Mirkwood Reconsidered
1 This new emphasis on Bombur certainly makes him a more memorable character, but at the cost of making him considerably more petty; he essentially replaces Bilbo as the party’s grumbler from this point on. In the original story he could hardly have contributed anything to the spider-battle, battered and debilitated as he was after mishandling by the spiders, not to mention being on the verge of starvation (remember that Bombur has had nothing to eat or drink at this point since falling into the enchanted stream seven days before). Then too his reluctance at the Lonely Mountain to climb narrow paths high in the air is not particularly unreasonable.
2 For more on the white deer and the invisible hunt, see ‘The Vanishing People’ in the commentary following Chapter IX.
3 For the proverb ‘Third time pays for all’, see Text Note 3 following Chapter XII.
4 This was clearly not an elven rope; compare the preternatural durability of Sam’s rope, a gift of the elves of Lothlórien, in Book IV of The Lord of the Rings.
Plot Notes B
1 Originally published in 1937 under the title ‘Knocking at the Door’. The date of composition of this poem is not known, but given the examples of two other poems Tolkien published in the same magazine that year (‘The Dragon’s Visit’ [late 1920s?] and ‘Iumonna Gold Galdre Bewunden’ [1923 or earlier]) it could have been written years before this appearance in The Oxford Magazine. This is made more probable by the fact that the poem was clearly inspired by Dunsany’s ‘The Hoard of the Gibbelins’, with perhaps some elements from ‘How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles’ as well (both in The Book of Wonder [1912]), and Dunsany’s influence on Tolkien waned after the Book of Lost Tales period. Finally, Douglas Anderson points out that on the typescript of an earlier version of the poem which seems to belong to the ‘Bimble Bay’ period (late 1920s), Tolkien long afterwards wrote ‘Ox. 1927? rev. 1937’ (DAA to JDR personal communication, 29th October 2006), thus confirming that the poem’s likeliest period of composition dates from just before Tolkien started The Hobbit.
2 This detail does not appear in the brief accounts of Glorund’s death in the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’, the 1930 Quenta, or the ‘Annals of Beleriand’; the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion did not reach this point in the story.
3 The name ‘Girion’ might derive from Gnomish (Sindarin) gîrin, meaning ‘bygone. old, belonging to former days. olden. former. ancient.’ (Gnomish Lexicon, Parma Eldalamberon vol. XI.38 & 39). King Long-ago would be a good-enough placeholder name for the Gem’s former owner, which in the event Tolkien wound up keeping into the published book.
4 For example, the Arabian Nights tale of Aladdin, who removes a single precious item from a vast underground hoard that is worth more than the rest of the treasure all together.
5 The Arkenstone thus entirely reverses its significance in the course of the story’s development, from its creation here as a handy portable share of treasure the dwarves intend to give Bilbo to carry home with him as payment for fulfilling his contract, to ultimately being the one piece of treasure in all the horde that the dwarves would never willingly part with.
The problem of how is Bilbo to get a fair share of this vast treasure home again seems to have first occurred to Tolkien in the last paragraph of page 1 of Plot Notes B, with the parenthetical exclamation about ‘how to get the stuff back . . . !’, inspired by the practical concerns of the dwarves acquiring wagons for carrying food and supplies to the Mountain. The problem no sooner arises than it is solved, for the time being at least, by the creation of the Jem of Girion on page 4 of these same Plot Notes.
6 In specific, the description of how Bilbo, after his return to his home, ‘Puts Gem in a safe but looks at it every day’ sounds remarkably like Gollum and his ring on his little island. See Plot Notes C, p. 496, for more on the Gem’s allure.
7 For unbowdlerized texts of these two folk tales, the best known to derive from native English tradition and not foreign sources such as Perrault, Andersen, or Grimm, see Iona & Peter Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales [1974], pages 47–65 and 162–74. Tolkien’s reference in his Letter to Waldman grieving that all that had survived of the native English mythology was ‘impoverished chap-book stuff’ (Letters p. 144) is probably a direct reference to these two stories, the oldest surviving versions of which appeared in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century chapbooks.
8 Note that Tolkien developed this idea at greater length in the 1947 Hobbit, where Bilbo, even in immediate peril of his life, concludes it would be wrong to stab his enemy from ambush; see p. 738.
9 For more on Tolkien’s evolving ideas regarding this great battle, and just which armies would take part in it, see the commentary on ‘The Battle of Five Armies’ on p. 713ff following the Third Phase text.
Chapter IX In the Halls of the Elvenking
1 While a few of the other Tales start from non-elven (human) perspectives, they quickly shift to elven settings early in the story; see, for example, ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ and ‘Turambar and the Foalókë’ in The Book of Lost Tales (I do not use the example of ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’, which would otherwise fit this pattern, since in the earliest surviving version of this story, in The Book of Lost Tales, Beren is an elf). In The Lays of Beleriand, the same pattern holds: in ‘The Children of Húrin’ Túrin reaches Doriath by the middle of the first canto, while ‘The Lay of Leithian’ devotes its first canto to Thingol the elvenking, the second to Beren and Barahir the human outlaws, and the third to bringing the human and elven halves of the story together.
2 To give one famous example, in 1895, when Tolkien was three years old, a woman was burned to death by her husband in the belief she was a changeling and that, by abusing the substitute, he could force the fairies to bring back his real wife. After burying the corpse he spent the next several nights waiting at the crossroads for the fairies to ride by, hoping to seize and reclaim his wife from among them. His behavior, which horrified the nation and led to a famous murder trial in which a number of members of his wife’s family were sent to jail for aiding and abetting in his faux-exorcism, was clearly in accordance with old beliefs regarding humans carried off by the elves reflected in stories recounted by Walter Scott, W. B. Yeats, and others, going at least as far back as the Tam Lin story [sixteenth century], if not Thomas Rhymer [thirteenth/fourteenth century] and Walter Map [twelfth century]; Briggs devotes an entire chapter to stories about humans carried off by the elves (‘Captives in Fairyland’), some of whom are rescued and some lost forever, in her book The Vanishing People [1978]. For more on the historical episode, see The Burning of Bridget Cleary by Angela Bourke [2000].
Tolkien was probably aware of this episode, since it is alluded to in Roger Lancelyn Green’s biography of Andrew Lang (Andrew Lang: A Critical Biography [1946], page 98), which had originated as Green’s B. Litt. dissertation directed by Tolkien himself.
3 ‘. . . I am a reader and lover of fairy-stories, but not a student of them, as Andrew Lang was. I have not the learning, nor the still more necessary wisdom, which the subject demands.’ – OFS, Essays Presented to Charles Williams [1947], page [38]. In the revised form of the essay that appeared in Tree and Leaf [1964], this passage is changed to read ‘. . . for though I have been a lover of fairy-stories since I learned to read, and have at times thought about them, I have not studied them professionally. I have been hardly more than a wandering explorer (or trespasser) in the land, full of wonder but not of information’ (Tree and Leaf, expanded edition [1988], page [9]).
Note that Tolkien is here comparing himself against one of the world’s top experts on fairy-stories, in a lecture-series named after that expert and intended to commemorate his achievements. Had Tolkien not already been considered something of an expert on fairy-stories himself, it seems unlikely he would have been asked to give the lecture, especially so shortly after The Hobbit’s first publication. The lecture was delivered in March 1939, but Tolkien seems to have already been at work on it as early as January–February 1938, since he promised to read ‘a paper “on” fairy stories’ to the Lovelace Society of Worcester College, Oxford at that time but since it was unfinished wound up reading them ‘The Lord of Thame’ (i.e., Farmer Giles of Ham) instead (FGH, expanded edition, page vi). This seems to indicate that he must have already received the invitation to deliver the lecture and selected its topic within months of The Hobbit’s publication, which had occurred only the preceding September [September 1937].
4 It may be significant that Mary Wright, the wife of his tutor and mentor, Joseph Wright, published a book in 1913 – that is, during the period of the Wrights’ closest connection with JRRT, when he was visiting their home on a regular basis for his tutorials and socializing (cf. Carpenter, pages 55–6) – called Rustic Speech and Folk-lore which devoted a chapter to the survival of belief in fairy creatures such as hobs and fairies as reflected in rural dialects into modern times.
5 This is less true of the elves as he developed them in The Lord of the Rings or the later revisions of the Silmarillion material; for this reason, he came to prefer ‘Eldar’ over ‘Elves’ in his very late material.
6 For the argument that Tolkien’s Valar were directly inspired by Dun sany’s Gods of Pegana, see my dissertation, Beyond the Fields We Know: The Short Stories of Lord Dunsany (Ph.D. diss., Marquette University, [1990]).
7 Briggs, page [7]. Her other reason for the title is the persistent legend of the elves’ withdrawal from mortal lands, or at least from contact with humans, something not at all evident in The Hobbit but very much a key feature of The Book of Lost Tales and a major background element of The Lord of the Rings.
8 Tolkien does use the motif of the fairy dance elsewhere, in Smith of Wootton Major [written circa 1964, published 1967]:
[H]e heard elven voices singing, and on a lawn beside a river . . . he came upon many maidens dancing. The speed and the grace and the ever-changing modes of their movements enchanted him, and he stepped forward towards their ring. Then suddenly they stood still, and a young maiden with flowing hair and kilted skirt came out to meet him . . . ‘Come! Now that you are here you shall dance with me’; and she took his hand and led him into the ring.
There they danced together, and for a while he knew what it was to have the swiftness and the power and the joy to accompany her. For a while. But soon as it seemed they halted again . . . ‘Farewell now!’ she said. ‘Maybe we shall meet again . . .’
—SWM, pages 31–3.
Note the careful use of words with significant associations in fairy-lore: the sight of them enchanted him, she led him into the [faery] ring, and ‘soon as it seemed’ their dance was over, all of which the reader is free to read as much or as little significance into as he or she pleases, in accordance with Tolkien’s championing of ‘applicability’ rather than allegory (cf. his Foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings).
9 See also Tolkien’s treatment of the enchanted forest of Lothlórien; when the Fellowship leave, they cannot agree on whether more time has passed than they thought or less (LotR.408). The best informed among those present, Legolas and Aragorn, argue that the difference was one of perception only, and this is borne out by the detailed calendar of events in Appendix B: ‘The Tale of Years’. But Tolkien’s rough drafts had reached a different conclusion, and one more in keeping with traditional folklore: ‘Whether we were in the past or the future or in a time that does not pass, I cannot say: but not I think till Silverlode bore us back to Anduin did we return to the stream of time that flows through mortal lands to the Great Sea’ (HME VII.355). See also page 286 (ibid.) for the conception of the elvenwood as a land outside of time, where travellers leave to find no time has passed in the outside world however long they remained within Lórien itself. For much more on time in Lórien, see ‘Over a Bridge of Time’, Chapter 4 in Verlyn Flieger’s A Question of Time: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie [1997].
10 The Middle English equivalent of the phrase Tolkien translates as ‘by magic’ is ‘with fairie’ – that is, by means of faerie or elven arts. Later in the poem he translates the same phrase as ‘by fairy magic’ (line 404).
As Douglas Anderson points out in The Annotated Hobbit (DAA. 199–200), Tolkien knew Sir Orfeo very well, having prepared his own text of the original Middle English poem [1944] and also translated the poem into modern English [before 1945, published 1975]. All my citations come from Tolkien’s translation. For a critical edition of Tolkien’s Middle English text, and a discussion of the changes Tolkien made to the original manuscript, see ‘Sir Orfeo: A Middle English Version by J. R. R. Tolkien’ by Carl Hostetter, in Tolkien Studies, Volume 1 [2004], pages 85–123.
11 It will be noted that all of these sources are, to some degree, ‘Celtic’ – that is, while some are written in (Old) French or (Middle) English, they all derive from Breton and Welsh legend. Tom Shippey has argued, in ‘Tolkien and Iceland: The Philology of Envy’,† that in creating his Mythology for England Tolkien ‘wanted English myths, and English legends, and English fairy-stories, and these did not exist. He refused to borrow from Celtic tradition, which he regarded as alien.’ This, I think, rather overstates the case. Certainly Tolkien did not choose Celtic legends for the core of his new myth, for reasons explained in his ‘Letter to Waldman’ (Letters p. 144), but he did explicitly state that he wanted it to possess ‘the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things)’ and it could be said that any English mythology worthy of the name would have to take into account the sense of vanished peoples and the lingering remnants of the former inhabitants of the land that is so much an element of England’s history. It is true enough that one of the most fundamental core elements in Tolkien’s imagined history of the elves derives from Norse tradition as recorded in the Eddas (see ‘The Three Kindreds of the Elves’ on p. 405), yet it is also true that those elves in Middle-earth speak a language (known at various points in its history as Gnomish, Noldorin, and finally Sindarin) that drew its inspiration and soundvalues from Welsh and that Tolkien’s warrior-elves resemble not the Icelanders of the sagas but the Tuatha dé Danaan of Irish myth more closely than any other literary antecedent; the elven and human immigrations and invasions of Beleriand can even be loosely paralleled to the Irish Leber Gabála Érenn (‘The Book of Invasions’ [cmp. eleventh century]) and Cath Maige Tuired (‘The Battle of Mag Tuired’; ninth/tenth century). As Verlyn Flieger says of The Book of Lost Tales, ‘It doesn’t take much to see in Tolkien’s Fairies (soon to be developed into Elves) a near-direct replication of the Irish Sidh, the fairy folk of the Celtic Otherworld’ (Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology [2005], page 136). See also Marjorie Burns’ Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth [2005] for a balanced argument on how Tolkien incorporated both Norse and Celtic elements into his mythology.
† This excellent and informative lecture, delivered at Icelandic National University [the Sigurður Nordal Institute] in September 2002, has not yet been published but is available online at http://www.nordals.hi.is/shippey.html.
12 Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium (‘A Courtier’s Trifles’) [c. 1181–1193 AD], edited by M. R. James [1914] and ‘Englished’ (translated) by Frederick Tupper and Marbury Bladen Ogle as Master Walter Map’s Book [1924]. While much of Map’s miscellany is made up of gossip about kings and tirades about monastic orders he disliked, among the stories he records is that of King Herla, a British king who rode on a visit to Faerie and, returning to his own land the next day, found that more than two hundred years had passed and his realm had long since been conquered by the Anglo-Saxons. When one of his men dismounted, he crumbled into dust; for centuries afterwards Herla and his rout rode unceasingly up and down the land until the apparition suddenly ceased a few decades before Map’s time (Map, pages 17–18).
Even more striking is the story of the woman who died whose husband later discovered her dancing in the woods with the Fair Folk and managed to rescue her and carry her back home again, a story Map likes so much he tells it twice (pages 97–8 & 218). The reunited couple resume their interrupted lives together, and Map notes that the descendants of her children born after her rescue were known to his day as ‘sons of the dead woman’. The parallels to Sir Orfeo on the one hand, where Orfeo sees both the dead and the fairies together once he enters the elf-hill and reaches the fairy king’s castle:
Then he began to gaze about,
and saw within the walls a rout
of folk that were thither drawn below,
and mourned as dead, but were not so.
— Sir Orfeo, lines 387–390
and the Bridget Cleary case on the other (see Note 2 above), are striking, considering that a century or more separates Map and Sir Orfeo, and another six centuries separates Orfeo from the Clearys, not to mention the geographical distance between Brittany, the setting of Map’s story and source of the Breton lay from which Sir Orfeo derives, and rural Ireland where the Clearys lived.
13 In addition to the hunters, Orfeo also sometimes sees dancing (lines 297–302) and sometimes warriors riding by:
At other times he would descry
a mighty host, it seemed, go by,
ten hundred knights all fair arrayed
with many a banner proud displayed.
Each face and mien was fierce and bold,
each knight a drawn sword there did hold,
and all were armed in harness fair
and marching on he knew not where.
— Sir Orfeo, lines 289–296.
This latter passage may have helped inspire the marshalling of the elven army that occurs near the end of The Hobbit, first for the siege of the Lonely Mountain and then for the Battle of Five Armies. It also may account for the elusive scene in Smith of Wootton Major where Smith sees a host of elven mariners march past, while Smith himself later joins in just such a dancing scene as the Middle English poem describes when he dances with the Queen of Faery herself (see Note 8 above).
14 In the typescript interpolation, this passage is expanded somewhat:
Then they heard the disquieting laughter. Sometimes there was singing in the distance too. The laughter was the laughter of fair voices not of goblins, and the singing was beautiful, but it sounded eerie and strange, and they were not comforted, rather they hurried on from those parts with what strength they had left.
— ‘The Enchanted Stream’, page [4]; emphasis mine.
15 Indeed, Marjorie Burns goes so far as to assert that ‘the inevitable water crossing . . . divides the rest of Middle-earth from the inner core of every Elven realm’ – Perilous Realms, page 61.
16 ‘Lord Nann and the Fairy’ (‘Aotrou Nann Hag ar Gorrigan’), Ballads and Songs of Brittany by Tom Taylor [1865], pages [8]–14; translated from Barsaz Breiz by Vicomte Hersart de la Villemarque [1846].† An alternate translation, apparently the first into English, appears in Thomas Keightley’s The Fairy Mythology, Illustrative of the Romance and Superstition of Various Countries [revised and expanded 1850 edition] as ‘Lord Nann and the Korrigan’, pages 433–436.
† Verlyn Flieger notes that Tolkien owned a copy of the original 1846 edition of Barsaz Breiz, with his name and the date ‘1922’ inscribed in it; this two-volume set is now in the English Faculty Library at Oxford (Interrupted Music, page 154).
17 In the original Breton lay, it is Lord Nann’s drinking of the water from her fountain that puts him in the Korrigan’s power. In Tolkien’s more complex and subtle version, Aotrou has already visited her before and gotten a magic potion from her to give his wife; she now demands repayment for that earlier draught. In a possible parallel to the enchanted stream scene in The Hobbit, it may be significant that Aotrou does not see the Korrigan until after he has dismounted and ‘laved his face in water cool’ from ‘the fountain of the fay’ (lines 288 and 284), just as the dwarves do not hear the elven hunt until after Bombur has fallen into the enchanted stream.
18 For more on identification of the Fair Folk with the ancient dead, see Briggs, The Vanishing People, pages 31 and 37. This is only one of the many competing theories of fairy origins, both among folklore scholars and within the tales themselves (see Briggs, ‘The Origins of Fairy Beliefs and Beliefs about Fairy Origins’, Chapter 2 in The Vanishing People). Other suggestions advanced at various times are that they are gods reduced in stature after their former worshippers converted to Christianity (e.g., the Tuatha dé Danaan and the major characters in the Four Branches of the Mabinogi such as Manawydan, Aranrhod, and Rhiannon); that they are fallen angels, those who supported neither God nor Satan during Lucifer’s rebellion and so were thrown out of Heaven but not driven into Hell; that they were a folk-memory of Neanderthals or other defeated peoples, earlier inhabitants of the land living on the margins of habitable lands (cf. Tolkien’s Drúedain or woodwoses); that they are a cursed offshoot of the human race, either the children of Cain (Beowulf) or ‘the hidden children of Eve’ (Briggs, pages 30–31), &c.
19 I base this translation upon a full rhyming translation of the poem made by Dr. Rhona Beare (unpublished), modified by comparison with Shippey’s prose translation (The Road to Middle-earth, expanded edition [2003], page 358) and my own consultation with Clark Hall’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary; any errors thus introduced are of course my own responsibility.
20 This feature can clearly be seen in two of Tolkien’s drawings for the Elvenking’s Halls in The Hobbit, one of which he chose to include for publication in the book; see DAA.224 (the top and bottommost drawings) or H-S#120, 121 (the lintel-gate shows up particularly well in the Artist & Illustrator reproductions). Interestingly enough, this same feature can also be seen in one of his drawings for the entrance to the underground elven city of Nargothrond (H-S#57); see my commentary on pp. 408–9 on the links between the wood-elves’ dwelling and Nargothrond.
For the intimate link between the elves and the dead, both of whom live in an ‘other’ world that is in some ways strikingly like our own and in others just as strikingly unlike, and both of whom can be perilous to deal with, see Note 18 above.
21 The Green Children. In this, the very first tale in the section on England in Keightley’s The Fairy Mythology (pages 281–3), he recounts the story by Ralph of Coggeshall (died c. 1227) and also by William of Newbridge (died c. 1198) of two children with green skin who accidentally wandered out of their underground world into the sunlight realm of Suffolk in the time of King Stephen (reigned 1135–54). Overcome by the glaring light of the sun, they could not find their way back to their own world. For more on this unusual story, a rare case of elves intruding into and becoming trapped within the mortal world, see Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies, pages 200–201.
22 Tolkien reveals extensive knowledge of the legends concerning the Tuatha dé Danaan and Welsh legends of the Fair Folk appearing in the Mabinogion and elsewhere in his short essay ‘The Name “Nodens”’, which appeared as a philological appendix to the archeological report published by R. E. M. Wheeler describing excavations at the Temple of Nodens in Gloucestershire [1932].
For more on the Tuatha dé Danaan, perhaps the best account is Lady Gregory’s retelling of Cath Maige Tuired (‘The Battle of Mag Tuired’) in her book Gods and Fighting Men [1904], giving a vivid account of Nuada of the Silver Hand and Lug of the Long Arm and their battles against the Fir Bolg and Fomorians.
23 Faerie could also be reached by sailing across the sea: cf. The Voyage of Bran [Irish, eighth century], and Tolkien’s own poems ‘Ides Ælfscýne’, ‘Imram’, and ‘The Sea-Bell’. The voyages of Eärendel the Mariner in the earliest Middle-earth poems, Eriol in The Book of Lost Tales, and the unfinished ‘Ælfwine of England’ story [circa 1920] all draw on Tolkien’s conception of an overseas Elvenhome reachable only by a chosen few.
24 On the face of it, the Elvenking’s statement that none can escape back out through his gates seems to be contradicted by the fact that Bilbo can slip in and out undetected, but we should note that the hobbit was not ‘brought’ inside as were the dwarves but entered on his own volition. The literal truth or otherwise of his words goes untested, since the dwarves do not in the end escape through those gates but by another exit (the trapdoor over the river).
25 This is all the more remarkable because of Tolkien’s earlier use of an enchanted drink motif (à la Rip Van Winkle) when Bombur is cast into a magical sleep after falling into (and presumably inadvertently drinking from) the dark waters of the enchanted stream. The motif of a stream bringing forgetfulness or drowsiness seems to derive more from classical mythology (the river Lethe) than folklore, but Douglas Anderson points out (DAA.198) that it also occurs in the St. Brendan legend, which Tolkien recast as ‘Imram’. In the original saint’s life, one of the many marvels Brendan and his companions encounter comes when they land on an island with a clear well. Those who drink from it fall asleep for a full day and night for each cup of water they drank. Although this episode is not one of those Tolkien included in ‘Imram’ (which represents an extremely abbreviated version of the legend, with incidents selected for maximum effect), he would certainly have been aware of it. See ‘The Soporific Well’, part 13 in John J. O’Meara’s translation of Navigatio Sancti Brendani (‘The Voyage of St. Brendan’ [1976; rpt. 1991]), pages 32–4.
