafted these further notes (cf. also the specific reference a few lines earlier to ‘412 miles’, the exact tally given in the Distances document (page 817).
Tolkien is pointing out here that by bringing Thorin & Company to Rivendell two weeks earlier than in the published book he has replaced one anomaly in the phases of the moon with another, so that the waning moon glimpsed on the night of the troll-adventure could not be at the right time of its cycle on Midsummer Eve to be a crescent moon, as required by the scene in which Elrond reads the moon-letters. See Text Note 6 below.
5 This passage of five lines (the last three on Ad.Ms.H.20a and the first two of Ad.Ms.H.20b) is very faint, but taken with the preceding paragraph the general sense is clear. Tolkien is searching for reasons to make their journey slower and delay their arrival in Rivendell to something closer to the original book (that is, about three weeks after the date given in New Chapter II and the Itinerary), and here suggests longer stays at Bree and the Last Inn, and the distress of their ponies in the wild, which in turn would lead to a slower rate of progress on the road after leaving Bree-land.
6 Tolkien’s point is that if the moon were a few days past new on Midsummer’s Eve, then the time specified for the troll-encounter (whether May 19th or the day before June 1st) cannot have a waning moon – that is, one past full. In addition, such a moon would not rise until well after dark (since the full moon rises at the same time that the sun sets), and the published book specifies that ‘it was nearly dark’ (i.e., the sun had not yet set) when ‘a waning moon appeared’ – characteristic of a waxing, not a waning, moon. His proposed solution, given in the next line, is to convert the moon Bilbo glimpsed that night into a waxing moon (‘young and thin’) or else evade the problem by simply describing it as ‘a wandering moon’ and avoid specifying its phase at all. The former would require the troll encounter to take place about thirty days before Elrond’s discovery of the moon-runes the night the moon had just passed the same phase at Midsummer. The latter is the solution he adopted in the 1966 Hobbit (DAA.66).
7 Actually, it is the journey from the Hoarwell to the trolls that needs lengthening, if The Hobbit is to agree with The Lord of the Rings; cf. Fonstad, The Atlas of Middle-earth page 97 and the tailnote to section (iv) below.
8 Technically a gibbous moon can be either waxing (between First Quarter and Full Moon) or waning (between Full Moon and Last Quarter), but the text is specific here that it was the latter, a waning moon.
9 These charts are now (since 1997) part of the Tolkien collection at Marquette (Additional Tolkien Manuscripts, Fourth Installment, Envelope 6, items 2, 3, & 4).
This single page of notes [Ad.Ms.H.17] shows Tolkien looking not backwards from Rivendell to the troll-encounter but ahead to the other crucial moon-scene, that of the new moon on Durin’s Day. Once again, as with section (iii) above, Tolkien seems to be treating Durin’s Day as if it fell in the first month of autumn rather than the last; whether this is inadvertence or a deliberate decision which he nowhere expressed in writing cannot now be determined.
