New Chapter III
Arrival in Rivendell

p. 56/3 They felt that danger was lurking on both sides of their road. They camped where they could, and set watches; and their^TN37

/7 trolls. On the fourth day from the Bridge^TN38 they passed the shadow of the dark hills. Gandalf laughed and pointed ahead; and still far off they saw another river before them, gleaming in the morning [> evening] sunshine, but all the lands beyond were shrouded in mist.

In the afternoon of the next day^TN39 they came to the river, and found a great ford over wide shallows, and there was a causeway of huge stepping-stones against which the stream gurgled and foamed; but on the far side the path wound steeply up a high frowning bank. When they had climbed to the top, leading their horses, they saw that the great mountains had marched down to meet them. The day was hot and clear and there was no mist, and it seemed only a day’s easy journey now to the feet of the nearest.

p. 57/3 ‘You must not miss the path, or that will be the end of you’,^TN40 he said. ‘You need food, for one thing, and rest in safety for a while, and advice. None of you have ever tried the north passes, I think. Their perils are always changing, and you must consult one who knows, if you are to make the right choice. Those who take the wrong way in the Misty Mountains never come back to try again!’

/10 ‘You have come to the last fences of the Westland. Ahead of us [> Over there] lies hidden the fair valley of Rivendell, of which no doubt some of you have heard tell, though few dwarves have ever seen it.^TN41 There Master Elrond lives in the Last Homely House. I sent a message by my friends, and we are expected’.

That sounded comforting; but they had not got there yet, and it was not easy to find the way to the secret valley and the Last Homely House west of the Mountains

p. 58/ 10 Delete about pretty well.^TN42

/11 They went on until moonless night [> twilight] overtook them, and they lay that night under the bright stars. The next day was failing, and they were still following Gandalf, whose head and beard wagged this way and that as he searched for the white stones in the dusk. White [> Pale] moths were fluttering in the whins^TN43 and long heather, and twilight deepened like a mist about the horses’ feet. ‘Supper-time and past it!’ thought Bilbo, who had not eaten since midday. His tired pony began to stumble over roots and stones.^TN44 Then just ahead Rohald neighed, and he hurried forward, and came to [a] steep fall in the ground so suddenly that he nearly slipped headlong down it.

‘Here it is at last!’ cried Gandalf, as the dwarves came up and stared over the edge

TEXT NOTES

1 This last sentence is bracketed for removal.

2 Gandalf’s white horse dates all the way back to the earliest pages of the Second Phase manuscript, but he only now gains a name: Rohald. Again I have found no authorized gloss, but the name is clearly Sindarin, with the ro- element meaning ‘horse’; cf. Aragorn’s horse, Roheryn (LotR.809), which means ‘horse of the lady’ (roch + heru; so named from being Arwen’s gift – cf. Silm.363), and Rochallor, High King Fingolfin’s great horse (Silm.153). Salo’s A Gateway to Sindarin lists no hald in its Sindarin-English Glossary, but it does have hall, which can mean either ‘exalted, high’ or ‘veiled, hidden, shadowed, shady’ (Salo, page 263).

In any case, the line adding the name of Gandalf’s white horse was not part of the original typescript here but was added later; Rohald’s name does not appear as originally typed until page 796 (see Text Notes 13 & 16).

3 Originally Tolkien intended the replacement text that follows to take the place of the passage beginning on line 5 of page 41 in the second edition (‘. . . rode forward all day, except of course when they stopped for meals . . .’) and continuing through line 22, ending with ‘the weather which had often been as good as May can be, even in tales and legends, took a nasty turn’. Much of this passage would in fact be replaced by Tolkien in the 1966 Hobbit (see DAA.65–6), although in briefer form than the text given here. When Tolkien came to actually write the replacement text, it flowed so fluently that by the time he stopped rather than sixteen lines later on page 41 he had reached the fifth line on page 46 (‘. . . crept behind a tree just behind William’). I have added the underlinings here and throughout this chapter, matching Tolkien’s own practice in New Chapter I, to help distinguish between Tolkien’s instructions and the words to which they apply. As with New Chapter I, ellipses without spaces separating the periods (e.g. .....) are Tolkien’s own.

