The 1947 Hobbit

The 1947 Hobbit – that is, the material Tolkien created around 1944 while working on The Lord of the Rings and sent to Allen & Unwin in 1947 as a way to bring the earlier book into harmony with its sequel – marks the first of a sequence of revisionings that led first to the second edition of The Hobbit [1951], then to ‘The Quest of Erebor’ [1954], and then finally to the 1960 Hobbit (the never-before published Fifth Phase). The first of these made adjustments within the original book to make it better match the sequel, the second retold a small portion of Bilbo’s story within the new book (or would have, had it been published as part of Appendix A as Tolkien originally intended), while the third re-envisioned a complete recasting of the old book to agree with the new in minute detail. Unlike these three, the ‘third edition’ Hobbit of 1966 was imposed upon him by outside circumstance (that is, the need to quickly produce an ‘authorized’ edition to belatedly assert the American copyright); by contrast, the others had all arisen from Tolkien’s internal compulsion to bring the old story of Bilbo’s adventure more strongly into accord with the new one of Frodo’s quest.

The Fourth Phase material exists in three states: ten sheets of fair copy manuscript numbered 1 to 10 in the upper right corner (Ad.Ms.H.34–53),^TN1 followed by six pages of single-spaced typescript numbered 1 through 6 in the upper right corner (Ad.Ms.H.77–82), followed by eight typeset sheets (sixteen pages) from Allen & Unwin showing how the new material looked when typeset and allowing Tolkien to proofread the changes (Ad.Ms.H.54–61). The first of these dates from 1944; the second either from 1944 or 1947; the third from 1950. They represent, respectively, Tolkien’s manuscript of the rewritten passages; his ‘home copy’ of the typescript of this material that he sent to Allen & Unwin; and Allen & Unwin’s page proofs of the changed sections returned to Tolkien for proofing.

Aside from a few ink-over-pencil additions, no drafting survives for these changes, though the fair copy text is far too neatly written to have been spontaneously generated without careful preparation – for one thing, as was his usual practice when revising material already set in type, Tolkien has taken great pains to keep many of his changes as localized as possible, so that only that specific line or lines would have to be re-set without affecting the rest of the page (and thus upsetting the layout of every subsequent page). Although the greatly expanded encounter with Gollum did add five extra pages to the book’s length, it added exactly five pages, so that for instance where page 99 in the first edition began with the words ‘“You would have dropped him,” said Dori’, page 104 in the second edition now began with those exact words; everything from the beginning of Chapter VI on has simply shifted five pages.

All Tolkien’s substitutions are preceded by a page and line number indicating exactly where each correction should be inserted into the existing (first edition) text. I have retained these, since even for those without access to a copy of the first or second edition they give a proportional sense of where a passage may be found. In any case, it should be easy for anyone familiar with Tolkien’s book in any of its permutations to locate these passages. Since this material transforms what was already an impressive chapter into one of the most moving and memorable scenes Tolkien ever wrote, I have provided unusually full annotation for this section, giving variations between the fair copy and the typescript (and proof pages) in the Text Notes, aside from changes in punctuation or paragraph breaks.

The fair copy page has no title, but in the left margin of the first page (Ad.Ms.H.34) Tolkien has hastily written in pencil:

(i)
Proposed correction of Hobbit to simplify Sequel (Gollum does not give ring).

The typescript (Ad.Ms.H.77) has the following header instead:

Corrections required in THE HOBBIT in order to bring the story into line with the sequel, THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

Above this is written in ink:

or rather if The Hobbit ran so the Sequel would be a little easier to <conduct> as a narrative (in Ch II), though not necessarily ‘truer’.

p. 85 1. 9. Before he lost all his friends and was driven away, alone, and crept down, down into the dark under the mountains.^TN2

p. 91 l. [14>]15ff.^TN4 He knew, of course, that the riddle-game was sacred and of immense antiquity, and even wicked creatures were afraid to cheat when they played at it. But he felt [cancelled: that] he could not trust this slimy thing to keep any promise at a pinch. Any excuse would do for him to slide out of it. And after all that last question had not been a genuine riddle according to the ancient rules.^TN5

But at any rate Gollum did not at once attack him. He could see the sword in Bilbo’s hand. He sat still, shivering and whispering. At last Bilbo could wait no longer.

‘Well?’ he said. ‘What about your promise? I want to go. You must show me the way’.

‘Did we say so, precious? Show the nasty little [noser >] baggins^TN6 the way out, yes, yes. But what has it got in its pocketses, eh? Not string, precious, but not nothing. Oh no! gollum’.

‘Never you mind’, said Bilbo. ‘A promise is a promise’.

‘Cross it is, precious, impatient’,^TN7 hissed Gollum. ‘But it must wait, yes it must. We can’t go up the tunnels so hasty. We must go and get some things first, yes, things to help us’.

‘Well, hurry up!’ said Bilbo, relieved to think of Gollum going away. He thought he was just making an excuse, and did not mean to come back. What was Gollum talking about? What useful thing could he keep out on the dark lake? But he was wrong. Gollum did meant to come back. He was angry now and hungry. And he was a miserable wicked creature, and already he had a plan.^TN8

Not far away was his island, of which Bilbo knew nothing, and there in his hiding-place he kept a few wretched oddments, and one very beautiful thing, very beautiful, very wonderful. He had a ring, a golden ring, a precious ring.

‘My birthday-present!’ he whispered to himself, as he had often done in the endless dark day.^TN9 ‘That’s what we wants now, yes; we wants it!’

He wanted it because it was a ring of power, and if you slipped [it >] that ring on your finger, you were invisible; only in the full sunlight could you be seen, and then only by your shadow, and that would be faint and shaky.^TN10

[Who knows >] ‘My birthday-present’ he whispered;^TN11 but who knows how Gollum came by that present, ages ago in the old days when such rings were still at large in the world. Perhaps even the Necromancer [> Master]^TN12 who made them could not have said. Gollum used to wear it at first, till it tired him; and then he kept it in a pouch next his skin, till it galled him; and now usually he hid it in a hole in the rock on his island, and went back [> was always going back] to look at it. And still sometimes he put it on, when he could not bear to be parted from it any longer, or when he was very, very, hungry, and tired of fish. Then he would creep along dark passages, looking for stray goblins. He might even venture into places where the torches were lit and made his eyes blink and smart; for he would be safe, oh yes, quite safe. No one would see him, no one would notice him, till he had his fingers on their throat. Only yesterday [> a few hours before]^TN13 he had worn it, and caught a small goblin-imp. How it squeaked! He still had a bone or two left to gnaw, but he wanted something softer.

‘Quite safe, yes’, he whispered [added: to himself]. ‘It won’t see us, will it my precious? No! It won’t see us, and its nassty little sword will be useless, yes quite’^TN14

That is what was in his wicked little mind, as he slipped suddenly from Bilbo’s side, and flapped back to his boat, and went off into the dark.

Bilbo thought he had heard the last of him, and he <felt in his bones ?that> Gollum did not meant to keep his promise.^TN15 Still he waited [added: a while;] for he had no idea how to find his way out alone. Suddenly he heard a screech. It sent a shiver down his back. Gollum was cursing and wailing away in the gloom, not very far off by the sound of it. He was on his island, scrabbling here and there, searching and seeking in vain.

‘Where iss it? Where iss it?’^TN16 Bilbo heard him crying. ‘Lost it is, my precious, lost, lost! Curse us, and crush us, my precious is lost!’

‘What’s the matter’, Bilbo called. ‘What have you lost?’

‘It mustn’t ask us’, [screech >] shrieked Gollum. ‘Not its business, no, gollum. It’s lost,^TN17 gollum, gollum, gollum’.