The ‘broad crescent’ moon on Midsummer eve in Elrond’s house fits very well with Durin’s Day in Chapter XI (2nd edn p. 221) – acc. to Shire Calendar Midsummer even was the June Lithe = June 30 + 1
A broad crescent would indicate that moon was approaching First Quarter therefore New Moon would be about June 26 (say) in Shire Calendar. Five [added: calendar] months later it would bring New Moon about Oct 19. This fits well enough with such time indicators as there are. They had been in Lake Town a week (+ 2 or 3 days?) when Bilbo had his cold – from LR we know that <this> was his birthday = Sep 22 (SC).TN1 They were about another week in L. Town before Thorin spoke of going. Say Sep 29. Their departure was not at once. say Oct 5. Two days rowing (Oct 7) and then their journey to the Mountain and the search for the Door could well take more than 12 days, but could be accomplished in that time.TN2
As for <earlier> Moon. Just before Troll adventure . . . moon was waning. It had not <?gone> (it was said not to have risen) as they arrived at Rivendell. A fortnight must be allowed from NM to FM or LQ to NM
__________________________
FQ. FM. LQ.| |NM
|NM7 FQ7 O7 LQ|TN3
The final lines of these notes just begin to explore the calculations which Tolkien developed further in section (v); see below. This little chart provided Tolkien with two months’ worth of moon-phases for him to work out the problem bedeviling him, and in fact nicely demonstrates that the period between the Last Quarter moon and New Moon, during which Bilbo met the trolls almost a week’s journey away from Rivendell, could not be followed three weeks later by a moon that had advanced only about a week in its cycle (that is, now being somewhere between the NM and FQ on the second line). Tolkien’s earlier solution (in New Chapter II and ‘Distances and Itinerary’) to move their arrival in Rivendell back from early June (circa June 7th in the original conception) to at least two weeks earlier (May 24th) also pushes ‘midsummer’ from around June 21st (modern calendar) to two days after June 30th (Shire Calendar).TN4 This does give the moons in their right phases but forces the company to stay a full month in Elrond’s House and fails to address the compatibility problem with The Lord of the Rings of why Bilbo got from the river to the trolls so quickly when Strider, the best hunter and tracker of his time, took so long. It also ignores the problem that a moon between last quarter and new cannot be seen in the early evening hours (as specified in the troll-encounter) but would only rise long after midnight.
TEXT NOTES
1 For the banquet where Bilbo had the cold (from his soaking in the Forest River while barrel-riding), see DAA.252. There is no mention in The Hobbit that this was Bilbo’s birthday; that detail, and the date (22nd September) both come from the opening chapter of The Lord of the Rings (LotR.42). Tolkien’s statement in these notes that this banquet came seven to ten days after their arrival in Lake Town (repeated from section ii above) is contradicted by Bilbo in his Farewell Speech, where Mr. Baggins is explicit that both his arrival in Esgaroth and that banquet took place on the same day, his fifty-first birthday. Even without this, circumstantial evidence from within The Hobbit itself would place the banquet much earlier than halfway through their stay: Bilbo was already sneezing in the early morning hours before their arrival in Esgaroth (DAA.242), so the ‘three days’ that his ‘shocking cold’ lasted are presumably the first three he spent in Lake Town (DAA.252); if these three days included his birthday then by that reckoning alone their arrival could have come no earlier than 19th September and the banquet no later than 25th September.
2 That is, Tolkien here intends for Durin’s Day to fall on 19th October. This avoids the cramming together of too much incident in the last weeks of the year (see page 481) and could be achieved with the change of a single word on page 64 in the second edition (cf. DAA.96), although had he carried out a thorough revision Tolkien would also have had to deal with the various comments about the rapid approach of winter in Chapters X, XI, & XIII. I have found no explicit statement from Tolkien about any decision regarding shifting Durin’s Day. As with the two competing Thror-Thrain/Thrain-Thror genealogies, Tolkien may have become confused by a single divergent passage in the text – in this case, one near the beginning of Chapter IV that still (until its post-authorial correction in the fourth edition of 1995) referred to Durin’s Day as occurring in the first month of autumn. But it seems extraordinary that he would have been guided by this passing remark, which he nowhere draws attention to in the Fifth Phase (1960) material, and not by the statement on a page he repeatedly cites from the end of Chapter III, literally divided from the other in the second edition only by a turn of the page.
3 These abbreviations stand, in proper sequence, for New Moon (NM), First Quarter (FQ), Full Moon (FM or the symbol O), and Last Quarter (LQ). The superscripts represent Tolkien’s notation of the number of days to allot for each phase of the moon in its twenty-eight day monthly cycle. The significance of the vertical lines (|) seems to be to mark off the phase he wishes to highlight (i.e., the period of the waning moon between last quarter and new moon).
4 Tolkien noted that astronomically the Shire Calendar was about ten days off from our modern calendar – that is, that a date given as Mid-summer in the Shire Calendar, the actual solstice, would correspond to about 21st or 22nd June in our Gregorian calendar (LotR.1144).
