This book offers for the first time a complete edition of the manuscript of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, now in the Special Collections and University Archives of Marquette University. Unlike most previous editions of Tolkien’s manuscripts, which incorporate all changes in order to present a text that represents Tolkien’s final thought on all points whenever possible, this edition tries rather to capture the first form in which the story flowed from his pen, with all the hesitations over wording and constant recasting of sentences that entailed. Even though the original draft strongly resembles the published story in its general outlines and indeed much of its expression, nevertheless the differences between the two are significant, and I have made it my task to record them as accurately as possible.
Since the published story is so familiar, it has taken on an air of inevitability, and it may come as something of a shock to see how differently Tolkien first conceived of some elements, and how differently they were sometimes expressed. Thus, to mention a few of the more striking examples, in this original version of the story Gollum does not try to kill Bilbo but instead faithfully shows him the way out of the goblin-tunnels after losing the riddle-contest.1 The entire scene in which Bilbo and the dwarves encounter the Enchanted Stream in Mirkwood did not exist in the original draft and was interpolated into the story later, at the typescript stage, while their encounter with the Spiders was rewritten to eliminate all mention of a great ball of spider-thread by means of which Bilbo navigated his way, Theseus-like, through the labyrinth of Mirkwood to find his missing companions. No such character as Dain existed until a very late stage in the drafting, while Bard is introduced abruptly only to be killed off almost at once. In his various outlines for the story, Tolkien went even further afield, sketching out how Bilbo would kill the dragon himself, with the Gem of Girion (better known by its later name, as ‘the Arkenstone’) to be his promised reward from the dwarves for the deed. The great battle that forms the story’s climax was to take place on Bilbo’s return journey, not at the Lonely Mountain; nor were any of the dwarves to take part in it, nor would Thorin and his admirable (great-) nephews die.
Tolkien was of course superbly skilled at nomenclature, and it can be disconcerting to discover that the names of some of the major characters were different when those characters were created. For much of the original story the wizard who rousts the hobbit from his comfortable hobbit-hole is Bladorthin, not ‘Gandalf’, with the name Gandalf belonging instead to the dwarven leader known in the published story as ‘Thorin Oakenshield’; the great werebear Gandalf & Company encounter east of the Misty Mountains is Medwed, not ‘Beorn’. Other names were more ephemeral, such as Pryftan for the dragon better known as Smaug, Fimbulfambi for the last King under the Mountain, and Fingolfin for the goblin-king so dramatically beheaded by Bullroarer Took. On a verbal level, the chilling cry of Thief, thief, thief! We hates it, we hates it, we hates it for ever! was not drafted until more than a decade after the Gollum chapter had originally been written, and did not make its way into print until seven years after that; the wizard’s advice to Bilbo and the dwarves on the eaves of Mirkwood was ‘keep your peckers up’ (rather than the more familiar ‘keep your spirits up’ that replaced it), and even the final line in the book is slightly different.
Yet, for all these departures, much of the story will still be familiar to those who have read the published version – for example, all the riddles in the contest with Gollum are present from the earliest draft of that chapter, all the other dwarves’ names remain the same (even if their roles are sometimes somewhat different), and Bilbo still undergoes the same slow transformation from stay-at-home-hobbit to resourceful adventuring burglar. In synopsis, the draft and the published book would appear virtually identical, but then Tolkien explicitly warned us against judging stories from summaries (‘On Fairy-Stories’, page 21). With as careful and meticulous an author as Tolkien, details matter, and it is here that the two versions of the story diverge. Think of this original draft as like the unaired pilot episode of a classic television series, the previously unissued demo recordings for a famous album, or the draft score of a beloved symphony. Or, to use a more literary analogy, the relationship between this draft and the published book is rather like that between Caxton’s incunabulum Le Morte D’Arthur and the manuscript of the same work, discovered in 1934, known as the Winchester Malory. In both cases, it is the professionally published, more structured form of the book which established itself as a classic, while the eventual publication of something closer to what the author first wrote reveals a great deal about how the book was originally put together, what its author’s intentions were, and more about its affinities with its sources, particularly when (in the case of The Hobbit) those sources are Tolkien’s own earlier unpublished works. That Tolkien himself in this case was responsible for establishing the polished final text does not obscure the fact that here we have two different versions of the same story, and rediscovering the earlier form casts new light on the familiar one. In the words of Tolkien’s classic essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’,
Recovery . . . is a re-gaining . . . of a clear view . . . We need . . . to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of . . . familiarity . . . Of all faces those of our familiares [intimates, familiars] are the ones . . . most difficult really to see with fresh attention, perceiving their likeness and unlikeness . . . [T]he things that are . . . (in a bad sense) familiar are the things that we have appropriated . . . We say we know them. They have become like the things which once attracted us . . . and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them.
—OFS.53–4.
This need for ‘Recovery’ is particularly apt in the case of The Hobbit, which in recent years has come to be seen more and more as a mere ‘prelude’ to The Lord of the Rings, a lesser first act that sets up the story and prepares the reader to encounter the masterpiece that follows. Such a view does not do justice to either book, and ignores the fact that the story of Bilbo’s adventure was meant to be read as a stand-alone work, and indeed existed as an independent work for a full seventeen years before being joined by its even more impressive sequel. I hope that this edition may serve as a means by which readers can see the familiar book anew and appreciate its power, its own unique charm, and its considerable artistry afresh.
‘In a Hole in the Ground’
The story is now well known of how, one day while grading student exams, Tolkien came across a blank page in one exam book and on the spur of the moment wrote on it ‘in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’. This scrap of paper is now lost and what survives of the earliest draft is undated, but Tolkien recounted the momentous event several times in interviews and letters; by assembling all the clues from these recollections into a composite account, we can establish the chronology of composition with relative certainty.
Auden
All I remember about the start of The Hobbit is sitting correcting School Certificate papers in the everlasting weariness of that annual task forced on impecunious academics with children. On a blank leaf I scrawled: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ I did not and do not know why. I did nothing about it, for a long time, and for some years I got no further than the production of Thror’s Map. But it became The Hobbit in the early 1930s . . .
—letter of 7th June 1955 to W. H. Auden;
Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, p. 215.
Harshaw
Two . . . English boys . . . asked Mr Tolkien how he happened to write The Hobbit. He replied that he was in the midst of correcting 286 examination papers one day when he suddenly turned over one of the papers and wrote: ‘At the edge of his hole stood the Hobbit.’ As he later tried to think just who and what this Hobbit was, his amazing story developed.
—circa September 1956; Ruth Harshaw,
‘When Carnival of Books Went to Europe’,
ALA Bulletin, February 1957, p. 120.
BBC TV
The actual beginning – though it’s not really the beginning, but the actual flashpoint I remember very clearly. I can still see the corner of my house in 20 Northmoor Road where it happened. I had an enormous pile of exam papers there. Marking school examinations in the summertime is very laborious and unfortunately also boring. And I remember picking up a paper and actually finding – I nearly gave an extra mark for it; an extra five marks, actually – there was one page of this particular paper that was left blank. Glorious! Nothing to read. So I scribbled on it, I can’t think why, In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
—Tolkien in Oxford, BBC Television, 1968.
