The second edition Hobbit showed Tolkien that he could revisit Bilbo’s story, even after a gap of years, and improve upon the original, while at the same time binding the story and its sequel more closely together. Roughly a decade after drafting that material, and several years after its publication, he returned to the story of the Unexpected Party and wrote ‘The Quest of Erebor’ [1954] – not a replacement for the opening chapter but in effect a complement to (and commentary on) it, retelling the story from Gandalf’s and the dwarves’ point of view. Focusing on the events that led Gandalf with Thorin & Company to Bilbo’s doorstep, it places Bilbo’s adventure in a larger – what we may call ‘strategic’ – context, as Gandalf considers how to counter the threat of Smaug in a war against Sauron, which he already foresees as impending some eighty years before the event. Fascinating though it is, ‘The Quest of Erebor’ does set one unfortunate precedent: it diminishes Bilbo in the reader’s eyes, casting him very much as a silly fellow puffing and bobbing on the mat. Gandalf, after describing Bilbo as ‘rather greedy and fat’, says the hobbit ‘made a complete fool of himself’ and ‘did not realize . . . how fatuous the Dwarves thought him . . . Thorin was much more . . . contemptuous than he perceived’ (UT.323–4).
Ultimately, only a few paragraphs of ‘The Quest of Erebor’ made their way into the published Lord of the Rings (LotR.1115 & 1116), but clearly Tolkien did not so much reject this material as merely find himself forced to cut it for reasons of space. When, around 1960, he decided to undertake a detailed revision of The Hobbit and fully reconcile it to the later story in chronology, geography, and style, he drew upon this unpublished material when recasting The Hobbit into The Lord of the Rings’ image. This is not to say that he inserted passages from the alternative opener into the earlier book, or even that he had the 1954 material before him as he worked, but rather that he approached Bilbo’s story from the point of view of the rejected Appendix material, very much to Bilbo’s disadvantage.
It has long been known that the last work Tolkien did on The Hobbit, the third edition of 1966, came about at his publisher’s request, since the appearance of the unauthorized Ace paperbacks of The Lord of the Rings in the summer of 1965 meant that Houghton Mifflin and now Ballantine Books needed him to produce a revised authorized text in order to belatedly assert the American copyright. Humphrey Carpenter describes how Tolkien began, and
spent many hours searching for some revision notes that he had already made, but he could not find them . . . When the next day he did get down to The Hobbit he found a good deal of it ‘very poor’ and had to restrain himself from rewriting the entire book.
— Tolkien: A Biography, pages 227–8.
These ‘revision notes’, the Fifth Phase or 1960 Hobbit, are far more extensive than Carpenter’s account indicates, in fact nothing less than a wholesale recasting of the book into the mold of its sequel. Aside from this passing mention in Carpenter’s book, this material remained wholly unknown until Christopher Tolkien read a substantial section from it as his Guest of Honor presentation at the 1987 Marquette Tolkien Conference (Mythcon XVIII). It is here published, in its entirety, for the first time.
The 1960 Hobbit does not form a continuous text, but rather a series of passages, some brief and some extensive, intended to replace their second edition equivalents – very much as the Fourth Phase replaced superseded passages from the first edition. As with that material (see page 732), I have retained Tolkien’s page and line numbers, on the theory that these chapters of The Hobbit are so familiar, and the range of pages so short, that it is easy for readers with any edition to locate the specific passage Tolkien means for comparison. Like the 1947 Hobbit, the Fifth Phase greatly expands upon the original in some places. Most of the material exists only in a single typescript, and it seems to have been composed on the typewriter. Although there are extensive plot-notes associated with the timeline and phases of the moon, very little rough drafting of the actual chapters survives; I give the few exceptions at the end of this chapter. I have divided the typescript and associated material into three groups:
• New Chapter I, which consists of fourteen pages of typescript [Ad.Ms.H.62–75], numbered 1 through 14 in the center at the top of each page; the first eight pages are double-spaced, the last six single-spaced. Appended to this I give excerpts from the two isolated sheets [Ad.Ms.H.12 & Ad.Ms.H.18] which contain very rough drafting for a few individual lines.
• New Chapter II, eight crowded single-spaced pages of typescript [Ad.Ms.H.25–32], numbered ‘II 1’, ‘II 2’, and the like in the upper right corner. This is immediately followed by about a single page’s worth of text (single-spaced typescript) for New Chapter III, starting in the middle of the last page of New Chapter II and halting about a third of the way down the next page [Ad.Ms.H.32–3] but given its own pagination (‘III 1’ and ‘III 2’, respectively). I follow this with the text of a single sheet of notes [Ad.Ms.H.11] which contains a few queries or reminders of points that need addressing in the preceding New Chapters.
• Timelines and Itinerary, which consists of four pages of single-spaced typescript [Ad.Ms.H.21–4] giving a detailed, day-by-day summary of Thorin & Company’s trip from Bag-End to Rivendell; four pages of manuscript notes [Ad.Ms.H.19, 20, 13] covering the same ground in rougher form; and six pages of rough notes [Ad.Ms.H.15–18], not wholly legible, dealing with problems in the tale’s chronology, particularly focusing on the phases of the moon.
Since this text is wholly unknown, aside from those fortunate enough to have been present at Christopher Tolkien’s reading at Marquette in 1987, I have here reversed my normal procedure. In all the earlier sections of this book I give the earliest recoverable version of a text, striving to record the first glimpses as Tolkien puts words down on the page, since the final polished form of that text is familiar to all his readers from the published book. Here by contrast I give the final text in all cases, with all significant earlier readings given in Text Notes. A number of ellipses or rows of dots are in the original; these are given in closed format as Tolkien typed them (...), to distinguish them from omissions made in the notes or transcriptions by myself as editor (. . .).