‘Well, so am I’, said [> cried] Bilbo, ‘and I want to get unlost. And I won the game, and you promised. So come along! Come and let me out, and then go on with your looking!’ Utterly miserable as Gollum sounded, Bilbo could not find much pity in his heart, and he had a feeling that anything Gollum wanted so much [cancelled: and missed so badly] could hardly be something good [cancelled: – for Gollum at any rate].^TN18 ‘Come along!’ he shouted.

‘No, not yet, precious!’ said Gollum [> Gollum answered]. ‘We must search for it, it’s lost, gollum’.

‘But you [promised >] never guessed my last question, and you promised’, said Bilbo.

‘Never guessed!’ said Gollum. Then suddenly out of the gloom came a sharp hiss. ‘What has it got in its pocketses? Tell us that. It must tell us first’.^TN19

As far as Bilbo knew, there was no particular reason why he should not tell – Gollum’s mind had jumped to a guess quicker than his: naturally, for Gollum had brooded on one thing for ages, and he was always afraid of it being stolen.^TN20 But Bilbo was annoyed at the delay; after all he had won the game, pretty fairly, and among awkward circumstances [> at a horrible risk]. ‘Answers were to be guessed not given’, he said.

‘But it wasn’t a fair question’, said Gollum. ‘Not a riddle, precious, no!’

‘Oh well, if it’s a matter of ordinary questions’ Bilbo replied, ‘then I asked one first. What have you lost? Tell me that!’

‘What has it got in its pocketses?’ The sound came hissing loud and sharp [> louder and sharper], and as he looked towards it, to his alarm Bilbo saw now [> now saw] two small points of light peering at him. As suspicion grew in Gollum’s mind, the light of his eyes burned with a pale flame.

‘What have you lost?’ Bilbo persisted.

But now the light in Gollum’s eyes had become a green fire, and it was coming swiftly nearer. Gollum was in his boat again, paddling wildly back to the dark shore; and such a rage [in his heart that >] of fear and suspicion in his heart^TN21 that no sword held any more terror for him.

Bilbo could not guess what had excited the wretched creature <so madly>, but he saw that all was up, and that Gollum had forgotten all promises.^TN22 Just in time he turned and ran blindly back up the [added: dark] passage down which he had come, keeping close to the wall and feeling it with his left hand.

‘What has it got in its pocketses?’ he heard the hiss loud behind him, and the splash as Gollum leaped from his boat.^TN23

‘What have I, I wonder?’ he said to himself, as he panted and stumbled along. He put his [added: left] hand in his pocket. The ring felt very cold as it [added: quietly] slipped on to his groping forefinger.^TN24

The hiss was close behind him. He turned and saw Gollum’s eyes like small green lamps coming up the slope. Terrified he tried to run faster, but suddenly he struck his toes on a snag in the floor and fell flat, with his little sword under him.

At that moment Gollum came up. But before Bilbo could do anything shout, pick himself up, wave his sword, Gollum passed on, taking no notice of him, cursing and whispering in the dark.^TN25

What could it mean? Gollum could see in the dark. Bilbo could see the light of eyes palely shining even from behind. Painfully he got up,^TN26 and very cautiously he followed. There seemed nothing else to do. It was no good crawling back down to Gollum’s water. Perhaps, if he followed him, Gollum might lead him to some way of escape without meaning to.

‘Curse it, curse it, curse it!’ hissed Gollum. ‘Curse it [> the Baggins]! It’s gone! What has it got in its pocketses? Oh we guess[es], we guess, my precious.^TN27 He’s found it, yes he must have, my birthday-present.

Bilbo pricked up his ears. [This was so interesting >] He was [added: at last] beginning to guess himself. He hurried a little, getting as close as he dared behind Gollum, who was still going quickly, not looking back, but turning his head from side to side, as Bilbo could see from the faint glimmer on the walls.

‘My birthday-present! Curse it! How did we lose it, my precious? Yes, that’s it, when we came this way yesterday^TN28 catching that nassty little squeaker. That’s it. Curse it. It slipped from us, after all these ages and ages. It’s gone, gollum!

Suddenly Gollum sat down and began to weep, a <horrible> wheezing and gurgling sound [> a whistling and gurgling sound horrible to listen to]. Bilbo halted, and flattened himself against the tunnel-wall; and hid his sword, which was now glowing faintly again.^TN29 [Then Gollum began to curse >] After a while Gollum stopped weeping and began to talk. He seemed to be having an argument with himself.

‘It’s no good going back there to search, no. We can’t [> doesn’t] remember all the places we’ve visited. And it’s no use. It’s [> The baggins has] got it in its pocketses; the nassty noser has, we says [> the nassty noser has found it].’

‘We guesses, precious, only guesses. We can’t know till we finds the nasty creature and squeezes it.’

‘But if it’s got in its <?pocketses>, we shan’t find it, we shan’t see it. It’ll escape us, gollum! It’ll go away, away with our present, gollum!’

‘Perhaps, precious. But it doesn’t know about the present.^TN30 It doesn’t know what the present can do, does it! It’ll just leave^TN31 it in its pocketses. It doesn’t know; and it can’t go far – it’s losst itself, the nassty nosey thing. It doesn’t know the way out. It said so.’

‘It said so, yes; but it’s tricksy. It doesn’t say what it means. It won’t say what it’s got in its pocketses. It knows. It’s off now, we guess, to the back-door, yes to the back door.’^TN32

‘The goblins[es] will catch it then. It can’t get out that way, precious.’

‘Sss, sss, gollum! [added in pencil: Goblinses!] Yes, but if it’s got the present, our precious present, then goblins[es] will get it, gollum! They’ll find it, they’ll find out what it does. We shan’t ever be safe again, never, gollum. One of the goblins[es] will put it on, and [then] no one will see him. He’ll be there but not seen. Not even our clever eyeses will notice him; and he’ll [creep >] come creepsy and tricksy and catch us: Gollum, gollum!’

‘Then let’s stop talking, precious, and make haste. If <illegible> [> the baggins has] gone that way we must go quick and see. Go! Not far now. Make haste!’

With a spring Gollum got up and started shambling off at a great pace. Bilbo hurried after him, still as cautiously as he could [> cautiously], though his chief fear now was of tripping on another snag and falling with a noise. His head was in a whirl of hope and wonder. It seemed that the ring he had was a magic ring: it made you invisible! He had heard of such things, of course, in old old tales; but he found it hard to believe [> it was hard to believe] that he really had found one, by accident. Still, there it was: Gollum with his bright eyes had passed him by, only a yard to one side.

On they went, Gollum flip-flapping ahead, wailing [> hissing] and cursing; Bilbo behind going as softly as a hobbit can. Soon they came to places where, as Bilbo had noticed on the way down, [added: side-] passages opened, this way and that. Gollum began at once to count them.

‘One left, yes! One right, yes! Two left, yes, yes! Two right, yes, yes’;^TN33 and so on and on. As the count grew, [he began before <looking> to get slow >] he slowed down, and he began to get shaky and weepy. For they were [> he was] leaving the water further and further behind, and he was getting afraid. Goblins were [> might be] about, and he had lost his ring.

At last he stopped by a low opening, on their left as they went up. ‘Six [> Seven] right, yes; four [> six] left, yes!’^TN34 he whispered. ‘[That’s it >] This is it. This is the way to the back door, yes. Here’s the passage. [added: He peered in and shrank back] But we dursn’t go in, precious; no we dursn’t. Goblins[es] down there, lots of goblins [> Goblinses]! We smells them – sss!’