26 The idea of hiding in barrels or crates is of course an ancient one (cf. the story of Ali Baba) that needs no specific source; even today newspapers occasionally carry the story of someone who has attempted to ship himself cross-country in a box. I have heard second-hand of one such story, a sixteenth-century account of an English traveller said to have escaped from a Turkish prison through means similar to those Bilbo employs in The Hobbit and which therefore might have inspired or influenced the episode in Tolkien’s story, but I have been unable to confirm the existence of such a story in Hakluyt’s Voyages or similar sources.
27 For a detailed look at the rather tangled matter of light-elves, dark-elves, and black-elves in the Eddas, and how they might interrelate with the wood-elves (wudu-ælfen) known from Old English sources, see Tom Shippey’s ‘Light-elves, Dark-elves, and Others’, the lead article in Tolkien Studies Volume I [2004], pages 1–15. Tolkien has clearly taken a confused and contradictory tradition known to us only through fragmentary survivals and imposed a coherent (and, to millions of readers, wholly satisfactory) pattern of his own upon it.
28 This passage was further revised for the replacement ending to this Ts. (1/1/58:16). In addition to many minor changes in wording, the phrase ‘different from other elves’ was replaced by ‘different from the high elves of the West, more dangerous and less wise’; ‘as well as the few elves that live in hills and mountains’ became ‘(together with their scattered relations in the hills and mountains)’; ‘to the great Fairyland of the West’ became ‘to Faerie in the West’; and finally a new sentence is added to the end of the paragraph: ‘Still elves they were and remain, and that is Good People’.
29 Compare the elven boat that appears in Tolkien’s illustration of Lake-Town (Plate VIII [bottom]) with the one in his painting of Taniquetil ([1928]; Pictures by JRRT plate 31; Priestman, Life and Legend, cover illustration; H-S#52). Even though one is built by the Wood-elves of Mirkwood and the other by the Teleri of Tol Eressëa, the boats are almost identical – naturally enough, having been built by two branches of the same kindred, the Teleri of Middle-earth (the Sindar) and the Teleri of Valinor, respectively (cf. Silm.58 & 61).
30 In the published Silmarillion (pages 52–3), those who set out and reached Valinor are the Calaquendi (‘Elves of the Light’); those who set out but failed to complete the journey the Úmanyar (‘those not of Aman the Undying Land’); and those who never set out or refused the summons the Avari (‘the Unwilling’). The Úmanyar and Avari together make up the Moriquendi (‘Elves of the Darkness’), with the sole exception of Thingol Greycloak, since he did indeed visit Valinor once and became lost on his return journey to that land: ‘king though he was of Úmanyar, he was not accounted among the Moriquendi, but with the Elves of the Light’ (Silm.56). The wood-elves of The Hobbit, along with their kin who live scattered in the hills and mountains, seem to be a mix of Úmanyar and Avari (or, as the Lhammas called them, Lembi; cf. the ‘family trees’ of languages in HME V.182).
Caranthir’s remark about Thingol is thus both deliberately insulting and untrue. However, it should be noted that this would not have been the case in earlier versions of the legend: in the 1930 Quenta it states explicitly that ‘Of the Dark-elves the chief in renown was Thingol’ (HME IV.85).
31 That is, the Deep-elves are so called because of their knowledge (‘deep’ in the sense of profound), not because they live underground. Similarly, their byname Gnome derives from the Greek gnosis (thought, knowledge, wisdom), a sense preserved today in gnomic literature (maxims, aphorisms, proverbs; literally ‘wisdom writing’) and Gnosticism (secret wisdom). Tolkien goes to some pains (Letters p. 318) to distinguish his Gnomes from the earth elementals created by Paracelsus [1658] and popularized by Alexander Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’ [1714], eventually abandoning ‘gnome’ altogether when he realized the popular association of the name with garden gnomes and the like was insurmountable.
The Light-elves are so called because of their devotion to the light of Valinor, which is so strong that they dwell among the Valar themselves at the foot of Mount Taniquetil rather than with their fellow elves in Elvenhome. The Sea-elves gained their name dwelling on the coasts of Beleriand before some of them removed first to Tol Eressëa and then Elvenhome itself; those left behind either withdrew into the woods of Middle-earth and became the wood-elves (Thingol’s people) or stayed beside the ocean and became known as the Falathrim (‘elves of the coasts’, Círdan the Shipwright’s people).
32 The old name ‘Light-elves’ was retained in the manuscript Christopher Tolkien refers to as ‘The Conclusion of the Quenta Silmarillion’ (HME V.323ff), but this text clearly is more closely linked to the 1930 Quenta than the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion as a whole, and it is not surprising that it retains some archaic elements, such as the retention of the old common name for the First Kindred that had appeared in the 1926 ‘Sketch,’ the 1930 Quenta, and The Hobbit (this particular passage from which probably dates from 1931).
The final name for the First Kindred, ‘Vanyar’, seems to have arisen sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s, possibly as late as 1958; cf. ‘The Annals of Aman’ ([circa 1958]; HME X.82–5) and ‘The Grey Annals’ ([1951 & 1958]; HME XI.6–7), as well as HME X.34 & 6 (Version D of the Ainulindalë [after 1951]).
33 One could say that Tolkien borrowed from Celtic legend and traditional folklore for the external description of the elves – that is, the elves as they appear to others (specifically, Bilbo and the dwarves) – and drew on his own legendarium once the focus shifts so that we can see the elves close up.
34 Unfortunately the elvenking’s halls are never described in detail, either in The Hobbit or afterwards, but we can get some idea of what they might have looked like (albeit on a somewhat grander scale) from Tolkien’s description in ‘The Lay of Leithian’ of King Thingol’s halls in Menegroth:
Downward . . .
through corridors of carven dread
whose turns were lit by lanterns hung
or flames from torches that were flung
on dragons hewn in the cold stone
with jewelled eyes and teeth of bone.
Then sudden, deep beneath the earth
the silences with silver mirth
were shaken and the rocks were ringing,
the birds of Melian were singing;
and wide the ways of shadow spread
as into archéd halls [Lúthien] led
Beren in wonder. There a light
like day immortal and like night
of stars unclouded, shone and gleamed.
A vault of topless trees it seemed,
whose trunks of carven stone there stood
like towers of an enchanted wood
in magic fast for ever bound,
bearing a roof whose branches wound
in endless tracery of green
lit by some leaf-emprisoned sheen
of moon and sun, and wrought of gems,
and each leaf hung on golden stems.
Lo! there amid immortal flowers
the nightingales in shining bowers
stand o’er the head of Melian,
while water for ever dripped and ran
from fountains in the rocky floor.
There Thingol sat.
—‘The Lay of Leithian’, Canto IV, lines 980–1009;
HME III.188–9.
35 Or, according to some versions of the legend, great-grandfather. Cf. Elrond’s words to Bingo [= Frodo] in the earliest version of the Rivendell chapter: ‘My mother was Elwing daughter of Lúthien daughter of King Thingol of Doriath’ (HME VI.215–16). The same wording survived into the second version of ‘The Council of Elrond’ (HME VII.110) and does not seem to have been altered to include Dior, Lúthien’s son, until the fourth draft (HME VII.127). Since Dior had already appeared as far back as The Book of Lost Tales, his absence here might be mere forgetfulness on Tolkien’s part when drafting ‘The New Hobbit’, or it might represent the brief appearance of an alternate tradition which was rejected in favor of the long-established genealogy.
36 For an earlier form of the same concept of Doriath’s mixed elven population, see The Book of Lost Tales: ‘many a wild and woodland clan rallied beneath King Tinwelint [Thingol]. Of those the most were Ilkorindi – which is to say Eldar that never had beheld Valinor or the Two Trees or dwelt in Kôr – and eerie they were and strange beings, knowing little of light or loveliness or of musics save it be dark songs and chantings of a rugged wonder that faded in the wooded places or echoed in deep caves.† Different indeed did they become when the Sun arose, and indeed before that already were their numbers mingled with a many wandering Gnomes [Noldor], and wayward sprites [very minor Maiar] too there were of Lorien’s host [i.e., the Vala Lórien or Irmo; cf. the Valaquenta, Silm.28] that dwelt in the courts of Tinwelint, being followers of Gwendeling [Melian], and these were not of the kindreds of the Eldalië [Eldar]’, in addition to ‘fugitives that fled to his protection’ after the Battle of Unnumbered Tears (‘The Tale of Tinúviel’, BLT II.9).
† Compare the strange singing Bilbo and the dwarves heard in the forest – beautiful but eerie and strange and not at all comforting.
37 This assertion represents a new element entering into the mythology, since in all previous versions of the story Thorin’s folk, the Longbeards or Indrafangs, had indeed taken part in the raid on Doriath and killing of the king; cf. BLT II.230 & 234–5, although in the original version of the story the dwarves of Nogrod (the Nauglath) rather than the dwarves of Belegost (the Indrafangs) had been the instigators of the attack. Both groups take part in the war in the 1926 ‘Sketch’ (HME IV.32) and 1930 Quenta (HME IV.132–3), except in the latter we are now told that the Indrafangs or Longbeards are the dwarves of Nogrod, not Belegost (something also true of the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion, which unfortunately does not include an account of the elf-dwarf war due to its having been left incomplete). The ‘(Later) Annals of Beleriand’ (post-Hobbit, pre-LotR) agrees with this tradition that both groups of dwarves invaded (HME V.141) but does not specify which is which.
In later material such as the ‘Annals of Aman’ ([1950s]; HME X.93), the ‘Grey Annals’ ([c. 1950–51]; HME XI.10), and the later Quenta Silmarillion ([post LotR/early 1950s]; HME XI.205), Tolkien reverted to the original identification of the dwarves of Belegost as the Longbeards, but all of these works broke off before reaching the war, so the role of the Longbeards within it remains murky. In the published Silmarillion, the dwarves of Belegost not only refuse to join their kin from Nogrod in the attack but ‘sought to dissuade them from their purpose’ (Silm.233). However, by that point the name ‘Longbeard’ had been shifted to the dwarves of Khazad-dûm (Moria), though it seems clear that this shift postdated The Hobbit and that the association of Thorin’s folk with the Blue Hills west of Bilbo’s home, which were only their temporary homes in exile in the published book, had very ancient roots in the original conception.
38 ‘As great a treasure as other elf-lords of old.’ The elf-lords specifically referred to here seem to be Orodreth of the Rodothlim (a figure whose role in the mythology was later greatly diminished, being largely superseded by Finrod Felagund of Nargothrond), Turgon of Gondolin, and, if he is not the same character as the Elvenking, Thingol of Doriath. Of Gondolin we are told the city held ‘a wealth of jewels and metals and stuffs and of things wrought by the hands of the Gnomes to surpassing beauty’ (BLT II.175).
For more on the great treasure of the Rodothlim, and the wonders the dwarves later crafted from it at Tinwelint’s [Thingol’s] bidding, see my commentary following Chapter XIV, starting on p. 595. Tinwelint’s treasure, like the Elvenking’s, was originally far too scanty for his liking (that is, before he gained the Rodothlim’s hoard), although his wealth was greatly increased in later versions of the story, along with his majesty and dignity:
Now the folk of Tinwelint were of the woodlands and had scant wealth, yet did they love fair and beauteous things, gold and silver and gems, as do all the Eldar . . . nor was the king of other mind in this, and his riches were small, save it be for that glorious Silmaril that many a king had given all his treasury contained if he might possess it. (‘Turambar and the Foalókë, BLT II.95)
Furthermore, as Christopher Tolkien points out (BLT II.245 & 128), Tinwelint frankly admits that part of his motive for sending some of his elves to investigate the caves of the Rodothlim after they had become a dragon’s lair is not just to find out what has become of his foster-son Túrin but the lure of dragon-treasure: ‘Yet it is a truth that I have need and desire of treasury, and it may be that such shall come to me by this venture’, although he magnanimously promises half of any treasure recovered to Túrin’s mother (BLT II.95). Compare the Elvenking’s similarly mixed motives in the final chapters of The Hobbit, where concern for the fate of the dwarves plays very little part and he chiefly wishes to claim Smaug’s enormous hoard but nonetheless fully recognizes the Lake-men’s claim to a large part of the treasure.
39 The 1937 Quenta Silmarillion broke off early in the Túrin story and so did not include the final quarter of the cycle, including the tales of the destruction of the great hidden elven kingdoms of Nargothrond, Doriath, and Gondolin, corresponding to chapters 21, 22, and 23, respectively, of the published Silmarillion, which draws its text for these sections primarily from the 1930 Quenta instead.
For the three main versions of the destruction of Thingol’s realm, see ‘The Nauglafring’ (BLT II.221-51), the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ (HME IV.32-3), and the 1930 Quenta, part 14 (HME IV.132–4, plus Christopher Tolkien’s commentary thereon on IV.187–91). Shorter accounts may be found in the ‘(Earliest) Annals of Beleriand’ (HME IV.306–7, V.141).
40 The plural ‘wars’ in this passage from The Hobbit is interesting but may simply refer to the early conception in The Book of Lost Tales of the dwarves as an evil people, like the goblins, who sometimes marched in Melko’s armies; see commentary, pp. 76ff.† More probably, it refers to strife between the dwarves of the Blue Mountains and their neighbors the Sons of Fëanor mentioned in the 1930 Quenta (HME IV.103–4): ‘[The sons of Fëanor] made war upon the Dwarves of Nogrod and Belegost; but they did not discover whence that strange race came, nor have any since’.
† In fact, the dwarf-host that destroyed Tinwelint’s realm was accompanied by ‘a great host of Orcs, and wandering goblins’, armed with dwarven weapons, attracted by ‘a good wage’ and the promise of much opportunity for looting and mayhem (BLT II.230, 232–3).
41 The name ‘Thranduil’ seems to have arisen quite late in the drafting of The Lord of the Rings, possibly during the construction of the Appendices after the main story had been completed; see part iv of this commentary on p. 417.
42 ‘Thither [i.e., to the Halls of Mandos] . . . fared the Elves . . . who were by illhap slain with weapons or did die of grief for those that were slain – and only so might the Eldar die, and then it was only for a while. There Mandos spake their doom, and there they waited in the darkness, dreaming of their past deeds, until such time as he appointed when they might again be born into their children, and go forth to laugh and sing again’ (‘The Coming of the Valar’, BLT 1.76).
Late in life Tolkien came to reject the concept that elves were literally reborn, preferring instead to have each elf’s spirit (or fëa) once again be incarnated in a body (or hröa) identical to that he or she had inhabited before death rather than born into a new body as a child; the original (adult) body was either re-created by the memory of the spirit or created by the Valar, under dispensation from Ilúvatar, to house that spirit. In this conception, elves took up their bodies again immediately upon leaving the Halls of Mandos, and it is specifically stated that ‘The re-housed fëa will normally remain in Aman [Valinor/Elvenhome]. Only in very exceptional cases . . . will they be transported back to Middle-earth’ (HME X.364).
43 It hardly seems a coincidence that Glorfindel, who died defending the seven-year-old Eärendil during the Fall of Gondolin, should turn up six thousand years later in the retinue of Eärendil’s son, Elrond Halfelven; he has clearly made it his task to guard the last scion of the house of Gondolin.
44 The name ‘Nargothrond’ itself arises for the first time in ‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’, which predated The Hobbit by at least five years; see HME III.36 & 55.
45 For Tolkien’s preferred spelling of this name, see HME V.98.
46 We know that Tolkien was unhappy with the results of Baynes’ efforts (see Note 14 to the commentary following The Bladorthin Typescript), but he seems to have restricted his criticisms to the art-pieces she put at the top and bottom of her map; so far as I know his reservations did not extend to the map itself.
47 The Nandor are a group of Teleri who abandoned the westward march but later changed their mind and joined the Sindar in Beleriand, becoming the Green Elves of Ossiriand.
Chapter X Lake Town
1 Scull notes that for his work on medieval language and literature Tolkien needed
. . . a deep understanding of the archaeology, history, and culture of the period in which the text is set . . . Tolkien’s interest in such matters for the periods he studied and taught is clear in his writings and contributed much to the background of his fiction.
– ‘The Influence of Archaeology and History on Tolkien’s World’, Scholarship & Fantasy: Proceedings of The Tolkien Phenomenon, May 1992, Turku, Finland, ed. K. J. Battarbee (page 33).
2 This era is recorded mainly through the records of the sole surviving Old English kingdom, the Saxon realm of Wessex, and naturally those records focus on the events from that perspective. Tolkien himself strongly identified with the Angles, considering himself ‘a Mercian’ (JRRT to CT, 18th January 1945; Letters p. 108) and at one point declaring a resolution ‘to refuse to speak anything but Old Mercian’ (JRRT to CT, 9th December 1943; Letters p. 65).
3 Tolkien was also influenced by other writers of ‘feigned history’, or pseudohistory, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain [1137], which covers the years from the time the Trojans defeated the giants down through King Arthur’s time and into which he inserted his own excursion into that genre, Farmer Giles of Ham.
4 Actually, it was later discovered that workmen had first turned up prehistoric artifacts at the site in 1829 but discarded them without informing any antiquarian of their existence. Cf. Keller, The Lake Dwellings of Switzerland, page 10.
5 This image comes from a matchbox cover reproduced as illustration #68 [page 146, top] in Bryony & John Coles’ Sweet Track to Glastonbury: The Somerset Levels in Prehistory [1986]; it seems to have been one of a series of twenty ‘Historic Westcountry’ images, in this case labelled ‘No 8 GLASTONBURY LAKE VILLAGE’. For more on the Glastonbury and Meade lake-villages as they were understood at the time Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, see Arthur Bulleid’s little booklet The Lake-Villages of Somerset [first published in 1924 and many times reprinted], Bulleid being the excavator of Glastonbury lake-village and, with George Gray, of the two minor lake-villages at Meade. My thanks to Jim Pietrusz for drawing the Coles’ book and Bulleid’s pamphlet to my attention and for loaning me both volumes, and to Bryony Coles for her courtesy in replying to my queries about this image.
6 I.e., Adrien de Mortillet, son of Gabriel de Mortillet, the leading French expert of his time on lake-dwellings (particularly the lake-dwelling at Lake Varese, Italy), famous today largely for his book Le Prehistorique: Antiquité de l’Homme [1882], which proposed a widely influential classification system for dividing prehistory into chronological epochs named after cultures identified through remains excavated at specific sites. Adrien himself was a distinguished archeologist and anthropologist in his own right.
7 The mountain is clearly larger here than the description in the published book would justify (for the manuscript version of this passage, see p. 548):
From their town the Lonely Mountain was mostly screened by the low hills at the far end of the lake, through a gap in which the Running River came down from the North. Only its high peak could they see in clear weather, and they looked seldom at it . . .
— DAA.[302].
However, it is far more aesthetically satisfying for the picture to show such an important feature somewhat larger than it might really appear; for another example, see the image of Thangorodrim in the background of Tolkien’s ‘Tol Sirion’ (Pictures by Tolkien, plate 36 †. In the original drawing by Tolkien, Thangorodrim and the smoke clouds hanging over it are a menacing, looming presence; in the redrawn colourized version by H. E. Riddett, Morgoth’s fortress has become a tiny dot in the far distance – more accurate perhaps but far less dramatic. (The two versions are presented on facing pages without comment in the first edition of Pictures by Tolkien [1979]; this change is noted in Pictures’ second edition [1992].)
† Also known as ‘The Vale of Sirion’; cf. H-S#55.
8 I can find no evidence that Tolkien ever visited the site, and in general he seems not to have felt any special interest in seeing for himself archeological digs, the results of which had inspired him when he read about them. For example, so far as I can determine he does not seem to have visited the site of any of the famous lake-dwellings discovered by Keller and his successors on his 1911 visit to Switzerland (for his route, see his 1967/68 letter to Michael Tolkien, Letters pp. 391–3). Nor can I find any evidence that he visited the site of Beorhtnoth’s tomb in Ely while working on The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, nor the temple of Nodens when writing his essay ‘The Name “Nodens”’, nor the burial mound at Sutton Hoo when writing the Rohirrim chapters of The Lord of the Rings. He did base places in his books on memorable spots he had visited, such as the Aglarond at Helm’s Deep on Cheddar Gorge, or the description of Rivendell and the Misty Mountains on his one trip to snow-covered mountains, his 1911 visit to Switzerland (see Marie Barnfield’s essay on Rivendell and Switzerland in Þe Lyfe ant þe Auncestrye, issue no. 3 [Spring 1996]), but this was a case of drawing inspiration from things he had happened to see years before, not of deliberately seeking out first-hand source material. In general, Tolkien seems to have drawn such inspiration more from imaginative reconstructions proposed in scholarly books than in on-site visits.
For more on possible real-world sites that might have inspired Tolkien, particularly in England and for The Lord of the Rings, see Mathew Lyons’ There and Back Again: In the Footsteps of J. R. R. Tolkien (Cadogan Guides, 2004). For the current state of archeological thinking on the ‘lake-dwellings’, see Francesco Menotti’s essay ‘The Pfahlbau-problem and the History of Lake-Dwelling Research in the Alps’ (Oxford Journal of Archaeology, vol. 20 number 4 [2001], pages 319–28).
9 For destruction by fire, see Keller, page 33: ‘as in many other lake dwellings, the upper structure had been destroyed by fire’. The popularized idea of violent destruction by fire and assault lingered for a very long time: cf. the ‘re-enactment’ of the ‘Scythian’ assault by dugout canoe on the reconstructed Polish lake-fortress of Biskupin staged in 1939. For a more moderate modern assessment, see the chapter devoted to Biskupin in Exploring Prehistoric Europe by Chris Scarre (part of the ‘Places in Time’ series [1998]) which, after admiring the high degree of organization required for a society to be able to create such a carefully planned structure, concludes ‘It is not hard to see . . . that the close-packed timber buildings must have posed an enormous fire risk, even without enemy action, and it is possible that . . . Biskupin simply burned down by accident’ (p. 170).
As for the persistent idea that only desperation would drive people to living in such dwellings, this ignores the wealth of resources available in wetlands. While generally viewed as wastelands, marshlands are actually prime hunting grounds for waterfowl (duck, geese, rails, snipe, &c.), not to mention fish and other animals that make their homes in or around the margins of lakes, bogs, and pools, providing a constant supply of food if the problem of shelter and access can be satisfactorily addressed.† Indeed, in the Middle Ages, the marsh later discovered to contain the ruins of the two ancient lake-villages was a prize possession of the Abbey of Glastonbury, which harvested large quantities of marshfowl from it every year; the Coles record that fisheries in the marshes near Meare alone paid the monks 7,000 eels each year (Sweet Track, page 21).