Plimmers
It all began when I was reading exam papers to earn a bit of extra money. That was agony. One of the tragedies of the underpaid professor is that he has to do menial jobs. He is expected to maintain a certain position and to send his children to good schools. Well, one day I came to a blank page in an exam book and I scribbled on it. ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’.
I knew no more about the creatures <sic> than that, and it was years before his story grew. I don’t know where the word came from. You can’t catch your mind out. It might have been associated with Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt.2 Certainly not rabbit, as some people think. Babbitt has the same bourgeois smugness that hobbits do. His world is the same limited place.
—‘The Man Who Understands Hobbits’,
Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, early 1967;
Daily Telegraph Magazine, 22nd March 1968, pages 31–32.
Carpenter
I am not sure but I think the Unexpected Party (the first chapter) was hastily written before 1935 but certainly after 1930 when I moved to 20 Northmoor Road.
—undated; quoted in Humphrey Carpenter,
Tolkien: A Biography, p. 177.
It is clear from these accounts that Tolkien did not remember the exact date, but he did retain a strong visual image of the scene. Two specific facts emerge: it was summertime, and the place was his study at 20 Northmoor Road. From this we can determine that the event took place no earlier than the summer of 1930, since it was early that year when the Tolkien family moved into the house from their former residence next door at 22 Northmoor Road (Carpenter, p. 113; Christopher Tolkien, Foreword to the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Hobbit [1987], p. vi).3
This dating was challenged by Michael Tolkien, the author’s second son (1920–1983), who stated in his unpublished memoirs that he clearly recalled his father standing with his back to the fire in his study at 22 Northmoor Road and saying that he was going to start telling his sons ‘a long story about a small being with furry feet, and asked us what he should be called – then, answering himself, said “I think we’ll call him a ‘Hobbit’.”’ (quoted in Christopher Tolkien’s Foreword, p. vi). Father John Tolkien, the eldest son (1917–2003), was equally definite that the story began before the move from 22 to number 20 Northmoor Road: ‘The first beginnings of the Hobbit were at 22 Northmoor Road; in my father’s study, the room to the left of the front door as one looks at the house. I remember clearly the wood block floor, mats etc . . . [T]here were no family readings for us all in 20 Northmoor Road, where we moved early in 1930. I was 12+ & I think could read for myself! The room with its many bookshelves was not conducive to that sort of thing. As far as I remember the readings were always in the study . . . The Hobbit started with a couple or so chapters, to which if we were lucky a couple or more would be added at the next Christmas . . . I went to boarding school in September 1931 and so although very close to the family, all sorts of stories may have been told which I cannot date.’4 Carpenter, writing in 1976, notes that Michael and John Tolkien ‘are not certain that what they were listening to at that time was necessarily a written story: they believe that it may well have been a number of impromptu tales which were later absorbed into The Hobbit proper’ (Carpenter, p. 177).
In support of his claim for an earlier origin of the book, in his guest-of-honor speech to the Tolkien Society’s Annual Dinner in May 1977 Michael described the stories he and his brothers and sister had written in imitation of The Hobbit.5 Michael recounts that these stories were populated by characters like Philpot Buggins, Ollum the giant frog, blokes (hobbits), smellers (wolves), the dwarves Roary, Borey, Gorey, Biffer, Trasher, Gasher, Beater, Bomber, Lammer, Throw-in (the chief dwarf), and young Blow-in and Go-in; Albert Bolger the troll, joshers, snargs, and the wizards Kimpu, Mandegar, and Scandalf the Beanpiper. Michael Tolkien dated his own contributions to this family apocrypha to 1929, when he was nine years old (Michael Tolkien, May 1977 speech; see also Christopher Tolkien, Foreword, p. vi), and thus argued that The Hobbit must have been begun by that date.
While it is quite likely that many elements incorporated into The Hobbit came from family lore predating the book (see for example my commentary following Chapter VII), and The Hobbit was undoubtedly influenced by the other stories Tolkien read his children in the ‘Winter Reads’ (which, despite Fr. John’s comment, continued to at least 19376 and probably beyond), Michael’s own account provides evidence that the stories he describes could not have preceded the actual writing of the book; too many of the names are parodies of forms that only emerged at a later stage, well into the composition of the manuscript. For example, Scandalf the wizard and Throw-in the head dwarf are clearly modelled on Gandalf and Thorin – but for the first two-thirds of the story the wizard was named Bladorthin and for more than half of it the chief dwarf is named Gandalf, not Thorin; these two characters seem not to have received their now-familiar names until around 1932. Furthermore, Tolkien himself is quite clear on the point that he made up the name ‘hobbit’ spontaneously at the moment of writing it down – that is, that the word itself emerged in a written text.
The most specific proof may be found in a commentary Tolkien wrote on the text for the dust-jacket for The Hobbit and sent to his publisher accompanying a letter dated 31st August 1937, in which he remarked ‘My eldest boy was thirteen when he heard the serial. It did not appeal to the younger ones who had to grow up to it successively’ (cf. Letters p. 21). Since John Tolkien was born on 16th November 1917, the events Tolkien is recalling here could not have taken place before the end of 1930; furthermore, Tolkien notes that ‘the younger ones’ (Michael was born 22nd October 1920 and Christopher 21st November 1924 and were thus respectively about nine and five in the summer of 1930, while Priscilla was still an infant, having been born in 1929) showed little interest at the time. Michael’s account not only contains inconsistencies but directly contradicts both the evidence of the manuscript and the accounts set down by his father, both at the time of the book’s publication and many years later. Given these facts, we should feel fully justified in accepting the word of the author recorded closer to the event over the childhood memories of a member of the original audience set down some 45 to 50 years after the fact.
If we grant a starting date of no earlier than the summer of 1930, is there any other evidence to help us narrow the field? In fact there is, in the form of letters and memoranda set down by C. S. Lewis, Stanley Unwin, Christopher Tolkien, and Tolkien himself. Early in 1933, Lewis wrote the following to his old friend Arthur Greeves:
Since term began I have had a delightful time reading a children’s story which Tolkien has just written. I have told of him before: the one man absolutely fitted, if fate had allowed, to be a third in our friendship in the old days, for he also grew up on W. Morris and George Macdonald. Reading his fairy tale has been uncanny – it is so exactly like what we [i.e., Lewis and Greeves] wd. both have longed to write (or read) in 1916: so that one feels he is not making it up but merely describing the same world into which all three of us have the entry. Whether it is really good (I think it is until the end) is of course another question: still more, whether it will succeed with modern children.
—letter of 4th February 1933 from C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves;
They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves,
ed. Walter Hooper [1979], p. 449.
