Introduction
1 This version of the Gollum story made it into print in the first edition, not being replaced until the second edition of 1951; contrast Chapter V: Gollum beginning on p. 153 with The Fourth Phase, beginning on page 729.
2 Babbitt [1922], by American author Sinclair Lewis, depicts the world and outlook of a small-town businessman who wishes to escape from the stifling conformity of his world and fails, although the end of the story holds out hope that his son might be more fortunate (one might perhaps draw an analogy between Bungo Baggins, who was strictly respectable and never had any adventures, and his more fortunate son Bilbo). It might be thought that Lewis’s becoming the first American to win a Nobel Prize for literature in 1930 might have drawn Tolkien’s attention at the opportune moment to have helped inspire the word ‘hobbit’, but this is unlikely since the prize was not announced until November 1930 and the evidence suggests that Tolkien had invented the name several months earlier during the summer of that year.
For more on the origin of the word ‘hobbit’, see Appendix I: The Denham Tracts.
3 An additional piece of information regarding the starting date of The Hobbit comes from a note Tolkien wrote to accompany his desk when he donated it to be sold for the benefit of the charity Help the Aged. Entitled ‘This Desk’ and dated July 27th, 1972, the handwritten note states that
This Desk
Was bought for me by my wife in 1927. It was my first desk, and has remained the one that I chiefly used for literary work until her death in 1971.
On it The Hobbit was entirely produced: written, typed, and illustrated.
The Lord of the Rings was written and revised in many places in Oxford and elsewhere; but on this desk were also written, at various times, the manuscript drafts of Books III, IV, V, and VI, until the last words of the Tale were reached in 1949.
I have presented this desk to help the aged in memory of my wife, Edith Mary, in the hope that its sale may help this Charity to house some old people of Britain in peace and comfort.
J. R. R. Tolkien
Merton College,
Oxford
July 27th,
1972.
Therefore, even if we do not accept Tolkien’s statement that the first impulse came after the 1930 move to the new house, the book could not have been started before 1927.
Both the note and the desk are now on display at the Wade Center at Wheaton College.
4 Personal communication, Fr. John Tolkien to John D. Rateliff, 6th February 1997.
5 I am grateful to the late Lester Simons, long-time Membership Secretary of the Tolkien Society, for providing me with an audiocassette recording of this event.
6 See pp. 634 & 545.
7 Lest the description of Father Christmas as a ‘magician’ give us pause, we should remember that Michael Tolkien recounts that the wizard ‘Kimpu’ in the family apocrypha derived his name from young Priscilla’s best attempt to say ‘Father Christmas’ – another argument, by the way, for a slightly later date than the one Michael suggests. Also, in the 1933 Father Christmas Letter the North Polar Bear interrupts the letter to say ‘You have no idea what the old man can doo! Litening and Fierworks and Thunder of Guns!’ (Letters from Father Christmas, p. 88) – a description which sounds very much like Gandalf at work: cf. Bilbo’s memory of the wizard’s fireworks at his grandfather’s parties (Chapter I) and the bolts of lightning that strike dead the goblins in the mountain-pass (Chapter IV).
8 For example, Elaine Griffiths’ comments in her interview with Ann Bonsor (BBC Radio Oxford [1974]) are so specific that we can tell that the version of the story she read was the First Typescript, yet she makes no mention of the story’s being incomplete. Accordingly, we must reject Carpenter’s theory that Tolkien abandoned the story at the point where the Second Phase manuscript breaks off (see p. 633); the overwhelming probability is that the ‘home manuscript’ Tolkien lent out was a composite typescript/manuscript consisting of the first typescript up to the death of Smaug, including a fair-copy handwritten insertion of the revised text of what is now Chapter XIII, and followed by forty-five pages of handwritten manuscript completing the story (see pp. 637–8). For more examples of composite typescript/manuscript texts by Tolkien, see the discussion below of the Bladorthin Typescript and the Second Phase manuscript and also see Verlyn Flieger’s discussion of the earliest surviving draft of SWM, itself a typescript/manuscript composite, reproduced in facsimile in the Extended Edition of Smith of Wootton Major [2005], pages 102–29.
We do not know how many people read the story outside of the Tolkien family before its submission to Allen & Unwin, but they include C. S. Lewis (see above), a 12–13 year old girl (Letters p. 21), the Rev. Mother of Cherwell Edge (Letters pp. 215, 346, 374), Elaine Griffiths, and lastly Griffiths’ friend Susan Dagnall, whose positive response encouraged Tolkien to formally submit the story in early October 1936. Quite possibly there were others; cf. Tolkien’s comment that ‘The MS. certainly wandered about’ (JRRT to C. A. Furth at Allen & Unwin, 31st August 1937; Letters p. 21). The composite typescript/manuscript was apparently read to the Inklings (see Letters p. 36), probably at about the time Tolkien submitted it to the publisher, since the group seems not to have existed when the manuscript was first written.†
† The Inklings seem to have coalesced as a group during 1933–4; Dr. ‘Humphrey’ Havard, who along with Tolkien, Lewis, and Warnie Lewis formed one of the four core members, told me he was invited to join upon his moving to Oxford and making Lewis’s acquaintance in 1934. It was certainly in existence by 1936, when Lewis mentions the group by name in his first letter to Charles Williams.
9 This meeting took place on 27th October, not 15th November as Carpenter states in Letters p. 25. They met again on Monday 15th November, when Tolkien turned over copies of ‘The Lay of Leithian’, the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion, and The Lost Road, and perhaps also Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet as well. Unwin had already requested, as a result of their earlier meeting, that Tolkien go ahead and ‘put together the volume of short fairy stories’ (SU to JRRT, 28th October 1937; A&U archives) of which Farmer Giles, which had already been read and approved but felt to be too short for publication by itself (e.g., A&U to JRRT 16th November 1937; A&U archives), would have been one, but in the brief time between their meetings Tolkien had not yet done so (having no doubt been kept busy preparing the other submissions). Mr Bliss had also already been read and provisionally accepted, provided that Tolkien could re-draw its many illustrations into a simpler style that would be easier (and cheaper) to reproduce. In the event, discouraging reader reports of The Lost Road (by Susan Dagnall, who admired the work but thought it unlikely to be a commercial success) and ‘The Lay of Leithian’ (by outside reader Edward Crankshaw, who much preferred the prose Quenta Silmarillion) led Unwin to urge Tolkien to attempt ‘another book about THE HOBBIT’ or, failing that, assemble ‘a volume of stories like FARMER GILES’ (SU to JRRT, 15th December 1937). At some point between the 16th and 19th, Tolkien wrote the first chapter of what would become The Lord of the Rings (or ‘The New Hobbit’, as he and his friends long referred to it), as Unwin was ‘thrilled to learn’ (SU to JRRT, 20th December 1937; A&U archives), stating that ‘another book . . . on the lines of THE HOBBIT is now assured of success’. How right he was.
Unwin’s memo, drawn up immediately following the 27th October meeting, is itself of great interest, and I therefore quote it here in full:
Professor Tolkien.
1. He has a volume of short fairy stories in various styles practically ready for publication.
2. He has the typescript of a History of the Gnomes, and stories arising from it.
3. MR. BLISS.
4. THE LOST ROAD, a partly written novel of which we could see the opening chapters.
5. A great deal of verse of one kind and another which would probably be worth looking at.
6. BEOWOLF <sic> upon which he has as yet done very little.†
He spoke enthusoastically <sic> of a children’s book called MARVELLOUS LAND OF SNERGS illustrated by George Morrow and published by Benn some few years ago. He mentioned that THE HOBBIT took him two or three years to write because he works very slowly.
S.U. October, 1937
– unpublished memo; Allen & Unwin archives.
† This is a reference to the revision of the Clark Hall prose translation upon which Tolkien and Elaine Griffiths had been working the year before; it was eventually published in 1940 after Griffiths had been replaced by Tolkien’s fellow Inkling Charles Wrenn. See pp. 693–4 for more on how this project seems to have first sparked contact between JRRT and Allen & Unwin and initiated the relationship that proved so beneficial to both.
10 For another example, in his Introductory Note to Tree and Leaf [1964]† Tolkien stated that his essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’ had been delivered as a lecture in 1938, and footnoted this ‘Not 1940 as incorrectly stated in 1947’ (e.g., by Tolkien himself in the first sentence of the version of the essay printed in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, p. 38). However, as Christopher Tolkien notes in his Preface to the revised edition of Tree and Leaf [1988], the lecture actually took place on 8th March 1939. Although the error is minor, once again we see Tolkien, on later consideration, characteristically pushes back a date.
For a final and perhaps extreme example, Clyde Kilby stated, in his memoir of Tolkien included in his book Tolkien and The Silmarillion [1976], that during the summer of 1966 Tolkien told him that ‘he was writing some of The Silmarillion . . . about 1910’ and also claims that ‘[Tolkien] told one of his closest friends that he had the whole of his mythic world in his mind as early as 1906’; unfortunately he does not identify his source for his statement. In fact, we know through Christopher Tolkien’s work in the History of Middle-earth series that the earliest prose tales date to about 1916–17, while the earliest Middle-earth poetry, the Eärendel poems, date to 1914. In addition, Kilby says that ‘Tolkien told me that some of the poems in Tom Bombadil [e.g., The Adventures of Tom Bombadil] had been written by him “as a boy”’ (Tolkien and The Silmarillion, pp. 47–8). Even if we assume that by ‘as a boy’ Tolkien meant not childhood but undergraduate days, none of the Bombadil poems are known to predate the 1920s, when Tolkien was in his thirties, and most of the rest were written in the 1930s.
† This Introductory Note was written in October 1963 according to Hammond, Descriptive Bibliography, pages 183–4.
11 This solitary exception is manuscript page 155, near the end of the Second Phase. The front of this sheet bears the scene from Chapter XIII describing the death of Smaug, while the back has several lines from a student’s attempt at Old English describing a meeting in Winchester between King Edward the Confessor and Godwin of Wessex, the father of Harold Godwinson.
A small amount of other extraneous material (not student essays) can be found on the versos of some pages. One of the outlines (Plot Notes F) is written on the back of a fragment from an unsent letter, but these were after all merely notes to himself and never part of the main manuscript. Similarly, some Lord of the Rings-era drafting for changes to the Gollum chapter (1/1/21:1–2) are on a page with the letterhead of The Catenian Association, the Oxford chapter of which Tolkien was the Vice-President at the time, while most of Tolkien’s 1944 draft for the replacement Gollum chapter (The Fourth Phase) was written on the back of old handouts Tolkien had prepared for classes; see p. 740 (Text Note 1).
12 A snippet from an otherwise unpublished letter quoted by Carpenter reveals that Tolkien was already hard at work preparing the text for submission to the publisher before 10th August 1936: ‘The Hobbit is now nearly finished, and the publishers clamouring for it’ (Tolkien: A Biography, p. 180).
13 Thus, in the sequence of Hobbit manuscripts at Marquette, this second typescript appears before the First Typescript in the filing system. For example, the manuscript of Chapter V is 1/1/5, the First Typescript of Chapter V is 1/1/55, and the Second Typescript of Chapter V is 1/1/36.
14 Presumably it was this injury, which would have kept young Michael from normal summer activities, that caused his father to ask him to undertake this task at all.
15 These consist of two copies of the First Page Proofs (Marq. 1/2/1 and 1/2/2) and one copy of the Second Page Proofs (Marq. 1/2/3). Of these, Marq. 1/2/1 represents the copy that Tolkien originally read through and marked up, while Marq. 1/2/2 is an exact duplicate from the printer onto which he then carefully wrote all those corrections as neatly as possible and returned to the publisher, keeping 1/2/1 for his own reference. The Second Proofs, Marq. 1/2/3, incorporate those changes and give Tolkien a last chance to correct mistakes made by the printer, fix hereto undetected errors surviving from the Typescript for Printers, and make any last-minute changes he felt absolutely necessary.
Chapter I(a) The Pryftan Fragment
1 Long afterwards, Tolkien scribbled the following note in pencil in the left margin on the front of the third sheet of this fragment:
Only page preserved
of the first scrawled copy of
The Hobbit which did not
reach beyond the first chapter
In a letter to W. H. Auden written in 1955 recounting the origins of the book, Tolkien recalled that ‘. . . for some years I got no further than the production of Thror’s Map’ (JRRT to WHA, 7th June 1955; Letters p. 215). Tolkien might well have meant this quite literally, since the earliest draft of the map takes up slightly more than half of this same page (the next to last of the fragment).
2 For the full story of this manuscript, whose present whereabouts are unknown, see Douglas A. Anderson’s article ‘R. W. Chambers and The Hobbit’, in Tolkien Studies, vol. III [2006], pp. 139 & 144.
3 Interview with the late Joy Hill; Battersea, London, May 1987.
4 Douglas A. Anderson notes in The Annotated Hobbit (1988; revised edition 2002, page [29]; hereafter DAA) that the opening passage of the book has become so much a part of our cultural heritage that it has even found its way into Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations [1980 & ff].
5 This fragment of draft, and the associated outline (Plot Notes E: ‘Little Bird’), are reproduced below on pp. 620–621 & 626 of Part 2 of this book.
6 This would account for his habit of going back and transcribing later changes onto earlier copies of texts, thus ensuring that the revisions would survive if the latest fair copy or final typescript were accidentally destroyed or lost in the post – a serious and all-too-real concern in those days before the advent of easy access to photocopiers.
7 Tolkien’s agreement with Marquette specified that he should retain any illustrative material among the manuscripts (with the obvious exception of Mr. Bliss), although due to the intermingling of the two in the event some illustrations came to Marquette and some text was retained by Tolkien. Tolkien kept no clear tally of exactly what he had sent to Marquette; when he was revising the text of The Lord of the Rings for the second edition, he wrote to the Archivist asking if Marquette had a particular piece of Ms. to which he needed to refer – a piece which we now know Tolkien had in fact retained (letter, JRRT to ‘The Librarian’ [Wm A. Fitzgerald], Marquette University, 3rd August 1965). And clearly when he came across this solitary sheet with Thror’s Map, probably sometime in the mid-1960s, he had forgotten about the existence of the other two sheets (see Note 1 above).
8 It was this facsimile publication in the 50th anniversary edition that enabled the late Taum Santoski to recognize that the solitary leaf retained by Tolkien and marked by him as the sole surviving sheet was in fact cognate with the two sheets that had come to Marquette thirty years before. As a result of his insight, we can now reunite all three, thus re-creating roughly half of the original opening chapter of The Hobbit as it stood in the First Phase manuscript (see below).
9 This correspondence is now at Marquette.
10 Adding to the confusion was the fact that at the time of the transfer some of Tolkien’s papers were at his house on Sandfield Road (into which he had only moved a few years before) and some were at his office at Merton College (Tolkien to [Fitzgerald], 3rd August 1965), which he was at that time beginning to clean out in anticipation of his upcoming retirement.
11 Along with several miscellaneous items, these include the 1947 Hobbit (see ‘The Fourth Phase’, beginning on p. 729) and the 1960 Hobbit (the ‘Fifth Phase’), the latter of which was of course not yet in existence at the time of Tolkien’s sale of the original draft, typescripts, and galleys to Marquette. I have given all these items the designator ‘Ad.Ms.H.’ [Additional Manuscript Hobbit] to distinguish them from the materials at Marquette (‘Marq.’) – e.g., Ad.Ms.H.6–7, Marq. 1/1/22:1–4, &c.
1 For example, Bifur, Bofur, Oin, Ori, and Nori, whose combined dialogue would hardly fill a single page of this book.
2 For more on the Dvergatal, an interpolation into the Völuspá, the first poem in the Elder Edda, see Appendix III.
The sole exception is Balin, whose name is a bit of a mystery; why should his be the only dwarf-name among the party not to come from the list in the Edda? Moreover, in his letter to the Observer (Appendix II), Tolkien is explicit that ‘the dwarf-names, and the wizard’s [i.e., “Gandalf”], are from the Elder Edda.’ In the absence of any statement to the contrary, this seems to imply that all the dwarf-names should be found in this list, making Balin’s conspicuous absence all the more puzzling. Perhaps Tolkien felt that the dwarf-name usually rendered Vali (or sometimes Nali) should more properly be spelt Bali or Balin. Or he might have taken the name from Bláin, an obscure figure described in the line of the Völuspá immediately preceding the dwarf-list proper, said to be a giant from whose legs or bones the dwarves were made. More probably, he borrowed the name from Arthurian legend: Sir Balin was one of the best-known, most tragic, and most unlikable of the early heroes of the Round Table. He is the anti-hero of part two of Malory’s The Tale of King Arthur (Book I of the work generally known as Le Morte D’Arthur); among his more notable achievements are the murder of the Lady of the Lake before the whole court of Camelot, the maiming of the Fisher-King (an act which creates The Waste Land and eventually requires the Grail quest to set right), and the killing of his own brother, Sir Balan, in a duel wherein each takes a mortal wound. If Malory’s work is indeed the source from whence Tolkien borrowed the name, he took none of the knight’s personality with it, as Balin the dwarf is easily the kindliest of Bilbo’s companions.
3 Hávamál, strophe 103: fimbulfambi heitir, saer fatt kann segja: ‘a fimbul-fambi he is called, who can say little’ – i.e., a mighty fool or great idiot. The fimbul- element is most famous through its appearance in Fimbulvter, the Great Winter whose coming signals the end of the world in Norse tradition. I am grateful to Christopher Tolkien for identifying the source and providing the translation.
4 For the probable meaning of Bladorthin’s name, see ‘The Name “Bladorthin”,’ on pp. 52–3.
5 For more on the name ‘Bilbo’, see pp. 47–8.
6 The story of Fingolfin, like so much else in the mythology, emerged gradually as the many-layered legends evolved. First in the Lost Tales we have Golfinweg, the Gnomish name for Finwë lord of the Gnomes (BLT I.115 & 132). Then in a prose fragment (probably written soon after 1920) recounting the arrival of the Elven host from Valinor in ‘the Great Lands’ (i.e., Middle-earth) we find the name Golfin given to one of the most prominent characters, the eldest of the three sons and captains of Gelmir, the king of the Gnomes (or Noldor). The fragment ends before we are told much about Golfin’s deeds, but it is Christopher Tolkien’s conclusion that Gelmir should be identified with Finwë and that ‘It is certainly clear that Golfin here is the first appearance of Fingolfin’ (HME IV.6–8).
The earliest use of the actual name ‘Fingolfin’ seems to be in the unfinished poem ‘The Lay of the Fall of Gondolin’ written shortly after the Lost Tales period (that is, sometime in the early 1920s). Here we are told of
. . . Fingolfin, Gelmir’s mighty heir.
’Twas the bent blades of the Glamhoth that drank Fingolfin’s life
as he stood alone by Fëanor . . .
—HME III.146.
In the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’, Fingolfin is the eldest son of Finn (= Finwë) and the older brother of Fëanor; in revisions he became Finn’s second son, as he thereafter remained right through to the published Silmarillion. A reluctant participant in the rebellion of the Noldoli, this Fingolfin returns to Valinor after the Shipburning. In revisions to the ‘Sketch’, however, he leads the rest of the Host by foot over the Grinding Ice and is slain when Morgoth breaks the ‘leaguer of Angband’; here his death takes place quite independently of Fëanor’s, who had already been killed by a balrog before Fingolfin’s host reached Middle-earth (see HME IV.14–15, 18–19, 22, 24). In a passage of ‘The Lay of Leithian’ written on 27th and 28th September 1930 (i.e., within a few months of the composition of the Pryftan Fragment), Tolkien describes Fingolfin’s duel with Morgoth in epic terms (HME III.284–6, 292) that make the contemporaneous application of the name to a goblin king famous only for his spectacular decapitation all the more remarkable; the only thing the two have in common is the dramatic nature of their deaths.
7 For more on the importance of the real world as a setting underlying Tolkien’s imagined prehistory, see my article ‘“And All the Days of Her Life Are Forgotten”: The Lord of the Rings as Mythic Prehistory’ in the Blackwelder Festschrift (The Lord of the Rings, 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, ed. Wayne G. Hammond & Christina Scull [2006], pages 67–100).
8 ‘like the Mercury of Eddison’ – i.e., the setting of E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros [1922], a book Tolkien greatly admired and from which he borrowed some elements for The Lord of the Rings; Eddison himself was twice a guest at the Inklings. Eddison states that his fantasy lands – Demonland, Witchland, Zimiamvia, and the rest – are on the planet Mercury, to which his narrator travels in a dream at the start of the story, but this detail plays no importance to the story and is soon dropped; they are much more like the backdrops to an Elizabethan or Jacobean drama than science fictional.