This single sheet of paper [Ad.Ms.H.15–16], the final piece of manuscript associated with the Fifth Phase or 1960 Hobbit, is covered with rough notes on both sides. The page has been folded in half and rotated ninety degrees so that it forms four half-pages: .15a (left), .15b (right), .16a (verso left), and .16b (verso right). The first half-page is written in red ball-point ink; the remaining three half-pages are in pencil, which unfortunately in some places has become illegible through the speed of the writing and its faintness after more than four and a half decades. As before I replace illegible words and passages by ellipses ( . . . ) and expand contractions where necessary to avoid confusion but have let stand the following authorial contractions: ‘L.R.’ or ‘LR’ stands for The Lord of the Rings, ‘SR’ for Shire Reckoning, and ‘SC’ for Shire Calendar.
<Waning> Moon June 1. sc. 4 past full
June 8. 2 before LQ.
June 15. 3 before NMTN1
NM June 28
LQ June 21
FM June 14
FQ June 7
NM May 30
1 <Ride> sleep in Shire . . . stay a night . . . in Bree.
. . . to F. Inn. <stay> . . . <night>
lose way in the Marshes <?Hay> ran <?low>
. . . <in> road is <?awash> . . . <least>
<Mitheithel> Bridge is broken (by Trolls.) . . .TN2
This marks the end of the ink text at the bottom of half-page Ad.Ms.H.15a. The top of the right-hand portion of the same page, Ad.Ms.H.15b, begins a new section or sub-section with its own header. From here on out the text is written in pencil, which is difficult to read throughout and becomes wholly illegible towards the end.
Hobbit [added:] Time table of journey will not work out?
• Time indications in text.
It was Wednesday when dwarves came to Bag End.
p. 35. Thrain went away 100 years last Thursday on 21st April. Since week-day relative to date did not change in Shire Calendar, 21st April was a Thursday in 2941 (= 1341 SR) the year of the Visit of the Dwarves. Therefore the U.P. occurred on 27 April (Wed.) 1341 SR. The journey to Erebor started on Thursday 28th April.TN3
p. 41 Bilbo says it is June 1st tomorrow at tea time on the [day >] before the adventure with the Trolls. *It would be better to make this correct if possible (rather than assume B. was out of his reckoning) . . . . that in Shire Calendar [they >] The Company had now been 32 days on the road (April 29, 30) 2; (May 1–30) 30. They had still a long way to go before Rivendell. They set out on the afternoon of June 1. After that the following time/distance <indications> occur:
p. 42 a waning moon was in the sky on the evening of May 30. On the eve of Midsummer (= Lithe June 30 + 1) and the eve of their departure from Rivendell, there was a broad silver crescent
p. 56 No singing first day = afternoon to night of June 1. nor next day June 2, nor day after June 3. 3 1/2 days journey. ‘One afternoon’ – gap of time <undefined> – they came to Ford of Bruinen. p. 58 that Day began to fail. it was very dim because moon had not risen.
<His> plan that they were supposed to reach the head of path down into Rivendell during early night of the day in which they had crossed the Ford (in afternoon). As they were going . . . wearilyTN4 and were in difficult country they could not have done more than 10–12 miles. In L.R. it was not made clear how far Ford was from RivendellTN5 (along the river course). But in the LR map 1 centimetre = 50 miles the distance from Ford to head of path down is 4 mm = 4/10 of 50 miles = 20 miles.
Alter p. 56 One afternoon to One fine morning [p. 57 they rode slowly on >]TN6 and adjust narrative to . . . long day lasting on into early night. <Or> <made> a camp in the <heather> above Rivendell.