4 A pencilled notation in the left margin along these lines seeks to establish a timeline of their trip. The first few words are too faint to read, but the rest of the note reads ‘. . . 2½ days’ journey arriving at evening on May 2.’ This corresponds to the entry in the Itinerary, which has them crossing the Brandywine Bridge early on 30th April and arriving at Bree on 2nd May; see page 818.

5 The word almost is cancelled in pencil and replaced by a passage in light pencil in the right margin, but I cannot make out any of this marginalia.

6 In the left margin along this line is written ‘16 days’, which is then changed to ‘15 days’. See entries 7 and 8 in the timeline (page 818), which between them equal fifteen days.

7 In the original story, some of these hills had castles on them, of which ‘many looked as if they had not been built for any good purpose’. In the more developed history of The Lord of the Rings, this area had now come to be the territory of the fallen evil kingdom of Rhudaur (one of the inheritor-kingdoms of fractured Arnor), which had been destroyed more than a millennium before. Accordingly, the slightly sinister castles become evil-looking ruins in the 1960 Hobbit, a change carried over (though not in the same words) into the 1966 Hobbit (the published third edition); cf. DAA.66.

8 See Itinerary, page 819.

9 Originally ‘The deep track’.

10 Originally this sentence read ‘This country was unknown to the dwarves’, obviously altered because it has already been established that Thorin’s people traded and travelled up and down the Great East Road. In addition, Thorin’s people could not have passed through Moria on their flight west after Smaug destroyed the Kingdom under the Mountain, nor is it likely that they came by way of the goblin-haunted Mount Gram, or took the extreme long away around through the Gap of Rohan. Instead, they almost certainly came by way of the Forest Road to the same passes Thorin and Company will attempt in Chapter IV and hence westward down the same East-West road they are now travelling all the way to the Blue Mountains west of the Shire. Furthermore, it seems extremely unlikely that Thorin’s dwarf-colony in Harlindon has no contact at all with Dain’s people in the Iron Hills, which would also imply east-west travel along this route.

11 The area in question is marked the ‘Ettenmoors’ on the Lord of the Rings map, etten (ettin) being an old word for ‘giants’ (descended from the Old English eoten, ent) that remained in use up until the early 1600s. Strider, in ‘Flight to the Ford’, glosses the term as ‘the troll-fells’ (LotR.216), troll being a mid-nineteenth-century borrowing from the Scandinavian which supplemented but did not replace giant (itself Anglo-Norman in origin). Also on the LotR map, the area in which Bilbo and the dwarves encounter the trolls is called the ‘Trollshaws’, shaw being an archaic word for woods or thicket; cf. the thick woods in all three of Tolkien’s pictures of the troll-episode, most notably ‘Trolls’ Hill’ (Plate IV [bottom]) and the black and white drawing ‘The Trolls’ (DAA.74).

12 Originally this passage read ‘no way to pass the great mountains, which still lie ahead’. Significantly, not even Balin (who, as The Lord of the Rings reveals, did later dare to enter Moria) takes Gandalf up on his taunt about trying the Mines of Moria as an alternate route past the mountains. Nonetheless its mention helps tie the geography of the two books (and the two journeys, of Bilbo and the Ring-bearer) together; like the earlier mention of the Prancing Pony at Bree, it emphasizes to those who have read The Lord of the Rings before (this version of) The Hobbit that both take place in the same world and, in this passage at least, traverse the same territory.

13 Again ‘Rohald’ is added later, replacing his white horse in the original.

14 This was originally followed by a cancelled line, ‘Last of all came the pack ponies’.

15 In this passage, Bilbo becomes the first of three hobbits who at one point or another ride with Gandalf on a great pale horse, the other two being Pippin in the ride from Rohan to Minas Tirith (The Lord of the Rings, last chapter of Book III and first chapter of Book V) and Odo, the latter in the rejected storyline from early drafts of The Lord of the Rings where Gandalf rescued him from the Black Riders at Crickhollow (HME VI.304) and Odo accompanied the wizard as far as Weathertop (HME VI.352, 355–6); none of the Odo material made it into the published book.