9 ‘I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned . . .’ – JRRT, quoted in Carpenter, page 189; italics mine.
10 ‘The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme. They owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains’ (JRRT to Professor L. W. Forster, 31st December 1960; Letters p. 303). Much earlier, Tolkien described his earliest surviving attempt at prose fiction by saying that ‘I am trying to turn one of the stories [of the Kalevala] . . . into a short story somewhat on the lines of Morris’ romances with chunks of poetry in between’ (JRRT to Edith Bratt, October 1914; Letters p. 7). The resulting tale, ‘The Story of Kullervo’, was the direct inspiration for Tolkien’s own tale of Túrin, one of the major component pieces that makes up The Book of Lost Tales (cf. Verlyn Flieger, Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology [2005], pages 28–9), and The Book of Lost Tales itself strongly resembles the narrative framework of Morris’s early masterpiece The Earthly Paradise [1865], in which a group of wanderers reach a far land where they exchange stories with their hosts, retelling Norse and Classical legends respectively. If Tolkien is the father of modern fantasy, then Morris and Dunsany are its grandfathers, the chief influences on Tolkien himself.
11 The fact that Tolkien himself had adopted Broceliand into his own mythology helps explain in part his rejection of Charles Williams’ notably eccentric use of it in the latter’s Arthurian cycle. It also casts an interesting light on Tolkien’s comment in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ on the diminishment (both physically and imaginatively) of fairies in stories of the late sixteenth century: ‘. . . the great voyages had begun to make the world seem too narrow to hold both men and elves . . . the magic land of Hy Breasail in the West had become the mere Brazils, the land of red-dye-wood’ (OFS.11) – ‘Breasail’ being an Irish variant on the Breton ‘Broceliand’.
Within Tolkien’s myth, an echo of the name survived even after its displacement by Beleriand as the name of the Great Lands, in the name ‘Ossiriand’, assigned to the extreme eastern portion of the former Broseliand; see also HME III.160, where Christopher Tolkien notes that ‘Ossiriand’ is twice pencilled alongside lines in ‘The Lay of Leithian’ as a suggested replacement for ‘Broseliand’.
12 Dr Judith Priestman, author of the Bodleian catalogue, notes that the proper name of this picture (item #209 in the exhibition) is ‘Halls of Manwe on the Mountains of the World above Faerie’ and dates it to July 1928 (Priestman p. 74). Since as we have seen Tolkien probably began The Hobbit in the summer of 1930 (cf. ‘The Chronology of Composition’, p. xiii), this image would still have been quite fresh in his mind at the time he wrote the Pryftan Fragment and drew this first map.
13 For more on the relationship between Gnomish (i.e., the language of the Gnomes or Noldor), Noldorin (the slightly later form of the same language), and Sindarin (the final form of that language, now conceived not as the tongue brought back to Middle-earth by the Noldor but that of the Sindar who were already there), see p. 562 & ff. Technically the language was known as ‘Noldorin’ at the time Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, but in order to avoid confusing the nonphilological I have generally used ‘Gnomish’ to mean the early (BLT-era) form of the language, as attested in The Book of Lost Tales and The Gnomish Lexicon, ‘Noldorin’ to mean the same language as reflected in the manuscript of The Hobbit from the early 1930s, and ‘Sindarin’ to mean the ‘classical’ form of the same language as it is reflected in the published Hobbit and in The Lord of the Rings.
For more on this ever-evolving language, see The Gnomish Lexicon (Parma Eldalamberon vol. XI [1995]) [Gnomish]; The Lhammas or ‘Account of Tongues’ (HME V.167–98 [1987]) and Early Noldorin Fragments (Parma Eldalamberon vol. XIII [2001]) [Noldorin]; A Gateway to Sindarin by David Salo [2004] [Sindarin], and the essay ‘Gnomish Is Sindarin’ by Christopher Gilson (Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth [2000], pages 95–104), which testifies to the continuity of the language despite shifting conceptions about its speakers.
Chapter I(b) The Bladorthin Typescript
1 The hobbit point of view regarding food is masterfully summed up on the first page of the first draft for the ‘New Hobbit’ (the sequel that eventually turned into The Lord of the Rings), where Tolkien notes that Bilbo was famous among his fellow hobbits for having ‘disappeared after breakfast one April 30th and not reappeared until lunchtime on June 22nd in the following year’ (HME VI.13). The opening paragraphs of the Bladorthin Typescript establish that Bilbo is a thoroughly typical hobbit in his concern for steady meals and his frequent laments, as the story progresses, over short rations.
2 That Swift’s bitingly satiric invention had come to be considered appropriate children’s fare (albeit usually in carefully bowdlerized versions), a shift that seems to have occurred during the Victorian era, is also attested to by T. H. White’s modern-day sequel, Mistress Masham’s Repose [1946].
3 Tolkien was of course well acquainted with Grahame’s work; in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ he cites the opening sentence of The Wind in the Willows (‘this excellent book’) approvingly and castigates A. A. Milne’s adaptation, Toad of Toad Hall [1929] (‘some children that I took to see [it] brought away as their chief memory nausea at the opening . . .’) – OFS, Note A (pages 66–7). Nor was this a passing enthusiasm; when the letters from which Grahame composed the book were published by Grahame’s widow in 1944 as First Whispers of ‘The Wind in the Willows’, long after Tolkien’s children had grown up, Tolkien wrote telling his son Christopher about reading the reviews and notes ‘I must get hold of a copy, if poss.’ (JRRT to CT, letter of 31 July and 1 August 1944; Letters p. 90). Finally, when a sharp-eyed proofreader queried the use of ‘learn’ instead of ‘teach’ in the scene at Bree (‘Bob ought to learn his cat the fiddle . . .’), Tolkien rejected the proposed correction and scribbled in the margin: ‘no indeed! Mr Badger in the Wind in the Willows would learn you better!’ (Ms. annotation to Marq. 3/2/14 page 51).
It is perhaps also worthwhile to note that when Tolkien’s fellow Inkling C. S. Lewis wanted to make a point about The Hobbit, he could find no better way to do so than by a comparison with The Wind in the Willows:
The Hobbit escapes the danger of degenerating into mere plot and excitement by a very curious shift of tone. As the humour and homeliness of the early chapters, the sheer ‘Hobbitry’, dies away we pass insensibly into the world of epic. It is as if the battle of Toad Hall had become a serious heimsókn and Badger had begun to talk like Njal†
—Essays Presented to Charles Williams [1947], ‘On Stories’, p. 104.
† the titular character of The Saga of Burnt Njal.
4 At first sight, fairies would seem, like the stone-giants, to be a race peculiar to The Hobbit, not found in The Lord of the Rings. But this is not the case: the usage in The Book of Lost Tales establishes ‘fairy’ as a synonym for ‘elf’. Fairy should not, by the way, be confused with ‘fay’, the term applied in The Book of Lost Tales to beings created before the world – i.e., the angels, spirits, and elementals later grouped together under the general rubric of ‘Maiar’. Thus Melian is a ‘fay’ (as, in all probability, are Goldberry and Bombadil; the one a nymph, the other a genius loci), while the elves of Rivendell are ‘fairies’.
5 This late shift from the original ‘married into a fairy family’ to the more specific ‘taken a fairy wife’ is interesting, adding as it does yet another example to the long list of faerie brides in Tolkien’s works. In every case of such marriages in Tolkien, it is the wife who belongs to the older, more powerful, and nobler race: Melian the Maia and Thingol the elf-king, Aredhel the elf-princess and Eöl the dark elf, Lúthien and Beren, Idril and Tuor, Mithrellas (Nimrodel’s handmaiden) and Imrazôr the Númenórean (parents of the first Lord of Dol Amroth; Unfinished Tales p. 248), Arwen and Aragorn, and even the belle dame sans merci of ‘Ides Ælfscýne’ (Songs for the Philologists, pages 10–11 [1936]). In terms of folklore analogues, Tolkien clearly prefers the Thomas Rymer theme to Tam Lin.
6 In a 1968 interview with Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, Tolkien compared his hero to Babbitt, the main character in Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel of the same name, and suggested that Lewis’s character might have been a subconscious influence: ‘Babbitt has the same bourgeois smugness that hobbits do. His world is the same limited place’ (‘The Man Who Understands Hobbits’, Daily Telegraph Magazine, 22nd March 1968, p. 32); see p. xxxvii, Note 2.
7 Lalia Took’s story is told in a letter to A. C. Nunn, c. 1958–9 (Letters p. 294–5).
8 The Tolkien children’s fondness for The Marvellous Land of Snergs, and the probability that this work influenced The Hobbit in some details (primarily the characterization of the hobbits themselves), is discussed in the Introduction to Douglas Anderson’s The Annotated Hobbit (DAA 6–7). Tolkien’s own high regard for this now-forgotten story is recorded in Unwin’s memorandum of October 1937, reproduced in Note 9 on pp. xxxix–xl.
9 This tale appears in the same collection as what seems to be Tolkien’s favorite Dunsany tale, ‘Chu-bu and Sheemish’ (cf. Letters pp. 375 & 418), as well as ‘The Hoard of the Gibbelins’, the story that probably inspired his poem ‘The Mewlips’ (see pp. 370 & 376).
10 Wodehouse’s breezy style, perfected just before World War I, remained unchanged throughout his long career: the Bertie and Jeeves stories are said to be the longest running series by a single author writing about the same characters, with very little evolution from the first story [published 1914] to the last [written in 1974]; see Kristin Thompson’s Wooster Proposes, Jeeves Disposes [1992]. Other notable nicknames among Bertie (Bertram) Wooster’s friends include Gussie (Augustus) Fink-Nottle, Barmy (Cyril) Fotheringay-Phipps, Boko (George Herbert) Fittleworth, Tuppy (Hildebrand) Glossop, and Catsmeat (Claude) Potter-Pirbright, as well as others more along the lines of The Lord of the Rings’ Merry (Meriadoc) Brandybuck and Pippin (Peregrin) Took, such as Chuffy (Marmaduke† ) Chuffnell and Biffy (Charles Edward) Biffen.
† Marmaduke was in fact the original name in the early Lord of the Rings drafts for the character who eventually became Merry; cf. HME VI.98–104.
11 Geographical locations such as Bilbo Cemetery in Lake Charles, Louisiana; Lake Bilbo near Warren, Arkansas; and Bilbo Island on the Tombigbee River in Alabama all seem, so far as I have been able to discern, to have drawn their names not from the literary character but from the family name; I have been able to trace a ‘Bilboe’s Landing’ on the Tombigbee as far back as 1809.
12 Replicas of a variant of this game are still sold in museum shops and at colonial reconstructions; see www.historylives.com/toysandgames.htm.
13 The reference is to the following passage from the published book: ‘. . . Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat’ (DAA. 32).
14 These comments come from an essay Tolkien wrote circa 1970 in response to seeing Pauline Baynes’ art for a poster-map of Middle-earth. In addition to ten vignettes on the map itself, Baynes added a headpiece at top showing all nine members of the Fellowship of the Ring (plus Bill the pony) and a tailpiece at bottom showing the Black Riders, Gollum, Shelob, and a horde of orcs. Although Tolkien greatly admired Baynes’ work on the whole, he disliked this particular piece so much that, in addition to writing this essay he had the top and bottom cropped off the original painting when he had it framed for presentation to his longtime secretary, Joy Hill (personal communication, May 1987). The original essay is now in the Bodleian Library (Tolkien Papers A61 a, fol. 1–31).
15 In a 1958 letter to Forrest J. Ackerman commenting on Morton Grady Zimmerman’s script for a proposed film of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien emphasized this point: ‘Gandalf, please, should not “splutter”. Though he may seem testy at times, has a sense of humour, and adopts a somewhat avuncular attitude to hobbits, he is a person of high and noble authority, and great dignity. The description on 1 p. 239† should never be forgotten’ (Letters p. 271).
† ‘Gandalf was shorter in stature than [Elrond and Glorfindel]; but his long white hair, his sweeping silver beard, and his broad shoulders, made him look like some wise king of ancient legend. In his aged face under great snowy brows his dark eyes were set like coals that could leap suddenly into fire.’ (LotR, 1st edition, vol. 1 page 239)
16 One distinctive feature of English fairy tales, as opposed to German (Grimm) or French (Mother Goose), is their fascination with giants, a motif going back at least as far as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Arthur’s battle with the giant of Mont St. Michel. The two most popular of all English fairy tales were ‘Jack the Giant Killer’ and ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’.
17 Although Bilbo does not recognize him, the wizard and hobbit are already acquainted, as indicated by Bilbo’s memories of Bladorthin’s behavior and by Bladorthin’s comment on the day of the Unexpected Party: ‘This is not like you Bilbo’ (p. 34) – obviously he could not comment that the hobbit was acting out of character unless he knew him well enough to predict his normal behavior.
Many years later, Tolkien returned to this scene and rewrote it (very much to Bilbo’s disadvantage) from the wizard’s and dwarves’ point of view; see ‘The Quest of Erebor’ in Unfinished Tales pp. 321–36, DAA Appendix A pp. [367]–77, and HME XII pages 282–9.
18 We hear little more of these other beneficiaries (or victims, depending on one’s point of view) of Bladorthin’s attention, but Tolkien probably had this passage in mind when he finalized the Took family tree at the very end of the LotR period (i.e., c. 1952–4). The wizard was a close friend of Bilbo’s grandfather, The Old Took (‘the title Old was bestowed on him . . . not so much for his age as for his oddity’, according to one draft passage in The Lord of the Rings; HME VI.245), and at least two of Bilbo’s Took uncles had adventures that sound suspiciously like something Bladorthin/Gandalf had a hand in: Hildifons ‘went off on a journey and never returned’ – a ‘there’ without a ‘back again’, so to speak – and Isengar is ‘said to have “gone to sea” in his youth’. In addition, a third brother, Hildigard, is laconically said to have ‘died young’, although no details are forthcoming (LotR.1137). Nor was Bilbo the only one of the Old Took’s grandchildren to go adventuring; one of Bilbo’s cousins – described in the published book as ‘a great traveller’ (DAA.145) – fared far enough afield to have ‘visited the forests in the north of Bilbo’s country’ (p. 203), an area wild enough to be frequented by wolves. In retrospect, we can speculate that the wizard had already used up the more adventurous members of the preceding generation and was forced to rely upon Mr. Baggins to round out the party.
We should perhaps also note the phrase ‘lads and lasses’, suggesting as it does that Bladorthin was an equal-opportunity enchanter, responsible for young hobbits of both sexes going off on adventures; the all-male cast of The Hobbit might thus be due largely to chance rather than design.
19 It will be observed that the motif of hobbits’ fear of water in The Lord of the Rings is another later accretion totally absent from this book: a hydrophobe would hardly propose barrelling down an underground river, and Bilbo shows no qualms about riding by boat from Lake Town across Long Lake and up the River Running (or indeed to staying in Lake Town, a city suspended above deep water).
20 The idea of hobbit stowaways on ships sailing to Valinor remained in the text until the third edition of 1966, when the passage was altered to read ‘. . . anything from climbing trees to visiting elves – or sailing in ships, sailing to other shores!’
21 Indeed, it is likely that here we see the first spark of an idea to which Tolkien later returned – that The Silmarillion would be a collection made by Bilbo at Rivendell from stories told to him there, just as Eriol the Wanderer and later Ælfwine of England had heard the ‘lost tales’ in the Cottage of Lost Play. A hint of this can be found in the ‘three large volumes’ of Bilbo’s Translations from the Elvish described in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings – ‘a work of great skill and learning’ ‘almost entirely concerned with the Elder Days’ ‘in which . . . he had used all the sources available to him in Rivendell, both living and written’ (LotR.26–7; see also LotR.1023).
22 The suffix -wen elsewhere means maiden, girl, daughter, in names such as Morwen (‘daughter of night’, a name for the planet Jupiter) and Urwen/Urwendi, the sun-maiden who guards the last fruit of the Golden Tree (and in the much later Arwen, Elrond’s daughter); originally Qenya (the language that later evolved into High-Elven, or Quenya) rather than Gnomish (the language that eventually became Sindarin), the suffix was gradually adopted into the latter, where it displaced the earlier -win or -gwen. Thus Túrin’s mother’s name underwent a transformation from Mavwin in ‘Turambar and the Foalóke’, one of the Lost Tales (BLT II) to Morwin and then Morwen in ‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’ (HME III).
Similarly, -dor, one of the most stable of Tolkien’s linguistic inventions, meant ‘land’ or ‘country’ in the sense of an inhabited land, as far back as the Gnomish Lexicon (Parma Eldalamberon XI.30), a meaning that persisted right through to the ‘classical’ period of the published Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion in names such as Dor Lómin, Dorwinion, Dor-na-Fauglith, Mordor, and Gondor.
Finally, it is possible that -or, an early suffix meaning ‘fay’ in the Gnomish Lexicon, is present here; cf. tavor ‘a wood fay’ from taur wood + -or fay (Parma Eldalamberon XI.69). A similar but apparently unrelated suffix has the rough meaning ‘one who is the master of X’ – e.g., Gnomish ind (‘house’) > indor (‘master of house’) and Qenya nand (‘field, acre’) > nandor (‘farmer’) (ibid., pp. 51 & 59).
23 I have learned since writing this section that Tolkien linguist Chris Gilson has examined the possible meaning of the name Bladorthin in an early issue of Vinyar Tengwar (issue 17, pages 1–2 [May 1991]), arriving at similar conclusions regarding the name’s appropriateness to Gandalf the Grey through somewhat different channels.
24 Bombur is not Tolkien’s only obese character; other examples of his rather cruel sense of humor on this point (of a piece with the period) are Fatty Bolger in The Lord of the Rings and especially Fattie Dorkins in Mr. Bliss. We should note, however, that at least two of Tolkien’s heroes – Farmer Giles and Bilbo himself – are distinctly on the tubby side.
25 Much, much later Tolkien jotted down as a note to himself two questions:
What happened to the musical instruments used by the Dwarves at Bag-end?
Why did they bring them to B-End?
Even thirty years later, he was unable to come up with a satisfactory answer; see p. 811.
26 This quarrel is discussed in more detail in ‘The King of Wood and Stone’; see pages 411–13 following Chapter IX.
Briefly, the original version of the story runs thusly: Tinwelint [Thingol] the elvenking hires dwarves to work the treasure of Mîm (brought to his hall by Úrin [Húrin], and thus doubly cursed) into jewelry, agreeing to let them name their own ‘small’ reward when the work is done. He sends them half the gold, taking a hostage to ensure their good behavior. When they deliver the first shipment, he is delighted at the results of their craft and promptly takes all the dwarven smiths prisoner, forcing them to complete the work at his halls rather than risk letting any of the gold out of his sight again. They grudgingly finish the assigned task, and then demand a princely reward for the insult – including, among much gold, an elf-bride apiece. The king pays them a pittance (from which he extracts the cost of their food and board during the time of their captivity) and has them beaten for their insolence, driving them from his land. They return home, gather an army, and return to sack the elven kingdom and kill the elvenking. On the return march, they are ambushed by an elven force under the command of Beren; many dwarves are slain, the rest put to flight, and the treasure lost, except for the Nauglafring bearing the Silmaril, which Beren takes and gives to Lúthien.
This abbreviated account leaves out many betrayals and much treachery by elf against elf and dwarf against dwarf.
27 The narrator’s importance to the story is usually slighted by critics who would prefer The Hobbit to conform to and resemble its sequel in every possible detail. In later years Tolkien came to regard the tone of the intrusive narrator’s remarks as condescending, feeling that it marked the book as targeted for children, and said over and over again in letters that he regretted this, considering it an error on his part and a severe flaw in the book. Taking their cue from Tolkien’s afterthoughts, critics writing on The Hobbit have almost universally condemned the narrative interpolations, contenting themselves with pointing out how inappropriate the narrative voice in The Hobbit would be if used in The Lord of the Rings, rather than asking what role the narrator was originally designed to play in what was, after all, conceived as a stand-alone work (and did in fact stand alone for seventeen years). Taken on its own terms, the voice of the narrator is one of the most important elements in the success of the story. For a notable exception, and an insightful examination of the function of the intrusive narrator in The Hobbit, see Paul Thomas’s essay ‘Some of Tolkien’s Narrators’ in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, ed. Verlyn Flieger & Carl F. Hostetter [2000], pp. 161–81.