The ‘term’ Lewis refers to is the spring, or Hilary, semester at Oxford, which traditionally starts on or near St Hilary’s Day (13th January). Two points in Lewis’s letter that particularly stand out are that he refers to Tolkien’s story as having just been written, and that he criticizes the ending of the tale as not being as good as the rest of the story. From this we can conclude that Tolkien probably finished writing the Ms. over the 1932 Christmas break (that is, December 1932–January 1933) and, as was his habit, loaned it to his friend for criticism and critique right away. Furthermore, what Lewis read was a complete story, not a large fragment of one lacking the final chapters – not only would he have surely commented on being handed a tale that broke off at the most dramatic moment, but he specifically singles out that portion of the tale for criticism.
This interpretation of events wins additional support from another contemporary document, the Father Christmas letters. Every year, Tolkien’s children received a personal letter from Father Christmas (the English Santa Claus) describing all the adventures Father Christmas and his companion, the North Polar Bear, had had since the last letter. Most of these adventures deal with various disasters which have prevented Father Christmas from sending all the presents the children had asked for (North Polar Bear’s falling down stairs on top of packages, mixing up labels, and the like), but the letters for 1932 and 1933 represent a dramatic shift in tone. In them, the world of Father Christmas and his friends suddenly becomes very like that of The Hobbit with the introduction of goblins to the series, right down to details such as characters becoming lost in goblin-caves, being rescued by an ancient and magical bear, and finding themselves besieged by hordes of goblins – whom they defeat with a combination of Father Christmas’s magic, the combat prowess of a great bear, and the aid of their elven allies the Red Gnomes. What’s more, in the striking picture of Father Christmas, Cave Bear, and a leanish North Polar Bear exploring the goblin-caves that accompanied the 1932 letter (Plate VI [top left]), we can even see both Gollum and Smaug make a cameo appearance: Smaug appears on the wall of the first passageway to the right, while Gollum can be seen peeking around a corner of the same passage, near the picture of the mammoth (see Plate VI [detail]). At least four goblins lurk in the passages to the left, while the middle column depicts goblins on drasils, the Father Christmas Letters’ equivalent of the goblin wolf-riders encountered in the Battle of Five Armies.
The presence of the Cave-Bear, Elves, and a magician7 at the battle with the goblins argues that the final chapters were in progress at the time this letter was written and not, as Carpenter suggests, only set down shortly before the submission of the book to Allen & Unwin. Carpenter believed that
. . . shortly after he had described the death of the dragon, Tolkien abandoned the story.
Or to be more accurate, he did not write any more of it down. For the benefit of his children he had narrated an impromptu conclusion to the story, but, as Christopher Tolkien expressed it, ‘the ending chapters were rather roughly done, and not typed out at all’. Indeed they were not even written in manuscript. The typescript of the nearly finished story . . . was occasionally shown to favoured friends, together with its accompanying maps (and perhaps already a few illustrations). But it did not often leave Tolkien’s study, where it sat, incomplete and now likely to remain so. The boys were growing up and no longer asked for ‘Winter Reads’, so there was no reason why The Hobbit should ever be finished.
—Carpenter, pp. 179–80.
Unfortunately, this will not do. Certainly there was a pause in the writing – in fact, several pauses; see ‘A Note on the Text’, below. But there is no evidence that the story was abandoned in an unfinished state, and a good deal of evidence that it was not. One is the notable fact that none of the people to whom the manuscript was lent before its publication8 made any comment on the story’s having been incomplete – remarkable in itself if we believe with Carpenter that the final quarter of the book was missing. Carpenter’s account confuses the issue further by stating that ‘there was a completed typescript in existence (lacking only the final chapters) in time for it to be shown to C. S. Lewis late in 1932’ (Carpenter, p. 177); in fact, as we have seen, Lewis not only read but specifically criticizes the ending. Furthermore, Lewis’s letter to Greeves makes it clear that Lewis was not reading Tolkien’s story over the Christmas break – in the paragraph preceding the one already cited, he tells his friend ‘In the way of reading [,] Lockhart [i.e., John G. Lockhart’s Life of Sir Walter Scott] kept me going through the whole vac. [vacation] and I am still only at Vol. 8’ (They Stand Together, p. 448); the next paragraph introduces the new topic of what he had been reading ‘Since term began’ – i.e., The Hobbit.
More evidence appears in the letter thirteen-year-old Christopher Tolkien wrote to Father Christmas in December 1937, shortly after the book’s publication, where he says
He [JRRT] wrote it ages ago, and read it to John, Michael, and me in our winter ‘reads’ after tea in the evening; but the ending chapters were rather roughly done, and not typed out at all; he finished it about a year ago . . .
—quoted in Christopher Tolkien,
Foreword, p. vii.
While Carpenter evidently interpreted this to mean that the final chapters had not been written at all but existed only in a hasty outline (what I have dubbed Plot Notes B and C), I suggest that we take young Christopher’s remarks literally and that by ‘roughly done’ he meant that the conclusion of the book existed only in his father’s handwritten manuscript, not typescript; then ‘about a year ago’ (in fact, in the autumn of 1936) Tolkien had returned to the text and at last typed out the final section in order to submit it to the publisher.
Two additional pieces of evidence from the period immediately following upon the book’s publication help us complete our chronology. In a memorandum made by Stanley Unwin after a meeting with Tolkien on Wednesday 27th October 1937 to discuss a possible follow-up to the success of The Hobbit,9 Unwin notes in passing that ‘He mentioned that THE HOBBIT took him two or three years to write because he works very slowly.’ This detail coincides perfectly with the dates from our other evidence – i.e., that the story was begun in the summer of 1930 and finished in early January 1933, a period of two and a half years from first inspiration to final chapter. Finally, in a letter Tolkien wrote to the English newspaper The Observer in response to a letter of inquiry which had appeared in the 16th January 1938 issue asking about the sources for his book, he concluded with the following tease:
Finally, I present the future researcher with a little problem. The tale halted in the telling for about a year at two separate points: where are they? But probably that would have been discovered anyway.
—J. R. R. Tolkien, letter to The Observer,
printed Sunday, 20th February 1938; see Appendix II.
If, as Tolkien told Unwin, the story took ‘two or three years’ to write but, as he noted to The Observer, that period was punctuated by two hiatuses of approximately a year each, then the actual writing of the book took place in several short, intense bursts – in fact, during the vacations between term-time – which I in this book refer to as the First Phase, Second Phase, and Third Phase. Such was, indeed, Tolkien’s regular habit of composition, as careful perusal of Letters and the History of Middle-earth volumes dealing with The Lord of the Rings manuscripts will reveal; see ‘A Note on the Text’ below for more information on the actual writing of the book.
There still remains one unresolved crux: why did Tolkien tell Auden (in 1955) and the Plimmers (in 1967) that a gap of several years intervened between the writing of the first chapter (The First Phase) and the rest of the book, when his earlier testimony to Unwin and the letter to The Observer make it clear that in fact the hiatus could have lasted no more than a single year? The answer I think lies in Tolkien’s tendency to exaggerate the passage of time and date events before they actually occurred; as an event recedes into the distance, he will often assign an earlier and earlier date for it.