† The focus of the Coles’ book is actually not on the lake-villages but on the wooden tracks constructed in ancient times to criss-cross the marshy areas and provide safe footing into and across the extensive wetlands; some of these tracks are more than 5,000 years old, including the ‘Sweet Track’ of the title.
10 For more on ‘Mirkwood’, see p. 19. While the juxtaposition of Morris’s Wolfings with Tolkien’s woodmen menaced by wolves is suggestive, the name in The House of the Wolfings simply refers to the totem animal that kindred has adopted: the Wolfings or people of the Wolf, to distinguish them from their neighbors the Bearings (folk of the Bear), the Elkings (Elk), the Hartings (Hart), and so forth.
11 Lake Town is really Tolkien’s only High Medieval setting, which is curious from an author who spent most of his working life in a city dominated by that High Medieval institution known as Oxford University. By contrast, despite a few comic anachronistic touches the village of Ham in Farmer Giles of Ham is a Dark Ages village, while Minas Tirith in The Lord of the Rings strongly evokes a great Classical city from the end of antiquity, Byzantine rather than Roman (cf. Letters p. 157), already in decline and surrounded by barbarian hordes. Hobbiton is, by Tolkien’s own description, a Victorian village from about the time of the Diamond Jubilee (i.e., Queen Victorian’s 60th anniversary on the throne in 1897; Letters p. 230); this is one reason it has such affinities on the one hand with the world of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows [1908], which draws on the same setting as it was a decade later, when the peace and quiet of the countryside was beginning to give way to the noise of the new century’s motorcars,† and on the other with the Puddleby-on-the-Marsh of Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Dolittle series [1922ff], which depict English village life six decades earlier, at the very beginning of the Victorian period. Wootton Major in Smith of Wootton Major is a deliberately timeless setting, while modern settings are relatively rare in Tolkien and are generally confined to single indoor locations: Mr. Bliss is a significant exception.
† For Tolkien’s own parable of motorcars destroying Oxford, see ‘The Bovadium Fragment’ (unpublished; Bodleian Library, Department of Western Manuscripts, Mss. Tolkien, Series A, folder A62, pages 38–91).
12 This makes the Master of the Town one of the very few elected officials to appear anywhere in Tolkien’s work, joined only by the Mayor of Michel Delving in The Lord of the Rings, the only elective office in the Shire (see part 3 of the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, ‘Of the Ordering of the Shire’). This essentially ceremonial role is held at the start of Frodo’s story by Old Will Whitfoot, ‘the fattest hobbit in the Westfarthing’, who is treated more as an ineffectual figure of fun than a wily politician (LotR.172 & 1050), ill-equipped to deal with Lotho and Sharkey’s usurpation. After the War of the Ring the position (‘Deputy Mayor’) is temporarily assumed by Frodo (LotR.1059) and afterwards held for many years by Sam (LotR.1067 & 1133–4). During Sam’s tenure (seven consecutive terms, for a total of forty-nine years) the dignity and authority of the office undergo considerable expansion, as may be seen by King Elessar’s letter (HME IX.117–18, 125–6, & 128–31), which treats the Mayor as the Shire’s chief executive and official representative.
Neither Ham nor Bree seem to have mayors, while Minas Tirith and Meduseld are ruled directly by their resident lords (or, more accurately, by the appointed officials of those lords).
13 That is, ‘politician’ in the sense of an elected official who tries to be all things to all people while always looking out primarily for his own interests – unlike, say, Master Gríma Wormtongue, who while a master plotter is neither elected nor a mere weathervane but an evil councillor with a private agenda which he pursues with great skill and care. Similarly, while there is much plotting on all sides in ‘The Wanderings of Húrin’ (HME XI.251–310), it is the maneuvering of clever and ruthless men, more in the style of the Allthing moot in Njal’s Saga, than politicians per se.
14 This was a work Tolkien professed to loathe yet seems to cite in one of his most cynical poems, ‘Progress in Bimble Town’, which is scathingly dedicated to ‘the Mayor and Corporation’, the phrase applied over and over in Browning’s poem to the burgomeister of Hamelin and his council.
That Tolkien castigates Browning’s poem late in life (JRRT to Jane Neave, 22nd November 1961; Letters p. 311) does not necessarily mean he was not influenced by it. This is particularly the case since his criticism of it comes in the context of a condemnation of works specifically written for children, in the course of which he severely criticizes The Hobbit itself as well as the works of Hans Christian Andersen, yet at the same time noting of the latter both that when young he ‘disliked [them] intensely’ and ‘read them myself often’, with what to an outsider ‘may have looked like rapture’ (ibid.). His praise of George MacDonald’s work in the 1930s and condemnation of it in the 1960s (cf. his remarks to Clyde Kilby, printed in Tolkien and the Silmarillion, page 31) is of a piece with this, and shows that his occasional censoriousness always needs to be taken in context.
The similarity between Tolkien’s ‘the Master and his councillors’ and Browning’s ‘the Mayor and Corporation’ was first explored by Douglas Anderson in The Annotated Hobbit (DAA.253), which reprints ‘Progress in Bimble Town’ (first published in The Oxford Magazine in October 1931, during the period when Tolkien was writing The Hobbit and quite possibly right around the time when he was writing this chapter). I am also grateful to Doug for helping me find Tolkien’s 1966 characterization of MacDonald as an ‘old grandmother’.
15 The worst such incident passing into legend as the ‘St. Scholastic Day massacre’ of February 10th 1354/55, which killed about ninety people, two-thirds of them students and the rest townspeople: the Mayor and town of Oxford were ordered by King Edward III to pay a fine of one silver penny for each student killed on the anniversary of that day, a ritual of public humiliation that was not abandoned until 1825.
16 Gandalf’s grandfather, the last King under the Mountain, had of course briefly been named Fimbulfambi (‘Great Fool’) in the Pryftan Fragment (see p. 9), but this name had not survived into the Bladorthin Typescript, where the reference is simply to ‘your grandfather’. Likewise, in the Second Phase continuation of Chapter I neither of Gandalf’s forebears is named, simply being referred to as ‘your father’ and ‘my grandfather’ (e.g., p. 73). Indeed, this anonymity carried over into the first and second editions of the published book; not until the 1966 paperback third edition text were Thror and Thrain’s names inserted into the first chapter:
• ‘made by your grandfather’ > ‘made by Thror, your grandfather’ (DAA.51)
• ‘Long ago in my grandfather’s time’ > ‘Long ago in my grandfather Thror’s time’ (DAA.54)
• ‘Your grandfather was killed’ > ‘Your grandfather Thror was killed’ (DAA.56)
• ‘And your father went away’ > ‘And Thrain your father went away’ (DAA.56)
One spot where we might expect these names to have been inserted but they were not comes in Chapter IV. In the manuscript text there is no indication that the goblin-chief realizes who his prisoner is (cf. p. 132), whereas in the exchange between Thorin and the Great Goblin in the First Typescript when the former gives his name (‘Thorin the dwarf’) the Great Goblin replies using his captive’s full name, indicating that he knows just who his prisoner is:
‘Not that it will do you much good, Thorin Oakenshield, I know too much about your folk already . . .’
—typescript page 86; Marq. 1/1/54:5 (italics mine).
17 Tolkien was of course intimately familiar with this text, citing it as his direct source for the dwarf-names in his February 1938 letter to The Observer (‘The dwarf-names . . . are from the Elder Edda’; see Appendix II). Cf. also his 29th March 1967 letter to W. H. Auden (Letters p. 379), thanking Auden for sending his translation of this poem; Tolkien promises to send Auden his own (as yet unpublished) recasting of some of the Elder Edda material (the Volsunga/Sigurd story) in return.
18 For this reason, Patricia Terry omits the dwarf-names from her translation of Völuspä in her Poems of the Elder Edda (cf. pages 2–3), as did Gudbrand Vigfusson and F. York Powell from their dual-text edition Corpus Poeticum Boreale [1883], a once-standard tome that sought to bring together all surviving remnants of Old Icelandic poetry; see Vol. I pages 192 and 194–5. Dronke includes it in her edition of Völuspá but forebears to comment on this passage, although it comprises ten percent of the entire poem (The Poetic Edda, Volume II: Mythological Poems [1997]; see especially page 122), describing it as ‘a unique record of unexpected tradition, made in an unfortunate place’ (page 92). W. H. Auden does include the entire passage in his translation, Völuspá: The Song of the Sybil [published 1968], which Auden sent to Tolkien in 1967 (see Note 17) and later collected into The Elder Edda: A Selection, tr. Paul B. Taylor & W. H. Auden, with introduction by Peter H. Salus and Taylor and notes by Salus [1969], a volume dedicated ‘For J. R. R. Tolkien’. Most significantly, Snorri Sturluson, who was better-informed on Eddic lore than it is possible for any modern scholar to be, selected this passage as one deserving preservation and explanation in his Prose Edda.
19 The full Thror–Thrain–Thorin genealogy occurs in the following passages:
• [p. 436]: ‘songs were still sung of the King Under the Mountain Thror and his son Thrain of the race of Durin . . . Some sang that Thror and Thrain would come back one day’ (Ms. page 131; corresponds to 1st ed. text page 199 and DAA.246).
• [p. 438]: ‘Thorin son of Thrain son of Thror King Under the Mountain!’ (Ms. page 132; 1st ed. page 202/DAA.248).
• [p. 439] ‘I am Thorin son of Thrain son of Thror King Under the Mountain. I return’ (Ms. page 133; 1st ed. page 203/DAA.249–50).
• [p. 441] ‘Certainly O Thorin Thrain’s son Thror’s son’ [the Master said] (Ms. page 136; 1st ed. page 207/DAA.253).
• [p. 504] ‘O Thorin Thrain’s son, may your beard grow ever longer’ [Bilbo] said crossly (Ms. page 142; 1st ed. page 218/DAA.267).
• [p. 619] ‘O Thorin Thrain’s son Thror’s son’ [said Roäc] (Ms. page 166). This passage survived into the Third Phase manuscript conclusion (new Ms. page 6) but was simplified to ‘O Thorin son of Thrain’ (1/1/65:1), preserving the genealogy but omitting the grandfather’s name, when the First Typescript was finally extended to include the final chapters of the story – e.g. immediately before the submission to Allen & Unwin on 3rd October 1936. This latter reading appears in the first and all subsequent editions of the book (cf. 1st ed. page 263/DAA.316).
There are also a number of references to Thror the grandfather:
• [p. 439] ‘. . . the King under the Mountain – that it was Thror’s grandson not Thror himself . . .’ (Ms. page 134; 1st ed. page 204/DAA.250).
• [p. 509] ‘Did you expect me to trot back with the whole treasure of Thror on my back?’ (Ms. page 146; 1st ed. page 226/DAA.276).
• [p. 582] ‘the Great Hall of Thror’ (Ms. page 164; 1st ed. page 247/DAA.297).
• [p. 619] ‘the legend of the wealth of Thror has not lost in the telling’ (Ts. 1/1/65:2; 1st ed. page 264/DAA.317).†
– and to Thrain the father:
• [p. 619] ‘O Thorin son of Thrain’ (Ts. 1/1/65:1; 1st ed. page 263/DAA.316); see above.
• [p. 646] ‘the gates of Thorin son of Thrain, King under the Mountain’ (new Ms. page 9; 1st ed. page 267/DAA 320); this passage is repeated on 1st ed. page 269/DAA.322 whereas the manuscript simply says ‘Again Thorin asked the same question as before’ without actually repeating the text.
• [p. 656, Text Note 30] ‘We speak unto Thorin Thrain’s son calling himself King under the Mountain’ (addition to new Ms. page 12; 1st ed. page 271/DAA.324).
Tolkien also deleted one reference to Thror and seems to have added one in a margin:
• [p. 473] ‘Thror’s map’ (Ms. page 137; 1/1/12:2) > ‘Thorin’s map’ (1st Ts. 1/1/61:2; 1st ed. page 212/DAA.260).
• [p. 588, Text Note 15] added: ‘the gem of Girion, <Thror’s> chief treasure’ (marginal addition to Ms. page 162) (Ms. 1/1/15; 1st ed. page 245/DAA.295).
† This corresponds to Ms. page 167, but Thror is not mentioned in the original draft nor in the new Ms. page 6 of the continuation; Roäc’s mention of ‘the wealth of Thror’ enters in for the first time in the First Typescript.
20 The Return of the Shadow (HME VI.403): ‘It is said in secret that Thráin (father of Thrór father of Thorin who fell in battle) possessed [a Ring of Power] that had descended from his sires’ [said Glóin]. In this volume Christopher Tolkien defers comment, simply pointing out ‘In The Hobbit Thráin was not the father of Thrór but his son. This is a complex question which will be discussed in Vol. VII’ (HME VI.414 Note 28). He returns to the point in The Treason of Isengard with a ‘Note on Thrór and Thráin’ (HME VII.159–60), which lucidly explains the problem of the competing genealogies and how his father ultimately solved it. One additional piece of evidence suggesting how Tolkien made the mistake is that the first portion of the book sent to him to proofread (signatures A–H) happened in its final pages to include the one place in the text where the genealogy was reversed, in Chapter VII. When he later received the remainder of the proofs, he seems to have taken the (erroneous) reading in the section he had already proofed and returned to the printers as fixed and thus changed all the readings in the remainder of the book to match it. Then he reversed his decision, stetted every transposition he had pencilled in, and requested that the anomalous entry in Chapter VII be changed instead to match the rest, resulting in the text as published.
21 The pasteover in Chapter XII (1/1/62:11) occurred before the creation of the Second Typescript, which faithfully reproduces the replacement text. I have been unable to read the original text beneath the pasteover.
22 The manuscript version of this passage had read simply:
and Thorin bade them eagerly to look for the Arkenstone of Thrain. ‘For that’ he said ‘is worth more than a river of gold in itself and to me yet more’ (new Ms. page 13; 1/1/17:7).
Chapter XI The Lonely Mountain
1 A heath is a wilderness of open, uncultivated, treeless, uninhabited land, typically covered by tough dwarf shrubs such as heather (which gets its name from the fact it grows on heaths) and gorse. By contrast, a similar tract of marshy land is called a moor. It may be significant that most heaths are the result of deforestation and, left to themselves, regrow as forests over time – that is, the very word contains a suggestion of a land that was not always so barren as it now appears but was reduced to its current state by an outside agency (in this case, the dragons themselves).
2 Modern translations prefer ‘great leviathan’ or ‘whale’ or even ‘crocodile’ for the Biblical creatures haunting the wilderness and the deeps, but these were understood to be dragons in Medieval tradition – cf. Leslie Kordecki’s Tradition and Development of the Medieval English Dragon (dissertation, Univ. of Toronto, 1980).
3 A scene which Tolkien twice illustrated; cf. H-S#50 & 51, both titled ‘Wudu Wyrtum Faest’, or ‘trees firm by the roots’ (taken from line 1364a). For the poet’s description of the moor, see in particular lines 1357 through 1376a.
4 See OFS, page 40: ‘. . . best of all the nameless North of Sigurd of the Völsungs, and the prince of all dragons’, i.e. Fafnir. For more on the influence of Fafnir on Tolkien’s depiction of Smaug, see the commentary following Chapter XII.
5 Although described as a ‘heath’ where ‘no man dared go near’, the Red Fairy Book version of the area surrounding Fafnir’s lair apparently includes trees, since we are told the dying dragon ‘lashed with his tail till stones broke and trees crashed about him’ (Red Fairy Book, page 360). We should probably not put too much weight on this, since Lang seems more concerned with striking images than narrative consistency. Although Lang claimed his version was ‘condensed by the Editor [i.e., Lang] from Mr. William Morris’s prose version of the “Volsunga Saga”’ (Preface, Red Fairy Book, page [vi]) – i.e., the Morris/Magnússon translation – in fact Lang draws as much from Morris’s narrative poem, Sigurd the Volsung, as the saga account; his reticence to admit this may be due to the fact that Morris was still alive at the time (not dying until six years later, in 1896) and might have objected to liberties being taken with his own poem, which fleshed out the sparse saga story in his own inimitable fashion.
Carpenter claims that Tolkien as a child thought ‘The Story of Sigurd’ ‘the best story he had ever read’ (Tolkien: A Biography, page 22), which seems to be Carpenter’s extrapolation from Tolkien’s remark in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ ranking the story (or, more accurately, the setting of the story in ‘the nameless North’) of Sigurd and Fafnir above Lewis Carroll or pirate stories, above tales of ‘Red Indians’ and their great forests, and even above stories about Merlin and Arthur (OFS.39–40, emphasis mine). See also Note 4 above.
6 A fell is any rocky or barren heights or wasteland – in short, a heath or moor at a high elevation.
7 Morris, who loved archaic English and made much use of it in his narrative poems and pseudomedieval fantasy romances, is probably using ‘desert’ here in its older sense of a deserted or depopulated region, but with echoes of its more modern application of an arid, barren countryside incapable of supporting life no doubt also present.
8 There are of course many other wastelands in Tolkien’s works, lands once fertile that have been destroyed by Morgoth’s or Sauron’s evil – not surprising, perhaps, in a man who had after all witnessed first-hand not just the scourges brought by industrialization and urbanization (‘the country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten’ – Foreword to The Lord of the Rings, page 12) but also had spent several months living next to the largest man-made desert in Europe, better known as No Man’s Land,† parts of which were still treeless and not yet arable more than fifty years later. The Lord of the Rings alone has the Brown Lands (once the Gardens of the Entwives), the Dead Marshes, and Mordor itself, not to mention regions depopulated by the forces of evil and turned into wilderness, such as Hollin (‘laid waste’ more than four thousand years before in S.A. 1697 and still desolate during the time of Frodo’s journey; cf. Book II Chapter 3: ‘The Ring Goes South’ and Appendix B ‘The Tale of Years’, LotR.1120), the Enedwaith, and most of the lands that had once made up the Kingdom of Arnor (‘Tale of Years’ entry for Third Age year 1636: ‘many parts of Eriador become desolate’; LotR.1123).
† Tolkien actually included No Man’s Land or Nomensland as a label on several of the Lord of the Rings maps in the early 1940s (see ‘The First Map’, HME VII, esp. pages 320–21). While the word vanished off the map after 1943, it appears in the text of the published book to describe the area between the Dead Marshes and the ashheaps before the Black Gate: ‘a dismal waste . . . dead peats and wide flats of dry cracked mud. The land ahead rose in long shallow slopes, barren and pitiless, towards the desert that lay at Sauron’s gate . . . the arid moors of the Noman-lands’ (LotR.656–7).
9 It is not known when Tolkien wrote the earliest of the four versions of Farmer Giles of Ham, but since the story originated as an impromptu tale told during a family picnic according to his eldest son, Fr. John Tolkien, it was certainly after 1926 when his family returned from Leeds to Oxford, especially since part of the story’s inspiration is to provide the ‘real’ explanation for Oxfordshire place-names such as Worminghall (and later Thame as well) and, I suspect, the nearby barrow known as Dragon Hoard (see Leslie Grinsell, Folklore of Prehistoric Sites in Britain [1976], pages 145 and 70). Since Tolkien was working on Roverandom from 1925–27 and The Hobbit from 1930–32/33, the most probable dates for FGH’s composition† are 1928–29 or 1933–34. And since the handwriting of the surviving pages of the Pryftan Fragment, the earliest part of The Hobbit to be set down, resembles that of the first draft of Farmer Giles, this makes it likely that Farmer Giles’ story immediately preceded Mr. Baggins’.
† That is, of the first two drafts, in which the narrator is called ‘Daddy’ and the ‘Family Jester’, respectively; the third draft, the greatly expanded version known as The Lord of Thame, was written in 1936–7 and the final version shortly before the book’s publication in 1949.
10 Christopher Tolkien notes that the word might be track instead of tract and that instead of ‘the lands were hurt and scorched’ his father might actually have written ‘. . . burnt and scorched’ (BLT II.118). In either case, Tolkien is clearly drawing here on the Fafnir story – in the saga and subsequent versions Fafnir has over the years worn a track or path through the stone between his lair and the spot where he goes to drink, and it is in this slot or groove that Sigurd digs his pit and lies in wait to stab him as he goes by:
Thou shalt find a path in the desert, and a road in the world of stone;
It is smooth and deep and hollow, but the rain hath riven it not,
And the wild wind hath not worn it, for it is Fafnir’s slot,
Whereby he wends to the water and the fathomless pool of old . . .
—Sigurd the Volsung, page 122.
By contrast, Glorund is so terrible and destructive that he carves such a path simply by moving across the landscape.
11 These parallels were present from the very first draft of Farmer Giles of Ham, although the description of the destruction around the dragon’s lair was much briefer in the original:
There was no mistaking the dragon’s tracks now. They were right in the parts where the dragon often walked or alighted from a little passage in the air. In fact all the smaller hills had a burned look about their brown tops as if these parts had been a dragon’s playground for many an age. And so they had.
—FGH, expanded edition, page 94.
12 This name had originally appeared with a different application in The Book of Lost Tales, where it was used for a spot near Tavrobel (Great Haywood in central England), site of the disastrous last battle wherein the Elves of Tol Eressëa were utterly defeated; cf. BLT II.284 & 287.
13 This fair green plain received the name Bladorion (‘the Wide Land’) in the ‘(Earliest) Annals of Valinor’, written in 1930 or very shortly thereafter (cf. HME IV.280). This was eventually replaced (circa 1951) in ‘The Grey Annals’ and other late Silmarillion texts by Ardgalen (‘the Green Region’); cf. HME XI.113. This latter name is the one used in The Silmarillion, in the hyphenated form Ard-galen; cf. Silm.119. Ardgalen was apparently similar in terrain to Rohan, since an inverted form of the same name, Calenardhon (Calen+ardhon), was the original Gondorian name for that province (Silm.317).
14 For the inversion of Thror’s and Thrain’s names on the maps (‘the map tradition’), see the commentary following Chapter X.
15 For those unfamiliar with birds who wouldn’t know a thrush from a warbler, suffice it to say that the song thrush is about the same size as the (American) robin, a fellow thrush (T. migratorius),† and has much the same habits, except that it prefers snails to earthworms. Despite their particular association with snails, song thrushes are omnivores and also eat worms, bugs, and berries as available. I am grateful to Yvette Waters and especially Jacki Bricker for help in identifying the particular species of thrush Tolkien based his Lonely Mountain thrush upon.
† not to be confused with the English robin, which is a different bird altogether, and only about the size of a sparrow.