28 One of Dunsany’s most important innovations was the creation of his own pantheon of gods – the first modern writer to ever do so – in The Gods of Pegana (1905); both Tolkien’s Valar and H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos were directly inspired by this thin little book. This is not the place to enter into a full-scale description of the elder fantasist’s impact, or to catalogue all Tolkien’s references to Dunsany’s work, but we should note that when Clyde Kilby arrived in Oxford in 1966 to offer his advice on The Silmarillion, Tolkien handed him a copy of Dunsany’s The Book of Wonder [1912] and told him to read it in preparation for his task (C. S. Kilby, unpublished lecture, Marquette Tolkien Conference, September 1983).
For more on Dunsany, and his influence on early Tolkien, see Beyond the Fields We Know: The Short Stories of Lord Dunsany by John D. Rateliff, Ph.D. dissertation, December 1990, Marquette University.
29 In a letter to L. Sprague de Camp of 30th August 1964, Tolkien specifically criticized Dunsany for doing exactly the same thing – i.e., deliberately pricking his own illusion ‘for the sake of a joke’ – in the story ‘The Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller’; cf. de Camp, Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers [1976], p. 243.
30 The relevant passage from Allen & Unwin’s blurb read ‘The birth of The Hobbit recalls very strongly that of Alice in Wonderland. Here again a professor of an abstruse subject is at play.’ Tolkien objected that he did not consider Old English and Icelandic literature ‘abstruse’ (‘Some folk may think so, but I do not like encouraging them’) and pointed out that Dodgson never reached the rank of professor. He also expressed his doubts as to the validity of the comparison, maintaining that ‘this stuff of mine is really more comparable to Dodgson’s amateur photography’ and the poem ‘Hiawatha’s Photographing’,† although he speculated that ‘the presence of “conundrums” in Alice’ might be ‘a parallel to echoes of Northern myth in The Hobbit.’ He concluded that ‘If you think it good, and fair (the compliment to The Hobbit is rather high) to maintain the comparison – Looking-glass ought to be mentioned. It is much closer in every way’ (JRRT to A&U, letter of 31st August 1937, Letters pp. 21–2).
In addition to the evidence of this letter, Christopher Tolkien testifies to his father’s fondness for, and familiarity with, Carroll’s work: in a gloss on a quote from Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno [1889] in Tolkien’s The Notion Club Papers, Christopher says ‘my father knew the work from which it comes well, and its verses formed part of his large repertoire of occasional recitation’ (HME IX.x; see also p. 214 and Note 22 pp. 214 & 660). Another of Carroll’s poems, ‘What Tottles Meant’, from Sylvie and Bruno Concluded [1893], seems to be echoed in the phrase ‘“Good morning” said Bilbo, and he meant it’ (p. 30). One of Carroll’s most famous poems, ‘Jabberwocky’ (from Through the Looking Glass), influenced Tolkien’s vocabulary at one point when he is describing Smaug (see Text Note 9, p. 368), and another from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,†† ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’, was used by Tolkien to provide the text for an inscription in his invented ‘Rúmilian’ script, which predates the more familiar tengwar or ‘Fëanorian’ script; Arden Smith dates this inscription from the early 1930s (Parma Eldalamberon vol. XIII [2001], pages 82 & 84).
Finally, although this took place long after The Hobbit was finished, we should note that one of Tolkien’s students, Roger Lancelyn Green (whose thesis Tolkien directed at Oxford), became a noted Carroll scholar and the editor of his diaries.
† This piece, written in the Kalevala meter, was collected in Phantasmagoria and Other Poems [1869]; Tolkien’s knowledge of it reflects that his acquaintance with Carroll’s work was more than casual, and extended well beyond the Alice books or even Sylvie and Bruno/Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.
†† Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland [1865] and Through the Looking-Glass [1871] together make up the composite volume Alice in Wonderland.
31 W. H. Auden picked up on this point in his tribute to Tolkien, the poem ‘A Short Ode to a Philologist’, a meditation on words such as Good-morning and their uses and abuses that he contributed to Tolkien’s festschrift, English and Medieval Studies Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Norman Davis & C. L. Wrenn [1962], which ends
a lot of us are grateful for
What J. R. R. Tolkien has done
As bard to Anglo-Saxon.
Tolkien returned the favor five years later with ‘For W. H. A.’, a dual-text poem in both Old English and Modern English, published in the journal Shenandoah’s tribute issue in honor of Auden’s sixtieth birthday [Winter 1967].
32 Published in 1936, but most of whose contents dated back to Tolkien’s time at Leeds [1920–25].
33 Thus Christopher Tolkien recalls ‘I have a faint dim feeling that for some of them, at any rate, like “far over the misty mountains”, he used some sort of recitative’ (CT to JDR, November 1993).
Chapter I(c) The Adventure Continues
1 In essence, ‘The Unexpected Party’ (to give Chapter I its eventual title) combines within its two halves parallels to both of the first two chapters in The Lord of the Rings (‘A Long-Expected Party’ and ‘The Shadow of the Past’, the latter originally named ‘Ancient History’), with the light-hearted gathering immediately followed by a revelation of the somewhat sinister history underlying the quest that is about to begin.
2 Thus, they are included under the rubric Úvanimor, who are defined in ‘The Coming of the Valar’ as ‘Úvanimor (who are monsters, giants, and ogres)’ (BLT I.75); compare uvanimo in the Qenya Lexicon, which is glossed as ‘monster’ (Parma Eldalamberon XII.98). An outline for the ‘Story of the Nauglafring or the Necklace of the Dwarves’ mentions how Linwë/Tinwelint, the figure who became Thingol Greycloak in later versions of the story, took a golden hoard ‘and he had a great necklace made by certain Úvanimor (Nautar or Nauglath)’ – i.e., dwarves (BLT II.136). Similarly, an outline for ‘Gilfanon’s Tale’ tells how Úvanimor (goblins and dwarves) fought together under the command of Melko’s servant, variously called Fangli, Fankil, and Fúkil, against men and elves at the Battle of Palisor (?Eden); see p. 82 and BLT I.236–7. For more on dwarves as part of what we might call the Children of Morgoth (that is, those forces allied with Melko/Melkor in the early stages of the mythology), see also BLT II.247.
3 For more on the theme of the cursed hoard, see pages 595–600 and also Tolkien’s poem ‘The Hoard’ (ATB poem #14, pp. 53–6), which he himself explicitly ties back to ‘the heroic days at the end of the First Age’ (ATB, Preface, p. 8).
4 This saga is also the source of one of Gollum’s riddles (see p. 173) and one of the sources for Dwalin’s and Durin’s names (see p. 42).
5 Elsewhere in the Lost Tales, Tolkien uses ‘nauglath’ in a less restrictive sense, to mean the whole of the dwarven race; cf. BLT II.223–4 and CT’s commentary on p. 247.
Tolkien later commented to Stanley Unwin, apropos of the ‘dwarfs/dwarves’ issue, that dwarf and gnome ‘are only translations into approximate equivalents of creatures with different names and rather different functions in their own world’; hence dwarf perhaps ‘may be allowed a peculiar plural’ (‘Dwarrows’ letter, JRRT to SU, 15th October 1937; Letters p. 23). Here he was no doubt referring to the use of the term dwarf rather than nauglath or indrafang.
6 This change came very late in the evolution of the legend(s), circa 1959–60. Cf. the essay ‘Quendi and Eldar’ in HME XI.
7 In the 1930 Quenta it is said ‘There they [the elves] made war upon the Dwarves of Nogrod and Belegost; but they did not discover whence that strange race came, nor have any since. They are not friend of Valar or of Eldar or of Men, nor do they serve Morgoth; though they are in many things more like his people, and little did they love the Gnomes . . .’ (HME IV.103–4); later ‘made war upon’ was changed to ‘had converse with’ (ibid.108). The ‘Annals of Beleriand’, composed slightly later, preserves the same idea in other words: ‘in those mountains they met the Dwarves, and there was yet no enmity between them and nonetheless little love. For it is not known whence the Dwarves came, save that they are not of Elf-kin or mortal kind or of Morgoth’s breed’ (HME IV.331). See pp. 721–2 for more on dwarven origin myths.
8 Tolkien may have derived the name from Mimir, the Norse god of wisdom, but more likely this represents one of his very few borrowings from Wagner, who gave the name ‘Mime’ to the dwarven smith who counselled Siegfried how to slay the giant Fafnir (a role filled by Regin in the Eddas and Völsunga Saga).
9 The first reference to this analogue I have found is in Tolkien’s 1947 ‘Thrym Thistlebeard’ letter (see p. 757). More specifically, Tolkien says in the 1965 interview:
The Dwarves of course are quite obviously a – wouldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? All their words are Semitic, obviously; constructed to be Semitic. There’s a tremendous love of the artefact. And of course the immense warlike passion of the Jews too, which we tend to forget nowadays.
—JRRT to Denys Gueroult, 1965 BBC interview.
10 The first sign of this motif that I am aware of occurs in Tolkien’s February 1938 letter to The Observer:
These dwarves are not quite the dwarfs of better known lore. They have been given Scandinavian names, it is true; but that is an editorial concession. Too many names in the tongues proper to the period might have been alarming. Dwarvish was both complicated and cacophonous. Even early elvish philologists avoided it, and the dwarves were obliged to use other languages, except for entirely private conversations.
—Letters p. 31; see Appendix II.
11 Tolkien’s own attitude towards anti-Semitism was eloquently expressed in 1938 when he was asked by a German publisher to confirm his arisch (Aryan) ancestry. To his own publisher he wrote ‘I should object strongly to any such declaration appearing in print. I do not regard the (probable) absence of all Jewish blood as necessarily honourable; and I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.’ To the German publishers, he retorted ‘if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people’ (Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, 25th July 1938, p. 37).
12 For Tolkien’s eventual distinction between the good dwarves of Belegost and the less virtuous, more easily angered dwarves of Nogrod, see pp. 431–2.
13 Or, to give it its full title, ‘The GEST of BEREN son of BARAHIR and LUTHIEN the FAY called TINUVIEL the NIGHTINGALE or the LAY OF LEITHIAN Release from Bondage’ (HME III.153). Tolkien began this major work in the summer of 1925 and continued to work on it up through September 1931, so that it both precedes and is contemporaneous with his work on The Hobbit, particularly the First Phase (summer 1930) and the bulk of the Second Phase.
Chapter II Trolls
1 The 1936 text can be found in HME VI.143.
2 This final version (LotR.223–4) was reprinted in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil as ‘The Stone Troll’ (ATB poem #7, pp. 39–40); a recording of Tolkien singing the song to the tune of the old folk-song ‘The Fox Went Out’ appeared on the 1967 Caedmon record Poems and Songs of Middle Earth.
3 This poem underwent a great deal of revision and substitution even as it was being written: ‘uncle’ in the second stanza was changed to ‘nuncle’; the entire fifth stanza was replaced by ‘But still I don’t see what is that to thee,/Wi’ me kith and me kin a-makin’ free/So get to Hell and ax leave o’ he/Afore thou gnaws me uncle’. The third and fourth lines of the sixth stanza were changed to ‘hath a more stony [> stonier] seat than its stony face’ and ‘and he [> Tom] rued that root on the rumpo/lumpo/bumpo’. Finally, the last lines of the poem seem to have given Tolkien special trouble: first he changed them to ‘But troll’s old seat is much the same/And the bone he boned from its owner/Donor/Boner’ – the reading he adopted in Songs for the Philologists. But on the manuscript he follows this at once with ‘That it was once in the boot of a burglar/Jurgler/<burgler>’, taking quite literally Tom’s earlier description of his Uncle John as ‘a thief’. When Tolkien decided to adapt this poem for inclusion in The Lord of the Rings, he deleted the references to heaven, hell, and churchyard (since he conceived of Middle-earth as a pre-Christian world with no ‘church’ per se), changing the latter to the less specific ‘graveyard’. In addition to completely rewriting the original sixth stanza into two new stanzas, Tolkien also added a whole new stanza between the original fifth and sixth stanzas, making the passive troll much more menacing:
‘For a couple o’ pins,’ says Troll, and grins,
‘I’ll eat thee too, and gnaw thy shins.
A bit o’ fresh meat will go down sweet!
I’ll try my teeth on thee now.
Hee now! See now!
I’m tired o’ gnawing old bones and skins;
I’ve a mind to dine on thee now.’
The new stanza is interesting because here we can see the chain of revisions come full circle. The depiction of William, Bert, and Tom in The Hobbit clearly derives from the old poem, but their characterization in the story in turn requires a rewriting of the poem to accommodate the changing conception, changing the Lonely Troll from a scavenger of carrion to a cannibalistic murderer. William’s touches of good-nature are perfectly in keeping with the original troll of ‘Pero & Podex’, a theme Tolkien also developed in the poem ‘Perry-the-Winkle’ (ATB poem #8, pp. 41–4). Later, when Tolkien had decided that trolls were creations of Morgoth (cf. LotR.507† ), he revised this scene accordingly to remove the last traces of ‘humanity’: see pp. 799–800.
† ‘Maybe you have heard of Trolls? They are mighty strong. But Trolls are only counterfeits, made by the Enemy in the Great Darkness, in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves. We are stronger than Trolls. We are made of the bones of the earth.’ – Treebeard the Ent.
4 ‘Oddsteeth’ (i.e., ‘by God’s teeth’) is not attested by the OED, but many similar constructions are listed there, such as Ods blood, Ods bodikins, and Ods wounds (more frequently condensed still further to ‘zounds!’). A fair number of examples occur in Shakespeare, and Chaucer mentions the practice of swearing by bits of God’s body in ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’:
With oaths so damnable in blasphemy
That it’s a grisly thing to hear them swear
Our dear Lord’s body they will rend and tear
—The Canterbury Tales, tr. Nevill Coghill
[1962], p. 263
By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the practice had ceased to be considered a strong blasphemy and become instead a mild way of swearing, eventually drifting into parody, as in this example by Tolkien.
5 Tolkien was professionally interested in dialects; his mentor when an undergraduate, Joseph Wright, was the editor and compiler of the massive English Dialect Dictionary [six volumes, 1898–1905], and Tolkien himself wrote the introduction to Haigh’s A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District [1928]. The leading expert of his time on the medieval dialect of the West Midlands, he also ranged further afield. Thus, in 1931 Tolkien delivered a major paper published three years later as ‘Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale’, in which he examines Chaucer’s spelling and word choice minutely through a number of manuscripts and concludes that in this Canterbury Tale Chaucer deliberately used dialect for comic effect. While giving Chaucer high marks for accuracy, he notes some lapses but judges them unimportant, so long as the general effect is conveyed to the intended audience.
6 Compare, for example, Dunsany’s ‘The Bird of the Difficult Eye’ [The Last Book of Wonder, 1916], where Neepy Thang buys a special ticket at a London train station to the End of the World.
7 The only possible exception I have found comes in William Morris’s The Roots of the Mountains, where at one point a character who believes in the existence of ‘trolls and wood-wights’ in the deep forest observes that ‘trolls would not come out of the waste into the sunlight of the Dale’ but does not specify why [1889; Newcastle Forgotten Fantasy re-issue, 1979, p. 175].
8 This occurs both in Dasent’s title story and also in another story in his collection, ‘Boots and the Troll’, though not in a third, ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff.’ In more recent times, Poul Anderson, in Three Hearts and Three Lions [1953], borrows the troll-turned-to-stone-by-daylight motif for a scene in his retelling of the story of Ogier the Dane. Terry Pratchett incorporated the idea into one of the early novels from his Discworld series, with the difference that his trolls come back to life again when the sun sets; cf. The Light Fantastic [1986] p. 98.
9 In her entry on trow, a variety of trolls found in the Shetlands, Briggs notes ‘The gigantic trolls, it will be remembered, could not live in the light of the sun, but turned into stone. This trait has been made familiar to many readers by its introduction into J. R. R. TOLKIEN’s The Hobbit. The Shetland trows also found the light of the sun dangerous, but not fatal. A trow who is above-ground at sunrise is earthbound and cannot return to its underground dwelling until sunset’ (Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and other supernatural creatures. [1976; Penguin edition 1977], p. 413; emphasis mine).
10 Thompson cites several nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works on Norse mythology as his authorities for what he calls motif F531.6.12.2, ‘Sunlight turns giant or troll to stone’, as well as for motif F455.8.1, ‘Trolls turn to stone at sunrise’. Grimm also cites, in his supplementary volume, ‘Many Swed[ish] tales of giants whom the first beam of the sunrise turns into stone’ (Teutonic Mythology vol. IV [1888], p. 1446).
11 These dates are established by two indicators. First, the rendezvous point given in the facsimile is ‘the Green Dragon Inn, Bywater’, a reading which replaced ‘the Great Mill across The Water’ in the marked page proofs Tolkien returned to Allen & Unwin shortly before 18th February 1937. Thus, the facsimile which incorporates this revision must postdate the page proofs. Second, the piece was in existence by February of 1938, since Tolkien refers to it in his letter to The Observer, in which he states that ‘a facsimile of the original letter left on the mantelpiece can be supplied’ (see Appendix II).
12 Brian Alderson, in the little booklet Blackwell Bookshops of Oxford issued commemorating the 50th anniversary of The Hobbit in 1987, was the first to note the close similarity of this picture to one by children’s illustrator Jennie Harbour that had appeared in the 1921 collection My Book of Favourite Fairy Tales by Edric Vredenburg; Harbour’s picture illustrates the Grimms’ ‘Hansel and Gretel’. Hammond & Scull print Harbour’s and Tolkien’s pictures on facing pages (H-S#101 & 102), as does Douglas Anderson in The Annotated Hobbit; Anderson also gives some background information on Harbour’s career and states that Tolkien knew of Harbour’s illustration through The Fairy Tale Book [1934].
† A possible source for this motif may come from Grettir’s Saga, where Grettir fights a troll-woman in a scene parallel to Beowulf’s encounters with Grendel and his Dam. After describing the she-troll’s death, the saga then remarkably enough also gives an alternate version: ‘Grettir said that the she-troll dived down into the gorge when she received the wound, but the men of Bardardale claim that the day dawned upon her as they were wrestling, and that she died when he cut off her arm – and she still stands there on the cliff, turned into stone’ (Grettir’s Saga, Chapter 65; tr. Denton Fox and Hermann Pálsson [1974; rpt 2005], page 138; emphasis mine). I am grateful to Marjorie Burns for drawing this passage to my attention.
A more proximate source probably lies in the work of Helen Buckhurst, a student and colleague of Tolkien’s, and one of the people to whom he presented a signed copy of The Hobbit upon its first publication (see Appendix V). In a 1926 lecture on ‘Icelandic Folklore’ (later reprinted in Saga-Book of the Viking Society, Vol. X pages 216–263), Buckhurst retells several stories about ‘Night-Trolls’, who turn to stone at dawn – e.g.
‘Dawn now hath caught thee, a stone shalt thou be,
And no man henceforth shall be harméd by thee’
—‘The Night Troll’ (Saga-Book, page 230)
and again in a story of two trolls (‘old man’ and ‘old woman’) moving an island:
they were caught by the daylight, and the island came to rest there, where it remains to this day . . . And at that same moment the old man and old woman were turned to rocks . . . he is tall and thin, just as he was in life . . .
—‘Old Man and Old Woman’ (ibid., page 231).
She also briefly summarizes a third such tale, based on a different rock formation, in which the island itself is ‘a troll cow’ flanked by its petrified troll owners (pages 231–232). For more on Buckhurst’s work, including a compete reprint of ‘The Night Troll’, see DAA.80–82. I am grateful to Doug Anderson for drawing Buckhurst’s work, and its importance, to my attention.
Chapter III Rivendell
1 The name ‘Rivendell’ does not appear at all in the first draft, but it does occur in the first typescript of Chapter XIX (Marq. 1/1/69) and in replacement pages slipped into the first typescript of Chapters II and III (Marq. 1/1/53), and thus made its way into the first edition.
2 This tradition, which Tolkien deplored, was forever immortalized in the Cottingley fairy photographs authenticated and popularized by Conan Doyle (see Pictures of Fairies: The Cottingley Photographs by Edward L. Gardner [1966]† ), more recently parodied by Terry Jones and Brian Froud in Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book [1994].
† This book, Gardner’s attempt to perpetuate the fraud by arguing that the photographs are genuine, was first published in 1945 under the title The Cottingley Photographs and Their Sequel.
3 The legends of the Tuatha de Danaan are most readily found in Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men [1904]. The final expression of elves as doughty human-sized warriors and knights in mainstream literature is Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene [1590]; the hero of the first book, the Redcrosse Knight, is assumed throughout to be an elf and only revealed as a human foundling at the very end; the hero of the second book, Sir Guyon (Guy) is an elf.
4 Tolkien himself expressed a wish that ‘the unhappy little thing, representing all that I came (so soon after) to fervently dislike, could be buried for ever’ (HME I.32).
