A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee.© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Hobbit: A Turning Point

John D. Rateliff

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[H]e . . . groped about . . . far from certain even of the direction they had been going . . . He guessed as well as he could . . . [S]uddenly his hand met what felt like a tiny ring of cold metal lying on the floor of the tunnel. It was the turning point in his career, but he did not know that. He put the ring in his pocket almost without thinking . . . (“Riddles in the Dark,” H 66)

I had an enormous pile of exam papers . . . I remember picking up a paper and actually finding . . . there was one page . . . that was left blank . . . So I scribbled on it, I can’t think why, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” (J. R. R. Tolkien, BBC 2 1968)

First writing, and then publishing, The Hobbit was the turning point in Tolkien’s career. It marks the point at which he “found his voice” and produced what we can now recognize, looking back, as a distinctively, characteristically Tolkienian work. It was his first published work of fiction, and a substantial one at that, over 300 pages long. And, aside from fugitive poems that had appeared in little magazines and obscure collections, the first among his published works to be set in what came to be called Middle-earth.

When Tolkien Wrote The Hobbit

The story of how Tolkien came to write his masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, is well known and reasonably well documented (see ch. 9): we even know such details as

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when the first draft of the first chapter was written (between December 16 and 19, 1937), the various phases into which work on that massive book fell, and where breaks occurred when Tolkien turned to other work (e.g., stories like “The Notion Club Papers” or his academic duties, which were greatly increased by the war); many of its later chapters can be dated to within a week or two.

Against this mass of information, the murkiness of The Hobbit’s origins is striking, and much misinformation has been put forth over the years as a result. None of the surviving manuscripts are dated, and though Tolkien remembered the moment of inspiration that sparked the book, he was unable afterwards to put a firm date on exactly when that event occurred. The simple truth is that this momentous event made very little impact at the time, to Tolkien or anyone else; rather like Rev. Dodg-son’s decision to make up an impromptu narrative during a picnic that later turned into Alice’s Adventures Underground.1 What mattered, in retrospect, was Dodgson’s and Tolkien’s later decision to try to set down that story.

Despite this, enough external evidence exists that, combined with what the differ-ent layers of the original manuscripts and typescripts tell us, we can reconstruct a timeline for the book’s composition. To begin with, we have Tolkien’s memory, repeated in several later reminiscences, of the eureka moment: that he wrote the book’s opening line out of the blue one summer’s day, inspired by an empty page he unex-pectedly encountered while grading a pile of student exams. Since he was certain that this had taken place in the new house he’d moved to in early 1930,2 he could have begun the book no earlier than the summer of 1930. We know from other evidence that the story took him two or three years to write3 and that the draft was completed by the start of the Hilary (spring) Term in early 1933.4 Thus the story’s origin can reasonably be dated to the summer of 1930 and its conclusion to either December 1932 or January 1933.5

In addition to these start and stop dates, we know something about the phases into which work on the book fell. Tolkien stated, in a letter written a few months after the book’s publication, that he paused twice, for about a year each time, in the course of writing it.6 In fact, we could infer these pauses even without Tolkien drawing our attention to them, thanks to points in the manuscript where changes in paper, pagina-tion, and characters’ names coincide. In addition, Tolkien sometimes stopped and sketched out plot-notes describing events in the still-unwritten chapters, and these help mark where pauses and hesitations took place.

First, he expanded upon that famous opening line7 to create a draft of the opening chapter, including a rough sketch of the Lonely Mountain map (complete with secret door and moon-runes), before the initial impetus spun out, but not before he’d made a typescript of what he’d written so far; perhaps already a sign that he sensed what he’d begun had potential. Then when he returned to the work some time later, he picked up where it left off with a handwritten manuscript that ran all the way from Bag-End to the scene on Ravenhill just as the Siege of the Mountain begins, all in continuous pagination with no chapter breaks. There were certainly pauses and hesitations in the course of writing, but remarkably enough the bulk

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of the book – some five-sixths of the whole – was written more or less in one sustained burst.

Having nearly reached the end, with less than five chapters to go (many among the shortest in the book), Tolkien then went back to the beginning and created a careful typescript (now divided into the familiar chapters) which, with a fair-copy handwritten text of one chapter, preserved most of what he’d written so far in legible form. He then completed the tale with a rough handwritten draft of the final chapters: everything from the point where Bard steps out of the dark lake to claim his heritage as Heir of Girion to Bilbo’s reunion with Gandalf and Balin.