A prime and unusually well documented example is the short tale ‘Leaf by Niggle’. In March of 1945, Tolkien had written to Stanley Unwin ‘. . . I woke up one morning (more than 2 years ago) with that odd thing virtually complete in my head. It took only a few hours to get down, and then copy out . . .’ (JRRT to Stanley Unwin, letter of circa 18th March 1945; Letters p. 113). The story was, therefore, written sometime in early 1943 or late 1942; Tolkien submitted it to the Dublin Review on 12 October 1944 (Letters p. 97; Hammond’s Descriptive Bibliography p. 348 notes that the editor had written to Tolkien soliciting submissions on 6th September), and it appeared in the January 1945 issue. Twelve years later, in his letter of 24th June 1957 to Caroline Whitman Everett (Letters p. 257), Tolkien tells much the same story:
I have not published any other short story but Leaf by Niggle. They do not arise in my mind. Leaf by Niggle arose suddenly and almost complete. It was written down almost at a sitting, and very nearly in the form in which it now appears. Looking at it myself now from a distance I should say that, in addition to my tree-love (it was originally called The Tree), it arose from my own preoccupation with The Lord of the Rings, the knowledge that it would be finished in great detail or not at all, and the fear (near certainty) that it would be ‘not at all’. The war had arisen to darken all horizons. But no such analyses are a complete explanation even of a short story.
By 1962, however, Tolkien had began to shift the origin of the story to an earlier date; he told his aunt Jane Neave that the story ‘was written (I think) just before the War began, though I first read it aloud to my friends early in 1940’ (JRRT to Jane Neave, letter of 8th-9th September 1962; Letters p. 320). Thus, whereas the 1957 letter makes it clear that the war was already underway at the time the story was written, the 1962 letter moves it back to ‘just before’ the war. By the time Tolkien wrote the introduction to the 1964 collection Tree & Leaf in October 1963 (Hammond, Descriptive Bibliography pp. 183–4), he believed that ‘Leaf by Niggle’ and the essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’ had been ‘written in the same period (1938–9) when The Lord of the Rings was beginning to unroll itself . . .’ and that ‘The story was not published until 1947’ (Tree & Leaf, p. [5]), thus exaggerating the period between composition and publication from about two years to almost nine while pushing the date of actual composition back by some 4 to 5 years.10
Like Michael Tolkien’s attempt to push the starting date of work on The Hobbit back into the 1920s, we must reject Tolkien’s later assertion of a gap of several years between the writing of the first line and resumption of work on the story – not just because it directly contradicts remarks he made much earlier, at the time of the book’s publication (when we might reasonably expect his recollection to be more accurate), but because it creates unresolvable paradoxes in the evidence. The simple fact is that if Tolkien began the story after the move to 20 Northmoor Road in 1930, then stopped for several years before proceeding further, and paused twice for a year or so during the actual composition (these pauses being attested by changes in paper in the manuscript itself), he could not possibly have loaned the completed tale to Lewis in January 1933 – yet we know he did. The external evidence of the date of the move and the weight of the contemporary documentary evidence (especially Lewis’s letter to Arthur Greeves and the 1932 Father Christmas letter) between them establish a consistent body of evidence which agrees with all the facts of Tolkien’s other recollections. Accordingly, we may state with some confidence that the story was indeed begun in the summer of 1930 and completed in January 1933.
Edith has gone to bed and the house is in darkness when [Tolkien] gets home. He builds up the fire in the study stove and fills his pipe. He ought, he knows, to do some more work on his lecture notes for the next morning, but he cannot resist taking from a drawer the half-finished manuscript of a story that he is writing to amuse himself and his children. It is probably, he suspects, a waste of time; certainly if he is going to devote any attention to this sort of thing it ought to be to The Silmarillion. But something draws him back night after night to this amusing little tale – at least it seems to amuse the boys. He sits down at the desk, fits a new relief nib to his dip pen (which he prefers to a fountain pen), unscrews the ink bottle, takes a sheet of old examination paper (which still has a candidate’s essay on the Battle of Maldon on the back of it), and begins to write: ‘When Bilbo opened his eyes, he wondered if he had; for it was just as dark as with them shut. No one was anywhere near him. Just imagine his fright! . . .’
We will leave him now. He will be at his desk until half past one, or two o’clock, or perhaps even later, with only the scratching of his pen to disturb the silence, while around him Northmoor Road sleeps.
—Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography, pp. 120–21.
The preceding passage from the chapter ‘Oxford Life’ in Carpenter’s biography concludes his fictional recreation of a typical ‘day in the life’ of J. R. R. Tolkien. While entertaining, it is by no means accurate as an account of The Hobbit’s composition. For one thing, the text Carpenter quotes is not that of the Ms. (see p. 153) but the published book (cf. The Annotated Hobbit p. [115]). Nor is the manuscript of The Hobbit written on the back of student exams, with the exception of a single page;11 I suspect Carpenter has gone astray here by confusing the manuscript of The Lord of the Rings, parts of which were drafted on any scraps of paper its author could lay his hands on during the wartime paper shortage, including many from students’ exams, with that of The Hobbit, which contains very little extraneous material. Finally, the idea that the book was written by burning the midnight oil, faithfully added to night after night after a long day’s academic chores, has no evidence to support it and a good deal against it. For one thing, Tolkien’s letters are full of references that make it clear that almost all his creative writing was done not in term-time but during his too-brief vacations between academic semesters, and indeed his son Christopher confirms (private communication) that this was his father’s usual pattern of composition.
The physical appearance of the manuscript also argues for periodic bursts of rapid writing rather than the nightly diligence Carpenter projects. As Carpenter himself notes elsewhere,
The manuscript of The Hobbit suggests that the actual writing of the main part of the story was done over a comparatively short period of time: the ink, paper, and handwriting style are consistent, the pages are numbered consecutively, and there are almost no chapter divisions. It would also appear that Tolkien wrote the story fluently and with little hesitation, for there are comparatively few erasures or revisions.
—Carpenter, pp. 177–8.
In fact, as we shall see, there are a great many changes made to the rough draft in the process of writing, and many more afterwards. Parts of the manuscript show signs of having been written in great haste, while other sections are careful fair copy. Nor does Carpenter’s suggestion account for the several sharp breaks that occur in the Ms. where the handwriting, names of characters, and paper all change. Large sections are consistent in writing style and the paper used, only to have no less than three sudden and marked changes in writing paper and handwriting, the first and last of which almost certainly mark the long hiatuses Tolkien describes in his letter to The Observer. In short, the situation is far more complicated, and also much more interesting, than Carpenter indicates.