5 Along with poems by Tolkien’s friends G. B. Smith and T. W. Earp, and future luminaries like Naomi M. Haldane (the future Naomi Mitchison), A. L. (Aldous) Huxley, and Dorothy L. Sayers.
6 This book of children’s poetry fortuitously played a role in inspiring ‘Bilbo’s First Song’; see p. 725.
7 The Snow-elves were joined the next year by Snow-men (see the letter for 1930). The latter did not make it into The Hobbit, but they did make it into The Lord of the Rings as the Snowmen of Forochel, also known as the Lossoth or the Forodwaith (LotR Appendix A, pp. 1078–9).
8 See the section of commentary on ‘Switzerland’ beginning on p. 145, as well as Letters pp. 308–9 (letter of 4th November 1961 to Joyce Reeves) & pp. 391–3 (letter of 1967/1968 to Michael Tolkien).
9 For Anglo-Saxon references, see The Exeter Book; for nineteenth-century lore, see The Denham Tracts.
10 A possible exception is the green elves’ behavior in ‘The Nauglafring’ when they laugh at and mock the desperate dwarves attempting to flee their ambush at the fords of Aros (BLT II.237).
11 In the first typescript (Marq. 1/1/53:5) the phrase ‘as kind as Christmas’ has been replaced by ‘as kind as summer’, the reading adopted in the published book – doubtless with an eye to Tolkien’s everpresent concern with decorum and the avoidance of blatant anachronisms (there is no ‘Christmas’ yet because we are in a prehistoric world before the Christian era).
12 Originally, Elrond was Eärendel’s only son (‘Sketch of the Mythology’, HME IV.38), and this was still the case in the 1930 Quenta as first written (HME IV.150) and also in the replacement text of this passage (Quenta II; HME IV.151). His brother Elros was only added in revisions to this replacement text; see HME IV.155, Notes 4, 9, & 10 and Christopher Tolkien’s commentary on HME IV.196. Thus this passage in The Hobbit probably predates the creation of Elros.
13 In the earlier versions of the story, it is Maidros rather than Maglor who rescues young Elrond; contrast HME IV.38 (‘Sketch’) and HME IV.150 & 153 (1930 Quenta & Quenta II, respectively), both of which assign this role to Maidros the eldest brother, with HME IV.155 (revisions to Quenta II) and subsequent texts (e.g., Silm.247), which credit the deed to Maglor instead.
14 Actually, as Christopher Tolkien points out (HME IV.39), Húrin is Elrond’s great-great-uncle.
15 ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ was written circa 1916–17 (BLT II.146) but not published until the appearance of volume two of The Book of Lost Tales [1984]). That Tolkien thought highly of the story is shown by the fact that this was the only Silmarillion story he ever read aloud at a public performance (to Exeter College’s Essay Club, in 1920); cf. Nevill Coghill’s account in Ann Bonsor’s 1974 BBC Radio Oxford program and also Carpenter’s brief mention (Tolkien: A Biography p. 102).
16 This custom continued up to the early eighteenth century; unwary scholars are sometimes tripped up by the fact that, for example, 24th March 1714 was followed the next day by 25th March 1715. The practice was phased out as the eighteenth century wore on, with the traditional usage often marked ‘O.S.’ (i.e., ‘Old Style’); in modern editions of letters from the time the dates are often adjusted to reflect current practices. The change to our current system was not made in England and its colonies (including what became the United States) until 1752.
Chapter IV Goblins
1 Note that the trolls, when exposed to sunlight, ‘go back to the stuff of the mountains they are made of’ (see p. 96). Similarly, Treebeard claims that Ents are ‘made of the bones of the earth’ (i.e., stone† – cf. LotR.507), and we are told in The Silmarillion of the elvish belief that upon death dwarves ‘returned to the earth and the stone of which they were made’ (Silm.44). Thus, even if Melkor did form the first goblins from ‘subterranean heats and slime’, this would not in itself prevent them from being sentient; the Old Testament itself tells (Genesis 2.7) how ‘the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground’, and the very word ‘Adam’ simply means ‘earth’ or ‘clay’ in Hebrew (thus the burial service: ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’).
† This is at variance with the creation myth recounted in The Silmarillion, where Yavanna tells Manwë ‘. . . it was in the Song . . . For while thou wert in the heavens and with Ulmo built the clouds and poured out the rains, I lifted up the branches of great trees to receive them, and some sang to Ilúvatar amid the wind and the rain’ (‘Of Aule and Yavanna’, Silm.45–6). Here it is clear that the Ents are trees ensouled by Ilúvatar: ‘the hand of Ilúvatar . . . entered in, and from it came forth many wonders . . . the thought of Yavanna will awake . . . and it will summon spirits from afar, and they will go among . . . the olvar [plant life], and some will dwell therein’ (ibid., p. 46).
2 Note Ilúvatar’s rebuke to Aulë when he first makes the dwarves: ‘the creatures of thy hand and mind can live only by that being, moving when thou thinkest to move them, and if thy thought be elsewhere, standing idle’ (Silm.43). When Sauron is finally destroyed at the climax of The Lord of the Rings ‘the creatures of Sauron, orc or troll or beast spell-enslaved, ran hither and thither mindless; and some slew themselves, or cast themselves in pits, or fled wailing back to hide in holes and dark lightless places far from hope’ (LotR.985).
3 In a footnote to one of these mini-essays, Tolkien proposed the name Boldog for these Maiar-orcs, almost a kind of lesser balrog (HME X.418). According to this theory, presumably the Great Goblin of the Misty Mountains, Azog, and Bolg were either creatures of this type or descended from them.
4 According to this theory, the idea was Morgoth’s but the actual execution was left to Sauron, who ‘was often able to achieve things, first conceived by Melkor, which his master did not or could not complete in the furious haste of his malice’ (HME X.420).
5 The slave-labor industry of Morgoth and his minions goes all the way back to The Book of Lost Tales. For example, in ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’ Beren is captured by Orcs, who ‘thought that Melko might perchance be pleasured if he was brought before him and might set him to some heavy thrall-work in his mines or in his smithies’ (BLT II.14–15), although in the event Beren winds up a kitchen-slave of Tevildo, Prince of Cats. Similarly, in ‘Turambar and the Foalókë, we see in Flinding, the escaped prisoner from ‘the mines of Melko’, the effects of such servitude.
6 Ms. Tolkien 14, folio 19, verso. This draft is now in the Department of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library in Oxford; I am grateful to Christina Scull for drawing this reference to my attention and providing me with a transcription.
7 Tolkien retained his good opinion of MacDonald right up until September of 1964, when he agreed to write a preface to a new edition of The Golden Key (JRRT to Mr. di Capua of Pantheon Books, 7th Sept 1964; Letters p. 351) – a task C. S. Lewis would no doubt have been asked to perform had he not died the year before. Unfortunately, actually rereading MacDonald again, probably for the first time in thirty years, filled Tolkien with dismay (cf. Carpenter page 242); the result was his writing ‘an anti-G[eorge]. M[acDonald]. tract’, the little story known as Smith of Wootton Major [1967] (SWM extended edition, ed. Verlyn Flieger [2005], pages 69–70).
8 MacDonald claims that goblins are not cruel for cruelty’s sake, but the general tone of the text does not support this.
9 For more on hobbit footware, see p. 784 and Letters p. 35.
10 Similarly, in The Lord of the Rings, when Shagrat and Gorbag reminisce fondly about ‘old times’ when they could maraud freely before the ‘Big Bosses’ came back (LotR.765); they seem to be referring to the period before Sauron’s return to Mordor almost seventy years before, suggesting a lifespan longer than a human’s or hobbit’s.†
† However, Gorbag’s allusion to ‘the Great Siege’ later in the same conversation (LotR.767) – that is, to the events of the Last Alliance just over three thousand years before – need not be from personal experience.
11 That Tolkien should have picked a specific year is typical of his comic precision (‘100 years ago last Tuesday’), but it’s not clear why he should have picked 1453, a year notorious in European history for two events: the fall of Constantinople and the end of the Hundred Years’ War. The one event marked the final end of the Roman Empire and defeat of Christendom by Islam, while the other put an end to centuries of English attempts to gain territory on the European mainland. Both are seminal in the transition from the so-called ‘Middle Ages’ to modern times, and the disappearance of nonhuman monsters such as goblins might plausibly be thought of as another feature of modern times, but this is speculation.
12 Another cave-painting accompanying the 1932 letter is clearly based on the great Neolithic paintings of Altamira (discovered in 1879; those at Lascaux and Chauvet were not discovered until 1940 and 1994, respectively, too late to influence the Father Christmas Letters). In addition to drawings of bears, bison, horse, stags, boar, and mammoths, the page is littered with goblin graffiti. Just above the lower left corner are two figures, hand in hand – the one clearly meant to represent a goblin from its inky blackness and pointy head, but the other is red and has a flat head shaped rather like an inverted triangle. This may be a representational drawing of a female goblin; if so, it is the only one Tolkien drew known to me.
13 Eruman is a dark shady land bordering on Valinor; the name essentially means ‘outside’ (see Christopher Tolkien’s discussion of both name and place, BLT I.252). For Gilim, see Parma Eldalamberon XI.38. Nan’s name may be linked to the Qenya [early Quenya] word for woods or forest; cf. the Qenya Lexicon’s nan(d) woodland, nandin dryad (Parma Eldalamberon XII.64).
14 The connection with the ents is strengthened by Sam’s comment when he introduces the subject: ‘what about these Tree-men, these giants, as you might call them?’ (LotR.57).
15 This portrayal of an apparently friendly yet actually evil giant may owe something to Golithos, the most interesting character in Wyke-Smith’s The Marvellous Land of Snergs. Formerly an ogre (the French equivalent of the Norse ‘troll’, and like it a term of wide applicability), he has taken the pledge and no longer eats people, but a visit from two tender young children proves too much for him after years of a strict vegetarian diet, and he attempts to revert to his former cannibalistic ways.
16 In his review of The Fellowship of the Ring, C. S. Lewis singled out ‘the unforgettable Ents’ for special praise – no doubt to the puzzlement of his original readers, since the ents do not enter the story until the second volume, The Two Towers, published several months later. Similarly, Edmund Wilson, in his famous diatribe ‘Oo, Those Awful Orcs’, grudgingly admitted that the ents ‘showed signs of imagination’.
17 As Doug Anderson points out (personal communication), the stone giants probably derive from the legend of the rübezahl, a German storm-spirit who, in the words of Andrew Lang, ‘amused himself by rolling great rocks down into the desolate valleys, to hear the thunder of their fall echoing among the hills’ (The Brown Fairy Book [1904] p. 283). Tolkien is not the only modern fantasist inspired by the legend; the game of nine-pins played by the strange little men in Washington Irving’s ‘Rip Van Winkle’ [1819] was probably also inspired by the same German folk-lore.
18 Or, to go further back, the story of King Arthur’s battle with the giant of Mont St. Michel, retold by both Geoffrey of Monmouth and Malory – or, further still, the story of Odysseus outwitting the cyclops. Whether called ogres, trolls, cyclopes, or giants, cannibalistic giant-folk loom large in the folklore of Europe.
19 For a detailed comparison of Tolkien’s 1911 journey and its possible influences on The Hobbit, see Marie Barnfield’s piece ‘The Roots of Rivendell’, published in the specialist Tolkien biography journal Þe Lyfe ant þe Auncestrye [1996], as well as Tolkien’s letter to his son Michael (Letters pp. 391–3).
20 The first of these is realistic but inconsequential; the second blends enchanted dream with waking delusion; the third actually refers to a direction the plot was to have taken which was subsequently abandoned – cf. p. 507 and commentary page 519.
21 Gordon’s edition, with some contributions by Tolkien, was completely redone by his widow, Ida Gordon, and eventually appeared from Oxford University Press in 1953. Tolkien’s intimacy with the poem is further indicated by the fact that he not only translated and helped edit it but also wrote poetry in the extremely difficult stanza used by the Pearl-poet, which combines both rhyme and alliteration, merging the continental tradition of rhyming verse with the older English tradition of alliteration.† Tolkien’s poem using the Pearl meter, ‘The Nameless Land’, was written in 1924. It originally appeared in 1927 in Realities: An Anthology of Verse, ed. G. S. Tancred and is reprinted in The Lost Road (HME V.98ff); Christopher Tolkien quotes there from a note of his father’s that it was ‘inspired by reading Pearl for examination purposes’.
† See Tolkien’s discussion of the meter in his letter to Jane Neave, 18th July 1962; Letters p. 317.
22 Tolkien recited the first of these from memory in the original Middle English at the 1938 Oxford ‘Summer Diversions’ organized by his friend and fellow Inkling Nevill Coghill (who later translated all of The Canterbury Tales into modern English) and Poet Laureate John Masefield, while he both translated Sir Orfeo into modern English and prepared a critical text that was released as a pamphlet by Oxford University in 1944; the latter, edited by Carl Hostetter, was published in Tolkien Studies (volume I [2004], pages 85–123).
23 It’s easy to forget that Tolkien began his academic career as a classicist and only transferred his major to medieval studies in his second year at Oxford; the influence of classical literature on his work has been sadly neglected by Tolkien studies. For a notable exception, see Kenneth Reckford’s excellent article ‘There and Back Again: Odysseus and Bilbo Baggins’ in Mythlore LIII [Spring 1988], pages 5–9.
As for The Dream of Scipio, Tolkien would not have had to rely upon hazy memories of undergraduate days for his knowledge of the work, since his friend and fellow Inkling C. S. Lewis discusses it at length in The Discarded Image,† pages 23–8, granting it great prominence for influencing the whole genre of medieval dream-vision.
† This book did not appear until 1964, the year after Lewis’s death, but the lecture-series upon which it was based was in existence by 1934 (see Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. W. H. Lewis [and Christopher Derrick]; rev. ed. 1988 ed. Fr. Walter Hooper, page 309, and also The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper, volume II [2004], page 141). Tolkien had sounded out Allen & Unwin about its publication as early as 1936 and they expressed an interest, although in the event Lewis demurred, apparently feeling it would reduce the appeal of his lectures if the material was readily available in print (Susan Dagnall to JRRT, letter of 10th December, 1936; Allen & Unwin Archives).
24 ‘Leaf by Niggle’, that enigmatic little tale, might also have originated in a dream, as Tolkien says he ‘woke one morning with it in my head’ (JRRT to Jane Neave, 8–9th Sept 1962; Letters p. 320); he uses virtually identical language in the preface to Tree and Leaf and in a 1945 letter to Stanley Unwin (Letters p. 113).
Chapter V Gollum
1 In its final, revised form it has been reprinted several times independently of the book (for example, in Boyer and Zahorski’s 1977 anthology The Fantastic Imagination); see Hammond, Descriptive Bibliography, page 23, and Åke Jönsson, En Tolkienbibliografi 1911–1980; Verk av och om J. R. R. Tolkien [1984], pages 15–16.
2 According to Hammond (pp. 4, 15, 16, 18, 21, and 26), the first printing (September 1937) was only 1500 copies, followed three months later by a second of 2300 copies (423 of which were destroyed in a warehouse fire during the Blitz) and a third of 1500 printed simultaneously with a Children’s Book Club edition of 3000 more (both late 1942/early 1943). The fourth printing (1946–7), the last to use the original text, was of 4000 copies. Finally, the first American edition of March 1938 accounts for another 5000 copies, for a grand total of 17,300, less the 423 destroyed before distribution, for an actual total of 16,877 books – a mere fraction compared with the 35,000 copies of the first paperback edition (Puffin, 1961), not to mention the vast numbers of the Ballantine, Allen & Unwin, Houghton Mifflin, and HarperCollins editions sold in the last forty years.
3 Printed in A Tolkien Compass, ed. Jared C. Lobdell [1975], pages 9–28; this article is excerpted from Chapter III (‘The Descendant of Cain’) of Christensen’s dissertation, Beowulf and The Hobbit: Elegy into Fantasy in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Creative Technique (Univ. of Southern California, 1969).
4 See Tolkien’s letters to Allen & Unwin and Sir Stanley Unwin of 1st August, 10th September, and 14th September 1950 (Letters pp. 141 – 142), and the section of commentary titled ‘The Fortunate Misunderstanding’ beginning on p. 761.
5 On the face of it, the former seems more probable, especially since the first typescript adds a phrase to the line about the original owners to the effect that they ‘were still there in odd corners, slinking and nosing about’ – a description that seems very aptly to fit Gollum, silent throttler of any solitary goblins he catches ‘while he was prowling about’. On the other hand, Gollum’s ‘memories of long before when he lived with his grandmother in a hole in a bank by a river’ seems to hint that he belongs in the later category of post-goblin intruder. The matter is made still murkier by uncertainty over how long it has been since the goblins came into these mountains – certainly within Medwed-Beorn’s lifetime, since he bitterly resents his expulsion (cf. pp. 231–2), but we cannot rule out the possibility of his being unusually long-lived (on the analogy of the eldest of the Cave-bears in the 1932 Father Christmas letter, whom Father Christmas ‘had not seen for centuries’; cf. the commentary to Chapter VII). In short, the narrator’s words seem to sum up the original Gollum best: we don’t know ‘who or what he was’.
6 This detail is actually a bit of archaic science: Euclid and Ptolemy believed that light rays emanate from the eyes, and it was not until well into the Middle Ages that Ibn al-Haitham (c.965–1039, known in the West as ‘Alhazen’), an Arabic scientist who specialized in optics, proved that we see by means of light reaching our eyes from luminous objects (The Key to ‘The Name of the Rose’ by Haft, White, & White [1987], page 40). Janice Coulter (private communication) raises the question of how could Gollum sneak up on prey when his ‘lamp-like’ eyes shone in the dark; the answer must be that the ring hid this projected light as well.
7 Engels sent a large (26? inches wide by 21 inches tall) illustrated letter to Tolkien on 1st November 1946; his Gollum-in-the-boat is huge, bloated, almost troll-sized (literally, since the other scene in the letter is of Bilbo and the trolls). Eventually a German translation, with illustrations by Engels, did appear in 1957; once again he depicted Gollum as large and rubbery, many times Bilbo’s size, with beams radiating from his eyes. Engels’ illustrations were removed from the revised 1971 German translation, but the original poster-sized letter can be seen on display in the Marquette Archives and is reproduced in The Annotated Hobbit as Plate Six (bottom).
8 The best description of Gollum as he appears in The Lord of the Rings comes in an unpublished commentary Tolkien made regarding Pauline Baynes’ depiction of various characters from The Lord of the Rings in the headpiece and tailpiece to her 1970 ‘Map of Middle-earth’. While Tolkien’s fondness for Baynes’ earlier work on Farmer Giles of Ham [1949] had resulted in her being chosen to illustrate both The Adventures of Tom Bombadil [1962] and Smith of Wootton Major [1967], as well as providing the covers for The Tolkien Reader [1966] and the first paper-back edition of The Hobbit (the Puffin edition of 1961, notorious for its ‘correction’ of dwarves to dwarfs, although elves remained), he disliked this piece so much that he wrote an essay critiquing her attempt in which he describes each member of the Fellowship of the Ring as he pictured them – an invaluable aid to any future illustrator of his work. In this he dismissed her Gollum as reminiscent of ‘the Michelin tyre man’ and included the following description of Gollum as he ultimately came to envision him:
Gollum was according to Gandalf one of a riverside hobbit people – and therefore in origin a member of a small variety of the human race, although he had become deformed during his long inhabiting of the dark lake. His long hands are therefore more or less right.* [*Not his feet. They are exaggerated. They are described as webby (Hobbit 88), like a swan’s (I. 398), but had prehensile toes (II 219).] But he was very thin – in The L.R. emaciated, not plump and rubbery; he had for his size a large head and a long thin neck, very large eyes (protuberant), and thin lank hair . . . He is often said to be dark or black (II 219, 220 where he was in moonlight).
Gollum was never naked. He had a pocket . . . He evidently had black garments in II 219 & eagle passage II 253: like ‘the famished skeleton of some child of Men, its ragged garment still clinging to it, its long arms and legs almost bone-white and bone-thin.’
His skin was white, no doubt with a pallor increased by dwelling long in the dark, and later by hunger. He remained a human being, not an animal or a mere bogey, even if deformed in mind and body: an object of disgust, but also of pity – to the deep-sighted, such as Frodo had become. There is no need to wonder how he came by clothes or replaced them: any consideration of the tale will show that he had plenty of opportunities by theft, or charity (as of the Wood-elves), throughout his life.