‘What shall we do, curse them and crush them? We must wait here precious, wait a bit and see!’^TN35

So they came to a dead stop. Gollum had brought Bilbo to the way out after all, but he [> Bilbo] could not get in! There was Gollum sitting humped up right in the opening, and his eyes gleamed cold in his head, as he swayed it from side to side between his knees.

Bilbo crept out from the wall more quietly than a mouse; but Gollum stiffened at once, and he sniffed; and his eyes went green. He hissed softly but menacingly. He could not see the hobbit, but other senses he had, sharpened too by the darkness: hearing and smell. Now he seemed to be crouched right down with his flat hands splayed on the floor [added: and his head thrust out, nose almost to the stone]. Though he was only a black shadow in the gleam of his own eyes, Bilbo could see or feel that he was tense as a bow string, gathered for a spring.^TN36

Bilbo stopped breathing and went stiff himself. He was desperate. He must get away, out of this horrible darkness, while he had any strength left. Thoughts flashed through his mind. He must fight. He must stab Gollum, kill the foul orc-<illegible>,^TN37 put his eyes out, kill him. It meant to kill him. But no, not a fair fight. He was invisible now. Gollum had no sword. Gollum had not actually tried to kill him yet. And he was miserable, alone, lost. A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo’s heart; a glimpse of endless unmarked days [of >] without light, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering. He trembled. All this passed in his mind in a flash of a second. And then quite suddenly in another flash, as if lifted by a sudden strength and resolve, he leaped.^TN38

No great leap perhaps for a man, but a leap in the dark. Straight over Gollum’s head he sprang [> jumped], about seven feet forward and three in the air: indeed he only just missed cracking his skull, had he known it, on the low arch of the passage.^TN39

Gollum threw himself backwards and <grabbed> as the hobbit fled^TN40 over, but too late: his hands snapped on thin air, and Bilbo falling fair on his sturdy feet sped off down the new passage [> tunnel]. He did not turn to see what Gollum was doing. There was a hissing and a cursing almost at his heels at first, then it stopped. Suddenly [> All at once] there was [> came] a bloodcurdling shriek, filled with hatred and despair. Gollum was beaten [> defeated]. He dared go no further. He had lost: lost his prey, and lost too the only thing he had ever cared for: his precious. The cry brought Bilbo’s heart to his mouth, but still he held on. Now faint like [> as] an echo, but menacing the voice came behind:

‘Thief, thief, thief! [added: baggins!] We hates it, we hates it, we hates it for ever.’^TN41

Then there was a silence. But that too seemed menacing to Bilbo. ‘If Goblins are so near that he smelt them’ he thought, ‘then they’ll have heard his shrieking and cursing. Careful now, or this will [> this way will] lead you to worse things’. The passage was low and roughly made. It was not too difficult for the hobbit, except when in spite of all care he stubbed his poor toes [once again >] again, several times, on nasty jagged stones [cancelled: in the floor, but it must have been a bit too low for goblins.] ‘A bit low for goblins, at least for the big ones’, thought Bilbo, not knowing that even the big ones, the orcs of the mountains, are used to that sort of thing [> go along at great speed stooping low with their hands almost on the floor].^TN42

Soon the passage, that had been sloping down, began to go up again, and after a while it climbed steeply. That slowed Bilbo down. But at last the slope stopped, the passage turned a corner, and dipped down again, and there at the bottom of a short incline he saw, filtering round another corner – a glimmer of light. Not red light as of fire or lantern, but [a] pale ordinary out-of-doors sort of light. Then he began to run. Scuttling along as fast as his legs would carry him he turned the last corner and came suddenly right into an open place, where the light, after all that time in the dark, seemed dazzlingly bright. Really it was only a leak of sunshine in through a doorway, where a great door, a stone door, was left standing a little open.^TN43

Bilbo blinked, and then suddenly he saw the goblins: goblins in full armour with drawn swords sitting just inside the door, and watching it with wide eyes, and watching the passage that led to it. They were aroused, alert, ready for anything.

They saw him sooner than he saw them. Yes they saw him. Whether it was an accident or a last trick of the ring before it took a new master, it was not on his finger! With yells of delight the goblins rushed upon him.^TN44

A pang of fear and loss, like an echo of Gollum’s,^TN45 smote Bilbo, and forgetting even to draw his sword he stuck his hand[s] in his pocket[s], And there was the ring still, in his left pocket, and it slipped on his finger. The goblins stopped short. They could not see a sign of him. [The >] He had vanished! They yelled twice as loud as before, but not so delightedly.

p.100 l.14 in three goes.] So I said what about your promise? Show me the way out! But he came at me to kill me, and I ran [added: & fell over] and he missed me in the dark. Then I followed him, because I heard him talking to himself. He thought I really knew the way out, and so he was making for it. And then he sat down in the entrance and I couldn’t get by. So I jumped over him and escaped, and ran on down to the gate.^TN46

p.101 l.6 from bottom Gandalf knew all about] the back-door as the goblins called the lower gate [where Bilbo

TEXT NOTES

1 These pages are neatly written with a minimum of cancellations and revisions (at least until the last three paragraphs, which are ink over pencil drafting and seem to have been added slightly later; see Text Note 46 below). They are written on the back of torn half-pages that were once mimeographs detailing the language of the C-scribe of The Owl and the Nightingale; Christopher Tolkien notes that this paper was ‘extensively used in the later chapters of The Two Towers’ [annotation to Ad.Ms.H.34]. He also points out, in his introduction to The Notion Club Papers, that his father borrowed the name ‘Nicholas Guildford’ for one of the prominent members of the pseudo-Inklings ‘Notion Club’ from a character in this early Middle English dialogue [circa 1200] (HME IX.150).

2 This replaced ‘before the goblins came, and he was cut off from his friends far under under the mountains’ <sic>, the reading of the first edition.

3 In the typescript, ‘If it asks us, and we doesn’t answer, then we does what it wants, eh? We shows it the way out, yes!’ replaces ‘If it asks us, and we doesn’t answer, we gives it a present, gollum!’ from the first edition.

4 The typescript introduces this extended passage with ‘For the passage from page 91, l. 15 beginning But funnily enough and ending with not so delightedly on page 95, l. 8 substitute the following account’. For the text thus replaced, see page 160 & ff of this book, the parallel-text presentation in Bonniejean Christensen’s ‘Gollum’s Character Transformation in The Hobbit’ in A Tolkien Compass, ed. Jared Lobdell [1975, abridged edition 2003], and the textual marginalia in Douglas Anderson’s The Annotated Hobbit (rev. ed.) pages 128–31.

5 The typescript replaces ‘the ancient rules’ with ‘the ancient laws’.

6 Here and on all but one subsequent occurrences the word ‘baggins’ was written in lowercase in the manuscript but was carefully hand-corrected to ‘Baggins’ in ink in the typescript; only in Gollum’s parting curse was it typed ‘Baggins’ from the start.

7 The words ‘cross’ and ‘impatient’ were reversed in the typescript.

8 This passage originally read

9 The typescript reads ‘endless dark days’; the original image perhaps more strongly captured the horrific eternal present in which the unaging Gollum has become trapped by the Ring.

10 Here ‘faint and shaky’ was changed to ‘shaky and faint’. The idea that the ring-wearer’s shadow can be seen in strong light is still present in the second and subsequent editions of The Hobbit, although this feature of the Ring came to be altogether ignored in The Lord of the Rings.

11 The opening of this paragraph was recast and supplemented by ink over pencil drafting in the margin to read

12 Although heavily cancelled the word ‘Necromancer’ is clear here, but was struck out at once and replaced with ‘Master’. The typescript includes a second significant change, where made is erased and replaced in ink with ruled. So that instead of ‘the Necromancer [> Master] who made them’ we get ‘the Master who ruled them’. Had the original name survived it would have been the only time in The Hobbit that a specific connection would have been drawn between the sinister Necromancer in his tower and Gollum’s ring. Even the replacement offers a subtle link between the two books, since ‘the Master who ruled them’ is a close synonym of the second book’s title, ‘the lord of the rings’.