16. In Culhwch and Olwen, Arthur sends Gwrhyr Gwastad Ieithoedd (‘interpreter of tongues’) with Cei (Kay) and Bedwyr (Bedivere), his two most trusted companions, on this quest because Gwrhyr ‘know[s] all tongues, and can translate the language of birds and animals’:
They went forth until they came to the Blackbird of Cilgwri.
‘For God’s sake,’ said Gwrhyr, ‘do you know anything about Mabon son of Modron, who was stolen from between his mother and the wall when only three nights old?’
‘When I first came here,’ replied the Blackbird, ‘a smith’s anvil was here, and I was a young bird. No work was done on it except while my beak rested upon it each evening; today there is not so much as a nut-sized piece that isn’t worn away, and God’s revenge on me if I have heard anything of the man you want. But what is right and just for me to do for Arthur’s messengers, I will do: there is a species of animal that God shaped before me, and I will guide you there.’
—tr. Patrick Ford, The Mabinogi and other Medieval Welsh Tales [1977], page 147.
This is merely the first of five encounters with progressively older creatures – a stag, an owl, an eagle, and finally a salmon – whom the questers question in turn before finding a clue to the location of the person they seek. Both Jones & Jones [1949] and Gantz [1976] prefer ‘Ouzel’ (page 124) and ‘Ousel’ (page 164), respectively, this being an old-fashioned term (along with water ouzel) for the bird also known as the dipper.
17. JRRT to Denys Gueroult, 1965 BBC radio interview. Tolkien’s remark originally applied to the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings but is generally applicable throughout many of his works.
Plot Notes C
1 We might also include Gondolin in this tally, since Elrond says ‘dragons it was that destroyed that city many ages ago’ (page 115). I am not counting here Túrin’s ambush of Glorund, which was achieved en route before the dragon reached the woodmen’s settlement, nor Giles’ encounter with Chrysophylax on a back-road several miles from Ham; these were essentially heroic or mock-heroic single combats à la Sigurd, not cooperative defenses by beleaguered townsfolk.
2 ‘darts’: that is, arrows. The word was originally not restricted to the small darts thrown in pub games but also applied to javelins, to arrows shot from a bow, and even to projectiles from siege weapons.
3 Compare the three following passages:
• ‘Now when that mighty worm was ware that he had his death-wound, then he lashed out head and tail, so that all things soever that were before him were broken to pieces’ (Volsunga Saga, page 59).
• ‘[T]he Dragon lashed with his tail till stones broke and trees crashed about him’ (‘The Story of Sigurd’, The Red Fairy Book, page 360).
• ‘Then did that drake writhe horribly and the huge spires of his contortions were terrible to see, and all the trees he brake that stood nigh to the place of his agony’ (‘Turambar and the Foalókë’, BLT II.107).
4 Although the gruesome, grotesque, and striking episode of Bilbo floating out through the Front Gate in a golden bowl vanished from the narrative, it is interesting to note that a huge cup appears both in the text (‘the great cup of Thror’; see page 514 [= DAA.287]) and also in the colour painting ‘Conversation with Smaug’ (Plate XI [top]); these may owe something to the long-since-abandoned plot-thread.
5 In full, the passage in question (from Chapter XVIII: Of the Slaying of the Worm Fafnir) runs thusly:
Then said Regin, ‘Make thee a hole, and sit down therein, and whenas the worm comes to the water, smite him into the heart, and so do him to death, and win for thee great fame thereby.’
But Sigurd said, ‘What will betide me if I be before the blood of the worm?’
Says Regin, ‘Of what avail to counsel thee if thou art still afeard of everything? Little art thou like thy kin in stoutness of heart.’
Then Sigurd rides right over the heath; but Regin gets him gone, sore afeard.
But Sigurd fell to digging him a pit, and whiles he was at that work, there came to him an old man with a long beard, and asked what he wrought there, and he told him.
Then answered the old man† and said, ‘Thou doest after sorry counsel: rather dig thee many pits, and let the blood run therein; but sit thee down in one thereof, and so thrust the worm’s heart through.’
And therewithal he vanished away; but Sigurd made the pits even as it was shown to him.
† [Morris’s note:] i.e., Odin in one of his many guises.
—Volsunga Saga, pages 58–9.
Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung omits the detail of the many pits but does describe ‘the rushing river of blood’ (page 124) that gushes forth when Fafnir receives his death-wound. By contrast, Lang’s ‘The Story of Sigurd’ includes the many pits but with typical carelessness omits any reason for their presence (Lang, The Red Fairy Book, page 360).
6 Glorund also died far away from his great bed of gold; cf. BLT II.87–8 & 107–9 (‘Turambar and the Foalókë’) and HME IV.127 & 129–30 (the 1930 Quenta).
7 Or, to be more accurate, part of the secret tunnel, presumably including that section in which the dwarves had stored their gold. The entire tunnel could not have collapsed, because it must have been within this passage that the dwarves hide when Smaug returns and thus escape being killed in the tumult. From the detail of Smaug smashing ‘walls [of his lair] and entrance to tunnel’, it seems clear that only the lower end of the passage is collapsed, which ‘[t]he dwarves dig through’ to once more gain access to Smaug’s great chamber.
8 The odd detail of the water around Smaug’s death site ‘shivering’ perhaps relates to the idea, expressed in the description of Leviathan (the dragon in the sea) in the Book of Job chapter 41 verse 31, that dragons make the water around them boil (‘like a pot’); see Text Note 33 following the next chapter (pp. 523–4) for more on this whole passage’s possible influence on Tolkien’s description of Smaug the Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities.
9 In this version of the story, Sigurd is called ‘Siegfried’, which led to Wagner’s usage of that name in his opera-cycle The Ring of the Nibelung [1869–76]; in Beowulf (lines 874–898) the dragon-slayer is Sigemund, whom Norse tradition by contrast considered the dragon-slayer’s father.
Chapter XII Conversations with Smaug
1 This would have been about 1899, the year before Tolkien began his formal education at King Edward’s School; by this time he had already been able to read and write for about three years, or since the age of four (Carpenter, page 21). Tolkien gave another account of this story a decade later in his piece ‘Tolkien on Tolkien’ printed in the October 1966 Tolkien issue of the magazine Diplomat: ‘Somewhere about six years old I tried to write some verses on a dragon about which I now remember nothing except that it contained the expression a green great dragon and that I remained puzzled for a very long time at being told that this should be great green’ (Diplomat, page 39; reprinted in Letters p. 221).
The next story we know of that Tolkien wrote after this piece of lost juvenilia, about fifteen years later [circa 1914], was ‘The Story of Kullervo’,† a William Morris-style adaptation from the Kalevala, which strongly influenced his slightly later Túrin story [circa 1919] written for The Book of Lost Tales. While the original Finnish story has no dragon, Túrin’s story featured one so prominently that it shared the title with the hero: ‘Turambar and the Foalókë’ (that is, Túrin and the Dragon).
In any case, by drawing his attention to the phenomenon known as the hierarchy of adjectives, the chance phrase ‘green great dragon’ seems to have played a role in Tolkien’s becoming aware of the deep structure of his own language and helped him discover his vocation as a philologist. For more on hierarchy of adjectives, and why for example an adjective of colour (like ‘green’) idiomatically follows an adjective of size (like ‘great’) in English, see Jose A. Carillo’s article ‘The hierarchy of adjectives’, available online at http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2003/may/21/top–stories/20030521top16.htm.
† It is unclear whether ‘The Story of Kullervo’ predates or postdates the Eärendel poems; the two seem to have been essentially contemporaneous, two different expressions of the same creative impulse (see Carpenter pages 71–3, BLT II.267, and John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War [2003] page 45).
2 For more on dragons in modern fantasy, and Tolkien’s influence on the way they are depicted, see my article ‘Dragons of Legend’ in the June 1996 issue of Dragon magazine (Dragon #230). For more on dragons in children’s literature from the 1890s to the 1950s, see Christina Scull’s ‘Dragons from Andrew Lang’s retelling of Sigurd to Tolkien’s Chrysophylax’ in Leaves from the Tree: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shorter Fiction [1991]. For more on Tolkien’s borrowing from, and transformation of, dragons in Old Norse and Old English literature and lore, see Jonathan Evans’ ‘The Dragon-Lore of Middle-earth: Tolkien and Old English and Old Norse Tradition’, in J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances, ed. George Clark & Daniel Timmons [2000]. Of particular note is Evans’ observation that
In Tolkien’s Middle-earth the dragon-lore of our own Middle Ages is analyzed into its elementary components, rationalized and reconstituted, and then reassembled to fit the larger thematic purposes of Tolkien’s grand narrative design. Tolkien treated the disjointed inferences and disparate motifs found in medieval literature as if they were the disjecta membra [i.e., scattered fragments] of a once-unified whole – that is, as if there really were a coherent underlying medieval conception of the dragon from which all scattered references drew information. This is in fact a fiction . . . an example of what Shippey has described as the reconstruction of a hypothetical . . . ‘asterisk reality’ that characterizes Tolkien’s vision and method. It is analogous to, and for Tolkien part and parcel of, comparative historical linguistic reconstruction . . . of lost . . . languages and thus lost worlds . . . The dragon-lore embedded in the medieval literature of . . . our world . . . is not coherent: it springs from sources as diverse as medieval European geography, ancient Semitic and Hellenistic cosmology and cosmogony, Roman mythology and popular legend, Latin hagiography, and Germanic legend and folklore.
—Evans, in Clark & Timmons, pages 27–8.
3 Tolkien seems to have had The Hobbit in mind when drafting this discussion of dragons in ‘On Fairy-Stories’, since part of what he says in the essay strongly parallels a passage in The Hobbit that goes all the way back to the Pryftan Fragment. Compare Tolkien’s words in OFS
I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood, intruding into my relatively safe world, in which it was, for instance, possible to read stories in peace of mind, free from fear. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril. The dweller in the quiet and fertile plains may hear of the tormented hills and the unharvested sea and long for them in his heart. For the heart is hard though the body be soft. (OFS.40)
with Bilbo’s thoughts in the Pryftan Fragment:
. . . something Tookish awoke within him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains and the seas, the pine trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves and wear a sword instead of a walking stick. He looked out of the window. The stars were out in a dark sky above the trees. He thought of the jewels of the dwarves shining in dark caves. Then in the wood beyond the Water a flame leapt up – somebody lighting a wood fire probably – and he thought of plundering dragons lighting on his quiet hill and setting it all in flames. Then he shuddered, and quite suddenly he was plain Mr. Baggins of Bag-end Under-Hill again (page 7; cf. DAA.45–6 for the final published text).
4 Carpenter, page 38. Carpenter’s source seems to have been Tolkien’s 1938 Christmas Dragon lecture (see Note 5 below), in which as an aside Tolkien says:
I [added: once as a boy] found a saurian jaw myself with nasty teeth at Lyme Regis – and thought I had stumbled on a bit of petrified dragon.†
—Ms. Tolk. A 61. fols. 98–125.
Carpenter dates this as having occurred on a summer holiday with Father Francis after Mabel Tolkien’s death, so probably in the summer of 1905, summer 1906, or summer 1907, when Tolkien was between thirteen and fifteen years old. However, this seems rather old for literal belief in dragons, especially given Tolkien’s stated annoyance at the attempts during his childhood of condescending adults to conflate prehistoric animals with dragons (Note D, OFS.69). It seems likely, therefore, that the episode Tolkien recalls dates from an earlier unrecorded visit during his mother’s lifetime – Hammond & Scull, for example, reproduce a seaside watercolour by Tolkien which they tentatively date to 1902, when Tolkien was only ten (Artist & Illustrator, pages 11 & 13), and Judith Priestman, in the centenary Bodleian catalogue, reproduces a two-page spread from the same sketchbook entitled ‘Sea Weeds and Star Fishes’ (Life and Legend, pages 12–13). Priestman does not date the piece, but places it between items from 1896 and 1900; in any case it was clearly painted by a child, not a teen. Hammond & Scull suggest the watercolour they reproduce might have been painted at Bournemouth or Poole, which are about forty miles east of Lyme Regis; all three are on the south English coast, a little over 200 miles south of Birmingham, where Tolkien was living at the time. At any rate, Tolkien’s recollection about finding the fossil and the early watercolours taken together show that a visit to Lyme Regis during his mother’s lifetime is certainly possible.
Lyme Regis is, incidentally, famous for its fossil finds, especially ichthyosaurs (which is probably what young JRRT found), plesiosaurs, and pterodactyls, many of which were discovered by amateur fossil-hunters in the early 1800s. For the role which actual fossils may have played in the rise of dragon-myths and legends of ‘giants in the earth’, see Simpson, British Dragons, pages 20–22.
† A faint echo of this ‘bit of petrified dragon’ might perhaps be found in the comment, added in the First Typescript of this chapter, that Smaug ‘went back to his golden couch to sleep – and to gather new strength. He would not forget or forgive the theft, not if a thousand years turned him to smouldering stone, but he could afford to wait. Slow and silent he crept back to his lair and half closed his eyes’ (typescript page 119, Marq. 1/1/62:5; compare page 508).
5 See Tolkien’s 16th December 1937 letter to Stanley Unwin (Letters pp. 27 & 435). Rather than a learned disquisition, this was a light-hearted slide-show for children, where Tolkien showed slides of dinosaurs† and of dragons, including his own dragon-paintings such as ‘Conversation with Smaug’ (Plate XI [top]), of which he said ‘This picture was made by my friend Mr Baggins or from his description . . . it shows a powerful lot of treasure’. Nonetheless, in the course of his lecture he makes a number of interesting points highly revealing of his personal dragon-lore. He describes the dragon as ‘a very special creature: draco fabulosus europaeus, the “European fabulous dragon”’, which he further divides into two kinds, ‘repus or creeping’ and ‘alatus or winged’; clearly, Glorund and Fafnir would belong to the former category, while Smaug is most definitely in the latter.†† In addition to alluding to several famous dragon stories, such as Thora’s dragon (from the legend of Ragnarr Shaggybreeks)††† and Thor’s encounter with the Miðgarðsormr (‘the Dragon of the Island-earth’), he observes of the dragon that ‘he is largely man-made, and therefore very dangerous’ and gives the admonition ‘If you ever come across a dragon’s egg, don’t encourage it.’ He describes dragons as ‘legendary creatures founded on serpent and lizard’, unlike the dinosaurs (‘No one I suppose can tell . . . how long strange obsolete creatures may have survived lurking in odd corners. But even such accidents cannot affect the fact that the Dinosaurs passed away infinitely long before the adventures of Men began’). Of Smaug in particular he says ‘A dragon made a desert. He rejoiced in destruction’ (see ‘The Desolation of the Dragon’ following Chapter XI).
Regarding encounters with dragons, Tolkien warns that a dragon will first try to catch your eye and then get your name in order to curse you before he dies with ‘evil magic’; Smaug of course tries to do both, and Glorund succeeds on both counts, with disastrous results for the would-be dragon-slayer. Tolkien gives as a maxim that the right place to look for a dragon is in a burial mound, no doubt, basing this rule upon Beowulf’s dragon, but Chrysophylax Dives is the only dragon of his known to me who actually follows this rule. He is emphatic that dragon-slaying is a solitary art, observing that ‘It was the function of dragons to tax the skill of heroes, and still more to tax other things, especially courage [added: and fortune].’ Armies, he maintains, are no use at all, nor would modern weaponry avail: ‘. . . machine-gun bullets are usually no more troublesome to them than a cloud of gnats; armies cannot overcome them; poison gas is a sweet breath to them (they invented it); bombs are their amusement’. Instead, ‘Dragons can only be defeated by brave men – usually alone. Sometimes a faithful friend may help, but it is rare: friends have a way of deserting you when [you are faced >] a dragon comes’; this is certainly the experience of Beowulf and of Túrin. Finally, ‘Dragons are the final test of heroes’, requiring ‘luck (or grace) . . . a blessing on your hand and heart’.
— Ms Tolkien A61 e., fols. 98–125.
† Stegosaur, brontosaurus (‘only recently named’), pteranodon, triceratops (‘a good name for a terrible creature’), and iguanodon, among others, including one slide he called ‘two jolly dinosaurs at play’.
†† Tolkien elsewhere notes that he is deliberately leaving out Chinese dragons, who are quite distinct from the European tradition, and symbolic dragons, such as St. George’s dragon, although he notes that the latter appears on the English money of the time (the gold sovereign).
††† This is the same Ragnar Lodbrok one of whose sons was named Beorn (see page 282) and whose son Ivarr the Boneless led the viking invasion of England. In brief, Thora was given a dragon’s egg or hatchling which grew up to be so fiercely protective of her that it endangered the whole area; Ragnar was the brave and clever hero who devised a scheme for challenging and defeating the dragon, thus winning her hand.
6 Two of these cases – e.g., in the attacks on Gondolin and on the host of the Valar – have additional significance because they depict dragons acting in groups. Tolkien is almost unique among fantasy authors in showing dragons working in unison towards some goal; the great legends always depicted them as solitary beasts, and most later authors have followed suit. The only post-Tolkien modern fantasy of note to deal with dragons en masse are the ‘Dragonriders of Pern’ series by Anne McCaffrey [1968ff] and the ‘Dragonlance’ novels by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, et al. [1984ff]. Even here, the McCaffrey novels are not true fantasy but romance novels given fantasy trappings and a science-fiction rationale: later books in the series reveal that the ‘dragons’ are in fact creatures genetically engineered by space colonists to fulfill a specific role in that planetary ecosystem. By contrast, the Dragonlance novels, although describing considerable numbers of dragons over the course of the series, only very rarely depict more than one dragon at a time; scenes in which dragons interact with each other are extremely rare. As a result, in modern fantasy dragons remain pre-eminently solitary creatures.
7 In the original [1937] version of this poem, the destruction is complete; in the version Tolkien re-wrote [circa 1961] for possible inclusion in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil the village’s sole survivor (Miss Biggins) ambushes and slays the dragon. Even this modern-day dragon is not the last of his kind, however; the final lines of the original poem describe how, having destroyed the town, he flies back to his own land of Finis-Terre (or, as Dunsany liked to call it, the World’s End):
Far over the sea he saw the peaks
round his own land ranging . . .
And the moon shone through his green wings
the night winds beating,
And he flew back over the dappled sea
to a green dragons’ meeting.
It may be that in this poem Tolkien finally told the story of the ‘green great dragon’ he had begun circa 1899.
Note that Tolkien is explicit that dragons survived the Third Age (Letters p. 177); in the account of the Last Battle that overthrew Morgoth in the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’, he is careful to include the detail that two (presumably one male and the other female, with this latter being the only female dragon to appear anywhere in Tolkien’s work) escaped the slaughter to propagate their kind (HME IV.39). In the Father Christmas Letters, he describes the modern-day dragons on the moon who cause eclipses (Letters from Father Christmas, 1927 letter), and in his 1937 Dragon Lecture he calls the moon ‘a refuge of dragons’ and showed a slide of one of the Roverandom pictures (also from 1927), describing his own white dragon (called the Great White Dragon of the Moon in Roverandom) as ‘a Saxon White Dragon that escaped from the Welsh borders† a long while ago.’ Tolkien is here probably drawing on the old tradition, most notably embodied in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso [1516], that the moon is the home of lost things and hence an appropriate retreat for mythological monsters lost from the world before modern times, such as dragons.
† Chrysophylax’s home in Farmer Giles, we should note – cf. Letters page 130.
8 Probably, as Paul Kocher speculated long ago (A Reader’s Guide to The Silmarillion [1980], page 271), Morgoth created dragons from balrogs – who are, after all, fire demons – by a process similar to that which created the orcs; see page 138 and the section of Morgoth’s Ring entitled ‘Myths Transformed’ (HME X). Particularly significant in this context is the description in ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ of dragon-forms ‘given hearts and spirits of blazing fire’ (BLT II.170).
9 For another ‘prophecy’ in The Hobbit that does not come to pass, see Smaug’s dreams of being slain by Bilbo (page 507 & Text Note 17 on page 519). This example is the exact obverse of Bilbo’s sudden vision while sitting safely at home in the Shire, since at the time it was written it foretold what Tolkien expected to happen in the next chapters. When he actually came to write them the story shifted in unexpected directions, leaving the dragon’s prophetic dream symbolically significant but no longer literally true.
10 Tolkien himself acknowledges both Smaug’s affinities to Fafnir and his distinctiveness in his 1965 radio interview with Denys Gueroult:
DG: I suppose Smaug might be interpreted as being a sort of Fafnir, is he?
JRRT: Oh yes, very much so. Except no, Fafnir was a human or humanoid being who took this form, whereas Smaug is just pure intelligent lizard.
It should be noted that, unlike Sigurd’s dragon, there is never any hint in Beowulf that its nameless dragon has ever been anything other than a ‘real worm, with a bestial life and thought of his own . . . a foe more evil than any human enemy’ (Beowulf essay, pages 14–15).
11 Christensen’s dissertation is mainly important because one section from it was revised and published separately as the article ‘Gollum’s Character Transformation in The Hobbit’, which appeared in A Tolkien Compass, ed. Jared Lobdell [1975], pages 9–28. A careful analysis of the changes Tolkien made between the first and second editions of The Hobbit (also covered in Part Four of this book), it gives the variant texts in parallel passages and remains one of the dozen or so best essays ever written on Tolkien’s work.
For another detailed study of Beowulf’s influence on The Hobbit, see Roberta Albrecht Adams’ Gollum and Grendel as Cain’s Kinsmen (M.A. thesis, Stetson Univ., 1978).
12 A good example of this is the phrase ‘the lord of the rings’, which appears in William Morris’s The Tale of Beowulf (tr. Wm Morris & A. J. Wyatt, Kelmscott Press [1895], page 82) as a translation of ‘hringa fengel’ (Beowulf, line 2345b), a phrase usually translated as ‘the prince of rings’ – that is, King Beowulf himself as ‘ring-giver’ or distributor of treasure to his followers. We know Tolkien read, and disliked, Morris’s translation (cf. his slighting reference to it in passing in the draft of his Beowulf essay given in Drout, Beowulf and the Critics [2002], page 97) – not surprising, given that Tolkien had probably already read Beowulf in the original before coming to Morris’s deliberately archaic, not to say idiosyncratic, translation – and it is certainly possible that this phrase popped back into Tolkien’s mind a quarter-century later when he was casting about for a suitable title to ‘The New Hobbit’.