—Bodleian, Department of Western Manuscripts,
Tolkien Papers, A61 fols 1–31.
9 Most of these additions occur in the first typescript – i.e., the next stage of composition. Thus, the ‘eggs’ of the draft becomes ‘eggses’, ‘just one more question to guess, yes, yes’ becomes ‘Jusst one more quesstion to guess, yes, yess’, and the first mention of ‘precious’ is strung out to ‘preciousss’. Other details were added to the printer’s proofs (‘It’s got to ask uss a quesstion, my precious, yes, yess, yesss.’). With very few exceptions, the text achieved in the proofs has remained unchanged, at least so far as Gollum’s conversational peculiarities are concerned, ever since.
10 I.e., two of Gollum’s references to Bilbo as ‘he’ rather than ‘it’ (‘What iss he, my precious?’ and ‘What’s he got in his handses?’ – cf. DAA.120) and Gollum’s reference to himself as ‘ye’ rather than ‘we’ (‘Praps ye sits here and chats with it a bitsy, my preciouss.’). This latter was unfortunately changed in the fifth edition of 1995 from ‘ye’ to ‘we’ in the interests of consistency, despite the lack of manuscript authority; the two references to Bilbo as ‘he’, however, remain.
11 This extremely effective and rather impressive performance of the revised text, made at George Sayer’s home in 1952 on an early home tape-recorder, was released by Caedmon Records in 1975 as J. R. R. Tolkien reads and sings his The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring (Caedmon TC 1477) and is currently available from Harper Audio as part of the ‘J. R. R. Tolkien Audio Collection’.
12 Anderson’s date derives from Tolkien himself having written ‘1928’ on one of the typescripts of another of the Bimble poems, which Carpenter seems to have misread as ‘1920’.
13 This interview on Radio Blackburn was broadcast in December 1975. I am grateful to Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull for drawing this recording to my attention and playing a tape of it for me, and to Gary Hunnewell for helping me locate a transcription.
14 My attention was drawn to Vafthrúthnismál and its probable influence on this chapter, as well as to a possible parallel in the Kalevala, by Dr. Tim Machan’s presentation at the 1987 Marquette Tolkien Conference, ‘Vafthrúthnismal, the Kalevala and “Riddles in the Dark”’. I am grateful to Dr. Machan for providing me with a copy of his unpublished paper. For more on the wisdom-challenge genre, see the introduction to his edition of Vafthrúthnismal (Durham Medieval Texts, Number 6 [1988]), especially pages 23–6.
15 So called to distinguish it from a shorter, unrelated, poem on the same subject. Both the original Old English text and a Modern English translation can be found in T. A. Shippey’s Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English [1976], pages 86–103. See also Shippey’s brief discussion of this work in The Road to Middle-earth [1982], page 112; rev. ed [2003], page 133. Note however that the Old English poem is less a ‘riddle-contest’ than a justification, via questions and answers, of God’s wisdom in ordering the world as it is; it ends with Saturn (portrayed here as a Chaldean wizard rather than a Grecian Titan) laughing with delight at his defeat – a startling contrast to the grim endings of most of the other contests discussed in this section.
16 For an excellent discussion of this scene, and its affinities to other Norse lore, see the section entitled ‘The Riddles of Gestumblindi’ in Christopher Tolkien’s introduction to his edition and translation of The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise [1960], pages xviii–xxi. The scene itself occupies pages 31–44 of the same edition, with additional riddles from one of the manuscripts given in an Appendix (pages 80–82).
17 This was almost certainly An Inheritance of Poetry, collected and arranged by Gladys L. Adshead and Annis Duff (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948); cf. Åke Jönsson, En Tolkienbibliografi, see p. 185, pages 15 & 14.
18 Quite aside from the riddles, Tolkien was much influenced by nursery rhymes. While at Leeds he translated ‘Who Killed Cock Robin’ and ‘I Love Sixpence’ into Old English (as ‘Ruddoc Hana’ and ‘Syx Mynet’, respectively) and wrote new lyrics set to the tunes of several more well-known nursery rhymes: ‘From One to Five’ (to the tune of ‘Three Wise Men of Gotham’), ‘The Root of the Boot’ (better known today as the troll song – see p. 101 – to ‘The Fox Went Out’), ‘“Lit” and “Lang”’ (to ‘Polly Put the Kettle On’), and ‘Éadig Béo þu!’ (to ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’). All these were published years later in A. H. Smith’s edition of Songs for the Philologists (University College London, 1936). Much earlier, as far back as March 1915 (cf. Christopher Tolkien’s commentary in BLT I.202), Tolkien had expanded the little nursery rhyme ‘The Man in the Moon’ (The man in the moon/Came tumbling down/And ask’d his way to Norwich./He went by the south,/And burnt his mouth,/With supping cold plum porridge’† ) into an 80-line piece (reprinted in BLT I.204–6) later revised into a 96-line version for The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (ATB poem #6, pages 34–[38]). Similarly, he took ‘Hey Diddle, Diddle,/The Cat and the Fiddle,/The Cow jump’d over the Moon;/The little Dog laughed/To see such Craft,†† /And the Dish ran away with the Spoon.’ – called by the Opies ‘Probably the best-known nonsense verse in the language’; they go on to note that ‘a considerable amount of nonsense has been written about it’ – and created a 60-line poem around it that encompassed and incorporated the existing poem and ‘explained’ all its curious references. In fact, Tolkien’s original title for his version was ‘The Cat and the Fiddle, or A Nursery Rhyme Undone and its Scandalous Secret Unlocked’ (HME VI.145–7). First published in 1923, this poem was later revised and incorporated in The Lord of the Rings (Chapter IX, ‘At the Sign of the Prancing Pony’; LotR.174–6) and reprinted in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (ATB poem #5, pages 31–3). Both of his man-in-the-moon poems start from familiar nursery rhyme lore and create a new poem based on it which paradoxically becomes, in the reader’s mind, the ‘lost original’ of the nursery rhyme.
Finally, Tolkien rewrote one seemingly innocuous little nursery rhyme to chilling effect: ‘Merrily sang the monks of Ely,/As King Canute came rowing by./“Row to the shore, knights,” said the king/“And let us hear these churchmen sing.”’††† Tolkien’s version appears at the very end of The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son [1953] as ‘Sadly they sing, the monks of Ely isle!/Row, men, row! Let us listen here a while!’, transformed from a cheerful little bit of doggerel into a funereal dirge.
† The second line was later changed to ‘Came down too soon’ and the last line to ‘supping hot pease porridge’ – cf. Baring-Gould #79 (pp. 82–4) and Opies p. 294.
†† Later ‘To see such sport’ or ‘To see such fun’. Cf. Baring-Gould #45, pp. 55–8.
††† Baring-Gould #203, p. 138. Tolkien quotes the Middle-English original of this rhyme at the end of part one of The Homecoming: ‘Merie sungen ðe muneches binnen Ely,/ða Cnut ching reu ðerby./“Roweð, cnites, noer the land/and here we ther muneches saeng.”’
19 The following chart of the ten riddles is provided for ease of comparison:
1st: mountain (Gollum).
2nd: teeth (Bilbo).
3rd: wind (Gollum).
4th: daisy (Bilbo).
5th: dark (Gollum).
6th: egg (Bilbo).
7th: fish (Gollum).
8th: no-legs (Bilbo).
9th: time (Gollum).
10th: ring (Bilbo).
20 ‘What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?’ The answer, as Sophocles knew, is a man, who crawls as an infant, walks upright as an adult, and hobbles along with a cane in old age. Note that, in keeping with the tradition of dangerous riddles, the Sphinx slays all who cannot answer her and, when foiled by Oedipus, kills herself (cf. Oedipus Rex).
21 The standard answer is a man at a table with a leg of mutton stolen by a dog; Tolkien adapts this to the circumstances by substituting ‘no-legs’ for one-leg (i.e., fish for mutton) and a cat (notoriously fond of fish) for the dog.
Baring-Gould also gives yet another variant (involving a milkmaid, cow, and stool) rather closer to Tolkien’s in compression and general style:
Two-legs sat on Three-legs by Four-legs.
One leg knocked Two-legs off Three-legs.
Two-legs hit Four-legs with Three-legs.
—Baring-Gould p. 277.
22 This poem appeared in A Northern Venture: Verses by Members of the Leeds University English School Association [1923], p. 20. A rough translation of Tolkien’s poem would run something like this: ‘My walls are wonderfully adorned with milk-white marblestone; a soft garment is hung within, most like to silk; in the midst is a well of water clear as glass; there the most beautiful of apples glitters on the current. My fortress has no entrance; yet bold thieves break into my palace and plunder that treasure. Say what I am called!’ My thanks to Dr. Tim Machan of Marquette University and Tolkien linguist David Salo for their help with this translation.
Tolkien also wrote a second Anglo-Saxon riddle which appears with ‘Meolchwitum sind marmanstane’ under the general title of ‘Enigmata Saxonica Nuper Inventa Duo’ – an ingenuous title, since in Latin ‘inventa’ can mean either ‘invented’ or ‘discovered’. Thus, the title translates as ‘Two Recently Discovered Saxon Riddles’ or ‘Two Recently Invented Saxon Riddles’, nicely ambiguous. I give here the companion piece, ‘Hild Hunecan’:
Hæfth Hild Hunecan hwite tunecan,
ond swa read rose hæfth rudige nose;
the leng heo bideth, the læss heo wrideth;
hire tearas hate on tan blate
biernende dreosath ond bearhtme freosath;
hwæt heo sie saga, searothancla maga.
A literal translation would run something along these lines: ‘Hild Hunecan hath a white tunican [tunic],/and a ruddy nose like a red rose;/the longer she bideth [waits], the less she thriveth [grows];/her hot tears on pale branch/fall burning and freeze ‘in a twinkling’;/say what she is, clever man.’
The answer, of course, is a candle. This is Tolkien’s free adaptation of another once well-known nursery rhyme riddle, unusual in that it both alliterates in proper Old English fashion and yet also uses internal rhyme – a difficult metrical feat. The original riddle reads as follows:
Little Nancy Etticoat
With a white petticoat,
And a red nose;
She has no feet or hands,
The longer she stands
The shorter she grows.
—Baring-Gould p. 275; Opies p. 153.
‘Hild’ is the Old English word for ‘battle’, but it was also a common proper name (still in use today under the slightly altered form of ‘Hilda’). I cannot explain ‘hunecan’, other than to suggest that it is a nonsense coinage and that ‘Hild Hunecan’ is, like ‘Nancy Etticoat’ (a candle) and ‘Humpty Dumpty’ (an egg), the name given in order to deceive the listener into thinking the riddle describes a person rather than an object. ‘Hunecan’ might therefore be a pun on ‘honey-kin’ (i.e., beeswax), which in a true Old English poem would have been spelled hunig-cynn. My thanks once again to Dr. Tim Machan and especially David Salo for providing much aid in this translation.
23 This first riddle is usually broken into three distinct riddles by editors (e.g., The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, Volume III: The Exeter Book, ed. Geo. P. Krapp [1936]; Old English Riddles, tr. Michael Alexander [1980]), each representing a different kind of storm. Craig Williamson, by contrast, in his detailed analysis of the Exeter Book riddles (The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book [1977]), argues that the manuscript is correct and that all 104 lines represent a single riddle, whose solution is Wind.
24 Tolkien’s riddle, of course, refers to the English daisy and not the larger American flower of the same name. English daisies are very small (usually about a half-inch in diameter), with white petals and a yellow center, the blossom lying flat on the grass. The name comes from the blossom’s habit of opening in sunlight and closing in shade or darkness. The American daisy, a relative of the chrysanthemum, is more like a black-eyed susan in appearance and size, while the English daisy is similar to a chamomile (and to Tolkien’s own elvish flower, the elanor or ‘star-sun’). I am grateful to Anne al-Shahi for introducing me to the English daisy.
While Tolkien maintained that the daisy-riddle was not in verse, due no doubt to its metrical irregularity, it could easily be converted into a poem by very slight revision of the final line, e.g. ‘. . . in a low place/Not in a high’ (which would give it the quite satisfactory rhyme scheme of aabbab).
25 For more on the cup-episode and the palimpsest page of the Beowulf manuscript, see p. 533. For the editorial addition of Prince Éomer to the story (in place of geomor, the manuscript reading), see Kiernan’s Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript [1981], page 184.
26 For more on the Hauksbok manuscript and its relationship to the other versions of the saga, see Christopher Tolkien’s introduction to his translation and edition, The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise [1960], especially pages xxix–xxxi and 80.
27 Indeed, David Day has devoted an entire book, Tolkien’s Ring [1994], to listing all the various ring-legends Tolkien might have drawn on for his One Ring, surveying and retelling Celtic, Greek, Tibetan, and Biblical myths, as well as stories from the Arthurian and Carolingian cycles, but focusing most on Norse and German myth, especially the story told variously in The Volsunga Saga, The Nibelungenlied, and Wagner’s Ring cycle (Das Rheingold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried, and Twilight of the Gods). While Day’s book is well written, wonderfully illustrated (by Alan Lee), and full of interesting stories, readers unfamiliar with the original legends should be warned that the book is factually worthless; Day has no compunction about making up details in order to magnify similarities between Tolkien and his ‘sources’.
28 While rare, rings of invisibility are primarily to be found in medieval (Chrétien, Hartmann, the Welsh adaptor) and renaissance (Boiardo, Ariosto) romance, as the examples discussed in this section of commentary show. Curiously enough, they are extremely rare in one place where we might expect to find them plentiful: in fairy tales. Certainly magical items abound in such tales – from the Grimms’ ‘The Tinderbox’ (which summons up three great dogs that do the owner’s bidding) to ‘The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes’ (better known as ‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses’), which features a cloak of invisibility – but so far only two have been discovered that feature rings of invisibility.
Since the success of The Lord of the Rings, magical rings of invisibility have become a generic part of post-Tolkienian fantasy, even to the extent of earning their own entry (along with rings of djinn summoning and rings of three wishes) in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide [1979; 2nd ed. 1989; 3rd ed. 2000]. Even so, they are generally avoided by fantasy authors as too blatantly borrowed from Tolkien – with the ironic result that they are more noted by their absence than their actual presence.
I would like to thank my friends ‘The Burrahobbits’, from whom I received much valuable help in uncovering ring-lore throughout this section.
29 Plato’s text is quite clear that this adventure happened to an ancestor of Gyges; however, some commentators have argued that it was Gyges himself who rose from shepherd to king via the power of his magic ring (in the best fairy-tale tradition). Interestingly enough, Herodotus (Histories, Book I, parts 8–13) also tells a story about how this Gyges rose to become king through the contrivance of the queen, but his story lacks any magical apparatus. Gyges was actually a real person, who in historical fact founded a dynasty of kings and reigned over Lydia (a neo-Hittite kingdom in western Anatolia) circa 687–652 BC. Aside from inspiring this legend, his chief claim to fame is that it was either in or immediately after his reign that the Lydians minted the world’s first coins.
30 Atlantis features in two of Plato’s late dialogues, Timaeus [circa 360 BC?] and more significantly in the late, unfinished Critias [circa 347 BC?], which contains a brief history and detailed description of Atlantis. Significantly, Plato does not claim to have invented the legend himself but has his character Critias state that his account was brought to Greece by Solon (who had died more than two centuries before), who in turn learned it from much earlier Egyptian accounts. Traditionally Plato scholarship has dismissed this claim as a fiction, but in recent years it has been revived as a serious possibility by iconoclasts such as Martin Bernal.
31 The passage in Plato might have been pointed out by C. S. Lewis, who considered himself a philosopher and one of whose three degrees was in ‘Greats’, or classical studies – cf. the figure of the Professor in the Narnia series, who keeps insisting ‘It’s all in Plato’ – or by another of the early Inklings, Adam Fox, who later wrote a book Plato for Pleasure [1945].
32 Despite their names, ‘High German’ (Hochdeutsch) and ‘Low German’ (Plattdeutsch) refer not to social status but region: High German originated as the form of the language spoken in the highlands of what is now Austria and Bavaria, near the Alps in southern Germany, while Low German was spoken in the lowlands near the coast in northern Germany and modern-day Holland. Old English is closely related to Low German, particularly Old Saxon (sometimes also called Old Low German), the language of those Saxons who did not immigrate to the British Isles alongside the Angles and Jutes. Modern written German descends from High German, since Martin Luther chose it for his translation of the Bible, although many Germans in the north still use Low German in less formal contexts. Just as a work written in thirteenth-century English is in ‘Middle English’, a work written in the southern form of German in the thirteenth century is in ‘Middle High German’. My thanks to Wolfgang, Brigitte, and Dr. Werner Baur for their help in sorting through the matter of modern vs. medieval German dialects.
33 The Red Book of Westmarch, Tolkien’s fictional source for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, takes its name from actual surviving medieval manuscripts such as The Red Book of Hergest and the White Book of Rhydderch, the two main texts of The Mabinogion [both fourteenth century]. Tolkien owned copies of both in the original Welsh, in the editions by J. Gwenogvryn Evans [The White Book, 1907; The Red Book, 1905† ], along with Lady Charlotte Guest’s famous translation [1837] (Verlyn Flieger, personal communication). Moreover, he taught Medieval Welsh at Leeds (Letters p. 12), and The Mabinogion is the greatest surviving work of literature in that language. Flieger also notes that Tolkien ‘made a transcription and partial translation of the First Branch, Pwyll’,†† along with extensive notes on the name ‘Annwn’ (Flieger, Interrupted Music [2005], page 60). Tolkien also draws upon one of The Mabinogion’s component stories, ‘Culhwch and Olwen’ – the oldest known Arthurian tale – in his essay ‘The Name “Nodens”’ [1932]. And of course the translator of the text given here, Gwyn Jones, was a friend of Tolkien’s; see p. 281.
† Note that this was a limited edition of six hundred copies, testifying to the seriousness of Tolkien’s interest in its text.
†† This text is now in the Bodleian Library’s Dept. of Western Manuscripts (Mss. Tolkien A18/1. fols 134–56).
34 Lewis’s remark, which in fact made the comparison to Ariosto’s disadvantage, comes from the blurb he wrote for the first edition of The Lord of the Rings and which was included on the inside front flap of the dust jacket: ‘If Ariosto rivalled it in invention (in fact he does not) he would still lack its heroic seriousness.’ Tolkien was at first pleased by the comparisons in the blurbs to Spenser, Malory, and Ariosto, declaring them ‘too much for my vanity!’ (JRRT to Rayner Unwin, 13th May 1954; Letters p. 181). For Tolkien’s later [circa 1967] disclaimer of any familiarity with the Italian mock-epic (‘I don’t know Ariosto, and I’d loathe him if I did’), see Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography, page 218.
35 Again, either Kreutzwald or Lang’s translator was careless or the original tradition this tale was based on confused, since we are told several times that one of the ring’s powers is to enable the wearer to fly, yet the betrayed witch-maiden later avenges herself on the hero when he is ‘in the form of a bird’ (page 19) by changing herself into an eagle and capturing him; this is the only indication anywhere in the tale that the ring actually transforms its wearer, rather than (as on the three previous occasions) simply granting the power of flight.
36 Faux-Rings: In addition to these genuine rings of invisibility, the scholarly record is littered with references to magical rings, several of which are described as a ‘ring of invisibility’ but, upon examination of the original literature, turn out to be nothing of the sort. I include two such samples here, both appearing in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, since they demonstrate how errors perpetuate themselves.
The first false ring appears in Ortnit, a Middle High German romance [circa 1217–25] set in Lombardy, part of the Dietrich cycle or Heldenbuch inspired by legends of Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths. This ring is labelled ‘Ornit’s Ring of Invisibility’ in Brewer’s (e.g., 14th edition, [1989], page 938), but in fact it has no such power. Instead, Ortnit’s ring would more accurately be called a ring to detect invisibility: it enables the wearer to see the ‘wilderness dwarf’ Alberich, a magical being who becomes Ortnit’s helper. Those without the ring can hear the dwarf (or more properly midget, since he appears as a perfectly proportioned four-year-old child although as strong as a hardy knight), who sometimes pretends to be an unseen angel; only Ortnit or those to whom he loans the ring can see the dwarf-king:
He saw [Alberich] . . . only by the power of the stone in the ring on his finger.
. . . just as soon as the little one seized the ring, he disappeared and was nowhere to be seen.
‘Speak! Where did you go?’ cried the Lombard.
‘Never mind where I am’ replied the little one . . . ‘You have given up a ring whose loss you will regret as long as you live. It was through the power of the stone that you were so lucky as to see and capture me, and I would always have had to serve you if you had kept it . . .’