The present text is organized around the major breaks in the Ms., which occur midway through the first chapter (between typescript page 12 & manuscript page 13), just after what is now the beginning of Chapter IX (between manuscript pages 118 & 119), and about a third of the way through what is now Chapter XV (following manuscript page 167). The very first stage of writing that grew out of the scribbled line ‘In a hole in the ground . . .’, which I call the First Phase, is now represented by six surviving pages of manuscript (an incomplete draft corresponding roughly to pages 25–32 of the first edition or pages 45–54 of The Annotated Hobbit) and by the twelve-page typescript that replaced this earliest draft before the missing pages were lost. These I refer to as ‘The Pryftan Fragment’ and ‘The Bladorthin Typescript’, respectively, after the names of the dragon and wizard used in each.
The Second Phase begins with manuscript page 13, which picks up exactly where page 12 of the Bladorthin Typescript had left off, completing its final sentence. Written on good-quality ‘foolscap’ paper, this comprises the main stage of Tolkien’s work on the book. Tolkien once admitted that ‘They say it is the first step that costs the effort. I do not find it so. I am sure I could write unlimited “first chapters”. I have indeed written many’ (JRRT to Charles Furth, 17th February 1938; Letters p. 29). The Second Phase marks the stage at which an intriguing opening developed into a nearly complete story. Given its length (over one hundred and fifty manuscript pages), it’s not surprising that this phase was interrupted several times, these points being marked by Tolkien’s pausing to draw up outlines or sketch out ‘plot notes’ of upcoming sections. These various interruptions are described in detail in the main text that follows; for now, we need only note the major break that occurred in the middle of the Second Phase, just at the point when Bilbo and the twelve remaining dwarves are ambushed and captured by the wood-elves, in what is now early in Chapter IX. Here Tolkien clearly paused for some months, because when he resumed he changed to a completely different type of writing paper, these being the unlined backs of lined sheets of writing paper probably extracted from the unused portion of students’ exam booklets. Thus, the Second Phase falls into two distinct parts: manuscript pages 13–118 on the good-quality ‘foolscap’ paper Tolkien favored (it also recurs as his paper of choice when writing The Lord of the Rings) and manuscript pages 119–67 on slightly poorer quality paper.
The Third Phase, which saw the completion of the initial draft, can be divided into several stages like the phase that preceded it. First Tolkien returned to the beginning of the story and created the First Typescript, covering what is now Chapters I through XII and part of Chapter XIV. He then made a handwritten fair copy manuscript of Chapter XIII and inserted this into the typescript. Finally, and most importantly, he completed the story by the addition of another forty-five pages of very hastily written manuscript, again on the same good-quality paper as the bulk of the Second Phase. This final section, which starts in Chapter XIV (again completing a sentence left unfinished on the last page of the typescript as it then existed) and covers Chapters XV through the end of the book (i.e., Chapter XIX), was almost certainly written in December 1932 and January 1933. The resulting composite typescript/fair copy/manuscript, sometimes referred to by Tolkien as the ‘home manuscript’ (cf. JRRT to Susan Dagnall, letter of 4th January 1937; Letters p. 14), was then circulated among Tolkien’s friends over the next several years. Sometime in the summer of 193612 Tolkien was asked to submit The Hobbit to Allen & Unwin, so he at this time extended the First Typescript to include Chapter XIII, the rest of Chapter XIV, and Chapters XV through XIX to the end of the book.
In addition to the First Typescript, there is also another copy of the completed story. For many years the processors at Marquette and also scholars consulting the original manuscripts were puzzled by the presence of a second typescript that in some ways seemed earlier than what I have called the First Typescript but in others was demonstrably later.13 Taum Santoski solved this problem by demonstrating that this text, which I call the Second Typescript, was made after the First Typescript and derives from it, but that it was rejected by Tolkien who then made the final layer of pre-submission revisions on the First Typescript instead, which thus became the ‘Typescript for Printers’ (i.e., the text from which the printers set the book). A clue within Carpenter’s biography makes it possible for us to reconstruct the story behind this second typescript’s creation, establish its relationship with the first typescript, and see the reason why it was ultimately rejected in favor of its predecessor.
Since Tolkien had, characteristically, made many revisions to his typescript while he had been re-reading the entire story and preparing it for submission to the publisher, the desirability of a cleaner typescript would have become obvious, especially given Tolkien’s difficult handwriting. Tolkien himself had no time to undertake this onerous task, and so he set his son Michael to create a second typescript that would incorporate all the changes (mostly handwritten in black ink) on the original. According to Carpenter, Michael (then sixteen), had badly injured his right hand on broken glass and so did all his typing for the book one-handed (Carpenter, p. 180).14 Although Carpenter does not distinguish between the two typescripts, it is clear that the Second Typescript was not made by Tolkien himself but by an inexpert typist who often skipped or misread words, occasionally dropped lines, sometimes had difficulty in reading Tolkien’s handwriting, and generally produced a poor-quality text. As a daunting task undertaken by a dutiful son and apparently completed within a very short space of time, the Second Typescript speaks well of Michael’s filial piety, but as an accurate text of The Hobbit it is sadly lacking. Even when carefully corrected by Tolkien, it is still inferior to the by now rather battered First Typescript, which therefore became the copy Tolkien ultimately sent off to Allen & Unwin (on 3rd October 1936 according to Carpenter; see Letters p.14) and which thence went to the printers, Unwin Brothers.
In the end, however, it is fortunate that the Second Typescript exists, because it enables us to date some of the changes Tolkien made to the work. Just as he revised the manuscript in two distinct stages (in ink at or soon after the time of composition, and in pencil later when preparing it to be superseded by the typescript), so too he revised the First Typescript in layers, and it is often not self-evident whether a given reading dates from the time when he was completing the tale (that is, corrections made in the course of typing or not long after) or several years later when he was preparing the text for submission to the publisher. However, comparison with the corresponding section of the Second Typescript often resolves the question: if a revision made in ink on the First Typescript is incorporated into the Second Typescript as first typed, then it belongs to the earlier layer of changes; if on the other hand it is written onto both typescripts then it is generally part of the later set of revisions. The issue is confused by two factors. First, Tolkien inked in corrections to set right Michael’s accidental omissions and errors. This led early processors at Marquette, seeing that these sections appeared as ink additions to one typescript (Michael’s) but as first typed in the other (Tolkien’s), to mistake these corrections for new additions to the text taken up in the other typescript and thus assume that Michael’s Typescript predated the ‘Typescript for Printer’. Second, even after he had rejected the Second Typescript as the current text, Tolkien continued to scrupulously enter corrections he made to the First Typescript onto the other rejected typescript as well. Thus, very late changes appear added to both. In effect, the Second Typescript became Tolkien’s safe copy, from which he could reconstruct the work if the final ‘Typescript for Printer’ were to become lost in the mail, be destroyed by an accident at the printer, or suffer some other misfortune.