13 This poem was in existence by at least 1923, when it was published in the Gryphon, a Leeds University literary magazine. A revised version appeared in The Oxford Magazine in 1937 (only a month after ‘The Dragon’s Visit’ had appeared in the same journal) and, further revised, was collected in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil [1962] as ‘The Hoard’ (poem #14); the original version can be found in The Annotated Hobbit (DAA.335–7). The original title, ‘lúmonna Gold Galdre Bewunden’ (loosely ‘The gold of men of old time was wound about with enchantment’), comes from line 3052 in Beowulf near the poem’s end. The poem’s links with Beowulf are strengthened by the fact that Tolkien included the entire poem in early drafts of his Beowulf essay (cf. Drout, Beowulf and the Critics, pages 56–8 and 199–205), along with C. S. Lewis’s ‘The Northern Dragon’,† which had obviously been inspired by Tolkien’s poem. Lewis’s poem is given the title ‘Atol inwit gæst’ [‘The Terrible Unwanted Guest’; Beowulf line 2670a] in the second draft of Tolkien’s essay (see Drout pages 110–14), but it is unclear whether this title is assigned by Tolkien or Lewis’s own. A slightly revised version is reprinted under the title ‘The Dragon Speaks’ in Poems, ed. Walter Hooper [1964], pages 92–3, but again it is unclear whether this title is Lewis’s or provided by the editor.
† This title appears to be Drout’s, taken from the chapter of Lewis’s book in which the poem first appeared (The Pilgrim’s Regress [1933], Book Ten, Chapter VIII).
14 Tolkien here was objecting to two sentences in the proposed blurb that compared his work to that of Lewis Carroll (‘The birth of The Hobbit recalls very strongly that of Alice in Wonderland. Here again a professor of an abstruse subject is at play’), pointing out among other things that Rev. Charles Dodgson, the mathematics lecturer who wrote under the pen name of Carroll, never reached his own rank of professor. More importantly, Tolkien maintained that ‘I do not profess an “abstruse” subject [e.g., Old English] . . . Some folk may think so, but I do not like encouraging them’. He did however concede that philology, which he called ‘my real professional bag of tricks’, might perhaps be ‘more comparable to Dodgson’s maths.’ If so, then any parallel would lie in ‘the fact that both these technical subjects in any overt form are absent’ (Letters pp. 21–2). See Note 30, pp. 64–5.
15 Although the text of the rest of this paragraph gives a fair idea of how deeply Bilbo is moved by the sight, and hints at the enchantment that almost falls upon him (especially when compared with the dwarves’ similar but even stronger reaction to the same sight a few chapters later; cf. page 580 & DAA.295–6). Note the lack of punctuation in the original text (‘the spendour the lust the glory’) where Tolkien piles on words to suggest aspects of the irreproducible experience:
He had heard tell and sing of dragon-hoards before, but the splendour the lust the glory of such treasure had never before come home to him. His heart was filled and pierced with the desire of dwarves – and he gazed, almost forgetting the frightful guardian, at the gold, gazed and gazed for what seemed ages, before drawn almost against his will he stole from the shadow of the door, across the floor, to the nearest edge of the mound of treasure.
16 At the time Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, Barfield had published three books: The Silver Trumpet [1925], History in English Words [1926], and Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning [1928]. We know that Tolkien read, and was deeply impressed by, Poetic Diction, since Lewis reported to Barfield:
You might like to know that when Tolkien dined with me the other night he said à propos of something quite different that your conception of the ancient semantic unity had modified his whole outlook and that he was always just going to say something in a lecture when your conception stopped him in time. ‘It is one of those things,’ he said ‘that when you’ve once seen it there are all sorts of things you can never say again.’
—CSL to OB [date unknown],
quoted in Carpenter, The Inklings [1978], page 42.
Based on this, Verlyn Flieger has eloquently argued that Barfield was a greater influence on Tolkien than any other writer excepting perhaps the Beowulf-poet (Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World [1983, rev. ed. 2002], page xxi). This is probably overstating the case, since there seems to be no great break or change in the late 1920s in the ongoing evolution of either Tolkien’s invented languages nor in the myths expressed in the Silmarillion tradition of his legendarium (i.e., between the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ and the alliterative lays on the one hand and the 1930 Quenta, the Annals, and the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion on the other). It might be better to say that, like many other readers of Barfield, Tolkien found Barfield’s ideas challenged his preconceptions and forced him to rethink the grounds upon which he based his ideas. As a result, Tolkien’s work did not become Barfieldian but even more Tolkienesque, a process that was already a constant feature (indeed a hallmark) of the legendarium.
As for the other two books, we know that shortly before Tolkien submitted The Hobbit to Allen & Unwin, Lewis loaned him Barfield’s little children’s story The Silver Trumpet, which Tolkien read to his children to an enthusiastic reception – so much so that, when he had finished, the younger Tolkiens are said to have protested: ‘You’re not going to give it back to Mr. Lewis, are you?’ (CSL to OB, June 28th 1936; The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. II [2004], page 198).
By contrast, History in English Words lays out the groundwork and provides a good deal of the proofs for the ideas expressed in Poetic Diction. There is no direct evidence that Tolkien read this book, but it seems very likely; it may even have inspired the abortive Tolkien-Lewis collaboration Language and Human Nature, which Tolkien described as being ‘on “Language” (Nature, Origins, Functions)’ (Letters pp. 105 & 440); this project was first mooted in 1944 and abandoned circa 1949–50 (cf. Letters of C. S. Lewis, revised edition [1988], page 399). In any case, History in English Words certainly served as the model of Lewis’s Studies in Words [1960], a book which Tolkien greatly disliked.
Finally, we must not forget that Tolkien actually knew Barfield, although not well. The two men had first met through their mutual friend Lewis sometime in the late 1920s, when the Barfields were living in the village of Long Crendon a few miles from Lewis’s home at the Kilns (in fact, near Thame and Worminghall, the sites where Tolkien set his Oxfordshire story, Farmer Giles of Ham), and both were founding members of the Inklings (circa 1933–34), although having by that time joined his family firm of solicitors (Barfield & Barfield) in London, Barfield could only rarely attend meetings. Tolkien particularly admired Barfield’s knack of puncturing Lewis at his most dogmatic (cf. Letters p. 103), and felt that of all the memoirs of their joint friend in Light on C.S. Lewis [1965] that ‘Barfield who knew him longest . . . gets nearest to the central point’ (Letters p. 363).
17 One side effect of Barfield’s theory is that it counters the assumption, implicit in almost all discussions of the past, that people who lived a long time ago were somehow stupider than those of us fortunate enough to live in the present day. The phrase ‘chronological snobbery’ represents C.S. Lewis’s coinage to express this attitude and neatly encapsulates the concept he took from Barfield (cf. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life [1955], page 208).
18 Barfield many also have contributed to the inspiration for Entish with his description in Poetic Diction of ‘the “holophrase”, or long, rambling conglomeration of sound and meaning, which is found among primitive and otherwise almost wordless peoples.’ In the same context, he also mentions ‘languages in which there are words for “gum-tree”, “wattle-tree”, etc., but none for “tree’’’ (Poetic Diction, 3rd ed. [1973], page 83). In its love of specificity over common nouns and its additive, repetitive word-building and syntax, Entish sounds very like a language of the type Barfield describes, except that Tolkien removes any pejorative sense of the language’s being ‘primitive’ (it has, after all, been preserved and presumably developed over more than seven thousand years by the time Merry and Pippin hear Treebeard and the other ents use it).
Chapter XIII The Death of Smaug
1 That Smaug had to be slain by a single character rather than simply perish in a hail of arrows or smash into the lake in a misjudged dive or be crushed beneath the rockfalls that Tolkien intended would partially collapse the chamber within the Lonely Mountain (cf. Plot Notes C) goes without saying. To repeat what Tolkien said in his unpublished lecture on dragons (see Note 5 following the commentary to Chapter XII), Tolkien felt that
Dragons can only be defeated by brave men – usually alone. Sometimes a faithful friend may help, but it is rare: friends have a way of deserting you when [you are faced >] a dragon comes. Dragons are the final test of heroes . . .
It follows that, if a dragon is the supreme challenge for a hero, it is only fitting that a dragon face a hero as his nemesis in turn, dying in single combat in the traditionally approved manner.
2 For example, if Gandalf re-appeared suddenly and struck the dragon dead in mid-flight, the reader would wonder why the wizard had bothered to involve the hobbit in Thorin’s quest at all, and it would make hay of all Gandalf’s earlier assertions that this is not his adventure after all (e.g., page 230).
3 I am assuming here that the surly-voiced watchman looking at the lights to the north is not the same character as the watch-captain who kept such poor look-out over the main bridge to Lake Town (cf. page 438 and Text Note 10 to Chapter X), who might have been expected to show a little more interest in the return of Thror’s Heir if he himself were a descendant of Girion Lord of Dale. It seems likely that Tolkien would have clarified this point and introduced Bard into the earlier scenes in Lake Town (Chapter X) in the 1960 Hobbit, had his revisionary work reached this far into the story, paralleling his work in The Lord of the Rings drafts to insert brief appearances by or mentions of Arwen back into the earlier parts of the story before her first actual entry quite late in the story (see HME VIII.370, 386, & 425; HME IX.52, 58–9 & 66).
Even if we were to assume that the two characters are the same, then the point still applies, though then we should say that only two pages separate the character’s sudden assumption of significance from his death.
4 See, for example, C. S. Lewis’s comment in his review of The Hobbit, where he remarks upon ‘the curious shift’ between the earlier parts of the story and ‘the saga-like tone of the later chapters’ (TLS 2nd October 1937; reprinted in C. S. Lewis, On Stories, ed. Walter Hooper [1982], page 81). For more on Lewis’s critique, see Note 3 following the commentary on the Bladorthin Typescript.
5 It is important that from the very first we are told that Bard is a descendant of Girion (a fact that enters in with the same sentence as his name; see page 549); this gives a new application to Bilbo’s words to Smaug about revenge and his reminder that ‘your success has made you some bitter enemies’ and a direct answer to Smaug’s rhetorical question ‘Girion lord of Dale is dead . . . and where are his sons’ sons who dare approach me?’ (page 511). Bard’s heritage as Girion’s heir gives him just as much right to revenge the Fall of Dale as Thorin would have for the destruction of Thror’s kingdom; it keeps the scales of poetic justice balanced.
Dynasty: We know nothing about Bard’s queen and little about his son Bain, who apparently ruled after him, but we do know that his grandson Brand is the king of Dale at the time of the War of the Ring some eighty years later and dies fighting alongside King Dain Ironfoot defending the Kingdom under the Mountain against Sauron’s forces in the Battle of Dale (LotR.1116 & 1130). By King Brand’s time, the Men of Dale are known as the Bardings (LotR.245; cf. the Beornings and Eorlings and Beowulf’s Scyldings) and the Kingdom of Dale extends down to include the lands surrounding the Long Lake: ‘his realm now reaches far south and east of Esgaroth’ (ibid.). Despite Glóin’s description of him as ‘a strong king’, Brand seems to have been a less forceful personality than his progenitor, since Glóin reports at the Council of Elrond that messengers from Mordor seeking news of hobbits have come not just to Dain but ‘also to King Brand in Dale, and he is afraid. We fear that he may yield. Already war is gathering on his eastern borders’ (LotR.259) – that is, that Brand might try to appease the Dark Lord and buy peace by giving Sauron’s emissaries news of Bilbo. After Brand’s death fighting in battle alongside King Dain Ironfoot, his son Bard II becomes ‘King in Dale’, extending the dynasty into the Fourth Age (LotR.1131), partnered with Dain’s son Thorin III Stonehelm as King under the Mountain.
6 Dailir: The word is Noldorin, Tolkien’s more developed form of ‘Gnomish’ (i.e., what during the Lord of the Rings period would be renamed ‘Sindarin’), and means ‘cleaver’ (‘Noldorin Word-lists’, Parma Eldalamberon XIII [2001], page 141). The –ir suffix here indicates a verb (daila, ‘to cleave’) transformed into an ‘agent noun’ (cf. Salo, A Gateway to Sindarin page 165), as in English pierce > Piercer, or the goblins’ names for Orcrist and Glamdring (‘Biter’ and ‘Beater’, respectively).† If we accept Dailir as parallel to the contemporary names Dairon and Daideloth, then the dai- element would probably have become dae- in later Elvish (cf. Dairon > Daeron and Daideloth > Dor Daedeloth). In any case, while Beleg’s arrow itself clearly served as a model for Bard’s arrow, its name is not an Elvish parallel to ‘Black Arrow’, which in the Noldorin of The Hobbit would have been something like Morlin or Morhlin (mor- ‘black’, as in Moria and Mordor, + lhinn ‘arrow’; cf. Parma Eldalamberon XIII page 163).
† Note that Tolkien believed that the unknown god Nodens’ name was also of this type, derived from a verbal form and thus meaning something like The Hunter or The Catcher (‘The Name “Nodens”’ [1932], pages 135–7).
7 This is not the only such passage in the book – cf. the Lord of the Eagles scene in Chapter VI or Gandalf/Thorin’s capture by the wood-elves – but it is by far the longest, and the only one which complicates the narrative, forcing Tolkien to choose which of the two series of events to tell first: the story of what happened to Smaug or the adventures of Bilbo and the dwarves at the Mountain in his absence. Here we see Tolkien employing the interlace narrative technique which will come to be such a feature of The Lord of the Rings, especially in Book III and the early parts of Book V of that work (cf. Richard West’s masterly article ‘The Interlace Structure of The Lord of the Rings’ in A Tolkien Compass, ed. Jared Lobdell [1975], pages 77–94). Initially Tolkien chose to follow the epic storyline, describing the dragon’s death and its effect on Bard, the wood-elves, and the folk of Lake Town and only then turning back to the Lonely Mountain; in the published book he reversed this and transposed the two respective chapters.
8 Glorund, the only dragon described in detail in the older Silmarillion material, is of course wingless. Ancalagon the Black is the first great winged dragon, and his combination of flight, fiery breath, and draconic strength prove almost too much for the host the Valar send against Morgoth, so that he is only defeated by a similarly airborne foe, Eärendel in the flying ship Wingelot. Unfortunately, Ancalagon’s battle is only described in remote and general terms. Spenser’s archetypical dragon provides a better example, but like Chrysophylax his wing is injured early in the fight and thereafter his ability to fly plays no part in his combat. The Green Dragon in ‘The Dragon’s Visit’, Chrysophylax in his battle against the Middle Kingdom’s knights, and especially the White Dragon of the Moon in his pursuit of Roverandom all make full use of their wings; along with Smaug’s devastating attacks on the Secret Door and Lake Town, these make it clear that flying combat is very much a feature of Tolkien’s dragons.
9 That pride is the cardinal sin in Tolkien’s ethos has been universally acknowledged among Tolkien scholars since Paul Kocher pointed it out more than thirty years ago (Master of Middle-Earth [1972]). It is perhaps less appreciated how often wrath accompanies it; the first sign of someone giving in to pride in Tolkien’s work is usually his losing his temper – cf. the scenes between Gandalf and Saruman (LotR.605–6), Sam and Sméagol (LotR.742), Frodo and Boromir (LotR.419–20), etc.
10 This is unusual in itself, since Tolkien rarely did action shots; almost all of his illustrations to his Middle-earth works are landscapes or mood pieces, designed to help the reader more vividly visualize the places in the books. The three exceptions to this rule among his art for The Hobbit are ‘The Three Trolls are turned to Stone’ (Plate V [top]), ‘Death of Smaug’ (Plate XII [top]), and ‘The Coming of the Eagles’ (Plate XII [bottom]), of which the burning of Lake Town and the smiting of the dragon is by far the most dramatic.
11 This unfinished painting may have been created in July 1937, when Tolkien was working to make several colour illustrations of The Hobbit for the American edition (see Note 10 following Chapter XIV on pp. 613–14). In addition to the five watercolours he submitted to Houghton Mifflin, illustrating The Hill (Hobbiton), Rivendell, the eagles’ eyrie, the barrel-ride down the Forest River, and Bilbo’s meeting with Smaug – all of which have appeared in many editions since – he also made or began colour pictures of Gandalf’s approach to and arrival at Bag-End, the trolls’ hill, four alternate depictions of Rivendell, Beorn’s Hall, the elf-hill in Mirkwood, two alternate versions of the barrel-riding scene, Smaug flying around the Lonely Mountain, the Battle of Five Armies, and Smaug’s death over Lake Town. Some of these were essentially black and white drawings enhanced with a very effective bit of colour, such as the firelight in ‘Troll’s Hill’ (Plate IV [bottom]) and ‘Firelight in Beorn’s house’ (Plate VI [bottom]).
12 In fact, it was the very next night, so even the crescent shown here should be far more slender.
13 The best reproduction of this picture appears in Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien, plate 19.
14 Similarly, he had denigrated his own art in public during his 1937 dragon lecture, when he included slides of several of his own dragon-pictures among the images he showed, saying of his charming little drawing ‘The White Dragon Pursues Roverandom & the Moondog’ (reprinted in Roverandom on plate 3, facing page 27) that ‘though a poor drawing’ it clearly showed a Saxon White Dragon, and drawing attention to ‘the world up in the sky’ (i.e., the image of Earth as seen from the moon in the upper left corner). Similarly, he said of the magnificent ‘Conversation with Smaug’ (Plate XI [top]) that ‘It is not very good – but it shows a powerful lot of treasure’. That is, in both cases the pictures included details he wanted to convey about dragons, whatever their merits (in his too-self-critical eyes) as art.
15 For the original spelling of this river-name as Esgaduin, rather than the later Esgalduin, see Christopher Tolkien’s notes to ‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’ (the A text and pre-revision B text, HME III.81) and ‘The Lay of Leithian’ (rough workings, ibid.158). ‘Esgaduin’ is also the form of the name that appears on the First Silmarillion Map [circa 1926], reproduced in HME IV between pages 220 and 221.
Esgaroth itself first appears in the text on manuscript page 155 (see page 549); an alternate spelling, Esgaron, appears in Plot Notes D. See Text Note 11 above and Text Note 7 following Plot Notes D (page 571).
16 The element –roth corresponds to –(th)rond ‘(fortified) cave’, the same element that we have already seen in the personal name Thranduil and the place-name Nargothrond; see page 417. ‘The Etymologies’, HME V page 384, under the root ROD- (cave), gives rondo as the Quendian (Quenya) form, rhond/rhonn as the Noldorin (Sindarin) form, and roth as the Doriathrin equivalent – that is, the form the word would take in the dialect of Ilkorin or native Middle-earth Elvish spoken in Thingol’s kingdom.
17 ‘Ilk.’ here means Ilkorin, the language of the elves of Middle-earth who never made the Great Journey to Valinor; cf. ‘The Three Kindreds of the Elves’ on page 406.
18 By contrast, in ‘The Etymologies’ Tolkien glossed this same word-element twice in contradictory ways, neither of which agrees with the earlier ‘Noldorin’ nor with the ESKE-/reed entry given elsewhere within ‘The Etymologies’, which certainly suggests uncertainty on his part as to the word’s meaning. First he gives it under the root EZGE- (‘rustle, noise of leaves’): ‘Q eske; Ilk. esg; cf. Esgalduin’ (HME V.357), but then this is cancelled and the word given yet a third alternate explanation under the root SKAL- (‘screen, hide [from light]’): ‘Ilk. esgal screen, hiding, roof of leaves’ with the derivative name ‘Ilk. Esgalduin “River under Veil (of leaves)”’. The Quendian form includes the meanings ‘veiled, hidden, shadowed, shady’ (HME V.386), and accordingly Salo glosses it as ‘the river of the veil’ (e.g., the Veiled River), ‘“veiled” or screened by the trees that overhung it’ (Salo, A Gateway to Sindarin, page 377). None of these meanings yields a satisfactory gloss for Lake Town, which is certainly not hidden nor overshadowed by trees and does not stand in the reedy part of the lake, as may plainly be seen by Tolkien’s various illustrations of the scene.
Luckily, the –duin element of Esgalduin is relatively straightforward, meaning ‘river’, likewise described as an Ilkorin term in ‘The Etymologies’ (HME V.355). Its most familiar appearance is as part of the Sindarin name Anduin (‘the Great River’) in The Lord of the Rings.
Plot Notes D
1 Actually, more accurately the B/C/D/B sequence, since the original final page of the earliest layer was renumbered 5 > 6 when Plot Notes D was inserted into the composite document, indicating that this page was still intended to outline the conclusion.
2 In this he is like Frodo, who in Tolkien’s opinion actually fails in his mission to destroy the Ring (cf. JRRT 1965 BBC radio interview with Denys Gueroult), but who is a hero nevertheless for having made its destruction possible. Similarly, Bilbo in the published book fails to establish an accord between King Thorin and the besieging forces, loses for a time the friendship (or at least the trust) of the dwarves, and actually finds himself joining forces with the men and elves who are there to kill his travelling companions and take Smaug’s gold by force; disaster is averted only through the unforeseen intrusion of the goblins.
3 ‘Long will I tarry, ere I begin this war for gold . . . Let us hope still for something that will bring reconciliation’ (DAA. 338).
4 One must, however, sympathize with his outburst that, if Thorin was indeed the heir of Thrain and Thror, ‘why did he not say so?’ The comment that ‘then he believed at last’, which presents the wood-elf king in a slightly more favorable light, however contradicts his having already accepted Thorin’s identity back near the end of Chapter XIII (‘When news of the rousing of the Dragon reached him, and of the fire upon the mountain tops, he thought that he had heard the last of Thorin Oakenshield’, and he certainly knew exactly who Thorin was since ‘he . . . had not forgotten the legend of the hoard of Thror’).
5 In The Lord of the Rings, Elrond makes clear that the Last Alliance is so called because ‘Never again shall there be any such league of Elves and Men; for Men multiply and the Firstborn decrease, and the two kindreds are estranged’ (‘The Council of Elrond’, LotR.261). It is unclear on the surface why the alliance here in The Hobbit of men and elves fighting side-by-side against first dwarves and then wargs and goblins does not count, unless by ‘such league’ Elrond meant something grander than the relatively small armies and localized battles of the Anduin Vale or Lonely Mountain projected here. In any case, his statement reflects a later conception than that described in The Hobbit, especially so far as the projected ‘Battle of Anduin Vale’ is concerned, and can only be accepted as true if we reserve the grand title of ‘alliance’ for massive struggles between great hosts (e.g., the surviving Númenoreans and Noldor against all Sauron’s armies) resulting in the end of an Age of the world. Here again we see The Hobbit closer in conception to similar battles described in the early Silmarillion material than either is to The Lord of the Rings and the later Silmarillion material.
6 Although, strictly speaking, Thorin may just have been wanting to honor the letter as well as the spirit of the contract: ‘one fourteenth share of total profits (if any)’ and been willing to count the sacrifice of the Gem of Girion as a necessary ‘expense’ in achieving their goal. Even so, this reinforces the point that he shows no signs of contracting the dragon-sickness anywhere in these Plot Notes or in the few remaining pages of the Second Phase text that follow.