. . . [Ortnit] was crafty and strong and, as soon as Alberich held out the ring, he threw him onto the ground. Bending down over him, the king exclaimed: ‘Well, evil spirit, before I let you go this time, you must tell me what you know.’ When he put on the ring, he could see Alberich and he held him tightly.
— Ortnit and Wolfdietrich: Two Medieval Romances, tr. J. W. Thomas [1986], pages 7, 10, & 11.
The second false ring appears in Reynard the Fox – a late twelfth- & early thirteenth-century Old French story-cycle of beast-fables so popular that the antihero’s name, renard, replaced goupil as the standard French word for fox. At one point in one of the best-known Reynard stories, published by Caxton as The History of Reynard the Fox [1485], Reynard falsely claims to have owned a marvellous ring that, according to recent editions of Brewer’s, among its many other powers ‘rendered the wearer of the ring invisible’. In fact, the ring has no such power, although there was little else it could not do:
. . . a ring of fine gold and within the ring next the finger were written letters enameled with sable and azure and there were three Hebrews’ names therein . . . those three names that Seth brought out of Paradise when he brought to his father Adam the oil of mercy. And whosoever bears on him these three names, he shall never be hurt by thunder nor lightning, nor no witchcraft shall have power over him, nor be tempted to do sin. And also he shall never take harm by cold though he lay three winter’s long nights in the field, though it snowed, stormed, or froze never so sore, so great might have these words . . . Without-forth on the ring stood a stone of three manner colours. The one part was like red crystal and shone like as fire had been therein in such wise that if anyone would go by night him behooved no other light, for the shining of the stone made and gave as great a light as it had been midday. That other part of the stone was white and clear as it had been burnished. Whoso had in his eyes any smart or soreness withoutforth, if he struck the stone on the place where the grief is, he shall anon be whole. Or if any man be sick in his body of venom or ill meat in his stomach, of colic, strangullion, stone, fistula, or canker or any other sickness, save only the very death, let him lay this stone in a little water and let him drink it and he shall forthwith be whole and all quit of his sickness.
. . . the third colour was green like glass. But there were some sprinkles therein like purple . . . who that bore this stone upon him should never be hurt of his enemy and . . . no man, were he ever so strong and hardy . . . might misdo him. And wherever he fought, he should have victory, were it by night or by day, all so far as he beheld it fasting. And also thereto wheresomever he went and in what fellowship, he should be beloved though they had hated him tofore. If he had the ring upon him, they should forget their anger as soon as they saw him. And though he were all naked in a field against a hundred armed men, he should be well hearted and escape from them with worship.
—The History of Reynard the Fox, tr. Wm Caxton [1485],
ed. Donald B. Sands [1960], pages 141–2.
The misinformation about Reynard’s ring entered in with the Centenary Edition of 1970, which replaced the correct earlier reading ‘the green [portion of the stone] rendered the wearer of the ring invincible’ (Brewer’s, 8th ed. [1963], page 765) with the erroneous ‘. . . wearer of the ring invisible’ (Brewer’s, Centenary [12th] ed. [1970], page 920; emphasis mine). Sad to say, however, the error regarding ‘Ornit’s Ring’ goes back to Rev. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer himself, and was present in every edition I checked, going back at least to 1890. Both these errors are still present in the most recent edition available to me (the 17th ed. [2005], 1st printing; cf. pp. 1165 & 1172).
My thanks to Gwendolyn Kestrel and Wolfgang Baur for aid in tracking down these errors in various editions of Brewer’s book.
37 For my commentary on the probable origins of the name ‘Balin’, see pp. 23–4.
38 Two of the most famous invisible characters contemporary with The Hobbit slightly predate Tolkien’s tale but did not become popular until after the manuscript of Mr. Baggins’ adventures had been completed, so it seems unlikely that they contributed anything to Tolkien’s portrayal of Gollum nor to Bilbo’s behavior when invisible, although they do show how the idea was in the air and could take any of a number of forms. The first of these was Thorne Smith’s Topper [1926], a story about playful ghosts whose invisible antics cause a staid, Bilbo-like character to gradually abandon his quiet dull life for a more enjoyable but less respectable existence. Smith’s work was very popular in the 1930s, but Topper only gained wide renown when it was made into a film in 1937 (starring a young Cary Grant as one of the ghosts), so successfully as to inspire a number of sequels and eventually a television series (1953ff, starring Leo G. Carroll as Mr. Topper). The closest parallel between the ghosts’ antics and Tolkien’s work is in Bingo’s pranks at Farmer Maggot’s in draft versions of The Lord of the Rings (HME VI.96–7, 290–3, & 297).
The most famous invisible character of the 1930s, however, was The Shadow, the crimefighter who ‘had the power to cloud men’s minds, so that they could not see him’. The conjunction of invisibility and a shadow is suggestive, given the limitation of Bilbo’s ring in hiding everything but his shadow, but while The Shadow’s adventures as a pulp fiction hero began in 1929, it was not until 1937 that he gained his own radio series celebrating his exploits (with Orson Welles as Lamont Cranston, a.k.a. The Shadow, and Agnes Moorhead as his girl friday Margo Lane), so it seems unlikely that this icon of the old radio serials contributed anything to Tolkien’s work.
Chapter VI Wargs and Eagles
1 This Russian folktale inspired a famous musical work of the same name by Prokofiev that appeared in the same year that Tolkien submitted The Hobbit for publication [1936]; it is probably best known today through the Disney cartoon adaptation [1946].
2 Cather has a Russian immigrant describe a scene where a sledgeful of people chased by starving wolves were saved by tossing a baby overboard, a traditional scene that has often been the subject of melodramatic paintings and prints.
3 This historical figure, more accurately known as Gilles de Retz, was one of Joan of Arc’s lieutenants who later became notorious as one of history’s first recorded serial killers, being executed for sorcery, heresy, and the murder of children in 1440. De Retz, who may or may not have been guilty of the charges, is generally held to have been the original of the Bluebeard legend.
4 Crockett’s La Meffraye (whose wolf-form is named Astarte) is reminiscent of the wolf-woman in MacDonald’s ‘Nycteris and Photogen’ [1882] (a story also known as ‘The Day Boy and the Night Girl’); MacDonald’s tale probably inspired Crockett’s characterization of the wolf-woman. MacDonald also wrote another story about a female werewolf, ‘The Gray Wolf’ [1871]; probably his single best short story, it depicts not an evil witch but a wistful, forlorn young woman cut off from love and normal human contact by her lycanthropy.
5 By contrast, the wolf-attack in ‘A Journey in the Dark’ (LOTR.314–17) is much closer to Crockett’s in conception and detail. Forced by terrain to fight on the ground, the Company of the Ring see the wolves massing in a great circle beyond their defensive ring, with ‘a great dark wolf-shape . . . summoning his pack to the assault’; we get the same sudden grey wall of attackers, the desperate thrusts and stabs by the defenders (in this case, Aragorn, Boromir, Gimli, and Legolas), and the withdrawal of the wolves before dawn. Also, it is made clear that these are no ordinary wolves, as their bodies melt away with the dawn (Crockett’s ‘were-wolves’, while enchanted, left their bodies behind when killed, as did the wargs of The Hobbit).† The chief difference between the scene in The Lord of the Rings and that in The Black Douglas is in the presence of Gandalf and his use once again of magical fire to turn the tide in the heroes’ favour.
† Otherwise Medwed could not skin one, as he does in the next chapter (cf. p. 241).
6 As noted above (Text Note 21), Tolkien originally wrote the word as ‘weorg’ on its first occurrence on manuscript page 69, then overwrote it as ‘warg’, the form used thereafter. It is possible that I have misread the ligatures and that the original word underneath the alteration was ‘wearg’ but I do not think so; both Taum Santoski and I independently read the second vowel as ‘o’.
7 Tolkien himself goes on to note that the word warg seemed to have caught on’ and cited its use in a science fiction story. This was Gene Wolfe’s ‘Trip, Trap’, which appeared in the hardcover anthology Orbit 2: The Best New Science Fiction of the Year, ed. Damon Knight [1967], pages 110–44. The relevant passage occurs in a conversation between an archeologist and an alien:
. . . I got a lesson in the zoology of the planet here, for the natives had been hunting and were returning with their butchered victims. Several of their specimens looked like creatures a wise young scholar would not want to study any other way, however much one might regret their demise. I particularly remember a naked-looking animal like a saber-toothed lemur. The natives called it Gonoth-hag – the Hunting-devil. There was also what looked like a very big wild dog or wolf, a Warg, formidable looking, but not beside the Gonoth-hag.
I am grateful to Richard West and Douglas Anderson for tracking down this reference for me.
Tolkien’s wargs have since been disseminated to a wide audience through the medium of the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons and its hundreds of associated novels and adventures, under the variant spelling ‘worg’ (defined in the Monster Manual as evil, intelligent wolves with their own language who sometime serve as goblin-mounts). This is only one of a number of Tolkienisms in the game, joining races like elves, half-elves, dwarves (so spelled), half-orcs, and halflings (divided into three types: ‘Tallfellows’ [= Fallohides], ‘Hairfoots’ [= Harfoots], & ‘Stouts’ [= Stoors]); monsters like wraiths, wights, orcs, goblins, ‘treants’ (tree-ents), and of course dragons, and treasures such as rings of invisibility and ‘mithral’ <sic> mail.
8 A good example is the change in the Lord of the Rings drafts from the Kingdom of Ond to Ondor to Gondor.
9 J. R. R. Tolkien, letter to Gene Wolfe, 7th November, 1966; reproduced in Vector, the Journal of the British SF Association, #67/68, Spring 1974, page 9. I am grateful to Douglas Anderson and Richard West for helping me confirm the exact quote.
10 Ibid. Tolkien may also have been influenced here by the bestiary tradition, which portrayed the wolf as an emblem of the devil; cf. this passage from a twelfth-century bestiary: ‘The devil bears the similitude of a wolf: he who is always looking over the human race with his evil eye, and darkly prowling round the sheepfolds of the faithful so that he may afflict and ruin their souls’ (Cambridge University Library Ms. II.4.26, edited [1928] by M. R. James and translated [1954] by T. H. White as The Book of Beasts, p. 59).
11 Cf. BLT II.33 and HME III.290–1 (lines 3754–3789). This feature is absent from the 1930 Quenta (HME IV.112–13), perhaps due to compression rather than deliberate alteration, but it appears obliquely in the published 1977 Silmarillion:
‘Carcharoth . . . was filled with doubt . . . Therefore . . . he denied them entry, and bade them stand . . .’
—Silm.180; italics mine.
12 This bit of pseudohistory was picked up by fantasy author Terry Pratchett and woven into the climax of his Discworld novel Small Gods [1992].
13 JRRT to Amy Ronald, letter of 2nd January 1969, Letters p. 397; see also Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings [1978], page 51. The four gospel writers were commonly depicted together as a man (Matthew), a lion (Mark), a bull (Luke), and an eagle (John).
14 Geoffrey Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. John H. Fisher [2nd edition, 1989]. All references are drawn from this excellent edition.
15 T. H. White, The Book of Beasts, page 107. White points out in a footnote that eagles can in fact look at the sun without blinking due to a nictitating membrane or inner eyelid (ibid.).
16 One example is the legend of the Watching of the Hawk; if a knight can stay awake beside the bird for a set period (usually seven days and nights, but sometimes three, and in one case a single night), a lady (a fay) will appear at the end of that time and grant him whatever he wishes. Sometimes, overwhelmed by her beauty, he asks for the lady’s favors – she grants them, but such encounters always bring future disaster; the wiser ask for prosperity, a magic purse, or some other more worldly reward. This motif appears in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville [written before 1366] (Chapter 16), in William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise [1865] (‘July’ section), and in E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros [1922] (Chapter X). I am indebted to Paul Thomas’s endnotes to the 1991 edition of Eddison’s work for drawing my attention to Mandeville.
17 ‘. . . upon Taniquetil was a great abode raised up for Manwë and a watchtower set. Thence did he speed his darting hawks and receive them on his return, and thither fared often in later days Sorontur King of Eagles whom Manwë gave much might and wisdom’ (‘The Coming of the Valar’, BLT I.73).
Like Zeus, Manwë is both a sky-god and the king of the gods; both reign from atop a holy mountaintop (Olympus and Taniquetil, respectively) over a sometimes fractious family of gods, using great eagles as their messengers. The resemblance between the Valar and the Olympians was much greater in the earliest versions of the stories (e.g., The Book of Lost Tales), where the Valar were actually called ‘gods’ and their family relationships – e.g., who were the siblings, spouses, and children of whom – were much stronger. Later revisions made the Valar less ‘human’ and more remote, less like gods and more like angels – particularly Manwë, who is transformed from the well-intentioned but ineffectual figure of the early tales, much given to hand-wringing and lamentation, to the remote but wise viceroy of Ilúvatar in Arda.
18 The complete Zimmerman script, with Tolkien’s annotations, is now in the Tolkien Collection at Marquette.
19 The exception is Thorondor’s delivery of the message of banishment to Melkor, which dropped out of the story after The Book of Lost Tales; no mention is made of this episode in ‘The Sketch of the Mythology’ (cf. HME IV.16) or later texts.
20 Christopher Tolkien notes that this detail is a later addition to the manuscript; cf. HME IV.115, note 11.
21 This painting is included in the American 40th and 50th anniversary editions (the green and gold slipcased sets, respectively); it is also reproduced, with information of Tolkien’s art sources for the piece, in The Annotated Hobbit (plate two [top]) and in Artist & Illustrator (H-S#113).
Chapter VII Medwed
1 From the available evidence, one would assume this to have included romance, flirtation, and ‘girl stuff’.
2 This is borne out in a passage appearing in the revised and extended edition of the Father Christmas Letters, where in the letter for 1928 Father Christmas says that he let the North Polar Bear pick out 11-year-old John’s present this year: ‘Polar Bear chose them; he says he knows what John likes because John likes bears’ (Letters from Father Christmas [1999], p. 40).
3 This information comes from a letter by Joan Tolkien, Michael Tolkien’s wife, published in The Sunday Times on 10th October 1982 under the heading ‘Origin of a Tolkien Tale’. She asserts that ‘the three bears are based on the teddy bears owned by the three boys. Archie was my husband’s bear and survived until 1933.’ However, we should also note that Priscilla in turn was very fond of teddy bears as a child; the later Father Christmas letters contain several references to ‘the Bingos’, her (vast) toy bear collection, numbering at least 60 bears by 1938 – cf. the letters for 1935 (Letters from Father Christmas, p. 104), 1937 (ibid. p. 120), 1938 (p. 124), and 1939 (p. 134) – but apparently reduced to a single favorite bear later on; cf. the letters for 1941 (p. 145), 1942 (p. 150), and 1943 (the last letter, p. 154); he even receives his own message from NPB one year (‘Messige to Billy Bear from Polar Bear[.] Sorry I could not send you a really good bomb . . .’) – 1942 letter (p. 151).
4 Note that, according to the code of conduct present in the medieval (and ancient) works to which so much of The Hobbit harkens back, Medwed’s feeding of the wanderers establishes a host/guest relationship between them; this is a point of cultural etiquette as strong as the ‘no cheating’ rule that similarly governs the Riddle-game: ‘sacred and of immense antiquity’. From that point on they are safe from the werebear, despite Bilbo’s distrust continuing for a while longer.
5 The teddy bear is a twentieth-century phenomenon, said to have acquired its name from the nickname of the U.S. president at the time, Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt (1901–9).
6 C. S. Lewis, ‘On Stories’, Essays Presented to Charles Williams, ed. C. S. Lewis [1947; 2nd edition, 1966], page 104. This piece is reprinted in the collection On Stories and Other Essays on Literature, ed. Walter Hooper [1982], page 18.
Heimsókn: an attack on a home or hall, as in the murder of Gunnar Hamundarson, who held out alone defending his home against forty men and very nearly prevailed (Njal’s Saga, chapters 76–7), or the death of Njal himself, burned alive with his wife, sons, and grandson after a force of a hundred men could not overcome his sons’ defense of the family hall (Njal’s Saga chapters 127–30). The Freswœl, or Fight at Finnesburg, to which Tolkien devoted an entire lecture-series (published posthumously as Finn and Hengest [1982]), can also be seen as a heimsókn of sorts. As T.A. Shippey points out (Tolkien Studies V [2008], p. 220–21), the term survives into the modern day in Scottish legal jargon as hamesucken, ‘[t]he crime of assaulting a person in his own house or dwelling-place’ (Concise OED vol. II, p. 1246–47), and as such finds its way into John Buchan’s Castle Gay [1930]. I am grateful to Richard West and Prof. Shippey for clarifying Lewis’s terminology for me.
7 Hrólfs Saga Kraka (Hrolf Kraki’s Saga) was written in the latter half of the fourteenth-century and is thus contemporary with the Gawain-poet and Chaucer, but the work survives only in seventeenth-century paper copies. The Bothvar Bjarki story derives from the lost Bjarkamál, which influenced not only Hrolf Kraki’s Saga but also the Bjarkarimur (a fifteenth-century Icelandic saga, now lost) and Skjödunga Saga (also lost, but not before Snorri Sturluson used two brief bits from it in his Prose Edda and a Latin summary of it had been made by Arngrím Jónsson in 1594). Some form of the story was also known to Saxo Grammaticus, who uses it in his late twelfth-century Gesta Danorum (better known as the source of the Hamlet story). And, of course, the Beowulf-poet (writing most probably in the eighth century but possibly later – the traditional dating of Beowulf having recently been challenged) knew either Bothvar’s story or (more likely) some analogue thereto.
In short, as a once well-known tale now buried and partially lost, glimpsed today only through later versions and tantalizing references to lost manuscripts, the Bjarkamál is exactly the type of ‘asterisk-tale’ that most attracted Tolkien. And, appropriately, just as we shall never be able to read the Bjarkamál, so too we never get Medwed’s full story but must reconstruct it from such glimpses into his history as we can get.
8 ‘Sellic Spell’ has never been published, although Tolkien did submit it for publication and have it accepted; the magazine, The Welsh Review, ceased publication before the issue that was to contain the story saw print and the editor, Tolkien’s friend Gwyn Jones (translator of both The Mabinogion and Hrolf Kraki’s Saga), who had already published Tolkien’s Breton lay (‘The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun’) in the same magazine in 1945, regretfully returned the tale to Tolkien. The manuscript of the story is now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
For more on the Bear’s Son story, see Klaeber, Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg, third edition, pages xiiiff.
9 Hrolf Kraki, or ‘Rolf the Beanpole’, makes an appearance in Beowulf as Hrothulf, King Hrothgar’s nephew; both Hrothgar and Hrolf Kraki belong to the Danish royal line, the Skjoldungs or Scyldingas, descendants of Scyld Scefing (‘Shield Sheafing’). Tolkien was deeply interested in the legends surrounding this royal house, and planned to devote a chapter of The Lost Road to ‘The Legend of King Sheave’. Of all the unwritten chapters, this is one of the few that actually got partially drafted, as a prose text of a few hundred words retelling the story of the infant found on a ship who becomes a great king, returning to the sea again in the end. (The same story is told of Audoin the Lombard, from whom Tolkien took the name of one of the major characters in The Lost Road.) Tolkien also recast the legend as a poem, ‘King Sheave’, which he intended to insert in the Anglo-Saxon (Ælfwine) chapter of The Lost Road; Christopher Tolkien prints the poem in HME V.87–91.
Note that whereas in the English tradition as represented by Beowulf old King Hrothgar is remembered as the wise monarch overthrown by his treacherous nephew, in Danish tradition it is the nephew who overthrew the elderly tyrant and ushered in an all-too-brief golden age. For more on the tangled traditions concerning these historical figures, see Klaeber pp. xxxi–xxxv.
10 The doomed couple’s names are significant: the cursed prince is Bjorn (‘Bear’) and the yeoman’s daughter Bera (‘She-Bear’); Bjarki means ‘Little Bear’ (bear-cub). Modern scholarship leans toward the theory that Bothvar Bjarki’s given name is Bjarki, with ‘Bothvar’ (‘Battle’) being a nickname given for his prowess in combat. Also, as several Tolkien scholars have pointed out, beorn (bear) is a common substitution in Old English poetry for ‘warrior’, just as wearg (wolf) is for ‘outlaw’; these probably had similar force to such usages today as referring to a woman as ‘a fox’ or a man as ‘a weasel’. That usage in poetic diction should not disguise the fact that ‘Beorn’ is simply the Old English equivalent of Bjorn, still a common Swedish name, and that ‘Bear’ has continued in use as a nickname in America at least down to as recently as the middle of the twentieth century.