At p. 58/11 They went on until moonless twilight overtook them, and they lay that night under the bright stars. The next day was failing But <then> perhaps . . . <the journey> too . . .TN7
p. 62 They stay in Rivendell at least 14 days. Therefore if they left on SC Midsummer = June 30 + 2 they arrived not earlier <than> June 16 night. How could they spend 16 days on way from Troll-shaw to Rivendell? On LR map it is 1 cm 2 mm from Troll place to Ford & 20 miles on beyond = [75 >] 60 + 20 = 80. Thus = [less than 5 miles a day >] exactly 5 miles on good days
If the Moon was waning sc. at least a day or two past full on May 30 it would be approx. same . . . on June 28. But if it were <really> waxing <for> [. . . it might be only 20/21days from June 1 & LQ to NM. <so> New Moon. >] There <might> be no moon at all after . . .TN8
FQ= half moon [7 days] = <moon> before <full> [7 days] (. . . FM O
LQ [7 days] = TN9 We must start from p. 63TN10 which fits (by chance!) fairly well . . . the New Moon would appear about Oct 19th. (SC)
The moon is a broad silver crescent therefore about halfway to FQ, <only> 3 to 4 days from NM. It is June 30+1 therefore NM was about June 28/(27) There would therefore be a NM about June 1 but <it was> called a waning moon p. 42 [And the >] <New Moon> . . . ?
Or we must shorten the time of the journey from the Trollshaw to Rivendell. LQ on night of the Troll-adventure NM. [June 28 Therefore LQ. >] Waning moon = only just going off <full> . . . therefore say on May 28
If N.Moon was on June 27. [LQ was on June 20. The F.M. >] FM was June 12/13
<Waning moon> must be . . . about June 15–16
They arrived Rivendell on June 16
But they <must> . . . <taken> . . . <?Say> in 4–6 days <?also> for journey from Trollshaw <?to> <?River>
<This> <is> <from> LQ <but> <?has> . . . to Waxing.
<?Just> say <wandering> for waning . . . <?having> <after> <?appeared> . . .TN11
In this final section of the 1960 Hobbit material, we see Tolkien returning once again to the time indicators in the published text to see if setting them out would suggest a solution to the tangle. Highly significant, therefore, is the lightly pencilled message written alongside the title – Time table of journey will not work out? – signaling as it does his realization that the ends he wanted to achieve could only come at the cost of an even more radical revision and recasting than he had already drafted for New Chapters I and II, and that New Chapter II would itself need to be re-done. And even with this, he had still not addressed the problem of matching the dwarves’ relatively swift trip from river to trolls (a matter of hours) with Strider’s urgent journey over the same ground (taking the better part of a week).
TEXT NOTES
1 This line is cancelled; I retain it here because it continues and clarifies the sequence of the two preceding lines.
2 The final line on this half-page, roughly three words following ‘(by Trolls)’, is illegible.
3 Tolkien is correct that days of the week are fixed to specific days of the month in the Shire Calendar year after year, but here he still has not noticed that since April (Astron) always begins on a Saturday, the 21st and 28th can never fall on a Thursday. U.P. = Unexpected Party.
4 This partially illegible sentence originally read ‘As they were walking (evidently <illegible> the ponies) – that is, Tolkien seems to have fixed on the idea that Bilbo and the dwarves were walking, not riding, at this point, which could help delay their arrival in Rivendell.
5 This is because Frodo, our point of view character for this section of the story, is unconscious when he travels that distance in The Lord of the Rings; Book I ends with his collapse at the Ford and Book II begins with him awakening already safe in Rivendell some days later. He of course covers this ground again on his return journey, but compression in the denouement of a very long story prevents the inclusion of much detail of that trip other than a few vivid encounters along the way.
6 The text of the first and second editions read ‘The afternoon sun shone down; but in all the silent waste there was no sign of any dwelling. They rode on for a while, and they soon saw that the house might be hidden almost anywhere between them and the mountains’. This passage was recast for the third edition to address the concerns raised in the 1960 Hobbit, although not in the same words: ‘Morning passed, afternoon came; but in all the silent waste there was no sign of any dwelling. They were growing anxious, for they saw now that the house might be hidden . . .’ (DAA.88 & 90).