Chapter XIV While the Dragon’s Away . . .
1 The other being the introduction of Bard, the legitimate heir of Girion.
2 That is, according to the original time-scheme, in which Bilbo with Thorin & Company spent more than a year on the road.
3 So ancient is the idea of dragons sleeping on gold that Jacob Grimm noted ormbedr or ‘worm’s bed’ as a standard kenning (traditional metaphor) for gold in Old Norse poetry; Teutonic Mythology (tr. James Stallybrass [1883], vol. II, page 689).
4 The later developments of this passage in subsequent Silmarillion texts bring it much closer into line with Smaug’s situation. Thus, in the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’, the rather odd detail of the dragon’s gold-bed being outside the caves out in the open is dropped:
Glórung lies in the caves of Narog and gathers beneath him all the gold and silver and gems there hoarded (HME IV.30).
This brings the Glorund story back into accord with the Sigurd story, in which Fafnir’s ‘abiding place’ is ‘dug down deep into the earth: there found Sigurd gold exceeding plenteous . . .’ (Völsunga Saga, tr. Morris & Magnússon, page 67). The 1930 Quenta refines this still further, until it becomes a very close approximation of Smaug’s practice:
Glómund . . . gathered unto himself the greater part of its wealth of gold and gems, and he lay thereon in its deepest hall, and desolation was about him (HME IV.127).
It would have been on the basis of a line such as this that Gandalf the dwarf can say with such confidence that ‘. . . all their wealth he took for himself. Probably, for that is the dragon’s way, he has piled it all up in [a] great heap in some hall far inside, and sleeps on it for a bed’ (page 72). Like Glorund, Smaug chooses the deepest chamber within the Lonely Mountain for his lair: every stair Thorin & Company take after leaving it leads up (cf. page 581).
5 It is true that the elves are accompanied by Túrin’s mother and sister, who might be thought to serve as a parallel for the presence in The Hobbit of Thorin, Fili, and Kili, since Mavwin and Nienóri were close kin of the man who had been acting as the Rodothlim’s champion while the three dwarves are all descendants (grandchild and great-great-grandchildren, respectively) of Thror, whose people had been destroyed or dispossessed by Smaug. It might also be noted that disaster comes about in every iteration of the Túrin story because of the presence of the two women in the group, just as it is Thorin’s behavior under the dragon-sickness that almost brings disaster in the Third Phase Hobbit story, but this might be pressing the point too far. Finally, Tinwelint’s sending a group whose brief is not just to take the treasure but also slay the dragon (a point made explicit on BLT II.96, where they are described as ‘that band of dragon-slayers’) could be taken as a parallel for the projected Bilbo-as-dragon-slayer theme of Plot Notes B & C.
6 This curse, the dragon’s ability to directly manipulate the minds of those who look into his eyes and to individually curse any whose name he knows, is distinct from the more general dragon-sickness attached to treasure that has come into contact with a dragon. Both Túrin and Nienóri make the mistake of making eye contact with the wyrm and are beguiled, and his knowledge of who they are enables Glorund to craft specific curses that set both on the road to incest and suicide. There is no mention of whether Sigurd looks into Fafnir’s eyes while the dragon is still alive, but the Fáfnismál and Völsunga Saga both agree that he initially gives a false name to avoid Fafnir’s dying curse; Bilbo wisely both avoids meeting Smaug’s gaze and giving him his real name. Both motifs are lacking in Beowulf, whose dragon is more animalistic and less of a personality, but note that even in Farmer Giles of Ham Chrysophylax wants to know the farmer’s name at their first meeting and the farmer refuses to tell him until he has gained the upper hand (FGH 41 & 43). See also Tolkien’s dragon lecture summarized in Note 5 following the commentary to Chapter XII.
7 Later Tolkien inserted a reference earlier in the text to Glorund having ‘set a guard that he might trust to watch his dwelling and his treasury, and the captain of these was Mîm the dwarf’ before he set forth on his final fatal mission to seek Túrin (BLT II.103 & 118).
8 The curse might be so relentlessly effective in part because, as Tinwelint concedes, none of the initial claimants have any real right to this treasure: ‘the Rodothlim who won it from the earth long time ago are no more, and no one has especial claim to so much as a handful save only Úrin by reason of his son Túrin, who slew the Worm, the robber of the Elves’ (BLT II.222). He advances his own claim on the fact that (a) ‘this gold belongs to the kindred of the Elves in common’ (a particularly specious argument, given that he is using it to deny Úrin’s elven companions more than a token share†) and (b) ‘Túrin is dead and Úrin will have none of it; and Túrin was my man’ (who had murdered a kinsman of the king and fled Tinwelint’s halls, abandoning his allegiance). The latter suggests additional complications that could have arisen in the scramble over Smaug’s gold had Bard not survived, as had been Tolkien’s original intent (see page 549), and the Master of Lake Town and Elvenking been left to settle matters between them.
† These outlaws had been human in the original draft of this tale but became elves in the revision, from which this sentence is taken; see BLT II.242.
9 I.e., Mîm’s curse: ‘Now Elves and Men shall rue this deed, and because of the death of Mîm the dwarf shall death follow this gold so long as it remain on Earth, and a like fate shall every part and portion share with the whole’ (BLT II.114). Mîm’s dying curse in ‘Turambar and the Foalókë’ pointedly excludes his own people, the dwarves, but a later passage in ‘The Nauglafring’ implies that whatever immunity they might have to the dragon-sickness does not protect them from Mîm’s all-encompassing curse: ‘Indeed all that folk love gold and silver more dearly than aught else on Earth, while that treasury was haunted by a spell and by no means were they armed against it’ (BLT II.229).
To this might be added yet a third curse, that laid upon the Nauglafring itself by the dwarven-smiths held in prison by Tinwelint and forced to expend their craft in slave-labor on his behalf: ‘even had that gold of the Rodothlim held no evil spell still had that carcanet been a thing of little luck, for the Dwarves were full of bitterness, and all its links were twined with baleful thoughts’ (BLT II.228) – not to mention that they incorporate into the necklace the Silmaril Beren and Tinúviel took from Morgoth’s crown, with the additional perils that gem (and its proximity to the original Dark Lord) might bring.
10 This piece was painted between 8th and 24th July 1937, too late for inclusion in the first printing but late enough that the text had already been typeset and thus finalized. The idea that Tolkien might himself provide additional illustrations, in colour, for the American edition was first mooted in May in a brief exchange between Charles Furth of Allen & Unwin and Tolkien (Furth to JRRT 11th May 1937, JRRT to Furth 13th May, Furth to JRRT 14th May), at which point Tolkien dispatched several Silmarillion illustrations as examples of his colour artwork. Unfortunately Houghton Mifflin mistook these for the actual pieces to be used, resulting in several months of confusion. In a letter written on or soon after 8th July, Tolkien says ‘I have done nothing about the new ones. I will now set about them, if they are still required, or it is not too late’ (JRRT to Furth, undated reply to Furth’s letters of 1st June & 8th July). In another undated letter, probably written on 24th or 23rd July, Tolkien asks for an update (‘I do not want to labour in vain’) and arranges to call on Stanley Unwin in London ‘on Wednesday next, 28th July’ to ‘submit what I have done’ and see if A&U’s production department thinks them ‘passable, & . . . suitable for reproduction’. Although HM had still not replied by 24th July (SU to JRRT), Tolkien seems by this point to have finished the four paintings,† since in his reply of 25th July (JRRT to SU) discussing their upcoming meeting he says ‘. . . I shall not take much of your time, as it will not take long to tell me if what I have done is suitable, & if unsuitable what is wrong’, suggesting that he was going to bring the paintings along for Unwin to vet them. Apparently the pieces were deemed acceptable, since the next mention of them is in Tolkien’s letter to Furth of 13th August, written while on vacation at Sidmouth in Devon, stating that ‘You are very welcome to use the coloured drawings at any time’ (that is, in any future reprint), suggesting the originals be stored at A&U’s offices once they are returned by the Americans, and concluding ‘I have completed the coloured version of the frontispiece. †† Would you care to have it to lay by (hopefully)?’ (JRRT to Furth, August 13th) – an offer which Furth, in his reply, gratefully accepts (Furth to JRRT, 16th August).
† These four were ‘Bilbo Comes to the Huts of the Raft-elves’, ‘Bilbo Woke Up with the Early Sun in His Eyes’, ‘Conversation with Smaug’, and ‘Rivendell’ (H-S#124, 113, 133, & 108 ; DAA plates 2B, 2A, 3A, and 1B)
†† This fifth painting is ‘The Hill: Hobbiton-across-the Water’ (H-S#98; DAA plate 1A).
11 For example, the glowing cone-shaped object directly above the bowing hobbit, or the three glowing low mounds to the left behind Smaug’s elbow.
12 Supreme, that is, within the context of The Hobbit; in The Lord of the Rings it is eclipsed by the Ring of Power belonging to Durin’s house, one of the Seven. After all, while they left the Arkenstone behind when they fled the Lonely Mountain Thror and Thrain managed to save their house’s Ring, just as their ancestors had done even from the Balrog’s rampage that drove them from Khazad-dûm (Moria); it later passed from Thror to Thrain and was not lost until the Necromancer captured Thorin’s father, a hundred years before the time of Bilbo’s journey (LotR.286, 1110, & 1113–14). But this is a Lord of the Rings-era innovation, not present at the time The Hobbit was written. For more on the emergence of Durin’s Ring, see the draft of Gloin’s speech at Rivendell in HME VI.398.
13 This passage appears on a piece of typescript pasted over the original text of the First Typescript (typescript page 125; 1/1/62:11); the underlying text cannot now be read even when the page is held up to the light, due to the darkening of the glue or paste Tolkien used. This replacement occurred before the Second Typescript was made, since the latter faithfully reproduces the pasteover text; presumably the obscured text closely resembled the manuscript version on page 515 of this book describing ‘the white gem of Girion Lord of Dale’.
Even though less is made of the Necklace of Girion than of the Arkenstone, it must be stressed that this was a rare and wonderful treasure in its own right: emeralds are far rarer and more valuable than diamonds or even rubies.
The description here of silver with a strength three times that of steel sounds very like the later mithril, but Tolkien never made this connection in later editions of The Hobbit after the introduction of mithril in The Lord of the Rings, although he did insert a single mention of mithril into the earlier book in his 1966 revision for the Ballantine paperback with regard to Bilbo’s ‘silvered steel’ mail-coat (DAA.295). It might be expected that the wondrous suit of mithril-mail, whose value is revealed in The Lord of the Rings to be greater than the Shire and everything in it (LotR.335), would turn out to be the very suit of armor King Girion surrendered his wondrous necklace for, but the connection is never made (perhaps because then the conscientious Bilbo would feel obliged to give Bard his mail-coat as well in the end).
The ‘Thrain’ here, by the way, is Thorin’s grandfather, the King under the Mountain; the reversed genealogy was in place when Tolkien made this addendum to the typescript (see page 458). In later years rather than simply making it the ‘Arkenstone of Thror’ he instead resolved the inconsistency by ascribing it to a distant ancestor, Thrain I, Thorin’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. In the later story, it was this Thrain I who led the exodus from Moria after his father and grandfather had been killed by the Balrog and the ancestral kingdom overthrown, founding the realm-in-exile at the Lonely Mountain, and discovered the Arkenstone there deep beneath the mountain (LotR.1117 & 1109).
14 For more on Eorcanstan and the cognate names in other Germanic languages, see Christopher Tolkien’s discussion in The Shaping of Middle-earth (HME IV.283) and Douglas Anderson’s note in The Annotated Hobbit (DAA.293–4). I am grateful to Doug’s entry for drawing my attention to Grimm.
15 In the rather gruesome story of Wayland the Smith’s captivity, crippling, revenge, and escape, he murders the sons of his captor and makes goblets of their skulls, brooches of their teeth, and ‘pure gems’ (Old Norse iarknasteina) of their eyes Volundarkviða, stanzas 25 & 35; cf. Dronke, vol II. pages 250 & 252).
16 So beautiful is this piece of jewelry that the poet compares it to the legendary Brosinga mene (‘necklace of the Brosings’, line 1199b), familiar in Old Norse legend as the Brisingamen, the goddess Freya’s most valued treasure (cf. ‘The Deluding of Gylfi’ [Gylfaginning] in Snorri’s Prose Edda, ‘The Lay of Thrym’ [Þrymsqviða] in the Elder Edda, and the tale of Loki’s theft of the necklace hinted at in the surviving fragments of the Húsdrapa [‘House Song’] of Ulf Uggason). Like the Book of Lost Tales’ Nauglafring (‘Necklace of the Dwarves’), which it no doubt inspired, the Brisingamen was made by great dwarven craftsmen working at the behest of others. Interestingly enough, Tinwelint’s captive dwarven jewelsmiths demand an elven maiden apiece as payment (which the elvenking refuses, having them beaten instead); Freya had to promise to sleep with each of the four dwarves who make her necklace and honors her agreement.
17 Christopher Wiseman told me (interview, August 1981) that Tolkien used to come to Rugby practice with a great big Gothic book under his arm, which he would apparently read in snatches when not engrossed in the game or actually on the field. This could not have been either Joseph Wright’s Gothic Grammar or Gothic Primer, both of which are smallish (octavo) volumes. I suspect Balg’s massive quarto (more than ten inches tall, seven inches wide, and over six hundred pages thick), simultaneously published in New York, London, Germany, and Mayville Wisconsin, to have been the book Wiseman remembered.
18 The Greek word is best known as the name of the hundred-eyed monster Argos (more commonly spelt Argus), who was so-named because of the clarity and sharpness of his vision. The Greek, Sanskrit, and Gothic words all probably go back to the same Indo-European root *ar(e)g- meaning ‘shining’ or ‘bright’ – the same root, in fact, which seems to underlie the word elf (Germanic *alba- or *albinjo, which seem to have meant ‘white’ and ‘shining’ – cf. ‘the White People’ as one of the euphemisms of the Fair Folk and the discussion of an uncanny whiteness as a defining elven characteristic in the commentary following Chapter IX). The Latin word for silver, argenta, also derives from the same root, and it may underlie the names for the Alps (‘the Whites’, so called for their snow-cover; cf. the White Mountains of Gondor) and Albion, a traditional name for Britain in old legends (‘The White Land’, from the White Cliffs of Dover, the first part of the island seen by someone approaching from mainland Europe).
19 By ‘glass’ Tolkien here probably means some sort of clear crystal, since the Silmarils survive many encounters that would have shattered mere glass. Cf. also the reference in the alliterative poems to the Silmarils as crystal, such as the allusion to Beren’s Silmaril as ‘the Gnome-crystal’ in The Lay of the Children of Húrin (line 379; HME III.107).
The appearance of pearls and opals here may owe something to Jacob Grimm’s guess, in Teutonic Mythology, that eorcanstan probably originally was applied either to ‘the oval milk-white opal’ and/or to the pearl (Grimm/Stallybrass, vol. III pages 1217–18).
20 The passage from the 1977 Silmarillion derives primarily not from the Later Quenta (X.187), which closely resembles the passage in the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion, but from the ‘Annals of Aman’ (the final version of the ‘Annals of Valinor’, supplemented by a few details taken from the Later Quenta):
. . . As three great jewels they were in form . . . Like the crystal of diamonds it appeared and yet was more strong than adamant, so that no violence within the walls of this world could mar it or break it. Yet that crystal was to the Silmarils but as is the body to the Children of Ilúvatar: the house of its inner fire, that is within it and yet in all parts of it, and is its life. And the inner fire of the Silmarils Fëanor made of the blended Light of the Trees of Valinor . . . Therefore even in the uttermost darkness the Silmarils of their own radiance shone like the stars of Varda; and yet, as were they indeed living things, they rejoiced in light and received it, and gave it back in hues more lovely than before.
—HME X.94–5.
21 The Gnomish Lexicon’s entry for ‘Nauglafring’ agrees, stating plainly that the Necklace of the Dwarves was ‘[m]ade for Ellu [= Tinwelint/Thingol] by the dwarves from the gold of Glorund, that Mîm, the fatherless, cursed and that brought ruin on Beren Ermabwed [the One-Handed], and Damrod [Dior], his son, and was not appeased till it sank with Elwing, beloved of Earendel, to the bottom of the seas’ (Parma Eldalamberon XI.59).
22 Note that the Three Rings of the Elves were originally to have been ‘of earth, sea, and sky’ (e.g., in the draft of the Ring-verse [HME VI.269] and also the ‘third phase’ text of ‘Ancient History’ [VI.319]: ‘the Three Rings of Earth, Sea, and Sky’). In the original draft of the Lothlórien chapter(s), it is plainly stated that Galadriel’s ring is the Ring of Earth (HME VII.252) and an associated page of drafting speculates that Fëanor himself made the three elven rings, ‘the Rings of Earth, Sea and Sky’ (ibid., page 255).
In the published book, of course, Kemen the Ring of Earth is replaced by Narya the Ring of Fire, Galadriel holds Nenya, the Ring of Water, and Elrond Vilya the Ring of Air, so that Earth, Sea and Sky have been replaced by Air, Water, and Fire. This later arrangement better matches the later (1937) Quenta Silmarillion, in which the three Silmarils are lost in the sky (Air), the fires in the depth of the earth (Earth > Fire), and the sea (Water).
Chapter XVa The Kindness of Ravens
1 It might seem unlikely that birds could carry enough food to make any appreciable difference, but ravens are quite large, typically about two feet in length and with a wingspan of some four feet. They are not only quite capable of killing and carrying off small animals but also sometimes carry off small items that attract their curiosity (a habit for which their smaller cousins the jackdaws are notorious).
‘A Thief Indeed’
1 ‘My tale is not consciously based on any other book – save one . . . the “Silmarillion”, a history of the Elves, to which frequent allusion is made’ – JRRT, letter to The Observer; see Appendix II. Although at times Tolkien sought to distance The Hobbit from the pre-existing legendarium, at others he freely admitted or even laid stress upon the connection.
2 Carpenter’s first involvement with Tolkien’s work was to direct a children’s theater adaptation of The Hobbit, and he later wrote a radio-play depicting Tolkien as a detached eccentric (‘In a Hole in the Ground, There Lived a Tolkien’ [1992]); most of my second meeting with him (in Oxford, in 1985) was spent watching him direct a rather odd adaptation of The Wizard of Oz for an all-teen cast. For more on Carpenter’s interests and background in drama, see the obituary by Charles Noad and Jessica Yates, published in the March 2005 issue of Amen Hen; I am grateful to its authors for sharing a pre-publication copy with me. See also Douglas A. Anderson’s detailed account of Carpenter’s work with Tolkien in Volume II of Tolkien Studies (pages 217–24).
3 See the Introduction to Douglas Anderson’s The Annotated Hobbit for more on the identities of those who read the book before its publication (DAA.12).
4 See Tolkien’s 4th June 1938 letter to Stanley Unwin telling him of ‘our literary club . . . before whom the Hobbit, and other works (such as The Silent Planet) have been read’ (Letters p. 36). Our best evidence suggests that the Inklings did not yet exist in January 1933 when Tolkien completed the story, but came together very shortly thereafter, one of the significant factors that led to the group’s formation being the retirement of Major (then Captain) Warnie Lewis in December 1932, his return from Shanghai to live with his brother at the Kilns, and his joining Tolkien and Lewis at some of their regular gatherings. The Inklings seem to have come about from the two men’s desire to include Warnie in their meetings while providing a comfortable environment for less exclusively academic discussion; the late Dr. Humphrey Havard told me he was invited to join the group upon returning to Oxford and meeting the Lewis brothers in 1934. The first documentary evidence for the group’s existence comes in C. S. Lewis’s first letter to Charles Williams (11th March 1936) inviting him to attend a meeting of ‘a sort of informal club called the Inklings’ (Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper, vol. II, page 183). The early members of the group included Tolkien, Lewis, Warnie, and Havard (the four who formed the core of the group throughout its existence), as well as Nevill Coghill (a fellow member with Lewis in Tolkien’s Kolbítars, and specially mentioned along with Tolkien and Warnie in Lewis’s letter to Williams), Hugo Dyson, Owen Barfield (usually in absentia, since he lived in London), Adam Fox (who seems to have promptly quit the group after they got him elected Professor of Poetry in 1938), and C. L. Wrenn.
Chapter XIX The End of the Journey
1 As the leader of the expedition, Thorin has more lines of dialogue than any other character except Bilbo, and he is present through far more chapters than, say, Gandalf. At first Thorin’s sudden death – shocking within the traditions of classic British children’s fantasy (e.g., Carroll, Grahame, Milne, Lofting, Nesbit)† – would seem to reverse Tolkien’s theory of eucatastrophe, the sudden unexpected happy ending to the tale, but in fact the eagles’ arrival that turns the tide serves as the eucatastrophe that makes The Hobbit a successful fairy-story within Tolkien’s own conception of the genre. Thorin’s death, and the later addition of those of Fili and Kili, serve rather to ground the eucatastrophe and prevent the book from being ‘escapist’ in a negative sense: in Tolkien’s terms they confirm ‘the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; [eucatastrophe] denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat’ (OFS.62).
† MacDonald, who shared the late Victorian sentimentality over early death, is the chief and notable exception to this rule, but Thorin’s death is quite unlike anything in MacDonald except perhaps the death-in-combat of the narrator of Phantastes [1858], and even there the author’s interest is primarily in the character’s first-person description of what happens to him immediately following his death.
2 See for instance in Beowulf, where Beowulf is offered the throne after his uncle Hygelac’s death but insists it go to his young cousin, Hygelac’s son, instead. Similar non-direct successions can be found in sources as widely ranged as Hamlet (based on Saxo Grammaticus’s twelfth-century Geste Danorum), where Prince Hamlet is passed over for his father’s throne in favor of his uncle Claudius, the early history of Islam (where Mohammad is succeeded as the first caliph by his father-in-law, not by his closest male relative, his cousin and son-in-law), and English history, which especially in early Norman times provides all too many examples.
3 That is, if I am right in my guess that Thrain and Nain were brothers in Tolkien’s original conception; see Text Note 13 following chapter XVII. Already by the time of the earliest family tree in the late 1940s Thorin and Dain had become the children of cousins – that is, third cousins or as hobbits would no doubt say each was the other’s ‘second cousin once removed’, descendants of a common great-grandfather – which they remained thereafter; see HME XII.277 and LotR.1117. For the idea of Thorin having close kin somewhere in the area that he could call upon in extremity, see his remark to the Great Goblin in Chapter IV: ‘We [are] on a journey to our relatives, our nephews and nieces and first, second, and third cousins and other descendants of our grandfathers who live on the East side of these truly hospitable mountains’ (page 132); this passage contains the first germ that eventually led to Dain and his band of five hundred hardened warriors marching from the Iron Hills.