13 This is further changed in ink on the typescript to ‘a few hours ago’. The removal of ‘yesterday’ was necessitated by the fact that there was no way of keeping track of the passage of days in the dark beneath the mountains; cf. the ‘endless unmarked days’ on page 738. See also Text Note 28 below.

The ‘small goblin-imp’ captured, throttled, and eaten by Gollum is probably our only encounter in the legendarium with an orc-child. Again, see Text Note 28 for Tolkien’s description of it as not just ‘little’ but ‘young’.

14 There are no skipped lines, such as the one following this paragraph, in the manuscript; all the ones in this chapter I have taken from the typescript, none of which carry over into Allen & Unwin’s page proofs.

15 The last half of this sentence, everything after ‘the last of him,’ was bracketed and then cancelled.

16 In the typescript, the extra sibilant is absent from the first ‘iss’ but an additional one appears in the first ‘Lost’, so that the line now reads ‘Where is it? Where iss it? . . . Losst it is, my precious . . .’ (emphasis mine).

17 Again, the typescript changes ‘lost’ to ‘losst’.

18 This sentence was revised to read ‘anything Gollum wanted so much could hardly be something good.’

19 This last sentence was slightly simplified in the typescript, to ‘It must tell first’.

20 This sentence was only achieved after three attempts. Originally Tolkien wrote:

Then he stopped, cancelled everything between the dashes, and continued:

Then again everything after ‘quicker than’ was cancelled, and the text given on page 735 written in the left margin. The typescript, along with some adjustments in punctuation and capitalization, changes the wording and arrangement slightly:

21 This sentence was later altered to read ‘. . . such a rage of loss and suspicion was in his heart . . .’. The replacement of Gollum’s first instinctive response of fear by the more covetous loss is in ink over pencil.

22 This sentence was changed to read ‘Bilbo could not guess what had maddened the wretched creature, but he saw that all was up, and that Gollum meant to murder him after all.’

23 The typescript changes leaped to leapt here, but ‘leaped’ was retained on Ad.Ms.H.48 (Ms) and Ad.Ms.H.81 (Ts). See page 738: ‘as if lifted by a new strength and resolve, he leaped’, and contrast DAA.130 (‘Gollum leapt from his boat’) with DAA.133 (‘[Bilbo] leaped. No great leap for a man . . .’).

24 Both of these changes are made in ink over pencil. The phrasing of this sentence is thematically significant: Bilbo does not put on the ring (subject-active verb-object) nor is a passive construction used but rather it slips on his finger (again subject-active verb-object, but with the Ring being the actor and Bilbo the acted upon). See Text Note 44 below.

25 This paragraph was revised in pencil, some of which was overwritten in ink:

The typescript refines the phrasing slightly:

26 Later Tolkien added in the margin ‘and sheathed his sword <which>’, then canceled it. This is clearly drafting for the passage that appears in pencil in the left margin of the corresponding page of typescript, which changes the passage to read ‘Painfully he got up, and sheathed his sword, which was now glowing faintly again. Then very cautiously he followed . . .’

Originally this action had occurred several paragraphs later; see page 736 and Text Note 29.

27 The change from ‘guess’ to ‘guesses’ was not taken up in the typescript and does not appear in the published second edition. The change from ‘Curse it!’ to ‘Curse the Baggins’ is added above the line in ink over pencil.

28 This ‘yesterday’ escaped Tolkien’s attention (see Text Note 13 above) and thus made its way into the typescript and then the page proofs, where it was corrected to read ‘When we came this way last, when we twisted that nassty young squeaker’ (Ad.Ms.H.56). On the bottom of this page Tolkien explained:

This last is a reference to ‘endless unmarked days without light’; see page 738 above.

29 The typescript has ‘sheathed his sword’ rather than the manuscript’s ‘hid his sword’, then all of the sentence after ‘the tunnel wall’ is cancelled (in ink) and the passage entered (in pencil) several paragraphs earlier; see Text Note 26. The original idea that Bilbo kept his sword in hand while following the person who is trying to kill him presents the hobbit as wary in a desperate situation; the revision lays more stress on his wishing to move silently and undetected in dangerous circumstances.

30 These sentences were altered to read

These lines were then bracketed and the word ‘omit’ written beside them; these sentences are indeed absent from the typescript, which merges the rest of this paragraph with the one preceding it (‘. . . and squeezes it. But it doesn’t know what the present can do . . .’).

31 The word I read as ‘leave’ here might also be ‘have’ (‘It’ll just have it in its pocketses’); at any rate, over it Tolkien pencilled ‘keep’, and this became the reading in the typescript.

In a rare case of a dropped sibilant, the typescript and proof read ‘lost’ for the ‘losst’ in the following sentence.

32 Changed to ‘It knows. It knows a way in, it must know a way out, yes. It’s off to the back-door, yes to the back door, that’s it.’

33 The typescript reverses this: ‘Two right, yes, yes. Two left, yes’, probably to avoid the impression that the tunnels fall into a neat unvarying pattern of right, left, right, left, &c.

34 This sentence was changed to read ‘Seven right, yes; six left, yes!’

35 On the typescript, Tolkien marked for these two sentences to be transposed. This direction was not carried out for some reason, for they appear in the original order in the page proofs. He seems to have begun to mark the proof page in pencil requesting this change and then erased his directions.

36 This paragraph was revised, both in ink and pencil, to read

37 I cannot read this cancelled word, but it lacks a descender at the end and thus is not orc-thing; orc-hun[ter] is more probable. The typescript (Ad.Ms.H.81) replaces this with the familiar ‘. . . He must stab the foul thing, put its eyes out’.

38 This paragraph was carefully revised, and since it is perhaps the most important in the book from the point of view of the sequel – certainly, at least, the key passage in the second edition revisions – I reproduce the whole paragraph as revised here for comparison with the original in the text.

The typescript again revises this slightly but significantly (‘. . . almost stopped breathing . . . No, not a fair fight . . . had not actually threatened to kill him, or tried to yet . . . without light or hope of betterment . . .’), achieving the text of the published second edition (see DAA.133).

Bilbo’s sudden insight into Gollum’s inner life here is on par with the unwitnessed moment outside Shelob’s lair when Gollum briefly appears as ‘an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing’ (LotR.742) – not surprisingly, because both were written at about the same time (cf. HME VIII.183–184, when Christopher dates this chapter in The Lord of the Rings to May 1944).^† Most significant here is the change in the original of his, he to its, it when Bilbo is preparing to kill ‘It’, literally depersonalizing his intended victim, and the shift preserved in the final text back to his using he to describe Gollum, along with once again using his name, once Bilbo begins to treat Gollum as a fellow creature again and therefore is unable to murder him, even in self-defense.

^† Assuming, of course, that this scene was in the original manuscript of that chapter, which is now lacking that section – cf. HME VIII.192.

39 Several small abridgments and some re-arrangement produced the familiar final version of this paragraph (cf. DAA.133).

40 The manuscript here (page 8, Ad.Ms.H.48) clearly reads ‘fled over’, while the typescript (page 5, Ad.Ms.H.81) has ‘fled over him’. The proofs (page 98, Ad.Ms.H.58) give instead ‘flew over him’. Tolkien marked for this to be changed to fled, but for some reason the change was not made and the printer’s reading persisted into the published book (second edition page 98; DAA.133).