Changes Before Publication

For the most part, the story as first drafted closely resembles the familiar published text, but there are startling exceptions. In that first rough draft of the opening chapter, Tolkien had named the dragon “Pryftan,” the goal of the Dwarves’ quest was “The Black Mountain,” the creator of the treasure map “Fimbulfambi,” and the goblin-king killed by Bullroarer Took “Fingolfin.” These proved ephemeral enough, but for most of the manuscript that followed the name of the chief Dwarf was “Gandalf,”8 while the wizard is named “Bladorthin” and the werebear “Medwed”; the names Thorin Oakenshield, Gandalf the wizard, and Beorn were relatively late changes only incor-porated into the story once the Dwarves and Hobbit reach Lake Town. Indeed Gandalf the Dwarf goes into a barrel in the Elvenking’s dungeon and Thorin the Dwarf (son of Thrain, son of Thror)9 comes out of that same barrel on the shores of the Long Lake, while the wizard is still Bladorthin as late as the group’s arrival at the Lonely Mountain.

As with names, so with plot: while the draft corresponds to the published story in general, one sequence was cut from the Mirkwood chapter (the longest in the book) and another added. The cut sequence casts Bilbo as a kind of Hobbit Theseus, finding his way through Mirkwood using a ball of spider-thread he collected from the giant spider he killed. The added sequence, which first appears in the typescript, is the introduction of the enchanted stream whose touch brings sleep, and all the complica-tions it entails. Briefer, but perhaps more important, changes abound. For example, Bard is introduced, only to be killed off again in the same scene, perishing when the stricken dragon falls upon the burning city, before Tolkien changes his mind and decides to keep the character around to play a role in the events following Smaug’s demise. Another significant change is Tolkien’s decision to reverse the order in which two chapters appear: “Fire and Water” (describing Smaug’s attack on Lake Town) originally preceded “Not at Home” (in which Bilbo and the Dwarves explore the dragon’s empty lair).

By far the most interesting departures come in the plot-notes, representing as they do an earlier layer of Tolkien’s thoughts about where the book was going and what

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would be in the still-unwritten chapters. For example, the Arkenstone is originally introduced (as “the Gem of Girion”) to provide Bilbo with a easily portable one-fourteenth portion of the hoard; ironically it transmogrifies from the piece of treasure the Dwarves explicitly promise Bilbo as his reward to become the one item in all that hoard which they would never part with. There is no hint of Dwarves succumbing to the dragon-sickness in the original outlines, nor any indication that some of Bilbo’s friends would perish in the Siege of the Mountain. Most startling of all was Tolkien’s plan to have Bilbo kill the dragon, stabbing Smaug with his little knife while the dragon slept, exhausted after the assault on Lake Town, thus fulfilling Smaug’s pro-phetic dream of being menaced by “a small warrior altogether insignificant in size, but provided with a bitter sword, and great courage” (HoH 507; cf. H 199). In one such set of notes, Tolkien writes of Bilbo being swept away by a steaming river of the dragon’s blood, riding in a golden cup until he is able to wade to safety, and becom-ing “hard & brave” as a result of his contact with the dragon-blood; an interesting echo of the Sigurd legend.

In the end Tolkien decided such great deeds are not for Bilbo, who behaves heroi-cally when he must but also remains pragmatic and essentially humble. Instead, Tolkien devised the extraordinary knot of conflicting claims, motives, and betrayals that makes up the story’s climax, ending the whole on a grand heroic note and yet still allowing Bilbo to remain Bilbo, a sensible fellow in a chivalric world. Along with the encounter with Gollum, it is the epic tone of the final chapters, developed by careful degrees, and the quiet dénouement of the “and back again” that makes The Hobbit so memorable.

The Road to Publication

Another of the myths associated with The Hobbit claims that, having carried the story as far as the death of Smaug, Tolkien abandoned the tale, consigning it to a drawer to languish alongside all his other unfinished projects. In fact, the available evidence shows that Tolkien completed the work within a relatively short time. And he at once began to loan the “Home Manuscript” (as the typescript with handwritten conclu-sion,10 plus maps, came to be called) to friends, circulating it among a wide array of acquaintances. Among those known to have read it during this period are his friend C. S. Lewis, a neighbor’s daughter(s), a nun, the poet W. R. Childe, and at least one of his students; there were probably more who have gone unrecorded (Tolkien himself observed that “the manuscript certainly wandered”; Letters 21).11 And all this took place in a period of a little over three years, by the end of which he had been approached by a publisher and asked to submit it.