4 See for example in Beowulf the elaborate comparison between Sigemund the dragon-slayer (= Sigurd) and bad King Heremod (lines 875–915), of whom it is said nallas beagas geaf Denum aefter dome – translated by Howell Chickering as ‘never a ring did he give, for glory, to the Danish men’, adding ‘Joyless he lived and unhappy he died’ (Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition, lines 1719–1721, tr. Howell D. Chickering Jr. [1977]).
5 Thus the question arises: why did Thror, Thrain, and Thorin not themselves settle in the Iron Hills and merge their group with the larger settlement of their kin already established there? Tolkien nowhere addresses this issue, but one suspects that King Thror wished neither to usurp his brother’s halls nor dwell in them as a guest and that his son and grandson were similarly proud and independent.
6 The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, ed. & tr. Christopher Tolkien [1960], page 68.
7 Tolkien explicitly refers to the story of Högni and Hedin’s endless battle in his essay ‘The Name “Nodens”’ (Report on the Excavation . . . in Lydney Park [1932], page 133).
8 This is the same source from which Tolkien had two or three years earlier taken the name ‘Fimbulfambi’ as the last King under the Mountain; see page 15.
9 Cf. Jonathan Evans on Tolkien’s dragon-lore; see Note 2 to the commentary on ‘Tolkien’s Dragons’ following Chapter XII (page 538).
1 The other, of course, being Golfimbul (or, in the First Phase text, Fingolfin) of Mount Gram, killed by Bullroarer Took in the Battle of the Green Fields. Mount Gram appears only in this context, but this may merely be another name for Gondobad/Gundabad, not least because ‘Gram’ is a Norse name (famous as the name of Sigurd’s sword forged or reforged by Regin) and thus would seem to belong to the area north and east of Bilbo’s home and because the Misty Mountains, which are particularly associated with the goblins throughout The Hobbit, also seem to be the mountains closest to Bilbo’s home (cf. Bilbo’s never having seen a mountain before, page 111).
As for Azog, while we are told in the manuscript that Dain killed Bolg’s father at Moria, Azog’s name does not enter the story until the 1960 Hobbit (see page 781), nor see print within The Hobbit until the third edition of 1966 (cf. DAA.56 and 339), having arisen during the creation of the Appendices for The Lord of the Rings (contrast HME XII.276, where in early drafts of this material old Thror is ‘slain in the dark by an Orc’ in Moria, with the specific references to Azog in HME XII.284 and LotR.1110–12).
2 Note that Nain’s forces chant ‘Azog! Azog!’, the name of their hated enemy, when they join the attack at the Battle of Moria (LotR.1112); hence, Dain’s dwarves in The Hobbit chant ‘Moria! Moria!’ as a reminder of the atrocity they wish to avenge on Bolg’s goblins (that is, the death of Thror). There is of course a long tradition of battle-cries that evoke famous defeats (‘Remember the Maine!’ ‘The Alamo!’) as well as victories.
3 A probable real-world source for the name comes from the Fir Bolg, one of the mythical races of Ireland whose deeds are retold in the twelfth-century Lebor Gabála Érenn (or Book of Invasions) along with those of the Fomorians and the Tuatha dé Danaan. Tolkien was well-versed in this mythic material (see page 427), and his attention might have been drawn to the name by John Rhys’s claim in Celtic Britain [1884] that Bolg was probably an Ivernian name – that is, that it came from the pre-Indo-European language of the British Isles (Rhys, pp. 268 & 281).† Since this is the same book from which Tolkien took the word ond (Ivernian for ‘stone’) and adapted it into Sindarin, it is entirely plausible that it may have influenced him in other borrowings as well.
† Rhys’s theory has since been rejected, and scholars now believe that Ivernian, like Pictish, was a Celtic language closely related to British (the ancestor of Welsh), superseded by Gaelic (Irish).
4 David Salo glosses the name ‘soldier of torment’ (A Gateway to Sindarin, page 344) and points out that The Etymologies, written circa 1937–8, contain two entries on Boldog. The first (HME V.375, under the root NDAK-) identifies the -dog element as a variant of daug, meaning ‘warrior’ (‘chiefly used of Orcs’), and suggests that Boldog might simply be a generic term for orc-warrior, although this last point seems rather doubtful. The second (HME V.377, under the root ÑGWAL-) gives bol- as a variant of baul, ‘torment’, as in the more familiar balrog and states flatly that ‘Orc-name Boldog = Orc-warrior “Torment-slayer”’.
1 See the last page of the original Plot Notes B and the associated commentary (pp. 366 & 375–6) for more on ‘the Battle of Anduin Vale’ and its projected participants. The evidence that Beorn-Medwed associated with a large number of other bears, whom he could call upon at need, goes all the way back to the Second Phase text of Chapter VII, where Bladorthin describes following their host in secret and finds
‘There must have been a regular bear-meeting outside here last night. I soon saw that Medwed could not have made them all – there were far too many of them, and they were of various sizes too: I should say little bears, big bears, ordinary bears, and gigantic big bears must have been dancing outside from dark to nearly dawn. They came from almost all directions except West from over the river, from the Misty Mountains.’
That night Bilbo sees this bear-moot in his dreams when he
dreamed a dream of hundreds of black bears dancing slow heavy dances round and round in the moonlight in the courtyard.
For Tolkien’s original audience’s enthusiasm for bears, see the commentary following Chapter VII, page 253ff.
2 It is possible that this idea first arose in Plot Notes F, which represents a transitional stage between the Second and Third Phases. Here there is no hint that the battle might take place elsewhere, but that detail might simply not have been set down in these very sketchy notes; neither is it specifically stated that the battle described takes place at the Mountain, although that is the implication.
3 ‘So began the battle . . . And it was called after [i.e., afterwards] the Battle of Five Armies . . . For upon one side were the Goblins and the Wolves and upon the other were men, elves, and dwarves’ (page 670; cf. DAA.339). This is remarkable, since the text is clear that the eagles played a decisive role in depriving the goblins of the devastating advantage they had claimed by seizing the high ground and that Beorn’s intervention turned the tide; the typescript and published book differ from the Third Phase manuscript in denying the eagles a full share of credit for the victory, ascribing it chiefly to Beorn’s assault.
4 This edition was not published in Tolkien’s lifetime but appeared in 1981, edited by Joan Turville-Petre. Its exact dating is unknown; Turville-Petre simply says it was ‘based on full notes for a series of lectures delivered to a specialist class in the 1930s and 1940s’ (The Old English Exodus: Text, Translation, and Commentary by J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Joan Turville-Petre [1981], page v). However, Tolkien had already given some of the poem’s vocabulary a very close look during the period when he was drafting The Hobbit (i.e., the very early 1930s): he begins his detailed study of the unusual phrase Sigelwara land with a quote from Exodus in an article that appeared in the December 1932 issue of Medium Ævum (that is, published during the weeks when Tolkien was writing the Third Phase text) and had been announced in the journal’s first issue back in May 1932† It thus seems quite possible that Tolkien’s notes on herefugolas and wælceasega, or at least the thinking that underlies them, dates from the very early thirties.
† The second part of Tolkien’s article did not appear until the June 1934 issue (Vol.III No.2).
5 In real life, ravens and wolves often form a symbiotic relationship: the ravens help spot the prey, the wolves make the kill, and the ravens get to feast on the carrion after the wolves have eaten their fill. See Bernd Heinrich’s Mind of the Raven [1999], particularly the chapters describing ravens as ‘wolf-birds’ because of the close association between the two in the wild (‘Ravens and Wolves in Yellowstone’ and ‘From Wolf-Birds to Human-Birds’). Bernd also includes a number of accounts of eagles feasting alongside ravens from the same corpses despite the generally hostile relations between the two types of bird (the predator-scavenger eagles and the scavenger-predator ravens).
6 Bats had of course already appeared in ‘Goblin Feet’, arguably the first piece of what became Tolkien’s ‘legendarium’ to see print (Oxford Poetry 1915, pages 64–5; cf. DAA.113). But here they are not threatening (‘pretty little flittermice’); like the ‘goblins’ themselves they are simply one more element of the elusive, gone-before-it-can-be-grasped little people. Hammond & Scull also see ‘bat-like faces’ on the curtains in Tolkien’s early drawing ‘Wickedness’ [H-S#32], one of the pieces in The Book of Ishness [1911–13], but given these images’ similarity to the Siamese cat that can just be glimpsed between the parted curtains of this image I suspect they are actually cats’ heads instead (cf. Artist & Illustrator, pages 37 and 36).
7 ‘Deadly Nightshade’ and Taur-na-Fuin are both alternative names for the same place, the dark forest elsewhere called Mirkwood. The tower Thû the Necromancer builds there after the escape described here is clearly the same Necromancer’s tower in southern Mirkwood in The Hobbit, where Thrain died and which Bladorthin advises Bilbo to avoid; see page 244.
1 See the passage quoted on page 78 in the commentary following Chapter I (c). This is echoed in the 1930 Quenta, written about the time Tolkien wrote the First Phase of The Hobbit (i.e., the bulk of the opening chapter): ‘the sons of Fëanor . . . made war upon the Dwarves of Nogrod and Belegost; but they did not discover whence that strange race came, nor have any since’ (HME IV.103–4). The story of Aulë’s creation of the dwarves (cf. Silm.43–4) did not arise until about the time of The Hobbit’s publication (i.e., a year or so after the completed typescript had been submitted to Allen & Unwin) in the ‘(Later) Annals of Beleriand’; see HME V.129 and 149. For the brief later development of the original negative, elven-centric view of the dwarves, see the passages cited on page 721 from the ‘(Later) Annals of Beleriand’, the Lhammas, and the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion.
2 Note that Tolkien’s friend C. S. Lewis, in what is perhaps his best book, The Discarded Image [posthumously published in 1964], names the chapter devoted to elves, nymphs, fauns, and fairies ‘The Longaevi’; i.e., ‘long-livers’.
3 That is, the first if we except the Arkenstone affecting the description of the Silmarils; cf. page 607.
4 For Tolkien, the chance for an artist to take part in actual Creation was the highest reward; cf. ‘Leaf by Niggle’. For Tolkien’s opinion that our own world was itself a sub-creation and that a writer might be able to contribute through his imaginative works in enriching the post-apocalyptic world that would succeed it, see my essay ‘“And All the Days of Her Life Are Forgotten”: The Lord of the Rings as Mythic Prehistory’, especially part v: ‘“We Make Because We Are Made”: Tolkien’s Sub-creative Theology’, in The Lord of the Rings 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, ed. Wayne G. Hammond & Christina Scull [Marquette University Press, 2006].
1 The poems in The Hobbit are distributed thusly: two in Chapter I (‘Chip the Glasses’ and ‘Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold’, plus a refrain from the latter), ‘O Where Are You Going’ in Chapter III, the goblin song in Chapter IV (‘Ho Ho My Lad’), the riddles (eight in all) in Chapter V, the second goblin song in Chapter VI (‘Fifteen Birds’), the dwarf song in Chapter VII (‘The Wind was on the Withered Heath’), Bilbo’s spider songs (‘Attercop’ and ‘Lazy Lob’) in Chapter VIII, two river songs in Chapter IX (‘Heave Ho Splash-plump’ and ‘Down the Swift Dark Stream You Go’), the Lake-men’s song in Chapter X (‘At the Mountain-king’s Return’), then a gap before the dwarven song in Chapter XV (‘The King is Come Unto His Hall’, a reworked version of the second song from Chapter I), and then a second gap before the three songs in Chapter XIX (‘Tra-la-la-lally Come Back to the Valley’, ‘Sing All Ye Joyful’, and ‘Roads Go Ever Ever On’).
Thus Chapter II is the only one of the first ten to lack a poem, while Chapter XV is the only one of the next eight to have one, followed by a sudden burst of three poems in the final chapter.
2 I give here the typescript text (1/1/69:4) for ease of reference; see page 693 above for the initial rough drafting of this poem. The only changes between the First Typescript version and the published text are the latter’s capitalization of the first words in the two lines not capitalized here (both are capitalized in the Second Typescript [1/1/50:4–5], a rare case where Michael’s typescript more closely resembles the published text than the main typescript) and the indenting of every other line in the published text (cf. DAA.359–60). The third line of the poem has been erased and retyped in the original, but I think this was simply to correct a carriage return error or some similar typing mistake.
Note that by referring to it as ‘Bilbo’s first poem’ Tolkien has either forgotten about the two spider-songs Bilbo spontaneously composed in Mirkwood (‘Attercop’ and ‘Lazy Lob’) or does not consider them ‘poems’ per se so much as rhyming nonsense to annoy his foes.
3 This is the first of the two ‘Songs on the Downs’ (Oxford Poetry 1915, page 60). Smith was one of Tolkien’s closest friends, and the poem is included in A Spring Harvest [1918], the book of Smith’s poems edited by Tolkien after GBS’s death in the Battle of the Somme.
4 Both Tolkien’s and Geach’s poems appear in Fifty New Poems for Children: An Anthology, Selected from Books Recently Published by Basil Blackwell (Basil Blackwell, Oxford [1922]). ‘Goblin Feet’ appears on pages 26–27 and ‘Romance’ on page 28; a bibliographic note on page 62 notes that Geach’s poem first appeared in Oxford Poetry 1918. For more on Geach, see The Annotated Hobbit (DAA.360–1).
5 These are stanzas two, twelve, and thirteen from Thomas’s poem, which continues with an all-too-timely application:
Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance;
Whatever the road bring
To me or take from me
They keep me company
With their pattering . . .
Simonson’s piece, ‘The Lord of the Rings in the Wake of the Great War’, appears in Reconsidering Tolkien, edited by Thomas Honegger (Walking Tree Press [2005]); see in particular pages 161–163. So far as I have been able to discover, no substantial comparison has yet been written of Tolkien with Thomas, who like Tolkien celebrated the quiet English countryside in his work, wrote fairy-tales, and fought on the Western Front, where he died in 1917.
6 The only difference between the two versions in The Lord of the Rings is that when Frodo repeats the poem two chapters later, he changes the word eager in line five to weary; Christopher Tolkien reveals in The Return of the Shadow that ‘weary’ is in fact the wording of the original draft (HME VI.47).
The Fortunate Misunderstanding
1 Tolkien had earlier described this material to Unwin in a letter written on 31st July 1947 but not sent until 21st September along with the Fourth Phase Hobbit material:
. . . when I revise chapter II [of LotR] for press: I intend, in any case, to shorten it. The proper way to negotiate the difficulty would be slightly to remodel the former story [The Hobbit] in its chapter V. That is not a practical question; though I certainly hope to leave behind me the whole thing revised and in final form . . .
—Letters, page 121.
The End of the Fifth Phase
1 While Elrond’s maintenance of the road makes sense and is in keeping with his role as the preserver of the last vestiges of the North Kingdom, it is hard to picture the elves of Rivendell working at road-mending, since throughout the legendarium the elves are never associated with road-making. We might speculate that he hires dwarves to do the work without actually permitting these contractors to know Rivendell’s exact location (lying as it does some way off the main road), but that solution runs afoul of this text’s statements that dwarves were not welcome here and did not know this part of the world well. No doubt if Tolkien had fully developed this idea we would know the answers to these apparent difficulties.
2 Hastings had argued that this phrase implied that William was capable of feeling pity and thus making a moral judgment. This would of course run counter to the legendarium’s presentation of the Creatures of Morgoth as irredeemably wicked. Tolkien however disagreed: ‘I do not say William felt pity – a word to me of moral and imaginative worth . . . Pity must restrain one from doing something immediately desirable and seemingly advantageous. There is no more “pity” here than in a beast of prey yawning, or lazily patting a creature it could eat, but does not want to, since it is not hungry’ (Letters p. 191). Thus there was no need to rewrite the scene of William’s actions, and Tolkien left his little comic masterpiece of the trolls’ dialogue intact, even preserving the mild profanity of ‘what the ’ell’.
Timelines and Itinerary
1 For example, as Janice Coulter has pointed out (private communication), if Gollum’s eyes glowed in the dark how did he sneak up on goblins? Or, to repeat a question Tolkien himself asked and left unanswered, why did the dwarves bring their musical instruments, some of which would have been quite bulky, to Bag-End? Overthinking such points is a hallmark of approaching a work in the first of these two traditions as if it were in the second.
2 Tolkien of course was not alone in creating this shift: Joyce’s Ulysses, where both of the major characters’ actions can be followed hour-by-hour and street-by-street through a single day on a Dublin city map, pioneered this mode in the realistic novel a decade and a half before Tolkien began work on his magnum opus. One might expect the detective novel or mystery to have pioneered this approach, but in fact Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, which defined the genre, is very much written in the old school, with a fine carelessness about dates, Holmes’ fields of expertise and expert knowledge, the location of Watson’s war wound (leg or shoulder), the dates (and number) of Watson’s marriage(s) and bereavement(s), and even the narrator’s first name (variously James or John). Before Tolkien, most fantasy novels followed the example of one of those two great masters, Dunsany and Morris, and took place in either dreamworlds à la Dunsany or deliberately unmapped and borderless medieval settings à la Morris (frameless tapestries, as it were). Post-Tolkien, world-building has become a key defining part of the genre: elaborate histories (‘backstory’) and chronologies, invented languages, multiple cultures and distinct humanesque races, fantasy pantheons, creation myths, and above all maps are all essential elements that make a work recognizably ‘fantasy’.
3 According to the ‘(Later) Annals of Beleriand’, the city was destroyed ninety years before the end of the First Age (HME V.142 & 144); 90 + the 3441 years of the Second Age (LotR.1121) + the 2941 years of the Third Age that had passed before Bilbo reached Rivendell (LotR.1126) = 6,472 years. The 1930 Quenta states that the attack came before dawn as the people were preparing to celebrate a festival known as the Gates of Summer (HME IV.144), which I take to mean greeting the dawn on midsummer’s day. Appendix D of The Lord of the Rings states that the elven day starts at sunset (LotR.1141); therefore the midsummer’s eve on which Elrond reads these runes is the anniversary of the day when his father’s city was destroyed.
4 Note that Tolkien’s friend C. S. Lewis makes the same mistake in his narrative poem The Queen of Drum [1927], as was pointed out to him by John Masefield, the poet laureate, to whom he sent the unpublished poem in 1938. Cf. Canto V, line 123 (page 170) and Masefield’s correction on page 178 (CSL, Narrative Poems, ed. Walter Hooper [1969]).
If we were to pursue a mythological explanation, of course, we could do so by noting that Tilion, the Maia who steers the moon, is well-known for his wayward behavior and difficulty in keeping a regular course, being easily distracted by the beauty of the Sun-maiden (Silm.99–100) or overindulgence in beer or brandy (1927 Father Christmas letter, ATB poem #5, LotR.174–6). But while this would be a perfectly reasonable explanation in Bilbo’s world, it would be special pleading in Frodo’s.
Appendix I The Denham Tracts
1 Although she was surely aware of it, since in her entry on Tolkien within the same book she praises his work for being ‘deepened by the use of traditional folklore which gave it that sense of being rooted in the earth which is the gift of folklore to literature’ – Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies, page 401. In her various entries on hobs and hobmen – ‘Hob, or Hobthrust’ (p. 222–223), ‘Lobs and Hobs’ (p. 270–271) and ‘Brownie’ (or little brown men, p. 45–49) – she summarizes traditional beliefs and in so doing helps us see the extent to which Tolkien was influenced by them. For example, her description of the brown men (brownies) as ‘small men, about three feet in height, very raggedly dressed in brown clothes, with brown faces and shaggy heads’ would take very little adjustment to serve as a description of hobbits in their latter days, when they have become a shy and fugitive people who ‘avoid us with dismay and are becoming hard to find’ (Prologue, LotR.[13]). Even though Denham’s groupings are somewhat erratic, it is suggestive that ‘hobbit’ is immediately followed by hobgoblin and brown-man (i.e., brownie) as items number one hundred and fifty-four, one hundred and fifty-five, and one hundred and fifty-six, respectively, in his final list. Elsewhere in The Denham Tracts he retells stories about several hobs, most notably the Cauld Lad o’ Hylton (‘the Cold Lad of Hilton’; Vol. I pages 55–57), Hob Thrush (Vol. II pages 355–356), and the Hazelrigg Dunnie (ibid. pages 157–163).
Denham’s own closeness to the material may be judged from his admission of his childhood terror of Peg Powler, a local drowning spirit,† and the precautions he took as a child to avoid attracting the attention of the fairies.††
† ‘the writer still perfectly recollects being dreadfully alarmed in the days of his childhood lest, more particularly when he chanced to be alone on the margin of those waters, she should issue from the stream and snatch him into her watery chambers’ – Vol. II page 42.
†† ‘I well remember that on more occasions than one, when a schoolboy, I have turned my coat inside out in passing through a wood in order to avoid the good people’ – Vol. II page 88.
2 Gomme’s preface to the second volume sums up the difficulties thusly: ‘Mr. Denham[’s] . . . peculiar practice of issuing these tracts sometimes without date or other means of identification makes it extremely difficult to ascertain whether all he published on folk-lore has been recovered. There is no complete collection . . . It often happened that a tract was issued as a simple leaflet, and that later on this would be included in another tract without any alteration of or allusion to the original publication’ (Vol. II page x). Indeed, the bulk of ‘Tract VIII’ (ibid. pages [1]–80) in the Folk-Lore Society’s compilation turns out to be from another tract (pages 21–80) titled ‘Folklore; or Manners, Customs, Weather Proverbs, Popular Charms, Juvenile Rhymes, Ballads, &c. &c. in the north of England’ (see the editorial footnote on the bottom of Vol. II page 21), whose title accurately reflects the miscellaneous nature of the compilation.
To compound the problem, the Folk-Lore Society volumes were carelessly edited and at several points inadvertently reprint slightly different versions of the same material – e.g., the long annotated list of items associated with fairies given as examples of ‘The not yet wholly exploded belief in fairies, fays, and elves’, which appears both as its own short tract (Tract XIV: ‘A Few Fragments of Fairy Folklore’; Vol. II pages 110–115) and in briefer form without explanatory notes on page 30 in the same volume as a single paragraph within what the editor designated as Tract VIII. Furthermore, at a number of points the editor either rewrote passages or inserted new material. Gomme’s preface (Vol. I page xi) promises that additional notes by Hardy would all be carefully identified with the latter’s bracketed initials (‘[J.H.]’), but in practice this is rarely the case. Contrast, for example, Denham’s first-person account of the strange behavior of his mother’s cat after its mistress died (Vol. II page 74) with the third-person reference to Denham on page 12 of the same volume, or quotations from letters by Denham (apparently to Hardy himself) woven into the main text on page 270 and elsewhere, not to mention many examples given in the text that are taken from works published after Denham’s death (e.g. Vol. II pages 182, 226, 257, 272, 287, 356, 357, &c.), the latest of these dating from 1888, when Denham had been dead almost thirty years. In short, the published text of these two volumes has undergone massive interference at the hands of its editor(s) and cannot reliably be taken as representing exactly what Denham wrote on specific points without outside confirmation from the original tracts.