16 This marks the first time that Rohald has appeared in the text as first typed; on previous occasions the name had been added in later as replacement text.

17 This was initially followed by the cancelled line ‘The rain too had almost stopped.’

18 Originally this passage read ‘But before they halted for midday, having covered several miles, they were under the shadow of the dark hills’.

19 Originally this sentence read ‘Far behind in the West there was a brief stab of red, as the sun sank’.

20 Originally this passage read ‘when it was nearly night’, which was altered first to ‘the dark’ (i.e., ‘when the dark . . .’) and then to ‘when the tree-shadowed road was dark’, before finally reaching the form given in the text.

21 In fact, ‘The Quest of Erebor’ makes this explicit. When Thorin reluctantly agrees in the wee hours of the morning following the Unexpected Party to take Bilbo, at Gandalf’s urging (and threats), Thorin makes it a condition that Gandalf shall then accompany them as well:

This account finally makes clear therefore that Gandalf does indeed have ‘pressing business’ of his own (DAA.187) and must leave Thorin & Company as soon as he decently can to deal with a different crisis elsewhere: marshalling the Wizards and the Wise – that is, Radagast and the Elven-princes – to join him in overruling Saruman and attacking the Necromancer before the latter can destroy Rivendell or Lórien (UT.321–2, 326; see also 350–51).

22 Mould here means not ‘mold’ in the sense of mildew or fungus (its most common usage today) but dirt rich with organic decay (in this case, from generations of fallen leaves).

23 The penultimate paragraph of Chapter VI observes that ‘Dwarves have never taken to matches even yet’ (DAA.159). Whether this line, and the relatively modern touch of Bilbo’s pocket-matches in Chapter V (DAA.116), would have survived in the 1960 Hobbit, had the Fifth Phase reached so far, is an unanswerable question; at any rate, they survived unchanged through the third edition changes of 1966.

24 Originally Balin describes this area as ‘Noman’s land’, a phrase Tolkien used several times in The Lord of the Rings for the area better known as the Brown Lands (LotR.394 & 657). The addition of these lines of dialogue by Balin and Gloin, like Fili and Kili’s promptly springing into action after Thorin’s decision at the fallen bridge and Bombur’s fumbling and grumbling, all help characterize the dwarves – for example, Balin’s distrust of the woods north of the road helps establish his good judgment, since it is soon revealed that trolls are lurking there. Had Tolkien continued the 1960 Hobbit all the way to the end he would no doubt have added similar bits of action or dialogue for the less differentiated members of Thorin & Company; i.e., Nori, Oin, Bofur, Bifur, and Ori.

25 Bilbo originally referred to ‘the kings’ (plural) here, but this may be no more than a typing error, which in any case was quickly corrected to ‘king’. This referent replaced the ‘They have seldom even heard of the king round here’ of the first and second (and ultimately third) editions. In the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien explain that this was an allusion to the fallen Dúnedain kingdoms of Arnor, in words he is clearly echoing here in the 1960 Hobbit:

There is an irony in this mention of the king here, when with hindsight from The Lord of the Rings’ Appendices A and B we realize that within a few days they will be arriving in Rivendell, where ten-year-old Aragorn, the rightful king of Arnor and Gondor, is living under the name of Estel (‘Hope’) in Elrond’s household.

26 Bombur’s expectation is amusing, given that Gandalf at his reappearance indeed ‘stepped from behind a great tree’; see DAA.80 and Tolkien’s correction for page 52 line 18 on page 799.

27 Note that the rephrasing here eliminates the direct address to the reader of all the published editions at this point: ‘though I don’t suppose you or I would have noticed anything . . . I don’t suppose even a weasel would have stirred a whisker’ (DAA.70); the formerly intrusive narrator ceases to be a character in the story, which now lacks a storyteller.