The details of how Tolkien first came into contact with Allen & Unwin, who were to be his publishers for the next half-century or so, are impossible to recover at this distance in time, but it seems to have come about through A&U’s desire to release an updated edition of John R. Clark Hall’s 1901 translation of Beowulf, to which they

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owned the copyright. Since Tolkien was one of the world’s leading Old English schol-ars,12 it is unsurprising that they might have approached him to undertake the task, or at least recommend someone who might. Although Tolkien had a habit of taking on new projects without first completing those he already had undertaken (at that time his works in progress included editions of Pearl, Sir Orfeo, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, the “Clarendon Chaucer,” and Ancrene Wisse, the last of which he had just committed to at the beginning of that same year; see chs. 1 and 3, and Chronology 181), in this case he turned down the job but suggested a graduate student of his, Elaine Griffiths, be given the project, agreeing to himself contribute a Preface on Old English prosody. Later, when Susan Dagnall, a representative of the publisher, called on Griffiths to see how the work was going, rather than confess that it was languish-ing Griffiths urged Dagnall to borrow Professor Tolkien’s “frightfully good story.”13 Rather than depart empty-handed back to London, Dagnall did so, and thought highly enough of what she read that A&U asked Tolkien to formally submit the work. All this seems to have occurred in the spring of 1936; that summer Tolkien was working to finalize the text, and by early October a completed and carefully revised typescript had arrived at A&U and was soon formally accepted. Published a year later, in late September 1937, while not a bestseller it was immediately judged a success, and A&U at once began urging Tolkien to write a follow-up book, which ultimately resulted in The Lord of the Rings.

The Influence of Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship

That Tolkien’s initial connection with those who would become the publishers of The Hobbit came through a Beowulf project is wholly fitting, given that Tolkien’s scholarly work had a great influence on his legendarium,14 as Tolkien himself gladly acknowl-edged. Only a few months after publication of The Hobbit, he was asked if Beowulf had inspired the cup-stealing scene, and he replied, “Beowulf is among my most valued sources, though it was not consciously present to the mind in the process of writing” (HoH 856).

In fact, although the cup-stealing scene offers the most obvious example of the Old English epic’s direct influence on Tolkien’s story – compare “Inside Information” (H 198–199) with Beowulf lines 2210b–2234 – this is far from the only such case. Consider, for example, the parallels between Grendel and Gollum: both outcasts and cannibals, living in dark caves in lairs surrounded by water, yet each possessing some precious treasure that seems entirely out of keeping with its setting. And yet Gollum is not Grendel but a grendel, so to speak: a creature of the same type, another of the Children of Cain living out a lonely exile, but with a distinct personality (and speech-pattern) all his own. What at first glance look like borrowings turn out, on closer scrutiny, to be sources of inspiration freely adapted to serve some new purpose. This is not the place to explore the influence of Beowulf on The Hobbit in detail15

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– Tom Shippey, after all, called it “The single work which influenced Tolkien most” (2005, 389), emphasizing the point with an “obviously” – but one more point is worth making before we move on: it is surely significant that the cup-stealing scene in Beowulf is itself at least in part a scholarly reconstruction, that folio being the most badly damaged part of the Beowulf manuscript. As Shippey has pointed out (2005, 23), Tolkien was drawn to “asterisk words” – hypothetical reconstructions of unattested forms. And, what is more, he was clearly drawn to what we might call asterisk texts: cruxes and damaged or debatable passages in surviving medieval manuscripts.

Of course, Tolkien’s medieval sources ranged far wider than just Beowulf, important as that work was, or even beyond Old English (see chs. 15–21). Just for The Hobbit, his sources included the Elder Edda, Sir Orfeo, Icelandic folktales, Heiðreks Saga, Marie de France, “Lord Nann and the Korrigan,” Hrólfr Kraki’s Saga, and the Sigurd legend as reflected in both the Edda and Völsunga saga, just to name the more obvious and readily identifiable sources; there were many more in which the borrowings were more elusive and subtle. Foremost among the Old Norse sources is the Dvergatal, a list of Dwarven names that somehow came to be interpolated into the mythological poem Völuspá, one of the most interesting and cryptic parts of the Elder (Poetic) Edda. From this Tolkien derived all the Dwarf-names in The Hobbit, with the exception of Balin, whose outlier status has never been satisfactorily explained. Or take the case of Gol-lum’s fish-riddle:

Alive without breath,As cold as death,Never-thirsty, ever-drinking,All in mail never clinking. (H 73)

This clearly derives (like the riddle-contest itself)16 from a riddle-contest in Heiðreks Saga:

What lives on high fells?What falls in deep dales?What lives without breath?What is never silent?This riddle ponder,O prince Heidrek! (C. Tolkien 1960, 80; emphasis mine)