The typescript of this paragraph includes one very minor departure from the fair copy: the replacement of ‘a hissing and a cursing’ with ‘a hissing and cursing’.

41 This marks the spot at which Tolkien’s 1952 audio recording of the Gollum chapter ends.

42 Once again the paragraph underwent minor changes for the typescript: ‘Goblins’ became ‘goblins’ (lower-cased), part of the cancelled passage was restored so that it was once more ‘nasty jagged stones in the floor’ that Bilbo stubbed his toes on, and the goblins are said to run ‘at a great speed’. More significantly, the use of the word orcs in the fair copy to describe ‘the big ones’ doubles the number of times this Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings term appears in the published Hobbit, ^†its only appearance in the original edition or manuscript being Bladorthin/ Gandalf’s warnings about trying to travel northward around Mirkwood (see page 244 and DAA.188); it also confirms our guesses about Bolg and his bodyguard (see page 711).

^† The third mention, discussed in Text Note 37 above, not having survived into the typescript.

43 Only four minor changes differentiate the typescript from the fair copy in this paragraph: the replacement of glimmer by glimpse, the omission of ordinary (‘a pale out-of-doors sort of light’), the substitution of a proper noun for the pronoun (‘Then Bilbo began to run’), and the omission of along (‘Scuttling as fast as’). See the commentary on ‘The Vanishing People’ (page 402) for connotations of ‘glimmer’ Tolkien may have wished to avoid here.

A single page (Marq. 1/1/21:1) survives among the Lord of the Rings papers that corresponds almost exactly to the last page (page 6) of the typescript, beginning at the exact same point (‘a stone door’) and also stopping at the identical spot (‘. . . the lower gate [where Bilbo’). Comparison reveals that this neat pencil text is an intermediary stage between the manuscript (Ad.Ms.H.52) and typescript (Ad.Ms.H.82), probably drawn up by Tolkien as a guide to the creation of the latter. This page became separated from the rest of the Hobbit revision material, probably because the back of this sheet (1/1/21:2) bears some nearly illegible notes and rough drafting for a passage from The Lord of the Rings, dealing with calculations regarding the time needed for Boromir and the Nazgûl to travel from Gondor or Minas Tirith to Rivendell.

These notes are written on a page bearing the letterhead of the Oxford Circle of The Catenian Association, listing ‘Prof. J.R.R. Tolkien’ as the group’s Vice-President and giving his address as 20 Northmoor Road (a house the Tolkiens occupied from 1930 to 1947). According to a history of this brotherhood for Catholic laymen, Tolkien was one of the founders of the group’s Oxford Circle in 1944 and served as that branch’s first Vice-President. Accordingly, it seems likely that these notes date from 1944, although of course they could have been written later, anytime up to 1947 when he sent the typescript version of this material to Allen & Unwin.

44 This paragraph ends with a cancelled incomplete sentence: ‘With a sudden <illegible> of fear or loss,’ which was plainly cancelled when Tolkien decided to begin a new paragraph instead with a more poignant form of the same sentiment.

In the original (first edition) version of this scene, Bilbo was not wearing the ring when he parted on neutral if not friendly terms from Gollum and so naturally it was not on his finger when he stumbled upon the goblins. The new version of the scene has to account for the facts that (a) Bilbo had to have had the ring on when he escaped from Gollum, and (b) he could not be wearing it when he encountered the goblins (or else they would not have seen him and the encounter would have been far less dramatic), yet (c) he had no reason to take it off in the meantime. Tolkien’s solution, to have the ring simply vanish from Bilbo’s finger, is the only time it seems to vanish from one place under its own power and reappear in another, unless we assume that it forced Bilbo to unconsciously slip it in his pocket without being aware of the act. It could not have come off accidentally, since someone feeling his way in total darkness with one hand on the wall would hold the other hand out in front, not put it in his pocket.

In any case, its attempt to get Bilbo killed by the goblins and itself into the hands of an orc (cf. Frodo’s glib words, ‘What . . . Wouldn’t an Orc have suited it better?’ – LotR.69), and hence eventually to the Necromancer (Sauron), is foiled by Bilbo’s luck (he is, after all, Mr. Lucky Number, has just been saved three times by luck during the riddle-game, and later admits ‘I have begun to trust my luck’ – cf. page 504) or presence of mind. The episode does, no doubt deliberately, call up echoes of its betrayal of Isildur (LotR.66 & UT.275) and, of course, its purposeful abandonment of Gollum: cf. Gandalf’s words to Frodo in ‘The Shadow of the Past’: ‘A Ring of Power looks after itself . . . It may slip off treacherously, but its keeper never abandons it . . . The Ring was trying to get back to its master.^† It had slipped from Isildur’s hand and betrayed him . . . it caught poor Déagol . . . it had devoured [Gollum] . . . So now, when its master was awake once more . . . it abandoned Gollum’ (LotR.68–69).

^† Note here Gandalf’s use of the term master, the same as that used within The Hobbit for Sauron as the Ring-lord: ‘even the Master who ruled them’. See also Text Note 12 above.

45 The typescript elaborates this slightly: ‘like an echo of Gollum’s misery’. This is the only time within The Hobbit, even the second edition text, where Bilbo’s being in danger of succumbing to the ‘Ring-sickness’, if we may so call it, is hinted at; everywhere else within the story it remains just a magic ring with no sinister connotations.

46 The text being replaced here read, in the first edition, ‘And he couldn’t guess in three goes. So I asked for my present, and he went to look for it, and couldn’t find it. So I said, “very well, help me to get out of this nasty place!” and he showed me the passage to the door. “Good-bye” I said, and I went on down.’

This entry and the two that follow it are crowded on the bottom of the last manuscript page (page 10, Ad.Ms.H.51); all are ink over pencil underwriting and probably slightly later than the fair copy text of the rest of the manuscript. The pencil has not been erased, and enough of it can be read under or around the ink to make it clear that it was simply drafting for the text that overwrote it, somewhat different in phrasing but close to it:

The first of these three entries seems to have given Tolkien a good deal of trouble – not so much in finding what he wanted to say but in getting it to fit in as small a space as possible (even so, its inclusion wound up adding lines to this page; see Text Note 47 below). In addition to the ink-over-pencil text at the end of the last of these ten manuscript pages, two pencilled versions take up the bottom half of the last typescript sheet as well, along with pencilled notations as Tolkien added up letters, adjusting his totals with each change or deletion.

The first of the pencilled drafts reads

before trailing off into illegibility. The next pencil draft, written below it, reads

By contrast, although the typed final version in the typescript above this drafting has an ‘X’ beside it in the margin, it represents the second edition text exactly as it appears in the page proof and subsequently published book. The only difference between the ink-over-pencil text (page 739) and the typescript is the latter’s omission of ‘on’ from the last sentence, so that ‘jumped over him and escaped, and ran on down to the gate’ becomes ‘. . . and ran down to the gate’.

47 The usually vigilant typesetters at Unwin Brothers dropped the phrase ‘dodging guards’ when they inserted ‘jumping over Gollum’. Tolkien wrote in the missing words on the proof page but, although the printers did subsequently enter it, they did so in the wrong place, reversing the order of the phrases from what Tolkien intended, and this transposition persists into the published book, so that instead of ‘when he talked about jumping over Gollum, dodging guards, and squeezing through’ – that is, the events in their chronological sequence – we get ‘when he talked about dodging guards, jumping over Gollum, and squeezing through’ (second edition page 105; cf. DAA.140). The original first edition text had simply read ‘when he talked about dodging guards, and squeezing through’ (first edition page 100; cf. page 200).

