I now give the ‘little bird’ outline, or Plot Notes E, the final piece of text unambiguously associated with the Second Phase storyline. In these hasty jottings we see how the events of the next chapter would have unfurled had the Second Phase text not been abandoned.

Plot Notes E
‘Little Bird’

Raven tells of 2 or 3 ponies still alive. Offers also to <assemble> <their> folk^TN1 and bring food from far and wide.

Fili and Kili go off to catch ponies: Others go into Mountain. Great <labours> day and night at the great door. Bilbo keeps watch on Ravenhill.

The birds bring news of approach of the men of lake and the Elvenking and the <joining> of the host with that of <?men> host of the Elves. Fili and Kili have not come back they are pursued by warriors

The dwarves gather weapons and a store of arrows to the G.D.^TN2 which is now blocked with stones <with crevices> for shooting from. The opening on Ravenhill is guarded by Dori & Nori.^TN3

Three days later Kili [rides up >] comes to the G.D. & begs for admitance. Their horses were shot under them but they have laid all the stores they could carry near the foot of the great spur, but as they climbed the hillside Fili was wounded & captured.^TN4 The host is already at the foot of the mountain.

Each of the ravens fly bringing meat and bread. But that night the dwarves steal out and recover the <bags>. The camp fires start up in the <ruins> of Dale.

The parley at the Gates. Thorin’s scornful words. He will give nothing to demand. What got they out of the last K.u.M?^TN5 The Elvenking on behalf of the Lake men demands payment <for/from> <illegible> of Smaug, the destruction of the town, all <?slain>. Thorin says first remove your menace from my <?palace>. Stores run low for the elves shoot at the ravens.

There seems little doubt that these hastily scribbled words comprise Tolkien’s final work on the Second Phase, differing greatly as they do from the events as they would appear in the actual written texts of the chapters that followed. At this point, he probably thought that no more than two or three chapters would be needed to complete the story: one to resolve events at the Mountain, a second to cover the Battle of Anduin Vale (see page 713) on the return journey, and a third to see Bilbo safely home afterwards. And it must be stressed that in one sense he was right. Even with the folding together of the projected ‘Battle of the Anduin Vale’ with the Siege of the Mountain and the greater complexity and added complications that Bard’s legitimate claim on the treasure and Thorin’s succumbing to dragon-sickness would bring in the Third Phase text, Tolkien here has come within forty-five pages of the end,^TN6 and nearly half of the book’s earlier chapters had reached twenty pages or more.^TN7 In the final book the remaining material would be divided into five chapters (out of the book’s total of nineteen), making it seem at first glance that Tolkien abandoned the book less than three-quarters of the way through. But this does not take into account the extreme brevity of these closing chapters, three of which are among the shortest in the book. If we go by page count, then, Tolkien was more than five-sixths of the way through the story when he broke off, not abandoning the book as Carpenter claimed but instead going back to the beginning and embarking on the creation of the First Typescript.

TEXT NOTES

1 By offering to assemble their folk, Roäc does not mean the dwarves but ravens; neither Plot Notes B/C/D nor E contain any reference to Dain, who had not yet been invented, and no dwarven army was to march to their relief.

2 That is, the Great Door, usually referred to as the ‘Front Gate’.

3 Since it seems unlikely that any dwarves would be posted where they would be cut off from their fellows once the valley was occupied, the idea of a tunnel leading from within the guard-post back into the dwarven city behind the Front Gate, suggested in Chapter XIV, must still be present.

4 The first seven words of this sentence were cancelled.

5 Here Thorin seems to be referring to Smaug, not Thror; cf. the surly watchman’s words in Chapter XIII (pp. 547–8). This is surprising, both for the threat implied and for its recognition of Smaug’s suzerainty – not to mention unwise, since he is speaking to survivors of Smaug’s attack who have all too much reason to blame him for their sufferings. Thorin’s refusal to hand over his family treasures to an angry mob or to negotiate at swords-point is in itself an admirable display of courage. Even though with hindsight provided by Third Phase developments we might see his ‘scornful’ reply to the massed army outside his gate as the first signs of dragon-sickness, within the context of the Second Phase story it is entirely in keeping with the heroic saga tradition.

6 That is, near the bottom of page 265 of the first edition, which had 310 pages.

7 In order to better see just how variable the chapter lengths are in the book, and how the longer chapters tend to cluster in the earlier half, the following chart lists all the chapters in order from longest to shortest, given the pagination of the first edition. I have used a copy of the third (wartime) printing from 1942 [cf. Hammond, Descriptive Bibliography, page 16] to determine these figures, which lacks the ‘Mirkwood’ halftone and colour plates (none of which were included in the original pagination in any case).