Several Beorns are found in English history and legend; cf. R. M. Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England [1952, 2nd edition 1970], pp. 34–8). The most prominent of these is probably the son of Ragnar Lodbrok who, with his brothers Hælfdene and Ivarr the Boneless, led the Danish invasions that almost overwhelmed Alfred the Great in the ninth century, establishing a Danish kingdom in England (the Danelaw) that endured for generations. Significantly, his name is alternately given as Bjorn, Baerin (shades of Beren, perhaps?), or Beorn, depending on the nationality of the source.
11 The two elder brothers’ part-monstrous forms is the result of the evil stepmother, Queen White, having forced their pregnant mother to eat two bits of bear-meat taken from the slaughtered prince. Despite being warned by her lover before his death, Bera ate the first mouthful, resulting in Elgfrothi’s half-human form. She spat out all but a morsel of the second mouthful, resulting in Thorir’s almost-human form. Bera refused the third mouthful outright, resulting in Bothvar’s being fully human to the eye despite his father’s curse, the only heritage from which seems to be the bear-manifestation of his final battle.
12 Note that Frothi (Froði) can also be transliterated Frodi; it is the same name that Tolkien anglicized as Frodo, his hero of The Lord of the Rings. Frodo Baggins’ name, however, probably comes not from Elgfrothi but from King Froði, in Icelandic tradition a legendary king of Denmark (grandson of the same Shield Sheafing about whom Tolkien wrote the poem referred to in Note 9 above), who reigned at the time of Christ’s birth and established a reign of peace: ‘Norsemen called it the Peace of Froði. No man injured another, even although he was confronted with the slayer of his father or brother, free or in bonds. Neither were there any thieves or robbers, so that a gold ring lay untouched for a long time on the Heath of Jelling’ (Prose Edda, p. 118).
13 Note that this sunny future prophesied at the time of The Hobbit did not exactly come to pass in the actual future as revealed by LotR – 80 years later, the goblins seem worse than ever – unless we take it as applying to the period immediately after the end of the Third Age, when they have been scattered and decimated following Sauron’s downfall.
14 To learn otherwise, we must go outside the book itself to Tolkien’s letters, where in a letter of 24th April 1954 to Naomi Mitchison, answering a number of questions that arose out of her reading one of the review copies, he devotes a paragraph to the subject:
Beorn is dead; see vol. I p. 241.† He appeared in The Hobbit. It was then the year Third Age 2940 (Shire-reckoning 1340). We are now in the years 3018–19 (1418–19). Though a skin-changer and no doubt a bit of a magician, Beorn was a Man.
—Letters, p. 178.
† [Editor’s note: this is the passage regarding Grimbeorn the Old alluded to above.]
It is only fair to note, however, that many of Tolkien’s conceptions shifted between the time he wrote The Hobbit and when he put the finishing touches on The Lord of the Rings some twenty years later; his emphatic pronouncement on Beorn’s fate may well be an afterthought rather than a deliberate linkage back to Scyld Scefing’s arrival, establishment of an eponymous people, and departure back into mystery.
15 Stanley Unwin’s The Truth About Publishing, an insider’s look at the book publishing industry first published in 1926 and regularly updated over the next forty years, provides much insight into this and many other cost-conscious decisions made by Allen & Unwin when producing the book.
16 J. S. Ryan, ‘Two Oxford Scholars’ Perceptions of the Traditional Germanic Hall’, Minas Tirith Evening Star, Spring 1990 issue, pages 8–11. I have since learned that this discovery was made independently by Wm H. Green as far back as 1969: in his dissertation, Green notes
Beorn’s ‘wide hall’ seems to suggest the great halls in ancient Northern literature, Heorot in Beowulf and Thorhall’s house in The Saga of Grettir the Strong: except for the absence of weapons on the wall, Tolkien’s drawing of the hall in the hardback edition of The Hobbit (p. 131) very strongly resembles the illustration of ‘the interior of a Norse hall’ in E. V. Gordon’s Introduction to Old Norse (p. 27), a book which Tolkien helped to prepare for the press (p. ix).
— Green, ‘The Hobbit’ and Other Fiction of J. R R. Tolkien: Their Roots in Medieval Heroic Literature and Language (dissertation, Louisiana State University, 1969), pages 131–2.
Green’s discovery failed to make its way into the general pool of Tolkien scholarship, but he deserves credit for having recognized the connection even without the benefit of ever seeing the unpublished version of Tolkien’s illustration, which more strongly resembles the one in Gordon’s book.
17 Eric Gordon (1896–1938) was first a student and then a colleague of Tolkien’s at Leeds, collaborating with him on an edition of Sir Gawain & the Green Knight [1925, revised edition 1930] that for years stood as the definitive edition of that great Arthurian poem. Gordon also contributed to Tolkien’s Songs for the Philologists [1936], a light-hearted collection of drinking songs in Old English, Old Norse, and Gothic set to nursery rhyme tunes. The two men planned several more collaborations and did a good deal of work on three more editions, of Pearl (a moving elegy in which a man meets his dead infant daughter in a dream-vision, believed to have been written by the same man who wrote Sir Gawain & the Green Knight), and two important Old English poems: The Wanderer (parts of which in time worked their way into The Lord of the Rings) and The Seafarer. After Gordon’s untimely death, two of these three projects (Pearl and Seafarer) were eventually completed by his widow, Ida Gordon.
Hammond & Scull (Artist & Illustrator, pp. 122 & 124) attribute the illustration in Gordon’s book to EVG himself, but this is merely an educated guess; the actual artist is unknown.
18 Since the publication of Ryan’s original article, it has come to light that Gordon’s drawing is based on an older one that had appeared in a number of academic works in the decades preceding it. Carl Hostetter discovered this earlier drawing, under the title ‘Nordische Halle’ [Norse Hall], in Die Altgermanische Dichtung [‘Old Germanic Poetry’] by Dr. Andreas Heusler (Berlin, 1923), page 109. But Heusler in turn credits the drawing to a German translation (1908) of Axel Olrik’s Nordisk Aandsliv i Vikingetid og tidlig Middelalder [‘Norse Intellectual Life during the Viking Era’, 1907], and when Arden Smith located Olrik’s book he discovered that Olrik in turn had taken the illustration from Den islandske Bolig i Fristatstiden [‘The Icelandic Dwelling in the Time of the Republic’] by Valtyr Gudmundsson (Copenhaven, 1894). Alerted by the linguists, Douglas Anderson managed to find a copy of Gudmundsson’s little book (an offprint from a piece published in the journal Folkelaesning the year before), which not only reproduces the drawing (page 12) but identifies the artist (page 26): E. Rondahl, who based it on a recently commissioned model in the National Museum of Copenhaven:
. . . drawn by the painter E. Rondahl after a model which is found in the National Museum in Copenhagen and which shows a fully furnished Icelandic room from the time around the year 1000. This model was made in the year 1892 at the behest and expense of the Ministry of Culture under my [Gudmundsson’s] direction and with assistance from architect Erik Schiodte and the directors of the National Museum in exact agreement with the information that is found in old writings about Icelandic rooms from the aforementioned time. The model was then exhibited at the Columbian Exposition in Spain.† .
† [I.e., the 1892 Columbian Historical Exposition in Madrid, not to be confused with the 1893 Columbian Exposition, better known as the Chicago World’s Fair.]
For a concise account, see DAA.171. I am grateful to Carl Hostetter and Arden Smith for sharing their discovery with me and to Arden Smith for the preceding quote, both text and translation.
19 The self-taught Joseph Wright rose from being a mill hand to Professor of Comparative Philology; see Carpenter pages 55–6. Tolkien studied under Wright at Oxford, and the older man was instrumental in convincing Tolkien to switch his focus from classical languages such as Latin and Greek to Old English, Old Norse, and Gothic. Indeed, it had been Tolkien’s discovery of Wright’s Gothic grammar that had set him on the road to becoming a philologist himself (see Carpenter p. 37 and Letters p. 357). For more on Wright, see The Life of Joseph Wright by E. M. Wright [1932], which contains a letter from Tolkien (Vol. II p. 651), and also Virginia Woolf’s novel The Years [1937], which contains a lively fictional portrait of Wright and his family.
20 That this is a field that interested Tolkien greatly is shown by Christopher Tolkien’s passing reference to ‘my father’s large collection of books on English place-names (including field-names, wood-names, stream-names, and their endlessly varying forms)’, from which he drew when selecting place-names in the Shire (Christopher Tolkien, letter to Hammond & Scull, cited in LotR: A Reader’s Companion [2005] page lvi).
21 See, for example, ‘The Shores of Faëry’ [1915], part of Tolkien’s planned volume of poetry submitted to Sidgwick & Jackson in 1916, The Trumpets of Faery:
East of the Moon, west of the Sun
There stands a lonely hill;
Its feet are in the pale green sea,
Its towers are white and still . . .
—BLT II.271.
22 Tolkien also discusses ‘the oldest and deepest desire’, which he identifies as the Great Escape or Escape from Death – or, for immortals, Escape from Deathlessness (OFS.61). Hence, no doubt, the traditional ending for any number of classic fairy tales: ‘. . . and they lived happily ever after.’
23 The Diamond Jubilee was an elaborate celebration held in 1897 to mark the sixtieth anniversary of Queen Victoria’s coming to the throne – and, incidentally, to recognize her as the longest-reigning English monarch by passing the previous record set by George III (reigned 1760–1820).
24 This passage was removed either when the books were re-written and expurgated by the American publisher in 1966 or shortly thereafter, or when it was further censored for the revised edition of 1988. The current text of the same chapter omits the entire paragraph (1988 Yearling edition p. 34).
While ostensively an attempt to remove any offensive stereotypes (for example, virtually all pictures of Dolittle’s African friend Prince Bumpo were deleted),† the book was also changed in more subtle ways – for example, a comparison of Long Arrow, the world’s greatest naturalist, to ‘this young fellow Charles Darwin that people are talking about so much now’ (1922 edition page 71) was silently dropped, so that no reference to Darwin appears in the current edition (1988 Yearling edition, page 57). For an account of the 1966 stealth censorship, which was made without any public announcement (or, so far as I have been able to discover, notice on the copyright page), see Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn [2003]. For an attempted justification of the 1988 rewriting, see the short afterword by Christopher Lofting, Hugh’s youngest son, to the 1988 Yearling edition (pages 312–14).
I am grateful to Gary Hunnewell’s presentation at the 1993 Mythcon for first making me aware of the changes between the original and later editions of the Dolittle books.
† Compare 1922 edition pages 175 & 353 with 1988 Yearling edition pages 149 & 302.
25 ‘Yes, the Doctor Dolittle books were central and deeply loved in our childhood, and we had the whole series, each new book as it appeared.’ – personal communication, Christopher Tolkien to John D. Rateliff, 23rd February 1993.
26 For instance, Dolittle returns from the first of his famous journeys rich and settles down in his Puddleby home as the local eccentric bachelor at the end of the first book (Story, pp. 177–9) and the second book ends with another homecoming and a mention of arriving in time for four o’clock tea (Voyages, p. 364). Then too there is the possibly accidental but suggestive resemblance of little Stubbins and Baggins, the point-of-view character who is initially the least important member of the party. Ironically, the most Tolkienesque of all the Dolittle books, Doctor Dolittle and the Secret Lake, did not appear until 1948, the year after Lofting’s death, although a version of it had been serialized as early as 1923. Much of the similarities between Tolkien’s and Lofting’s works comes from shared experience of ordinary small-town or village English life,† a similar understated comic sensibility, an appreciation of the heroic potential of those who are decidedly unheroic in appearance and manner, and an unabashed fondness for an earlier, now-lost era just passing out of living memory. While not as direct an influence on Tolkien’s work as Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, there seems no doubt that Lofting’s series contributed its share to the ‘leaf-mould’ from which The Hobbit sprang.
† Lofting was only six years older than Tolkien and, while he spent much of his adult life in America, also served in the Somme and like Tolkien not only was invalided home from the Western Front but began what would turn out to be his life’s work during that period; the first Dolittle book originated as letters written home to his children from the front.
27 It does still appear in early drafts of The Lord of the Rings, but was removed before publication; see HME VII.131 & 149.
It seems probable that Tolkien would have removed or altered this reference from The Hobbit as well had the 1960 ‘Fifth Phase’ of his work on that book reached this far into the text, but we can never know for sure.
28 The original text simply notes that Radagast lives ‘near the borders of Mirkwood’; changes in black ink to the First Typescript (Marq. 1/1/57:4) add the detail that this is the southern border (i.e., nearer the Necromancer than Bladorthin advises Bilbo is safe to travel). This change was made before the Second Typescript, which incorporates it (1/1/38:5).
Further changes bring Medwed/Beorn’s comment on Radagast closer into line with the published text, but interestingly enough here the first and second typescripts were revised differently, and some of the revisions that now appear on them were added after Tolkien had received the page proofs. Since this offers valuable proof that Tolkien sometimes went back and entered revisions onto earlier drafts (no doubt as safety copies, and to prevent proliferation of variant texts that could occur if he failed to remember a later change), I give the whole sequence here:
Ms.: ‘Yes yes: not a bad fellow [added: I know him well].’
Both Tss. as originally typed: ‘Yes, yes; not a bad fellow. I know him well.’
1st Ts. (1/1/57:4), as revised in black ink: ‘Yes, yes; not a bad fellow, I know him well. [added: as wizards go. I see him now and again’, said Beorn]†
Tolkien’s failure to cancel any of the existing text in the first typescript resulted in the following reading in the page proofs (Marq. 1/2/2: page 226): ‘Yes, yes; not a bad fellow, I know him well as wizards go. I see him now and again,’ said Beorn.
This was changed by black ink corrections to the page proofs to read ‘Yes; not a bad fellow as wizards go, I believe. I used to see him now and again’ said Beorn, thus achieving the text of the published book (DAA.167). At this same point, ‘know him well’ was replaced in pencil by ‘believe’ in the First Typescript.
† A pencilled addition is made at the same point in the Second Typescript (1/1/38:6), but it was later overwritten and cannot now be read. Later ‘I know him well’ was cancelled there in black ink and replaced by the same additional text as in the First Typescript, but the words ‘I believe’ do not appear.
29 In Tolkien’s hierarchy of colours, Radagast’s humble ‘earthen brown’ signifies that he is a being of less manifested power than Saruman the White or Gandalf the Grey, or even the two Blue Wizards Tolkien later added to round out the Five, Alatar and Pallando.
30 Here Tolkien seems to be thinking of the battle of the Last Alliance as a current event taking place as part of the War of the Ring.
31 Note that Saruman, for example, uses the correct form ‘the Shire’ (‘What brings you now from your lurking-place in the Shire?’), although we later learn that he had the advantage of prior knowledge of the area through his spies. Interestingly enough, in the original draft of this encounter Radagast had correctly named the hobbits’ country ‘the Shire’ (HME VII.131), but Tolkien changed this for the published version.
Also curious is the fact that Tolkien later made Radagast’s usage seem more reasonable in one of the texts for ‘The Hunt for the Ring’ [circa 1954–5], where we are told that Sauron’s torturers could get only two names out of Gollum: ‘That is why the Black Riders seem to have had two main pieces of information only to go on: Shire and Baggins’ (UT.342). Thus, when Radagast says ‘wherever they go the Riders ask for news of a land called Shire’ (LotR.274) he is being precisely accurate.
32 In all versions of Gandalf’s story, Radagast’s importance as a faithful messenger is juxtaposed with Butterbur’s failure to keep his promise to deliver Gandalf’s message to Frodo telling him to leave the Shire at once. The negligence of the unreliable messenger almost brings about Sauron’s victory and is at least partly responsible for Frodo’s incurable wound suffered on Weathertop, whereas Radagast’s faithfulness as a messenger makes possible Gandalf’s escape, a crucial factor in the victory of the West in the war against Sauron.
33 Tolkien does state that their one failure was ‘to search out [Sauron’s] hiding [place]’ after his fall (whether in the destruction of Númenor or at the end of the Second Age is unclear). We could choose to see this paralleled by Radagast’s establishing his home near Dol Guldur as an attempt to keep watch on that sinister site, believed by the White Council to be occupied by one of Sauron’s minions if not Sauron himself (Tale of Years entry for S.A.1100, LotR.1122). There seems to be an unstated agreement among the Istari that each will make a particular region his special concern – Radagast in Wilderland (Rhovanion), Gandalf in Eriador, Saruman in the Southlands once ruled by Gondor, and the other two either together or severally in the East (Rhûn), which in real-world analogy would encompass all of Asia.
34 See the account of the choosing of the Istari, a text probably written in the late 1950s, in Unfinished Tales (UT.393), and also Christopher Tolkien’s explanation of the name (UT.401 Note 6).
By contrast, Rhosgobel, the name of Radagast’s home, is unambiguously Noldorin/Sindarin: rhosc (‘brown’) + gobel (‘fenced homestead’), translated by Tolkien as ‘Brownhay’ (with ‘hay’ here meaning a hedged enclosure). But this name dates from the middle stage of Tolkien’s work on The Lord of the Rings in the early 1940s, at least a decade after Radagast himself was named. See HME VII.149, 164, & 172–3, as well as ‘The Etymologies’ (HME V.385 & 380) and Salo’s Gateway pp. 390, 284, & 258.
35 The word raba (‘dog’) does occur in one rough draft passage of Lowdham’s Report giving noun declensions, showing that at least the rada- part of the name has a parallel structure in Adûnaic, but this is far too slender to build upon and the whole name remains strikingly unlike any attested Adûnaic form in sound and orthography.
36 One of the Celtic languages, such as Welsh or pre-invasion British, would seem a possibility because of the presence in this same chapter of Carrock, which as we have seen derives from a lost Celtic original (see p. 262). But this assimilated form seems a solitary exception; Tolkien used Celtic languages in The Lord of the Rings for the languages of non-Edainic folk such as the Bree-Men and the Dunlendings, making them inappropriate as a source for place-names and personal names from Rhovanion (Wilderland) according to his thinking at the time he wrote the sequel. There is no way to know if this rather unusual departure from the Atani/Indo-European parallels already existed in his mind when he was writing The Hobbit. It may be that he avoided using Celtic in the earlier book simply because Welsh had been such a great influence on Noldorin/Sindarin (particularly its sound-system), which he did make use of in The Hobbit.
Old Norse is not an option here, despite the presence of Gandalf as a wizard-name in the published book, because (a) Old Norse had already been assigned to the area north-east of Mirkwood from whence the dwarves came and (b) the Bladorthin > Gandalf change postdates the creation of the name Radagast.
37 Gast is also an alternate spelling for giest (the ancestor of modern English guest), meaning ‘stranger’. Rœd (OE: ‘counsel’) is sometimes cited as a possible element in Radagast’s name, but Tolkien’s usage elsewhere (‘Rede oft is found at the rising of the Sun’ – LotR.449) shows that had this been the case he would probably have spelled the name Redegast. But this error, if it is one, is ancient; see p. 280 for evidence that Alfred the Great identified the first element in the name as Ræd rather than Rad.
38 The Slavic affinities of the name were first noted by Jim Allan as far back as 1978 (An Introduction to Elvish, p. 175). The only other Slavic origin for one of Tolkien’s names suggested there is variag (the Variags of Khand; LotR.879), the Russian name for the Varangian Guard, the Viking bodyguards of the Emperor of Constantinople (An Introduction to Elvish, pp. 174–5).
I am grateful to Carl Hostetter for drawing my attention both to Grimm’s work on this topic (personal communication, Hostetter to Rateliff, 23rd February 2000) and also to a long, learned, informative, and inconclusive on-line discussion about the possible Slavic antecedents of the name (TolkLang list, July 1996).
39 Some have seen Radagast’s acting as a messenger as evidence that Tolkien accepted Grimm’s identification of Radegast with Mercury, the messenger of the gods. However, against this must be set Gandalf’s assertion that ‘you were never a traveller’ (LotR.274), which would seem to discount the identification.
40 This statue was created by sculptor Albin Polasek in Prague in 1929; an image of it can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Radegastgod.jpg. In style it was no doubt inspired by the multifaced statues unearthed by antiquarians and archeologists (e.g., cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:SwiatowidZbrucz.jpg). Rev. H. H. Milman, in his notes to an 1845 annotated edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, mentions the discovery of one such statue, identified as ‘[a] statue of Radegast’, between 1760 and 1770 ‘on the supposed site of Rhetra’.
Another modern use of the name in an unusual context, for the hapless teacher in Mr. Radagast Makes an Unexpected Journey, a children’s book by Sharon Nastick (Thomas Y. Crowell: Weekly Reader Books, 1981), clearly derives not from Slavic lore but borrows the name from Tolkien, although it does not resemble Tolkien’s work in any other respect.