For the most part, while including all revisions to the manuscript page itself I have not recorded changes between the manuscript and the typescript(s), since these invariably move the story closer to its familiar published form, although I have, on occasion, noted just when some significant line or event entered into the tale between draft and publication (e.g., a rider, first typescript, second typescript, or page proofs). Similarly, I have only rarely noted changes made between the typescripts and page proofs, or on the page proofs themselves; anyone examining the three sets of page proofs15 now at Marquette will be deeply impressed by Tolkien’s close attention to detail, his ability to spot potential contradictions, and his gift (no doubt developed through years of practice with academic publications) of replacing a problematic passage with new text that takes up exactly the same amount of space, but to address every change made at every stage would call for a variorum edition – a worthy goal, but one beyond the scope of this book.
With the material I have labelled the Fourth Phase, we enter into the post-publication history of The Hobbit. While the book was so successful that a sequel was called for almost at once, at several times in later years Tolkien returned to the original story and re-wrote parts of it to better suit his evolving conception of Middle-earth and the role which the story of Bilbo’s adventure played in it. The first and most important of these re-visionings is what I here call the Fourth Phase: his recasting of the encounter with Gollum in Chapter V to bring that character’s actions into line with what he had written about him in The Lord of the Rings (then unpublished and indeed still unfinished). This tour-de-force, perhaps the most famous scene Tolkien ever wrote, was drafted in 1944, sent to Allen & Unwin in 1947, and published as the ‘second edition’ of The Hobbit in 1951.
Another significant piece of writing relating to The Hobbit is ‘The Quest of Erebor’, originally written as part of Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings in the early 1950s but in the event omitted from that work for reasons of space. This presents Bilbo’s story, particularly the opening chapter of the book, from Gandalf’s point of view and sets it firmly within the larger context of the war against Sauron. While a fascinating and relevant piece, I have not included it here because it is readily available elsewhere: different drafts or excerpts of it have been published in Unfinished Tales (pp. 321–36), The Annotated Hobbit (revised edition, pp. [367]–77), The War of the Ring (HME VIII, pp. 357–8), and The Peoples of Middle-earth (HME XII, pp. 281ff).
This brings us to our final text, the 1960 Hobbit, representing the Fifth Phase of Tolkien’s work on the book. In this previously unpublished material, Tolkien returned to the concerns of ‘The Quest of Erebor’ and set out to re-write the entire Hobbit in the style of The Lord of the Rings. Although he wisely abandoned this new draft at the start of Chapter III, this fascinating glimpse into a radically different approach to the story helps us appreciate the story as it stands all the more, besides providing some interesting and hitherto unknown details about Bilbo’s itinerary. A few years later, when Tolkien was asked by his American publisher to revise both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit in order to assert the American copyright against the unauthorized edition of the former that had just been issued by Ace Books, he used a few of the changes he had contemplated in the 1960 Hobbit but for the most part refrained from any but minor changes to the established text. It might be argued that these constitute a ‘Sixth Phase’ of work on the book, but if so it would be the only one that was imposed on Tolkien from without rather than arose from within. Since the 1966 ‘third edition’ changes are both minor and very well documented by Douglas Anderson in The Annotated Hobbit I have not listed them all here and instead refer readers either to his excellent book or to Hammond’s definitive Descriptive Bibliography, pages 28–39.
More information on each of these stages is contained in the head-note to each section of the text.
My presentation of the text is intended to distinguish as much as possible what Tolkien wrote from my own commentary and notes upon it. The format for each chapter is thus a brief headnote by me, followed by Tolkien’s text, often followed by a brief tailnote. Next come Text Notes (TN) discussing difficult readings, highlighting various changes or sequences of changes, and the like. After this comes my Commentary in the form of mini-essays on topics arising out of that chapter, followed by Notes upon the commentary. Wherever possible, I have kept my own commentary and Tolkien’s texts typographically distinct.
It must be stressed that there are no chapter divisions in the original manuscript, which flows as one continuous text with no more than the occasional skipped line to mark a change in scene or passage of time. My decision after much internal debate to follow Marquette’s lead, and also Christopher Tolkien’s practice at various points in The History of Middle-earth – that is, to insert chapter breaks where Tolkien himself later chose to make chapter divisions – comes as a result of my conviction that doing so greatly improves ease of reference, making it possible for those familiar with the published book to find any corresponding manuscript passage with relative ease. Nevertheless, these chapter breaks are an editorial contrivance and some readers may wish to ignore them, moving directly from the end of one ‘Chapter’ to the continuation of the text at the beginning of the next.
Formatting
It had been my original intent to record every brushstroke, cancellation, and addition to each manuscript page, so that in lieu of a facsimile reproduction this book could serve as a means by which scholars of Tolkien’s work could follow every step, letter by letter and line by line, of the process by which Tolkien created his work. However, over the long course of working with the manuscript for this edition I have been persuaded that such mechanical fidelity would produce only confusion and slowly come to the conclusion that an edition of a manuscript should be, well, edited. Accordingly, I have silently omitted minor changes (such as Tolkien’s own correction of miswritten or misspelled words) and sometimes slightly re-arranged material for clarity. I have also provided punctuation where necessary (mainly quotation marks and periods at the end of sentences), although I have kept this to a minimum in order to preserve the lightly-punctuated flow of the original. Changes in the manuscript by Tolkien himself are indicated by brackets; brackets have also been used in a few instances to mark missing words necessary for the sense that have been provided editorially. An arrow coming at the end of the bracketed passage [thus >] indicates that the material within the brackets was replaced by what follows. By contrast, an arrow coming at the beginning of a bracketed passage [> thus] indicates that the material within the brackets replaced what came before. My reason for this flexibility in their application has been the goal of producing a coherent sentence where possible in each case. Occasionally I have supplied rubrics such as [added:] or [cancelled:] within the brackets where this improves the clarity of the sequence of changes or makes a sentence easier to read.
Any transcription of Tolkien’s manuscripts will inevitably encounter difficulties with accurately reading his handwriting, which can vary from the most beautiful calligraphy worthy of an illuminated medieval manuscript to mere wavy lines rather like the print-out from an oscilloscope. Familiarity with his characteristic ligatures, a good grasp of Tolkienian phraseology, and comparison with the published versions of such passages have often enabled me to read them, but I confess that sometimes his scrawl has defeated me. Unfortunately, it is those very passages that were most hastily written down and which vary the most from the final text which are of course the most interesting to us, such as the First Outline (see pp. 229–30). In any case it is important to approach this or any other Tolkien manuscript with a fresh eye and remain wary of reading into the earliest draft the familiar wording of a published text. In the edition which follows, doubtful readings of nearly illegible words are presented within French brackets: <thus>, while wholly illegible words are either replaced by <illegible> or ellipses (. . .), with possible readings often suggested in an associated Text Note. For the use of future scholars who might wish to examine the manuscript readings for themselves, I have deposited at Marquette a copy of my complete line-by-line and page-by-page transcript of all the manuscript material for The Hobbit in the Archives. I have also deposited a copy of Taum Santoski’s unfinished edition [circa 1989] for those who wish to compare his readings with my own. Finally, my website (www.sacnothscriptorium.com) hosts a list of errata for this book, while my blog (www.sacnoths.blogspot.com) features updates on all things Tolkienian, among other topics.