28 Originally, ‘trolls of that sort’. In a 1954 letter, Tolkien described the trolls appearing in The Hobbit as ‘Stone-trolls’ (JRRT to Peter Hastings, Letters p.191). The ‘other kinds’ mentioned in the following sentences include the cave-troll that almost forces its way into Balin’s burial chamber in Moria (LotR.342–3) and the Olog-hai (LotR.1166), described in the rumors circulating in the Shire in ‘The Shadow of the Past’: ‘Trolls were abroad, no longer dull-witted, but cunning and armed with dreadful weapons’ (LotR.57).

29 This entry is a late addition, written in the left margin.

30 That is, in place of the original passage that read ‘. . . after waiting for some time for Bilbo to come back, or to hoot like an owl, they started off one by one’, the text should now read ‘. . . hoot like an owl, they left Bombur to mind the ponies. . .’

31 This sentence is bracketed in pencil but not deleted. Presumably what called it into question was the new scene earlier in this same chapter where they had in fact left behind one of their number (the overlooked hobbit) on the far bank of the swollen river.

32 The sequence in which the dwarves arrived at the troll’s campfire is altered from the original, which mimicked the order in which they arrived on Bilbo’s doorstep (and included the surprising information that Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur were the Heir of Durin’s ‘attendants’ – i.e. either courtiers or an honor-guard). Now the surprisingly good account the last two captured gave of themselves is transferred from the unlikely Bifur and Bombur (not elsewhere distinguished for their valour) to the more active and effective Fili and Kili.

33 This page is not literally blank but it does lack any text, being devoted to the black-and-white picture ‘The Trolls’ (cf. DAA.74).

34 Originally ‘set a stone over them with dwarf runes’.

35 Originally Tolkien typed ‘there are more trolls about’ before changing it to the less specific and more evocative ‘other wicked things abroad’.

36 Gandalf’s final statement, absent from earlier editions, is curious, since nothing added here indicates that Bilbo played any part in saving them from the cannibal feast.

37 The unchanged skipped text that bridges the gap between this revision and the next is ‘and their horses had more to eat than they had; for there was plenty of grass, but there was not much in their bags, even with what they had got from the trolls.’ This actually misses an opportunity to correct an error going all the way back to the first edition, since ‘horses’ should in fact read ponies here. The original book had switched back and forth between ‘horse’ and ‘pony’, especially in the Lonely Mountain chapters (see page 479), as if the two were interchangeable, but the dichotomy between the dwarves’ ponies and the wizard’s horse has been stressed throughout New Chapter II.

38 Written in the left margin alongside this: ‘May 22’. See Itinerary, page 819.

39 Written in the left margin alongside this: ‘May 23’. See Itinerary, page 819.

40 The shift from first person plural (‘We must not . . . we shall be . . . We need’) in the published editions (cf. DAA.88) to second person (‘You must not . . . the end of you . . . You need’) here has the effect of exempting the wizard himself, suggesting that whatever dire peril they may find themselves in he at least will come through unscathed. This is in keeping with his enhanced stature in The Lord of the Rings, but again it leaves him detached, not really a part of the group struggling to survive the adventure he arranged.

41 The idea that dwarves were not particularly welcome at Rivendell is a new and somewhat disconcerting idea, apparently imported back into The Hobbit to match the initially chilly relations between Gimli’s people and the elves of Lórien in The Lord of the Rings. The version of this passage Tolkien originally drafted, ‘no dwarf has’, was even more uncompromising (i.e., ‘though no dwarf has [ever seen it]). It is also out of keeping with their extended stay there, which in the 1960 Hobbit is expanded from the two weeks (‘a fortnight’) of the published book to at least five (see Itinerary, page 823).

42 The passage being altered reads ‘Gandalf, who seemed to know his way about pretty well’, which would now become ‘Gandalf, who seemed to know his way.’

43 whin, like heather, is a tough prickly shrub, more commonly known as furze, that grows in European wastelands.

44 This sentence was followed by several lines of drafting:

Although cancelled, this passage shows us that the ‘he’ who hurried forward in the next sentence is Bilbo, not Gandalf or his horse.