3 This almost certainly involves a misapprehension on Denham’s part, since in Burns’ poem ‘Tam O’Shanter’ [1791] Cutty Sark (‘short skirt/smock’) is the name of a beautiful witch so called from her revealing garments, not (as he puts it in a footnote to the 1895 list) ‘a certain class of female Boggles’; see note D31.
4 Specifically, the lines that open Denham’s piece† come from Hamlet, Act I, Scene 1, lines 158–165. Horatio and the guards are discussing the effect of the cock’s crow on the ghost of King Hamlet, whose manifestation they have just witnessed.
† These lines of dialogue are absent in the 1848 article, which is simply headed ‘SEASONAL INFORMATION’ (a title possibly provided by the journal’s editor) followed by the line ‘Ghosts never appear on Christmas eve!’ in quotation marks; the latter was probably Denham’s title, since it reappears in The Denham Tracts version.
5 This would presumably be the antiquarian Captain Francis Grose, author of The Antiquities of England and Wales [six volumes, 1773–1787], Antiquities of Scotland [two volumes, 1789 & 1791], and the unfinished Antiquities of Ireland [1791].
6 That is, seventy or eighty years before this piece’s first publication in 1848, not from the time of its collection in The Denham Tracts – that is, in the 1770s and before.
7 Originally, in the 1848 list, fairies appeared here between ignis-fatui and brownies, before being moved to near the end of the 1895 list.
8 Denham prints sirens here instead of R. Scot’s sylens, both in the 1848 and the 1895 lists. Some folklorists have suspected that the word should be read sylvans instead, meaning some woodland creature such as the satyrs, Pans, and fauns that precede it, but the point is debatable.
9 The 1895 printing actually reads dwafs here, but it is clear from the 1848 reading (dwarfs) that this is a simple misprint. Note that while Denham (and Scot) use elves instead of elfs (as indeed did Tolkien’s slightly elder contemporary, Lord Dunsany), neither used the purely Tolkienesque dwarves.
10 Originally, in the 1848 list, thrummy-caps appeared here between sprets and spunks, before being moved to near the end of the 1895 list.
11 tod-lowries: In his 1848 piece, Denham glosses this as ‘Phantom foxes’, one of only two footnotes to the original article and the only one not picked up and repeated in the final piece.
12 Originally, in the 1848 list, cutties appeared here between brags and wraiths, before being moved to the penultimate position in the 1895 list.
13 A simpler version of this footnote appears in the 1848 article: ‘There is a village of this name near Chester-le-street, in the county of Durham.’
14 Denham’s note actually reads ‘12, 13, 21, 23, 27. The same with note 8.’ (e.g., D8). That is, he interprets these six as different names for the same concept. I have repeated the text of Denham’s note (D8) at each occurrence for the sake of clarity.
15 That is, the Jacobite Uprising of 1715; the said earl was executed for treason in 1716 for his role in supporting the Old Pretender (James Stuart, son of the deposed James II).
16 While Denham himself accepted the theory that ‘hob-thrush’ is a contraction of ‘hob-o’-t’-hurst’ (i.e., hob in the woods – see noteD7), Briggs follows Gillian Edwards in suggesting that ‘hobthrust’ derives instead from hob-thyrs, thyrs being one of the Old English words for giant† (A Dictionary of Fairies, page 223); thurse (thurses) itself appears elsewhere in Denham’s list. Since as Tolkien notes hob- is a diminutive (see page 862), the name essentially means ‘little giant’.
† along with the more familiar (to the ears of Tolkien’s readers, at any rate) eoten.
17 A secondary possibility is that the word was drawn to his attention by one of his many correspondents (one of whom was Dr. Hardy, the editor more than thirty years after Denham’s death of The Denham Tracts themselves – see the Preface to Volume I page viii). If this is the case, the name may have come from somewhat further afield, either the northern Midlands or just over the border in southern Scotland (e.g., Berwickshire), both areas being similarly well-provided with hob legends.
18 Gilliver, Marshall, & Weiner give the title page for the 1851 tract:
To all and singular the Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Phantasms, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, These brief Pages are Fearlessly Inscribed, In utter defiance of their Power and Influence, By their verie hvmble Seruaunte, To Com’aund, M:A:D.
—The Ring of Words, page 147.
This is almost certainly the same tract given in a listing of Denham’s works drawn up by Denham himself just before his death. The listing, published as the first item (‘A List of Antiquarian Tomes, Tracts and Trifles’) in an 1858 collection of Denham’s work titled Denham Tracts, or a few Pictures of the Olden Time in connection with The North of England [1858; facsimile reprint 1974], gives as the first item of section XI (‘Sundry Minor Tracts, &c.’) a piece titled ‘Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Phantasms’, stating that the first edition of fifty copies was printed in 1852 and ran six pages long; the second item in the same list is the second edition of the same title (eight pages, 1853). The listing may be found on page 7 of the 1858 Denham Tracts, which unfortunately does not include that tract among its 142 pages.
19 For Tolkien’s attempt to get this book by his friend published by Allen & Unwin in 1936, see Note 23 to the commentary following Chapter IV, page 152. In the event, it was not published until 1964, the year following Lewis’s death.
20 For more on Tolkien’s admiration for, and usage of, Wright’s book, see the commentary on Wright as a source for ‘the carrock’, pages 202–203.
21 Other creatures from Denham’s list appearing in Tolkien’s other works include wraithes (wraiths), corpse-candles, gnomes, fairies, fays, and korigans (as the Corrigan in ‘The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun’).
22 See Letters p. 410. Tolkien’s probable source for this information† was John Rhys’s Celtic Britain [1884], page 270.†† Modern scholarship has concluded that the so-called ‘Ivernian’ language, like the similarly once-mysterious Pictish, was in fact simply an earlier form of Celtic.
† First uncovered by Carl Hostetter and Pat Wynne in their article ‘Stone Towers’ (Mythlore #74, Autumn 1993), page 48.
†† The other ‘Ivernian’ word to which Tolkien refers in his letter that he had forgotten was fern, meaning (according to Rhys) ‘anything good’. Rhys also thought he detected Ivernian words underlying proper and place names such as Bolg (pages 268, 281) and Nét/Nuada/Nodens (page 263).
I have since learned of a still earlier appearance of Denham’s list, in his little book bearing the rather unwieldy title A Collection of Proverbs and Popular Sayings Relating to the Seasons, the Weather, and Agricultural Pursuits; Gathered Chiefly from Oral Tradition [Percy Society, 1846]. The longest section (pages 23–68 out of a slim volume of only 79 pages, including frontmatter) is devoted to sayings organized by month; our now-familiar list appears (sans hobbit) as a long footnote in the December section, pegged to the saying ‘Ghosts never appear on Christmas-eve’ (which appears between ‘Christmas comes but once a year’ and ‘Busy as an oven at Christmas’). I here give Denham’s note in its entirety; italicization, spelling (e.g., ‘Shakspeare’), and the like are as in the original:
‡So says Shakspeare; and the truth thereof few, now-a-days, will call into question. Grose observes, too, that those born on Christmas-day cannot see spirits.
What a happiness this must have been seventy or eighty years ago and upwards, to those chosen few who had the good luck to be born on this day; when the whole world was so over-run with ghosts, boggles, bloody-bones, spirits, demons, ignis-fatui, fairies, brownies, bug-bears, black-dogs, spectres, spelly-coats,* scare-crows, witches, wizards, barguests, Robin-goodfellows, hags, night-bats, scrags, break-necks, fantasms, hobgoblins, hobhoulards, boggy-boes, dobbys, hobthrusts, fetches, kelpies, warlocks, mock-beggars, mumpokers, jemmy-burties, and apparitions, that there was not a village in England that had not its peculiar ghost! Nay, every lone tenement or mansion which could boast of any antiquity, had its boggle or spectre. The church-yards were all haunted. Every green lane had its boulder-stone, on which an apparition kept watch by night; every common had a circle of fairies belonging to it; and there was scarce a shepherd to be met with who had not seen a spirit!
* These were Scotch boggles: they wore garments of shells, which made a horrid rattling when they appeared abroad. [Denham’s Note]
Denham states in his Preface that his work of collection began ‘as far back as the year 1825’ (p. i) and was done ‘chiefly orally’ (ibid.); this might account for his later recording the word hobbit, for which no prior written source has yet been found before Denham’s own 1853 publication.
Appendix II Tolkien’S Letter to the Observer(The Hobyahs)
1 According to Tolkien’s disclaimer to Unwin on 4th March 1938 (Letters p. 34), he had written ‘a short and fairly sane reply for publication’ and sent it in with ‘this jesting reply’, the latter accompanied by a stamped envelope to forward its contents to ‘Habit’. The contents of the now-lost shorter version are not known, but presumably it would have covered much the same points in less detailed form (and in less entertainingly playful language).
Tolkien’s letter to The Observer is reproduced in Letters pp. 30–32, but I reproduce it here as it appeared on page 9 of the original newspaper.
2 ‘accidental homophones . . . [and] not . . . synonyms’: That is, having the same sound but not the same meaning and sharing no common origin, such as weak (which derives from the Old Norse veikr) and week (which derives from Old English wicu).
3 I.e., quende, noldo, orc, and naug, respectively.
4 This passing reference enables us to date Bilbo’s contract, reproduced for the first time as plate two of the Frontispiece to this volume, as already having been in existence by mid-January 1938.
5 Etymology: that is, research into the origin of a word, tracing it as far back to its original source(s) as possible. At issue is whether Tolkien’s claim to have invented the word is accepted by the OED, although apparently it was questioned by no one except Tolkien himself, solely on the basis of the ‘Habit’ letter thirty-two years before.
6 Slightly different excerpts from this letter appear in both Letters pp. 404–405 and Gilliver et al.’s The Ring of Words pages 143–144; the first paragraph given here appears only in Letters and the final paragraph only in The Ring of Words. The latter goes on to give the OED entry as it was actually published in 1976:
In the tales of J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973): one of an imaginary people, a small variety of the human race, that gave themselves this name (meaning ‘hole-dweller’) but were called by others halflings, since they were half the height of normal men.
7 Tolkien is obviously writing from memory here without the original clipping in front of him, since ‘Habit’ had in fact specified a somewhat earlier date (i.e., circa 1904).
8 The story ‘Puss-Cat Mew’ can most readily be found in Douglas A. Anderson’s collection Tales Before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy [2003], pages 46–86. It is unfortunate, given Tolkien’s early fondness for the tale, that Knatchbull-Hugessen did not inherit any of the writing talent of his illustrious great-aunt. Instead, Stories for My Children in general and ‘Puss-Cat Mew’ in particular exhibit all the characteristics in children’s stories that Tolkien came to loathe: a facetious narrator, smug moralizing, jarring anachronisms, and prettified fairies that would have been right at home in ‘Tinfang Warble’ or ‘Goblin Feet’. In short, Knatchbull-Hugessen’s best is more or less on par with Tolkien’s worst.
However, as Anderson notes (Tales, page 47), it is possible to see a few parallels to scenes in The Hobbit in its narrative; examples include the hero’s fight with three dwarves in which he knocks out the tooth of one and bashes the second in the face, only to be struck down by the third (compare Thorin’s fight with the three trolls, in which he knocks out Tom’s fang, pokes Bert in the eye, and is then nabbed by William), the hero’s acquisition of a glove of invisibility (which he uses to assassinate his various foes, just like the ‘practical’ burglars of whom Bilbo has heard tell – see page 92), or the hero’s sitting down and turning out his pockets for crumbs when lost in the forest after escaping a deadly foe. But none of the parallels is particularly compelling, and all could be the result of simple coincidence. More interesting is that Knatchbull-Hugessen starts with a bit of nursery rhyme:
Puss-cat Mew jumped over a coal;
In her best petticoat burnt a great hole;
Puss-cat Mew shan’t have any milk
Till her best petticoat’s mended with silk.†
and writes his story to explain the events behind it, a very Tolkienesque enterprise.
Far more important, although not of relevance for The Hobbit, is that ‘Puss-Cat Mew’ marks the first time we know of that Tolkien was exposed to what became one of the signature motifs in his legendarium: the winning of a faerie bride by a worthy mortal (the titular cat of Knatchbull-Hugessen’s story is in fact a fairy under an enchantment). This theme appears over and over again in Tolkien’s work, from the story of Beren and Lúthien to that of Aragorn and Arwen, from Tuor and Idril or the story of Mithrellas of Lórien and Imrazôr the Númenórean (UT.248) to the nameless temptress of ‘Ides Ælfscyýne’ and her equally nameless victim.
† Baring-Gould gives a somewhat different version of this same poem, which he derives from the work of James O. Halliwell (i.e., either one of the editions of The Nursery Rhymes of England [1842ff] or Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales [1849]):
Pussy cat Mole jumped over a coal
And in her best petticoat burnt a great hole
Poor Pussy’s weeping, she’ll have no more milk
Until her best petticoat’s mended with silk.
—The Annotated Mother Goose [1962],
page 171; rhyme #300
9 This identification was made as far back as 1988 in the first edition of Douglas Anderson’s The Annotated Hobbit (page 5); more information appears in the revised edition (DAA.9).
10 Reprinted in Joseph Jacobs, More English Fairy Tales [1894], tale number LXIX, pages [118]–124, plus notes page 232. Despite Jacobs’ carelessness – he gets both the name of the journal (‘American Folk-Lore Journal’) and the volume (‘iii’) in which the story appeared wrong – he reproduced the tale itself word-for-word as it had appeared in Proudfit’s version, aside from a few minor changes in punctuation (some inadvertent).
Proudfit himself, in addition to his splendidly hobbit-like name, was a distinguished archeologist and anthropologist, with a special interest in the preColumbian settlements in the Washington DC area. A career bureaucrat, he seems to have drafted the first version of what later became the Antiquities Act when a lawyer working for the McKinley administration [1899] and later as Acting Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs under Taft intervened decisively to preserve Navaho sites in the Southwest [1909].
Briggs observes (A Dictionary of Fairies page 223) that although derived from Scots immigrants, the story as told by Proudfit and Jacobs retains no trace of Scots dialect.
Appendix III The Dvergatal (The Dwarf Names)
1 Cf., for example, Vigfusson & Powell’s Corpus Poeticvm Boreale [1883] Vol. I pages 192 (‘The Mnemonic Verses . . . relating to the Dwarves . . . have been removed as most certainly extraneous, though they had crept even into Snorri’s text’) and 79, and Dronke The Poetic Edda, Volume II: Mythological Poems [1997] pages 38, 92, 122, and especially 67.
2 The three volumes published so far of Dronke’s edition – Volume I: Heroic Poems [1969], Volume II: Mythological Poems [1997], and Volume III: Mythological Poems II [2011] – cover only thirteen out of the collection’s twenty-nine component poems. The remaining volumes are to cover the Helgi lays and the Sigurd cycle† and the remaining mythological and miscellaneous pieces.
† That is, the portions rewritten by Tolkien as Volsungakvida En Nyja; cf. Letters p. 452.
3 These four dwarf-names are missing in the Codex Regius [circa 1270], the best manuscript of the Völuspá, but they are present in most other manuscripts of the Dvergatal, including the Hauksbók [circa 1302–1310, though this material was added circa 1330–1350]; see Dronke, textual notes, page 90, and her notes on the manuscripts, page 61.
4 Dronke reads these as two names, as per the Codex Regius (Hepti, Vili) and Hauksbók (Hefti, Fili); all other manuscripts of the Dvergatal give them as a single name (Heptifili); see Dronke, textual notes, page 91.
5 These four names, absent from the Codex Regius, appear in the Hauksbók; see Dronke, textual notes, page 91. Burin, a variant of the fourth name given in one manuscript of Snorri’s version (as ‘Bvrin’), would later appear in early drafts of The Lord of the Rings as the son of Balin, who comes to Rivendell searching for news of his father and thus attends the Council of Elrond; he was later replaced by Gimli son of Gloin (HME VI.395, 397, 400) as the dwarven member of the Fellowship.
6 These four names appear in neither the Codex Regius nor the Hauksbók versions of the Völuspá, but only in manuscripts of Snorri’s version of the Dvergatal (from Gylfaginning). In one important manuscript of that work, Ori does not appear here but higher up in the list, immediately following Bömburr and Nori in stanza 11, where it replaces the name Án. Similarly, in two manuscripts of Snorri’s version Ái (cf. the last line of stanza 11) is replaced by Oin. See Dronke, textual notes, pages 92 and 90.
7 With the possible exception of Balin, unless we accept this as Tolkien’s own variant, unattested in the manuscript tradition, of Blain, as I have suggested on page 24.
Appendix IV Tolkien’s Correspondence with Arthur Ransome
1 ‘No one ever influenced Tolkien – you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch’ (CSL to Charles Moorman, 15th May 1959; Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper [1988], page 481). However, not only did Tolkien change the wording in The Lord of the Rings at one point when Rhona Beare questioned the implications of one phrase (see Letters pp. 277 & 279), but Lewis himself had a significant impact on ‘The Lay of Leithian’ (see HME III.315–329). Perhaps significantly, Tolkien tended not to adopt Lewis’s suggestions but instead recast passages that Lewis had criticized. It seems fair to conclude, therefore, that he gladly corrected errors brought to his attention but often changed things in his own way rather than directly accepting others’ suggestions.
2 For more on Ransome and ‘Ric’ (Eric Rucker) Eddison, see Ransome’s autobiography (The Autobiography of Arthur Ransome, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis [1976], pages 37–40) and also the biography by Hugh Brogan† (The Life of Arthur Ransome [1984], pages 10–11). Tolkien admired Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros [1922] (except for the nomenclature, which is markedly eccentric), but strongly objected to the philosophy behind Eddison’s later ‘Zimiamvian’ books (Mistress of Mistresses [1935], A Fish Dinner in Memison [1941], and the unfinished The Mezentian Gate [1958]) – cf. JRRT to Caroline Whitman Everett, letter of 24th June 1957; Letters p. 258. Tolkien and Eddison actually met at least twice when ERE attended Inklings meetings at Lewis’s invitation in 1943 and 1944, at which he read from his later works.
† Brogan himself was a correspondent of JRRT when young; see Letters pp. 129, 131, 132, 185–186, 224, 225–226, & 230.
3 The books in the ‘Swallows and Amazons’ series are as follows: #1. Swallows and Amazons [1930], #2. Swallowdale [1931], #3. Peter Duck [1932], #4. Winter Holiday [1933], #5. Coot Club [1934], #6. Pigeon Post [1936], #7. We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea [1937], #8. Secret Water [1939], #9. The Big Sic [1940], #10. Missee Lee [1941], #11. The Picts and the Martyrs [1943], #12. Great Northern? [1947], #13. Coots in the North [unfinished; posthumously publ. 1988].
4 Subsequent Carnegie medal winners include such famous books as Mary Norton’s The Borrowers [1952], C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle [1956], Richard Adams’ Watership Down [1972], and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Book I: Northern Lights [1995].†
† This last is better known in the United States as The Golden Compass.
5 See Ransome’s autobiography, pages 268–269, and also Unwin’s autobiography, The Truth About a Publisher [1960], pages 165–166, for the two men’s perspectives.
6 I have taken the text of this letter from a tengwar inscription Tolkien made [Ad.Ms.H.6]. In addition to being very lightly punctuated, the tengwar copy differs in some details from the text published in Ransome’s collected letters (Signalling from Mars: The Letters of Arthur Ransome, ed. Hugh Brogan [1997], pp. 249–250). For example, Brogan prints ‘excitable hobbit’, ‘no doubt right’, ‘Thorin is surely misinterpreted’, and ‘the chronicle’. I am grateful to Arden Smith for his aid in translating Tolkien’s beautiful tengwar calligraphy back into English letters.
7 The following text is a composite: the first half of Tolkien’s letter I have taken from another tengwar transcription by Tolkien himself [Ad.Ms.H.7], while the second half comes from Ransome’s collected letters; see Note 10 below. Once again I am grateful to Arden Smith for his timely aid.
8 Men rather than children: John Tolkien was now twenty years old, and Michael seventeen. Confirmation of Tolkien’s statement that the ‘Swallows and Amazons’ books were popular in the Tolkien household and that his sons retained their Ransomes even after they were grown was discovered by researcher Lyn Mellone in the summer of 2006. According to her posting on TarBoard, the online Arthur Ransome discussion board (http://www.tarboard.net/tarboard/messages/23986.htm), Adam Tolkien, Christopher’s younger son, responded to her queries by affirming the popularity of the books among Tolkien’s children, stating that not only did ‘Christopher [recall] specifically Swallows and Amazons and Missee Lee’ – which, as Mellone notes, was published four years after The Hobbit and thus testifies to continued interest on their part – but that he had in turn passed them along to his own son, Adam, who had enjoyed them very much in his turn.
9 Here Tolkien accidentally wrote ‘212’ in his tengwar transcription, but the passage in question actually occurs on p. 112 of the first edition; Brogan gives the citation correctly (Signalling from Mars p. 250).
10 At this point, Tolkien’s tengwar transcription ends, at the bottom of a page [Ad.Ms.H.7], the verso of which [Ad.Ms.H.6] is covered by his transcription of Ransome’s letter to him (see above). If Tolkien continued his transcription, it was on a separate sheet of paper which has since become lost. Accordingly, from this point onwards I take the text from Brogan’s edition of Ransome’s letters, Signalling from Mars pp. 250–251.
As before, the tengwar text differs slightly from that published in Ransome’s collected letters – e.g., ‘could expect’ there becomes ‘could have expected’, ‘so close an acquaintance with’ becomes ‘so close a scrutiny of’, and ‘will go up’ becomes ‘would go up’. More importantly, the transcription includes a passage omitted from the published text (the line ‘You tempt me grievously’ through ‘of such import’), in which Tolkien briefly places ‘the history of the hobbit’ into context with that of ‘the world into which Mr. Baggins strayed’ – i.e., that of the Silmarillion texts.
11 Ransome’s operation: he had undergone surgery for a hernia (Brogan, Signalling from Mars, page 249). The ‘nursing home’ in which he was staying, by the way, was not a euphemism for an old folks’ home but rather a convalescent home for those recovering from long-term illness or major surgery.
12 See Mellone’s account, detailing each annotation, at the online Ransome discussion list TarBoard, specifically ‘http://www.tarboard.net/tarboard/messages/23986.htm. I am also grateful to her for reading and critiquing this Appendix.’