7 Only a single short word, starting with a capital ‘T’, follows ‘too’, but I cannot make out what it might be.
8 The last word following ‘after’ is illegible and probably unfinished, but the gist of the sentence is clear: a new crescent would set shortly after sunset, leaving the night dark.
9 Here I think Tolkien is reminding himself of the rather confusing terminology whereby ‘quarter’ is applied to a half-moon (because it is a quarter of the way through its twenty-eight day cycle), and also which way the crescent faces when the moon is waxing and waning, for purposes of description.
10 The allusion is to the line ‘The moon was shining in a broad silver crescent’ on midsummer eve – cf. DAA.95.
11 I cannot make out anything in the last two lines following this point except the words ‘June 15’ and the final phrase ‘ – not . . . waning’.
See also section (iii) above for Tolkien’s decision to simplify his problem by replacing ‘waning’ with ‘wandering’, a change he carried out in the 1966 third edition.
In all these notes and compilations on distances, dates, and moons, we see Tolkien attempting to take The Hobbit, a story written out of one storytelling tradition of long ago and far away, where details are only included when dramatically relevant or aesthetically effective and things work according to their own narrative logic,1 and make it into a story like The Lord of the Rings, which is written in a very different tradition, where each mile of each day of each character’s journey can be followed on a map and plotted on a timetable. Tolkien himself is largely responsible for creating the latter,2 and making it the standard by which modern fantasies are judged, but he also excelled at writing the former, a traditional mode going all the way back to the Middle Ages and beyond. There is a qualitative difference between the narrator’s admission that ‘I don’t know what river it was’ (DAA.67) or ‘I don’t know where he came from, nor who or what he was’ (DAA.118) and Gandalf’s well-informed speculation about the whereabouts of the lost palantíri (LotR.621), or his partial knowledge about ‘older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world’ (LotR.327).
The Hobbit harkens back to an older tradition, where forests seem endless, a period of captivity is a weary long time rather than twenty-one days (August 9th–30th), dragons and goblins destroyed Gondolin ‘many ages ago’ (rather than exactly 6,472 years before to the very day),3 and it is the passing of seasons rather than the counting of days that mark the passage of time. Bilbo’s is a world where the moon only just past new can rise after the sun sets (an astronomical impossibility) rather than becoming visible in the west just after the sun goes down (DAA.307–8, 312),4 because that’s how Tolkien envisions the scene, and the chill moonlight falling on the now-quieting scene of devastation sets just the right note to follow the noise and flames and flashes of light and sudden violence of the immediately preceding pages.
If The Lord of the Rings is, as some have claimed, the ‘Book of the Century’, then The Hobbit is more than the book that made it all possible. A major contribution to the Golden Age of children’s literature, it is a rare example of a work that transcends age boundaries in its readership, like Grahame’s The Golden Age, Carroll’s two Alice books, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and very few others. It is, like Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in relation to his Ulysses, or Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark in relation to Alice in Wonderland, a case of a masterpiece overshadowed by another masterpiece on a grander scale from the same author. Had Tolkien never completed The Lord of the Rings, he would still be remembered as one of the great fantasy authors. The achievement of the sequel has eclipsed the accomplishment of writing The Hobbit itself, but we should not deny the distinct appeal and charm of the original book. In the end, I think it was more than just the intractable nature of the problems facing him in recasting the book that caused Tolkien to abandon the 1960 Hobbit. Rather, he decided to trust his friend’s judgment that what he was doing was ‘wonderful, but not The Hobbit’. That is, he came to recognize that The Hobbit was more than The Lord of the Rings writ small, more than a ‘charming prelude’: indeed, a work deserving to stand on its own merits.
And with that realization, aside from the ‘Sixth Phase’ of 1965/66 forced upon him by his publishers – which he took as the opportunity for correction of some errors and the incorporation of some fixes he had settled upon during his work on the 1960 Hobbit – Tolkien’s decades-long work on The Hobbit finally came to an end.