It should be noted that the changes discussed in Text Notes 46 & 47 were the only ones that created an overrun, since the first expanded its paragraph from seven lines to ten and the second from three lines to four. Once they finally implemented both changes, the typesetters compensated for the expanded page 100/105 by moving one line to the bottom of the preceding page (new page 104, corresponding to old page 99) and two lines to the top of the following page (new page 106, corresponding to old page 101); by the time the second edition text reaches page 107, the second edition text once again corresponds page-by-page to the first edition text (in this case, to old page 102).

(ii)
Errors in ‘The Hobbit’. Misprints, or uncorrected verbal errors in the Ms.
[added in pencil: previously sent in]

These are not important, except for precision. Though back p. 104 for black is unfortunate; while when [p.64] is required to match the runes on the map.^TN1

(iii)
Other corrections.

On page 30, ll. 26,27 by inadvertence (that has annoyed some of the ‘fans’ who have solved all the runes) the text: five feet high is the door and three abreast may enter it does not correspond with the actual runes, and should read: five feet high the door and three may walk abreast. I think the map-maker did not read his text properly,^TN2 but since his map cannot be altered, and his version is better, I hope the text can be adjusted.

The Map-maker has also placed on his map the words HERE OF OLD WAS THRAIN KING UNDER THE MOUNTAIN, in defiance of the fact that his father [> Thrain’s father] Thror was still alive and dwarf-kings do not abdicate. I am afraid that nothing can here be done, except to point out in the Sequel that the Thrain referred to was a yet more ancient king.^TN3

On pages 27 (l. 28) man; and 294 (l. 11) men. Arthur Ransome^TN4 and others pointed out the desirability of not using man, men as ‘person, people’ in a story in which other rational creatures than Men appear. On p. 27 read ‘fellow’; and on p. 294 read ‘of us’.^TN5

More annoying to me is the carelessness on p. 35 And your father went away on the third of March, a hundred years ago last Thursday. Now the Unexpected Party occurred on a Wednesday (as is stated). If this remark is true, then the Party must have occurred on March 9th. But that is impossible. Not only does it make the time far too long before the travellers reach the trolls on the night of May 31st (p. 41); but also they are supposed to start off the next morning, and that is ‘just before May’. For ‘third of March’ we must read ‘twenty-first of April’ – or regretfully abandon the comic precision of ‘last Thursday’. For since Bilbo’s birthday was the 22nd of September and fell that year on a Thursday, a party held on a Wednesday near the end of April must have occurred on the 20th [> 27th]. Read therefore either ‘on the third of March, a hundred years ago last month’ or ‘on the twenty first of April, a hundred years ago last Thursday’. [added in ?pencil: The latter is better.]

TEXT NOTES

1 That is, the text that currently read ‘Already the shadows were deepening about them, though far away through the trees and over the back tops of those growing lower down’ (first edition page 104 line 16) should instead have read ‘. . . over the black tops . . .’ Similarly, in Rivendell Elrond states that the moon-letters read ‘Stand by the grey stone where the thrush knocks’, whereas the runes on the actual map provided with the book say instead ‘. . . when the thrush knocks’. Since he could not change the printed map without great trouble and expense and did not wish to have a loremaster like Master Elrond appear careless or in error, the latter error was more significant than the former (which at worst would merely puzzle some readers). Both of these corrections appear in the proofs Tolkien was sent in 1950 (Ad.Ms.H.61) and in subsequent editions of the book from the fifth printing onward.

2 The ‘map-maker’ whose work Tolkien disparages here is, of course, himself, not the production departments at Unwin Brothers and Allen & Unwin. Compare his similar humorous self-deprecatory remarks in lectures at Oxford about his definitive edition of Sir Gawain & the Green Knight, still in print more than eighty years after its first publication: ‘Tolkien and Gordon were quite wrong, quite wrong when they said that! Can’t imagine what they were thinking of!’ (Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography, page 105).

The correction requested was indeed made, bringing the story’s text into agreement with the map’s runes: five feet high the door and three may walk abreast (Ad.Ms.H.60; DAA.52).

3 This paragraph was bracketed, usually a sign that the material so treated needs further attention, either cancellation or replacement. In this case, the point was addressed in the brief prefatory note Tolkien added to the book, starting with the second edition; see part (iv) below.

The matter was further developed in The Lord of the Rings, where ‘Thráin I’ became the dwarf-king who led his people away from Moria after the Balrog killed his father (Náin I) and grandfather (Durin VI), founding the Kingdom under the Mountain at the Lonely Mountain, and discovering the Arkenstone (thus explaining its hitherto puzzling title as ‘the Arkenstone of Thrain’ and explaining away the remnants in the text of the Thror-Thrain-Thorin/Thrain-Thror-Thorin confusion); see LotR.1109 & 1117. For the original drafts of this material, see HME XII.275–7 and Note 5 on HME XII.286.

4 For Ransome’s letter, and Tolkien’s reply, see Appendix IV.

5 The specific passages in question are Gandalf’s description of Bilbo as an ‘Excitable little man’ (changed in the page proofs to ‘Excitable little fellow’; Ad.Ms.H.60) and Thorin’s dying words ‘If more men valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold’ (changed to ‘If more of us valued . . .’; Ad.Ms.H.59).

Tolkien had suggested these two changes as far back as December 1937 (see Letters, p. 28), only three months after the book was first published; they finally appeared in the fifth printing (i.e., the second edition) of 1951.

(iv)
Prefatory Note

This reprint has been revised. Some small inaccuracies have been corrected: such as the failure of the text on pages 30 and 64 to translate precisely the runes on Thror’s Map; and the date twenty first of April, previously on page 35 given wrongly as the third of March. The last error was due to a misreading of the difficult hand and language of the original diary [cancelled: or memoir].^TN1

More important is the matter of Chapter Five. I have thought it desirable to give now the true story of the ending of the Riddle Game, in place of the somewhat ‘altered’ account of it that Bilbo gave to his friends (and put down in his diary). This weighed on his conscience, as notes in his private papers show, and he was uneasily aware that Gandalf did not believe it.^TN2 His story – that Gollum had promised to give the Ring to him as a gift, if he won the game – seemed of course to the wizard most unlikely from the first, and in the light of later developments [cancelled: was] simply incredible. But it was not until many years after Bilbo’s journey that he pressed the old hobbit to tell him the truth; for the truth about the Ring had become desperately important.

If ever it proves possible to arrange extracts from the Red Book and present them in English to students of hobbit-lore,^TN3 it will be made clear how it was that Bilbo, as honest a hobbit by nature as could be found, came to put out a false tale; and how by that game at the dark roots of the Misty Mountains the history of the Western world and the end of the Third Age was changed. For the Red Book of Westmarch, not long ago rediscovered and deciphered, contains a chronicle (of great length and by many hands) of that perilous time,^TN4 as it was seen by hobbits; and its earlier parts are largely made up of extracts from Bilbo’s writings, including the various secret or private papers that he [handed >] gave to his heir.

However, in the meanwhile none of this need trouble those who in this edition make their first acquaintance with hobbit-lore.^TN5 It has little bearing on the tale of the dragon-hoard. Yet I felt that some immediate explanation was due to those who may possess older copies, and might suspect me of wilfully [rewriting >] altering the story, in one version or the other. I have not. The older version is the account in Bilbo’s diary;^TN6 the later is the truth as told to Gandalf and revealed in the Red Book. And there for the present I will leave the matter.