Manuscript Citations
This book is filled with references to specific manuscript and typescript pages. Of these, ‘Ms. p. XX’ means that Tolkien himself gave that manuscript page this number; similarly ‘Ts. p. XX’ indicates that Tolkien gave that page that number in the First Typescript. By contrast, the processors at Marquette broke up the two-hundred-odd pages of the manuscript (plus the two typescripts and miscellaneous outlines and rejected sheets) into manageable smaller chunks, placing each section that corresponded to a chapter in the published book into its own folder. Thus, a citation such as ‘Ms. page 13; Marq. 1/1/1:3’ indicates that this text comes from the page of handwritten manuscript that Tolkien numbered ‘13’ (in fact, the first page of the Second Phase), and that in the Marquette Tolkien Collection the page in question may be found in series 1 (The Hobbit), box 1 (manuscripts and typescripts), folder 1 (Chapter 1), page 3 (the first two sheets in this folder being unnumbered title pages). Similarly, the first page of text of the First Typescript (Ts. page 1; Marq. 1/1/51:2) appears in series 1, box 1, folder 51, page 2 (the first page in this folder being another unnumbered handwritten title page, this one including for the first time the subtitle or There and Back Again); the corresponding page in the Second Typescript is 1/1/32:2 (preceded by yet another title page). Since Tolkien wrote the bulk of the manuscript on two-sided sheets (e.g., Ms. page 14 is on the back of Ms. page 13), this means that no neat division between chapters is possible; sometimes the opening paragraphs of one chapter appear on the last sheet in the folder for the previous chapter, while the closing paragraphs of another chapter might appear on the first sheet in the folder holding the next chapter.
In addition to the main body of manuscripts at Marquette purchased from Tolkien himself in the late 1950s, some additional material was generously donated to the collection by Christopher Tolkien in four installments: in 1987, 1988, 1990, and 1997. While most of this additional material was from The Lord of the Rings, it included the all-important stray sheet from the First Phase of The Hobbit bearing the earliest draft of the Lonely Mountain map, reproduced by Christopher in his Foreword to the fiftieth anniversary Hobbit and serving as my book’s Frontispiece. Pending an eventual reprocessing of the entire collection to incorporate this material into its proper sequence with the other manuscripts already at Marquette, these manuscripts and typescripts have their own designators: the page serving as my book’s Frontispiece being MSS-1 Tolkien, Mss 1/1/1.
Finally, a small amount of manuscript material pertaining to The Hobbit but not part of the original draft, some of which did not even exist at the time Tolkien sold the bulk of his Hobbit papers to Marquette, remains in the hands of the Estate. These have been assigned page numbers by Christopher Tolkien for ease of reference when he generously made them available to Taum Santoski and myself, and to distinguish them from the two sets of Marquette material I refer to these as Ad.Ms.H.xx (= Additional Manuscript Hobbit p. xx). For example, the Fourth Phase handwritten draft revision of the Gollum chapter occupies Ad.Ms.H.34–52, while the Fifth Phase day-by-day itinerary of Bilbo’s trip from Hobbiton to Rivendell appears on Ad.Ms.H.21–24.
Where I have had occasion to cite materials in other collections, such as the Bodleian Library’s Department of Western Manuscripts in Oxford, I have used the citation system used by those libraries at the time I consulted the materials in question.
(iv)
Abbreviations and Acknowledgments
A great many works are cited, some repeatedly, over the course of this work. In order to save space and reduce redundancy, I use abbreviations in the place of some oft-cited titles. The most important of these is Douglas A. Anderson’s The Annotated Hobbit, which I have taken for my base text of the published book. The reasons for this are twofold: not only is Anderson’s the best text in print, incorporating all authorial changes, but his book and mine are complementary. He takes as a starting point the first printing of 1937 and scrupulously records every change and correction to the text by Tolkien from that point onward, while I look backwards from the moment of the first printing to tell the story of how the book was written.
I also make frequent reference to such essential works as The Lord of the Rings, Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator, and of course the History of Middle-earth series.
Finally, I draw throughout on the work of my friend Taum Santoski. This book began as a collaboration between us, and while in the event all the text and commentary are my own, I have relied upon Taum’s pioneering work at establishing the correct manuscript sequence. Taum’s particular fields of expertise were Tolkien’s invented languages and his artwork, and it is to be deeply regretted that he set down so little of this in writing; accordingly, I draw on my memory of our many conversations about the book at various points.
DAA: Douglas A. Anderson, The Annotated Hobbit [1988; revised edition, 2002]. All references here are to the revised and expanded second edition of Anderson’s superlative work unless otherwise stated. Where I have needed to refer to the first [1937] or second [1951] or third [1966] editions of Tolkien’s original book, I have used the copies most readily available to me, these being the 3rd (1942), 13th (1961), and 31st (?1974) printings, respectively.
‘Foreword’: Christopher Tolkien, Foreword to the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Hobbit [1987].
HME: The History of Middle-earth series (twelve volumes), ed. Christopher Tolkien. The twelve volumes of this series are individually cited as follows:
BLT I: The Book of Lost Tales, Part I [1983]
BLT II: The Book of Lost Tales, Part II [1984]
HME III: The Lays of Beleriand [1985]
HME IV: The Shaping of Middle-earth [1986]
HME V: The Lost Road [1987]
HME VI: The Return of the Shadow [1988]
HME VII: The Treason of Isengard [1989]
HME VIII: The War of the Ring [1990]
HME IX: Sauron Defeated [1992]
HME X: Morgoth’s Ring [1993]
HME XI: The War of the Jewels [1994]
HME XII: The Peoples of Middle-earth [1996]
Of these, volumes I & II contain a two-part presentation of ‘The Book of Lost Tales’, volumes VI, VII, VIII, & IXa form the subseries ‘The History of The Lord of the Rings’ (to which the first half of volume XII forms an unofficial appendage), and volumes X & XI comprise ‘The Later Silmarillion’. In addition, one should not neglect The History of Middle-earth Index [2002], a compilation of the indexes of all twelve volumes, which is extremely useful in tracking changes in names and the reappearance of specific names and characters from volume to volume. In this edition, I have drawn heavily on the first five volumes, these being the materials that either preceded (I–III) or are contemporary with the writing (IV) or publication (V) of The Hobbit. The most important individual works within these volumes for my study of The Hobbit, and the ones most frequently cited, have been the component tales of The Book of Lost Tales (particularly ‘Turambar and the Foalókë’ and ‘The Nauglafring’, both in BLT II), the long epic poem ‘The Lay of Leithian’ (HME III), the synoptic 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ (HME IV), and the 1930 Quenta (HME IV).
LotR: The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. One volume edition, illustrated by Alan Lee [1991]. Among the many, many editions of The Lord of the Rings I have chosen this one as my base text, because it is widely available, because its one-volume format makes it easy to use, and because it predates certain post-authorial changes. However, any reference to a specific point in The Hobbit’s sequel should be easy to find by anyone even moderately familiar with the story. Where reference to the first edition text seemed desirable, I have used my copy of the first Allen & Unwin edition, which consists of a first printing of volume I [1954] and a second printing of volumes II [1955] and III [1955].