41 Indeed, Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology, which pulls together all that could be recovered of pre-medieval Germanic folklore and beliefs, is precisely the kind of thing Tolkien wished had been possible for the English, as he explained in his Letter to Waldman (Letters p. 143ff). Unfortunately the English folklorists started too late; his subcreated legendarium was a replacement for what had been forever lost. See Tolkien’s little poem in a late [1969] letter comically claiming to be Grimm’s heir:
J. R. R. Tolkien
had a cat called Grimalkin:
once a familiar of Herr Grimm,
now he spoke the law to him.
—JRRT to Amy Ronald, 2nd. January 1969; Letters p. 398.
For a serious and convincing argument that Tolkien, for his achievements in fairy-tale/fantasy, (reconstructed) mythology, and language, indeed deserves more than any other to be considered Jacob Grimm’s modern-day successor, see Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth.
42 For example, J. S. Cardale’s 1829 translation into modern English of Alfred the Great’s Old English version of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy [King Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon Version of Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae] opens with the following:
At the time when the Goths of the country of Scythia made war against the empire of the Romans, and, with their kings, who were called Rhadagast and Alaric, sacked the Roman city, and reduced to subjection all the kingdom of Italy . . .
This passage does not appear in Boethius’s original Latin text. The form ‘Rhadagast’ also appears in a note in Chapter XXX of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [1776–1788], which connects the name to the Slavic Radegast:
The name of Rhadagast was that of a local deity of the Obotrites† (in Mecklenburg). A hero might naturally assume the appellation of his tutelar god; but it is not probable that the Barbarians should worship an unsuccessful hero. See Mascou, Hist. of the Germans, viii.14.
† [Editor’s Note: The Obotrites were one of the Slavic peoples known as the Wends.]
Gibbon’s source was Johann Jakob Mascov’s Geschichte der Teutschen bis zu Anfang der Franckischen Monarchie, translated into English by Thomas Lediard as History of the Ancient Germans [1737]. Mascov’s sources were no doubt the original chronicles by Adam of Bremen and Helmold, but I have been unable to confirm whether Mascov was the first to make the Radagaisus/Radegast connection or if some still earlier scholar had anticipated him in this.
I am grateful to David Salo for drawing my attention to Radagast’s Gothic antecedents, for providing me with a photocopy of the relevant passage from Cardale’s text, and for demonstrating how the intrusive ‘h’ in Rhadagast is an eighteenth-/nineteenth-century error – albeit one repeated by as august an authority as the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, which uses the form Rhadgast under its entry for Gota [Goth]; 1898 edition p. 486 (personal communication, Salo to Rateliff, 10th December 1998).
43 It is reprinted, with a translation, in Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth; Rhona Beare’s earlier excellent translation unfortunately remains unpublished. Shippey points out that this is ‘[t]he only extant Gothic poem’ (ibid., rev. ed. [2003] p. 26), but this is not quite true, since Songs for the Philologists also includes a Gothic translation by E. V. Gordon of the drinking ditty ‘When I’m Dead’ (Songs for the Philologists p. 26), dissatisfaction with which prompted Tolkien to create his own version (still unpublished). See also Arden Smith’s essay ‘Tolkienian Gothic’ in the Blackwelder festschrift (The Lord of the Rings 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, ed. Hammond & Scull [2006]), pages 267–81.
44 See the examples cited in Sandra Ballif Straubhaar’s ‘Myth, Late Roman History, and Multiculturalism in Tolkien’s Middle-earth’, esp. pages 104–5 & 108–9, in Tolkien and the Invention of Myth, ed. Jane Chance [2004].
45 For a historical account less highly coloured than Isidore’s or Gibbon’s, see Herwig Wolfram’s History of the Goths, tr. Th. J. Dunlap [1988], especially pages 168–70. Unlike the pagan Radagaisus, the somewhat more successful Visigoth leader Alaric was Christian; by ‘heretic’ Isidore simply means that Alaric was an Arian (like most Goths) rather than a Trinitarian.
46 Fortinbras is familiar with all readers of Hamlet as one of the few characters actually still alive at the end of the play, the Norwegian prince who succeeds to the throne of Denmark after Hamlet’s death. Odovacar (also known as Odoacer) is the Germanic chieftain who deposed the last emperor of Rome in 476 AD, marking the official end of the Roman Empire in the west. Sigismond (Sigismund, d. 523) was one of the last kings of the Burgundians, whose line plays such a large role in the Sigurd story, before their kingdom was destroyed by the Merovingians.
47 A more famous example of a non-German name of the era preserved only in a Germanic language is Attila, which is Gothic for ‘Little Father’ (i.e., ‘Daddy’); the great Hun leader’s original (probably similar) name in his own language is lost. For the appeal of such chance historical survivals to Tolkien, see Letters pp. 264 & 447.
48 Again I am grateful to David Salo for the probable Gothic form of Radagaisus’ name.
Chapter VIII Mirkwood
1 This would occur about five years later, in The Lost Road and ‘The Fall of Númenor’ [both circa 1936].
2 For another example, compare Gandalf the Grey’s statement that
There are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world. (LotR.327)
and also Gandalf the White’s eyewitness account regarding the Things that lurk below the Mines of Moria:
Far, far below the deepest delvings of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he. (LotR.523)
3 Compare ‘The Theft of Melko and the Darkening of Valinor’ [circa 1919?], BLT I, especially pages 151–4; the narrative poem fragment ‘The Flight of the Noldoli from Valinor’ [mid-1920s], HME III.132; the ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ [1926], HME IV.16–17; the 1930 Quenta, HME IV.91–3; the ‘(Earliest) Annals of Valinor’ [early 1930s], HME IV.265–6; the ‘(Later) Annals of Valinor’ [mid/late-1930s], HME V.114; the Quenta Silmarillion [1937], HME V.230–33; ‘The Annals of Aman’ [?1951], HME X.97–101 & 108–9; and the Later Quenta Silmarillion [late 1950s], HME X.190, 284–9, & 295–7.
For the ‘definitive’ version, see Chapter 8: ‘Of the Darkening of Valinor’ and the beginning of Chapter 9: ‘Of the Flight of the Noldor’, pages 73–7 and 80–81 of the published Silmarillion [1977].
4 fairy: that is, elf. See the passage in The Bladorthin Typescript about how ‘one of the Tooks took a fairy wife’ and my commentary, p. 59.
5 Perhaps significantly, spiders are absent from ‘Goblin Feet’, despite the presence there of bats (‘flittermice’), beetles, glow-worms, and ‘golden honey-flies’ (which I take to be bees rather than butterflies), not to mention leprechauns, gnomes, fairies, goblins, and coney-rabbits. Cf. Oxford Poetry 1915 pp. 64–5.
6 Elsewhere another prophecy is given stating that Melko will destroy the Door of Night while the Sunship is Outside, Urwendi will be lost beyond recall, and Fionwë, the son of Manwë and Varda (the figure who later evolved into Ëonwë, Manwe’s herald) destroys Melko to avenge the Sunmaiden. (‘The Hiding of Valinor’; BLT I.219 & 222.)
7 The four lines I have indented here were cancelled in the original (HME VII.108 Note 18); I include them because they help flesh out this, the only blow-by-blow account we have of an epic battle in which one of Tolkien’s most elusive characters slays one of his most powerful villains.
8 For an additional appearance outside the mythos, see Tolkien’s children’s story Roverandom [written circa 1927, published 1998]. Among Rover’s adventures are a lengthy stay with the Man-in-the-Moon, during which he discovers that the light side of the moon is populated with fifty-seven varieties of spiders (along with other remarkable fauna), who are more or less under the Man-in-the-Moon’s control, some of them ‘great grey spiders’ that spin webs from mountain to mountain and are easily large enough to catch and eat a dog. The Dark Side of the Moon, for its part, is home to a multitude of poisonous black spiders that even the pale spiders of the other side are afraid of, very like the Mirkwood Spiders (who are also large, poisonous, and sinister).
9 There is no mention of Beren’s struggles with the spiders before his appearance in Doriath in ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’ (BLT II.11), for example, nor in the ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ (HME IV.24) or the 1930 Quenta (HME IV.109).
10 It is perhaps noteworthy that this entire passage was praised by CSL in his commentary on ‘The Lay of Leithian’ as ‘truly worthy of the Geste’ (HME III.322).
11 The 1937 Quenta Silmarillion text(s) for this chapter were used by Christopher Tolkien as the basis for the corresponding chapter in The Silmarillion [1977], so he did not reprint the material in the relevant History of Middle-earth volume; hence this quotation comes from the 1977 book.
12 For a technical explanation of why spiders cannot grow significantly larger than the largest known specimen, see ‘Giant Spiders and “Mammoth” Oliphaunts’ in Henry Gee’s The Science of Middle-earth [2004] especially page 177; it’s basically a matter of biomechanics (or hydraulics). The largest real world spider is a South American tarantula, whose body is only a few (3½) inches across, although its legs fan out to add several more inches to that (a maximum of about 11 inches). While this is certainly big for a spider, it’s still tiny, smaller than all but the smallest birds and mammals, and would pose little threat to Tolkien’s dwarves or even a hobbit. The largest spider known is generally thought to have been the fossil Megarachne (‘large spider’) of the Carboniferous Period, some 345 million years ago, but recently the theory has been advanced that this may actually not be a spider at all but a sea scorpion; I am indebted to Dr. Gee for the latter information (e-mail, Rateliff to Gee and Gee to Rateliff, 17th November 2004).
13 It might be thought that by making his spiders congregate and cooperate together Tolkien is departing from the reality, since most spiders are solitary hunters, but in point of fact communal spiders, while an exception to the norm, do exist. He is also correct in having his spiders subdue and hang up their prey: since spiders cannot eat solid food, they tend to let prey decompose a bit then drink its juices. Some of the larger spiders can indeed make a hissing noise (stridulation); cf. the ‘sort of low creaking hissing sound’ Tolkien ascribed to his creations. And although he never mentions it in his text he gets the most important fact of all right in all of his illustrations with spiders in them: eight legs (rather than an insect’s six). This level of accurate detail is not surprising, given Tolkien’s lifelong love of nature: someone who met him shortly before his death told me the conversation turned at one point to wasps, about which he proceeded to tell her an amazing amount of detailed information.
For an example of another author’s inadvertent misdescription of spiders, see Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret [written circa 1858ff], which at one point describes the Doctor’s pet ‘great giant spider’, with its ‘six sprawling legs’ – Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret, ed. Edward H. Davidson [1954], page 52. Hawthorne also describes the spider as ‘an insect’, but in this he is correct in the usage of the time, the term arachnid not being coined by Huxley until 1869, five years after Hawthorne’s death.
14 Note that Humphrey Carpenter, in retelling this episode in Tolkien: A Biography [1976], was careful to change ‘stung’ to ‘bit’: ‘when Ronald was beginning to walk, he stumbled on a tarantula. It bit him, and he ran in terror across the garden until the nurse snatched him up and sucked out the poison. When he grew up he could remember a hot day and running in fear through long, dead grass, but the memory of the tarantula itself faded, and he said that the incident left him with no especial dislike of spiders. Nevertheless, in his stories he wrote more than once of monstrous spiders with venomous bites’ (Carpenter, pages 13–14).
15 It can be argued that the Witch-King’s mount is an ‘asterisk creature’, a modern reconstruction from bits and pieces of available evidence, very much corresponding to the ‘asterisk words’ that Tolkien drew such inspiration from in his philology, or the manuscript cruxes and lacunae that seem to have been the part of medieval stories that especially sparked his imagination.
16 I have since learned that the baboon spiders of South Africa (subfamily Harpactirince) are sometimes called ‘tarantulas’, and they do indeed closely resemble the tarantulas of South America in appearance and habits, being fellow members of the family Theraphosidae. I have been unable to confirm whether their range includes the area around Bloemfontein, or would have at the time Tolkien was living there (1892–1895).
17 Then, to complicate matters, Tolkien’s halftone was redrawn by some anonymous American artist and this careful line drawing replaced his original in the first printing of the American edition (contrast Tolkien’s original on DAA.192 with the redrawn version on DAA.193). Finally, late in life Tolkien wrote a new title, ‘Fangorn Forest’, on his 1928 painting of Taur-na-Fuin so that it could appear in the 1974 Tolkien calendar as an illustration of Merry and Pippin in Fangorn. He did not, however, change the picture itself.
18 I am indebted for information about the purple emperor’s dark variant to Andrew Middleton (e-mail, Rateliff to Middleton, 18th November 2004; Middleton to Rateliff, 19th November 2004), who along with Elizabeth Goodyear heads up a purple emperor conservation project: see the website www.btinternet.com/Ãmichael.goodyear/BCHM/species_files/purple_emp.htm.
For a discussion of black (melanic) animals in Tolkien’s writings, see the essay ‘Melanism and Middle-earth’ by Henry Gee, posted online at http://greenbooks.theonering.net/guest/files/081104_01.html.
19 Once again I am grateful to Andrew Middleton for this information. Mr. Middleton writes: ‘[A] spider of ordinary size or its web would probably not be able to take [a butterfly the size and strength of a Purple Emperor] . . . It would be hard to imagine how anything but a very special spider could secure an emperor around the tops of the oaks’ (e-mail, Middleton to Rateliff, 19th November 2004).
20 Traditionally, Theseus is considered to have lived a generation or two before the Trojan War [circa 1200 BC]. Like Hercules and Jason, he was the hero of many tales, of which his adventure with the minotaur is only the most famous. No epic or coherent whole dealing with his exploits survives from Grecian times, but his story can be reconstructed from references in other tales, scenes on pottery and wall-friezes, and the like. Our main sources for the Theseus story are twofold. First, the Roman poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses [circa 8 AD] strings together vignettes drawn from myths and legends that were already old in his time, several of which feature Theseus. Second, the Roman biographer Plutarch (d. 120) wrote a biography of Theseus as one of his Parallel Lives, partnering him with Romulus (the legendary founder of Rome); this is much the longest surviving account but unfortunately also the least mythical, since Plutarch attempts to explain away or rationalize most of the fantastic elements.
For another indication of Tolkien’s familiarity with the Theseus legend, it is perhaps significant that he once stated the piece of fan mail that had pleased him most was a note from Mary Renault, author of two historical novels that retold the Theseus story in light of what modern archeology knew of Minoan (Cretan) and Mycenaean (Greek) cultures: The King Must Die [1958] and its sequel The Bull from the Sea [1962]. Both Tolkien and Lewis greatly admired her books, especially these two; cf. JRRT to Charlotte & Denis Plimmer, 8th February 1967, where he reports being ‘deeply engaged’ in her books, ‘especially the two about Theseus’ (Letters p. 377). Similarly, in James Dundas-Grant’s memoir of Lewis, this fellow Inkling recalls visiting CSL in the nursing home shortly before his death and listening to Lewis talk about Theseus from his hospital bed, recommending Renault’s work (C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, ed. James T. Como [1979], page 232).
We should also not forget that the Labyrinth was very much in the public eye in the early decades of the twentieth century, especially for those like Tolkien interested in the connections between myth, prehistory, and archeology, through Sir Arthur Evans’ excavations at Knossos in Crete [1900–1940], where he claimed to have discovered the palace of King Minos and the actual passageways that inspired the Labyrinth legend. Evans brought back artifacts from these digs to Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum (of which he was the curator), which is just down the street from the Eagle and Child, the Inklings’ favorite pub.
21 The story ends in tragedy, however: Theseus abandoned Ariadne on the first island they came to, and his father, Aegeus, killed himself when he saw the ships returning. According to the legend, Theseus had promised before leaving home to switch the ships’ black sails for white sails if he was still alive but in the event forgot to do so. Mistakenly seeing their black sails as a sign that his son had died, in his grief Aegeus leapt into the sea, which has ever since been called the Aegean.
Theseus’s tragic homecoming is echoed in The Lord of the Rings Book V, Chapter VII: ‘The Pyre of Denethor’, where the combination of his son’s impending death and the sight in the palantír of ships with black sails coming up the Anduin spark Denethor’s suicide, just as very similar signs had King Aegeus’s in the old tale. And just as in the myth, those ships bear the new ruler, Aragorn, who will shortly be crowned the new king of the city.
22 It is possible that Macaulay’s work was a possible source for one scene in The Hobbit; compare Macaulay’s retelling of Horatius’ heroic deed holding a bridge alone against an oncoming army, with Bard the Bowman’s final solitary stand against the dragon in Chapter XIII, including the last desperate swim after the structure each defends collapses into the water.
23 That is, among those who appear on the scene in the present day, as opposed to now-dead figures from the past like ‘poor Belladonna’.
24 There is one more reference to the ball of spider’s thread in the First Typescript. The last four pages of this chapter were removed and replaced with new pages at some point before the creation of the Second Typescript; the rejected sheets now make up Marq. 1/1/30:2–5 while the replacement pages complete the composite chapter 1/1/58. The rejected pages represent an intermediate stage between the manuscript text and the published version; the only section that concerns us here is a slightly rewritten account of Bilbo’s regaining the thread after freeing his companions:
. . . and hundreds of angry spiders were goggling at them all round and about and above. But some of them [> the dwarves] had knives, and some had sticks, and all of them could get at stones; and Bilbo had his elvish dagger. So the battle began, and the spiders were held off. Indeed they soon saw that it was going to take a long time to recapture their prey.
That was all very well, but how were the dwarves going to escape? That is just what worried Bilbo, especially when he saw that the spiders were beginning to weave their webs from tree to tree all round them again. In the end he could think of no plan except to let the dwarves into the secret of his ring, though he was rather sorry about it. As quickly as he could, in between the shouts and the whacking of sticks and the throwing of stones, he explained it all to them; and when he had got them to understand, he told them to stay where they were and keep the spiders off, while he went to look for the ball of thread, which he had laid by a tree some distance off. Then he slipped on his ring and, to the great astonishment of the dwarves, he disappeared.
Very soon they heard the sound of ‘Lazy Lob’ and ‘Attercop!’ from among the trees. That upset the spiders very much, and helped the dwarves to press forward and attack them. In this way they drew slowly to the edge of the colony. Suddenly Bilbo reappeared again. He was carrying his ball of thread, ‘Follow me!’ he called, and off they all went after him, as fast as they could, though that was not much more than a hobble and a wobble.
The spiders followed too, of course; but the hobbit tired himself out dashing backwards and forwards slashing at their threads, hacking at their legs and stabbing at their heads and bodies if they came too near, so that although they swelled with rage and spluttered and frothed like mad they did not succeed in stopping the dwarves from moving steadily away. It was a terrible business and seemed to take hours, but in the end following the thread Bilbo got them all back to the tree where he had his first battle with the spider in the dark. There suddenly the last of the following spiders fell back and returned disappointed to their dark colony. They did not seem to like the place where the dwarves and Bilbo had come to. Perhaps some good magic still lingered there, for of course it was at the very edge of one of the rings where the strange feasting of the elvish people had been held.
They had escaped the spiders, but where were they, and where was their path, and where was there any food? They asked all these questions of course over and over again, as they lay miserably on the ground, too ill and exhausted to go any further . . .
This account eliminates the comic scene of Bilbo running all around trying to back-track the random zig-zags he made while taunting the spiders and substitutes a grim battle for freedom against desperate odds. In this version, once the retreat begins Bilbo does not leave the dwarves; his vanishment is only to find the thread, which here leads them back only as far as the spot where Bilbo defeated the first spider, the scene where he regained the path on his own having vanished. A few other details, such as the spiders who sit cursing in the trees after they have escaped, have also disappeared from the story, while an important new idea has entered it: that the areas where the elves had feasted retain some residue of ‘good magic’, a motif that in itself helps ennoble the elves and counteract some of the sinister connotations from the Plot Notes and manuscript draft.
25 However, it is possible that even had they reached the eastern end of the forest, further disaster still lay in wait for them; see ‘Visiting the Mewlips’ in the commentary following Plot Notes B (p. 370).
26 It has given some readers pause that the Necromancer (Sauron) could have missed the map or, in the published book, both the map and the magic key that accompanied it, but this is no more implausible than that the elves also failed to discover the secret map Gandalf was carrying.
27 Here I am referring to the story as it appeared in the first edition, where Bilbo uses the blade more as a light source than a weapon, rather than the recast version of the scene Tolkien sent to Allen & Unwin in 1947 which ends with Bilbo’s internal struggle over whether or not to ambush and kill Gollum in order to escape. See Part Four of this book, beginning on p. 729.