I will end with one further note, on a point that several readers have raised. Thorin Oakenshield was the son of Thráin, and Thráin was son of Thrór King under the Mountain. But upon the Map is written here of old was Thrain King under the Mountain Yet dwarf-kings do not abdicate, and Thror was still alive when Smaug put an end to the kingdom for that time. Nonetheless the Map is not at fault. Names [added: often] repeat themselves in dwarvish dynasties, and the genealogies of the Red Book show that the Thráin referred to was Thráin I, a distant ancestor of Thrór, who had long before ruled the same realm, before his people passed on to the remoter mountains of the North. Thrór and his son were thus in fact re-entering old [cancelled: incomplete] delvings of their kin when, driven out of the North again, they returned to the Lonely Mountain of Erebor.^TN7 Dwarves had been long in the world and known much troublous history before the days of Thrór,^TN8 and when he wrote of old he meant it: in the ancient past remembered still in those deep throated^TN9 songs of lore that the dwarf-kin sang in their secret tongue at feasts to which none but dwarves were bidden. Some say that they sing still.

Note on corrections and alterations in reprint 1950

In this reprint several minor inaccuracies, most of them noted by readers, have been corrected. For example, the text on pages 30 and 64 now corresponds exactly with the runes on Thror’s Map. On page 35 the third of March, a misreading of the difficult hand and language of the original, is replaced by the correct reading the twenty first of April, a date borne out by the fact that the expedition started on a fine morning ‘just before May’.^TN10 More important is the matter of Chapter Five. There the true story of the ending of the Riddle Game, as it was eventually revealed (under pressure) by Bilbo to Gandalf, is now given according to the Red Book, in place of the version Bilbo first gave to his friends, and actually set down in his diary. This strange departure from truth on the part of a most honest hobbit was a portent of great significance. It does not, however, concern the present story, and those who in this edition make their first acquaintance with hobbit-lore need not trouble about it. Its explanation lies in the history of the Ring, as it is set out in the chronicles of the Red Book of Westmarch, and it must await their publication.

A final note may be added, on a point raised by several students of the lore of the period. On Thror’s Map is written Here of old was Thrain King under the Mountain; Thrain was the son of Thror, the last King under the Mountain before the coming of the dragon. The Map, however, is not in error. Names are often repeated in dynasties, and the genealogies show that a distant ancestor of Thror was referred to, Thrain I, a fugitive from Moria, who first discovered the Lonely Mountain, Erebor, and ruled there for a while, before his people moved on to the remoter mountains of the North – Dwarves had already known a long and troublous history in the world before the days of Thror, and when he wrote of old he meant it: in the ancient past, remembered still in the songs of lore that the dwarf-kin sang in their secret tongue at feasts to which none but dwarves were bidden. Some say that they sing them still, and with the lengthening of the years the songs have become very long indeed.^TN11

JRRT

9/9/50

At the bottom of the typescript page, Tolkien added the notation in pencil:

The fair copy page (D) is stamped ‘18 SEP 1950’ by the printer, showing that this and not the typescript is actually the text sent to be typeset. By the omission of the passages I have italicized, the Note was shortened to the point where it could fit on a single page (in fact, on the hitherto-blank back of the table of contents) and thus not disrupt the pagination; had Tolkien known earlier that such a note would be needed, the pagination could no doubt have been adjusted as it was for the Gollum chapter (see page 732 above).

The Prefatory Notes as published did establish a rationale for changing one of the key chapters in the book, the encounter with Gollum, in a way that served the purposes of the sequel without harm to the coherence and independence of the original book: the replaced passage is revealed to be authentic but inaccurate. And for its part, the passage on Thrain I at last resolves the inconsistency created by the earlier confusion between the two competing Thror-Thrain-Thorin/Thrain-Thror-Thorin genealogies. In a masterly demonstration of his preferred method, Tolkien leaves intact both pieces of information – that Thror was the last King under the Mountain (text) and that ‘Here of old was Thrain King . . .’ (map) – by adding a third new piece of information alongside them that places them into harmony as part of a larger picture.

The abbreviated published version of this Prefatory Note provides the necessary information to place the new edition in context, but the more extended versions that had to be trimmed down had done more. For example, the closing sentences (‘when he wrote of old he meant it’) conjure up a vast sense of time only remembered in songs which we, not being dwarves, can never be privileged to hear. More remarkably, like some of the remarks about hobbits in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, they bring the story down to the present day (e.g., ‘[Hobbits] now avoid us with dismay’, ‘the regions in which Hobbits then lived were doubtless the same as those in which they still linger’ – LotR.13 & 14, italics mine): ‘Some say they sing them still . . .’ Also, the idea that Thror returned to incomplete delvings from long ago enhances his stature as the founder (rather than merely re-occupier) of the Kingdom under the Mountain.

Significant in another sense, as a road not taken, is Tolkien’s proffered explanation that a change here is simply a correction of an ‘error due to a misreading of the difficult hand and language of the original’. Had he adopted this simple expedient, which was entirely in keeping with his authorial pose as editor and translator of Bilbo’s story (cf. the runic border on the dust jacket, where Tolkien referred to himself as the translator of Bilbo’s memoir), it would have served him well when he tried to resolve the conundrum of recalcitrant phases of the moon in the 1960 Hobbit.

TEXT NOTES

1 In the typescript, the example and explanation are both dropped and the paragraphs run together: ‘. . . have been corrected, many of them long noted by readers and students of hobbit-lore. More important than these details is the matter . . .’

2 ‘Gandalf did not believe it’ > ‘Gandalf had never believed it’.

3 The opening of this paragraph was replaced by ‘When, if ever, a selection from the matter of the Red Book is presented to students of the period’.

4 The typescript reads ‘. . . how by that game at the dark roots of the mountains the fortunes of the Western World . . . of Westmarch, a hobbit-heirloom not long ago re-discovered and deciphered, contains chronicles [cancelled: and commentaries] of that perilous time . . .’

5 Changed to ‘with hobbitry’.

6 The typescript reads ‘. . . the account in Bilbo’s memoirs, my primary source’. This distinction is significant because there is no mention in The Hobbit of Bilbo’s jotting down what happened to him each day, while we are told in the Epilogue that Gandalf and Balin visit him while he is writing ‘his memoirs’.

7 This sentence was bracketed in the manuscript.

The typescript expands slightly upon the career of Thráin I: ‘a distant ancestor of Thrór, a fugitive from Moria, and the first discoverer of the Lonely Mountain, Erebor, who ruled that land for a while, before his people . . .’; the sentence about Thror and his son re-entering old delvings upon their return is absent in the typescript. The inclusion of ‘and his son’ shows how closely Thror and Thrain are linked in Tolkien’s mind; the genealogy in The Lord of the Rings, which probably postdates this prefatory note, gives the date of Thrain’s birth as fifty-four years after Thror’s re-establishment of the Kingdom under the Mountain (LotR.1117).

8 For the details of this ‘troublous history’, see Appendix A part iii: ‘Durin’s Folk’ in The Lord of the Rings. Even within the context of the original Hobbit, note Thorin’s thoughts during the Siege of the Mountain: how each piece of treasure had associations for him with ‘old memories of the labours and sorrows of his race’ (page 648).

9 The words ‘deep throated’, bracketed in the fair copy, do not appear in the typescript.

10 This passage is bracketed in the typescript and absent in the fair copy. The next sentence began a new paragraph in the typescript but becomes part of the first paragraph in the fair copy.

11 The fair copy might well have once included these sentences, since it ends rather abruptly at the bottom of a page. If so, although bracketed in the typescript they were probably curtailed for reasons of space rather than any dissatisfaction with their content.

(v)
Thrym Thistlebeard

As for ‘the Hobbit’. There are a fair number of errors in it; and though I keep on sending corrections in to Allen & Unwin they don’t seem to get put right . . .