And then there is the curious case of Beorn, who clearly owes something to the elusive figure of Böðvar Bjarki, the most valiant of all the companions of King Hrólfr Kraki in Hrólfr Kraki’s Saga who at times is able to project a magical bear-form that lays low all foes. The link is confirmed by the illustration of Beorn’s Hall that Tolkien drew for The Hobbit, which turns out to be based on an illustration of Hrólfr Kraki’s hall in E. V. Gordon’s An Introduction to Old Norse (Gordon 1956, 28), which is also the hall known in Old English tradition as Heorot, the council-seat of King Hrothgar

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in which Beowulf’s great battle with Grendel takes place. It is no wonder that Bilbo feels uneasy lying in that dark hall surrounded by his sleeping companions and listen-ing to the noises outside, just as Beowulf did when waiting for Grendel.17

In fact, Tolkien included so many medieval themes and motifs in The Hobbit (and, of course, The Lord of the Rings) that his work now serves as a gateway into medieval literature for many readers; many, perhaps most, modern medievalists were first introduced to Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or the Elder Edda by Tolk-ien’s adaptations from, or known interest in, these works. Tolkien was able to breathe new life into medieval motifs, from reviving a fourteenth-century proverb (“third time pays for all”; cf. HoH, 516–517) to reclaiming traditional Faërie creatures like the Wood-elves from the sillification they had undergone in Elizabethan and Edward-ian hands, harkening back instead to the “true tradition,” as Shippey calls it, depicted in works such as Sir Orfeo (Shippey 2005, 388ff.).18 Most of all, perhaps, he revived the ideal of dragons as truly terrible foes, not the whimsical creatures of Kenneth Grahame nor the easily slain obstacles of too many fairy-tales of the Victorian age: forever replacing the latter with the Fáfniresque Smaug, the Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities (H 207).

The Hobbit and the Legendarium

When Tolkien came to write that suggestive first line, he had already been creating fantasy works for a decade and a half, starting in a many-faceted burst of creative energy in late 1914/early 1915 that manifested itself with the “Earendel” poems (September 1914), the creation of the first of his Elven languages (1915), the launch-ing of his first prose effort, the “Kullervo” story (late 1914 to early 1915), and the painting of several scenes from his imaged world (early to mid-1915), culminating in the start of work on The Book of Lost Tales (late 1916 to 1917). Indeed, if our reconstructed timeline is right, composition of The Hobbit either overlapped with or began immediately following the completion of the “Quenta” (the “1930 Silmarillion”) and its associated “Annals,” the earliest “Annals of Valinor” and the earliest “Annals of Beleriand” (all circa 1930). And it definitely overlapped with work on the “Lay of Leithian,” which had been started as far back as 1925 but was carried on concurrently for roughly halfway through the drafting of Mr Baggins’s story (through about Sep-tember 1931; Lays 150). Tolkien once said, apropos of the abandoned sequel to Farmer Giles, that The Silmarillion “and all that” had worked its way into virtually everything else he’d written.19 It would therefore be strange if the “Silmarillion” tales Tolkien was working on at the same time had not influenced the new tale he had just under-taken and was working on concurrently.

Nonetheless, the relationship between The Silmarillion and The Hobbit has vexed Tolkien scholars for years, confused no doubt by Tolkien’s attempts at various times and in varying contexts to explain the rather complicated relationship between The Silmarillion (which was written first but was to be published last), The Hobbit (which

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was written after The Silmarillion but published before it), and The Lord of the Rings (which was in a sense a sequel to them both, published after the one but before the other). On the one hand, we have Tolkien’s confident assertion that The Hobbit “was not intended to have anything to do with [the legendarium] . . . It had no necessary connexion with the ‘mythology’, but naturally became attracted towards this domi-nant construction in my mind .  .  . (Letters 346). On the other hand, we have his cheerful statement that “My tale is not consciously based on any other book – save one, and that is unpublished: the ‘Silmarillion’, a history of the Elves, to which fre-quent allusion is made” (Letters 31).