Letters: The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. by Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien [1981; revised edition with expanded index, 2000].
A&U: Allen & Unwin correspondence with JRRT, October 1936 through December 1937. Although not quite complete, this file of letters between Tolkien and various members of the firm of George Allen & Unwin – primarily Stanley Unwin, Susan Dagnall, and Charles Furth – along with a few internal memos provides a wealth of information about the publication of the book, as well as a few details about its presubmission history. I am grateful to Mary Butler, formerly of HarperCollins, for making this file available to me in the early stages of this project.
Hammond Scull: J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator by Wayne G. Hammond & Christina Scull [1995]. Individual paintings and drawings within this book are cited by the number Hammond & Scull assign them. Thus H-S#134 refers to figure 134 in their book, ‘Untitled (Smaug Flies around the Lonely Mountain)’ reproduced on page 142 of Artist & Illustrator.
Hammond: J. R. R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography by Wayne G. Hammond with Douglas A. Anderson [1993]. This is the definitive record of publishing information about each of Tolkien’s works, including misprints and variations between editions, and a brief but detailed account of each book’s genesis.
Carpenter: Tolkien: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter [1977]. The authorized biography; inaccurate in some details but after thirty years still unsurpassed as an overview of Tolkien’s life.
OED: The Oxford English Dictionary. Specific citations come from the two-volume set more properly known as The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary [1971].
OFS: ‘On Fairy-Stories’ by J. R. R. Tolkien, in Tree and Leaf [1964; expanded edition 1988]. An earlier version of this essay had appeared in the memorial festschrift Essays Presented to Charles Williams [1947], but unless stated otherwise all my citations come from the slightly revised 1964 form of this seminal work.
FGH: Farmer Giles of Ham by J. R. R. Tolkien [1949; expanded edition 1999].
FCL: The Father Christmas Letters by J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Baillie Tolkien [1976]. Most citations have been taken from the expanded edition (as Letters from Father Christmas [1999]).
ATB: The Adventures of Tom Bombadil by J. R. R. Tolkien [1962]. Individual poems are cited by number – e.g., the fourteenth poem, ‘The Hoard’, is referred to as ATB poem #14.
Beowulf Essay: ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’ [1936]. I have used the 1978 facsimile reproduction (by the Arden Library) of the original 1936 publication but the essay is also readily available in The Monsters & the Critics and Other Essays [1983; trade paperback 1997].
Silm: The Silmarillion, ed. Christopher Tolkien [1977; revised edition 1999].
UT: Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, ed. Christopher Tolkien [1979].
Acknowledgments
This project has been in the works for many years, and a great many people have helped, both those I consulted on specific points and those who offered more general support and encouragement.
In addition to those acknowledged in my notes, I would like to thank the following for their contributions.
• to Christopher Tolkien, for allowing me to undertake this project, for his patience with many questions over the course of it, and for his exceptional example through his many editions of his father’s work, particularly the History of Middle-earth series.
• to my friend the late Taum Santoski, for entrusting me to take over this project and see it through to fruition.
• to the late Rayner Unwin, for his encouragement and good advice in the early stages of this project.
• to Charles Elston, who as archivist of the Marquette Tolkien collection made the materials under his protection available to all Tolkien scholars. Also to those at the Marquette Archives, particularly Terry Margherita, Tracy Muench, and Phil Runkel, who patiently sat for many hours while I transcribed manuscripts or checked and re-checked transcriptions, sometimes with a magnifying glass or light table. And also to Matt Blessing, the current archivist, for his patience with many follow-up questions in the project’s final stages.
• to the late Terry Tuttle, who despite his own worsening health gave me free access to Taum Santoski’s papers, without which my work as Taum’s literary executor would have been much more difficult.
• to all the participants in the Tolkien Symposiums over the last sixteen years, including Verlyn Flieger, Richard West, Wayne Hammond, Christina Scull, Marjorie Burns, Paul Thomas, Doug Anderson, the late Richard Blackwelder, Matt Fisher, Carolyn Kiel, Taum Santoski, Chris Mitchell, Gary Hunnewell, Vaughn Howland, Janice Coulter, David Bratman, Arden Smith, Carl Hostetter, and others.
• to Jessica Yates, whose Seeing-Stone project first put me in touch with Tolkien scholars in other parts of the world.
• to Richard West, Gwendolyn Kestrel, and especially Jim Pietrusz for their generosity in loaning me material or aid in helping me locate obscure works inaccessible to an independent scholar without access to Interlibrary Loan.
• to Judith Priestman and others of the Bodleian’s Department of Western Manuscripts for their help during my four research trips to the Bodleian in 1981, 1985, 1992, and especially 1987.
• to the Marion E. Wade collection at Wheaton College, in gratitude for their having awarded me a Clyde S. Kilby Research Grant in 1997 to help fund the ongoing research for this project, and to Lyle Dorsett, Marjorie Mead, Chris Mitchell, and others at the Wade Center for their courtesy during my many visits to the Wade researching this and other projects over the years.
• to the Tolkien Society, for featuring me as a guest speaker at their Hobbit Workshop in May 1987; to Nancy Martsch and Beyond Bree for asking me to talk about this project as Guest of Honor at BreeMoot 3 in Minneapolis in 1997; and to the Mythopoeic Society, at whose 1993 and 1997 conferences I presented earlier versions of two chapters.
• to Doug Anderson, for his generosity in sharing his knowledge about Tolkien chronology and of all things Hobbit.
• to David Salo, for having patiently answered many questions about Tolkien’s invented languages and Old English studies.
• to Wayne Hammond & Christina Scull, for helping with many points regarding Tolkien’s publication history.
• to Steve Brown, Wolf & Shelly Baur, Mark Sehestedt, and Jeff Grubb, for continually encouraging me to ‘get it done’; and to the Burrahobbits and Mithlonders, participants in two Tolkien-centric fantasy book discussion groups, who have heard much of this material piecemeal over the years.
• to Kate Latham, Chris Smith, David Brawn, and Mary Butler, for their patience.
• to Doug Anderson, Paul Thomas, and Richard West, for reading through the complete book and offering advice and corrections, and to Charles Noad for meticulously proofing the whole.
• to my mother, for her faith and support.
• to my wife, Janice Coulter, whose help and patience made it possible for me to complete this project despite many interruptions over a long period. In addition to helping me with the initial transcription and the proofing thereof, she has served as my sounding board, sometimes pointing out connections that had eluded me and offering insights that enabled me to work my way through some of the tangles that confronted me.
• to Mrs. Henry, my junior high librarian who, when I returned The Hobbit to the library in September of 1973 (having read it twice back-to-back) and lamented that there weren’t any more like it anywhere, told me about The Lord of the Rings . . .
• And to Susan Dagnall, for asking.