But the author also made errors. On p. 30 the text to agree with red runes should read ‘five feet high the door and three may walk abreast’

The chief error otherwise is on p. 25: the third of March a hundred years ago last Thursday. The party was on a Wednesday (p. 17, 20). If this was true, therefore, the party must have been on March 9 and the expedition must have set out on March 10. But that was not so: it was just before May (p. 40), and also it would only have taken about a month’s slow going to reach the Trolls on 31st May (p. 41). As Bilbo’s birthday was Sept. 22nd and a Thursday that year, the party must actually have occurred on Wednesday April 27th. The text should read twenty-first of April /or/ a hundred years [added: ago] last month. The latter is correct. . . .

Runes. The whole linguistic situation of ‘The Hobbit’ has become rather complicated owing to the necessity for translation. The language of the time, or the Common Speech of the West, is represented by English. This particular variety of Dwarf came from the North where a more northerly language was locally spoken. Now Dwarves have their own secret language, but like Jews and Gypsies use the language of the country. So all these Dwarves have Norse dwarf-names to represent the relations of the country and people of Dale (Bard the Bowman) etc. to the Common Language. The Dwarves used a more inscriptional alphabet – and I am now rather sorry that I used instead the Anglo-Saxon Runes (on the translation principle). The dwarf-alphabet was much better. The Elvish Alphabets do not come into the Hobbit – unless you have the full English edn. with coloured pictures, in which case you will see a bit of an inscription in an Elvish alphabet (the Alphabet of Fëanor) on the great jars in the left-foreground. This alphabet plays a considerable part in the sequel ‘The Lord of the Rings’. I can let you have all these things, if you want them. They were not, of course, invented for the Hobbit or its sequel, since these things are only fragments torn out of ‘the Silmarillion’ or The History of the Elves, which no one will publish.

As for the actual runes in the book and your question. Þ·Þ stands for Thror son of Thrain. But that is an error that besides myself you alone have spotted. On p. 202–3, the order is given as Thorin – Thrain – Thror. The map-maker was confused and had the order Thorin – Thror – Thrain. But even that was erroneous as dwarf-kings don’t abdicate, and the ‘grandfather’ was still alive when the map was made. In the sequel it will appear that the grandfather Thror was son of an older King Thrym (Thistlebeard). So that Þ·Þ stands for Thrór Thrym’s son. All these dwarf-names (except Thrym and Thistilbarði (Thistlebeard), which is in another list) come out of the list of dwarf-names inserted into the Völuspá or ‘Prophecy of the Sibyl’ that is the first poem of the Elder Edda.^TN1

After this, he continues with a discussion on the actual Anglo Saxon runes, his recent visit to Lincolnshire on college business, a dubious reliquary of ‘Little Saint Hugh (the supposed martyr)’, Chaucer’s ‘Prologue’, and the various editions available of The Hobbit.

The logic underlying the problem with ‘the third of March’ is the same as in part (iii) above, although interestingly enough here, only five days after sending off (i), (ii), and (iii) to Stanley Unwin, Tolkien now prefers a different phrasing in the replacement text. The reference to dwarves adopting the language of the country they live in ‘like Jews and Gypsies’ shows that this idea was already present long before Tolkien compared his dwarves with the Jews in his 1965 radio interview with Denys Gueroult (see page 86, Note 9 and also page 859), although so far as I am aware the comparison to the Gypsies (an apt parallel to the wandering dwarves mentioned in early parts of The Lord of the Rings) occurs nowhere else.

The most interesting passage, of course, is that dealing with Thrym Thistlebeard, a hitherto unknown king of Durin’s line. Although like Fimbulfambi he was destined never to appear in canonical form, having already been replaced by Dain (I) in the earliest surviving dwarven family-trees (see Marq. 3/9/1 and also HME XII.277), in this case he was probably not rejected so much as simply forgotten. I have already noted, on pp. 602–3, that the runic initials þ·þ on the inscribed jar in the foreground of the painting ‘Conversation with Smaug’ (Plate XI [top]) must refer to Þror and Þrain (or possibly Þrain and Þror), and that the presence of both’s initials here presents some problems. This unpublished letter is proof first that the Thrain-Thror-Thorin genealogy was simply an error (‘the map-maker was confused’) and that Tolkien himself came to be well aware of the problem inherent in the initials on the inscribed jar. In this paragraph he offers a satisfactory and ingenious solution to their meaning, once again solving a problem in the received text by addition, not contradiction or replacement.

Why then was it never implemented? My guess is that Tolkien had not yet thought of this solution when he sent the errata off to Allen & Unwin on 21st September and that he generated the character on the spot in response to Paxman’s question five days later. But he neglected to keep a copy of this letter for his files,^TN2 so that when he came to create the dwarven family tree, he had by that point forgotten about Thrym Thistlebeard.^TN3

TEXT NOTES

1 Thrym (‘Uproar’) comes from the Þrymskviða, part of the Elder Edda, while Thistilbarði (‘Thistlebeard’) is part of a þulur (thulur) or namelist, one of many sometimes appended to Snorri’s Prose Edda. However, in the original each is the name of a giant, not a dwarf.

Thrym is indeed the famous King Thrym of Jötunheim (‘giantland’), lord of the frost-giants; þrymskviða is the story of how he stole Mjöllnir (Thor’s hammer, the bane of all giants) and demanded Freya’s hand for its return. Loki convinced Thor to disguise himself as the bride-to-be, enabling the angry storm god to get close enough to reclaim his weapon, whereupon he killed most of the wedding party. This story has an unusual personal connection to Tolkien, for it was retold by his friend Rob Gilson as a short Christmas play in 1903, when the future fellow T.C.B.S. member was about ten years old. Called ‘Thor’s Journey to Fetch His Hammer’, something of its precocious nature can be conveyed through its list of characters, scenes, and the mock-Shakespearian diction of its closing lines:

I am grateful to David Bratman for drawing my attention to R. Q. Gilson’s early interest in Eddic myths and providing me with a copy of both this mini-play and ‘The Wooing of Gerda’, a similar retelling of Skírnismál from the year before (Christmas 1902).

As for Thistilbardi, Dronke (The Poetic Edda, vol. II, page 183) cites it as part of a list of giant names: þistilbarði, Hrímnir, and Ganglati (Thistlebeard, Sootface, and Slowcoach) all being among the names for giants and Hengikepta, Loþinfingra, and Grottintanna (Hangjaw, Hairyfingers, and Grittingteeth) those for giantesses. The full list, one of a number of verse name-lists or thulur appearing in some manuscripts of Snorri’s Edda – including lists of names for Odin, Thor, Freya, dwarves (deriving mainly from the Dvergatal), valkyrie, giants, giantesses, and the like – is printed in the massive collection Corpvs Poeticum Boreale: The Poetry of the Old Northern Tongue, ed. Gudbrand Vigfusson & F. York Powell [2 vols., 1883], which attempts to bring together virtually all Old Norse heroic and mythological verse still in existence. The ‘Thulor’ appear in Bk X, §6: ‘Rhymed Glossaries’ (Vol. II, pages 422–39), and Thistilbardi’s name in line 64 on page 425, in the same line with Thrym himself:

2 In his letter of 10th September 1950 to Stanley Unwin, announcing his decision to accept the ‘second edition’ Hobbit as the true and authentic version of the story and sending him the new Prefatory Note, Tolkien mentioned that ‘as I have no secretary I rarely keep copies of my own letters, and I do not suppose that my recollections of them at long remove are necessarily accurate’ (Ad.Ms.H.83; a portion of this letter, but not this passage, appears in Letters p. 142).

3 The absence of any mention of Thrym Thistlebeard from the 1950 Prefatory Note probably indicates that Tolkien had forgotten about him at this point, but in any case it would have been awkward to bring up a point hinging on a detail in an illustration in the introduction to a printing of the book that did not contain that picture.