If we look not at Tolkien’s comments but at the work itself, especially its manu-script form, we may find it easier to resolve this issue. For one thing, Bilbo’s world is almost entirely populated by creatures Tolkien had already written about in various “Silmarillion” texts: Elves, Dwarves, Humans, the Half-elven, Goblins, giant Eagles, evil wolves, giant spiders, blood-sucking bats, and fiery dragons.20 And his borrowings from this earlier material are not just general but highly specific. Thus we are told that the Wood-elves Bilbo meets in Mirkwood:

descended from the ancient tribes that never went to Faerie in the West. There the Light-elves and the Deep-elves and the Sea-elves [i.e., the Vanyar, Noldor, and Teleri] went and lived for ages . . . before some came back into the Wide World. (H 156)

All this derives directly from Tolkien’s private mythology. Orcrist and Glamdring (and Sting) are not just Elven swords but “made in Gondolin for the Goblin-wars . . . dragons and goblins destroyed that city many ages ago” (H 50). We are later told Bilbo had grown up listening to tales of Gondolin and the goblin-wars “of which so many songs had sung” (H 67); it seems almost as if the events of the “Quenta” and “Annals of Beleriand” might be of a piece with the “wonderful tales . . . about dragons and goblins and giants” that Bilbo used to listen to at the Old Took’s parties (H 7). Be that as it may, it’s hard to argue that the Elrond whose human and Elven ancestors fought together in “the wars of the evil goblins and the elves and the first men in the North” – which we are told are recorded in “the strange stories before the beginning of History” (H 49), i.e., The Silmarillion – is not the same Elrond the Half-elfin with the identical background described in the 1926 “Sketch of the Mythology” (Shaping 38) and the 1930 Quenta (Shaping 158). And Tolkien himself identifies the Elvenking’s quarrel with the Dwarves – alluded to but never satisfactorily explained in The Hobbit (157) – with King Thingol’s dispute (Letters 346), explicitly making the connection; this strongly suggested that it is the same historical event retold in two different tales taking place in the same world, The Hobbit and the 1930 “Quenta” (Shaping 132–133). Perhaps most revealing of all is a brief reference in the original Hobbit manuscript to Beren and Lúthien.

When Gandalf the Dwarf (the later Thorin Oakenshield) says there must be a reckoning with the Necromancer for his father’s death, Bladorthin the wizard says:

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That is a job quite beyond the powers of all the dwarves .  .  . And anyway his castle stands no more and he is flown to another darker place – Beren and Tinúviel broke his power, but that is quite another story. (HoH 73)

This is extraordinary, in that it reveals that Tolkien knew, even as he was writing this early draft of the first chapter, that the Necromancer in whose dungeon the Dwarven-king’s father had perished was the same Thû who had imprisoned Beren and Finrod (or “Felagund” as he was then called; Shaping 110–111), as described at length in “The Lay of Leithian” (Cantos VII and IX; Lays 227–232, 248–255), just as he knew when continuing Bilbo’s story into the sequel, The Lord of the Rings, that the “Sauron” whose strongholds Frodo must penetrate was the same Necromancer whose lair Bilbo had avoided (H 130).

Thus we see that the parallels and borrowings are too many to be casually dis-missed. The question is how are we to take them. If we think of all these as one-way borrowings, light-hearted and consequence free, then we can align ourselves with Tolkien’s statement about there being “no necessary connexion” between the two. But that does not accord with Tolkien’s earlier statement that he consciously based The Hobbit on The Silmarillion. One reason Tolkien scholars have had so much resistance to accepting this latter statement and the evidence of the manuscript is that they are looking backwards from the gravitas of the 1977 Silmarillion and Tolkien’s other late works in the legendarium (e.g., “The Grey Annals”) and forgetting that the earlier writings were more light-hearted and in flux than they now seem. Even if Tolkien started by borrowing elements from the earlier legendarium without concern for how their re-use in The Hobbit might affect the original stories,21 publishing The Hobbit had the effect of fixing certain elements in the mythos, leading to Tolkien’s eventual decision to have the two stories take place in the same world at different times in its history. And just as Tolkien changed what he took from medieval works like Beowulf to fit the purposes of his new story, so too he adapted freely at times in borrowing from his own earlier work.

Children’s Literature and The Hobbit

Alongside inspiration from medieval literature and borrowings from his own earlier stories, a third important strand must be taken into account when considering the mix that made up The Hobbit: Tolkien’s immediate audience, his four children, who ranged in age from 13 to a toddler of one when he began the story. He had been making up stories for his children, both oral and written, at least since the first Father Christmas Letter of 1920; by 1930 this included not just the ongoing Father Christmas series (which continued until 1943) but also Roverandom (1925–1927) and probably the first two drafts of Farmer Giles of Ham (sometime between 1926 and 1930); soon to follow were Mr. Bliss (circa 1932/33) and the rewritten and expanded Farmer Giles (“The Lord of Thame,” early 1938; see ch. 13). And yet among all these

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works The Hobbit stands out for sheer ambition. It is more than twice the length of Roverandom, and much more complex. The total text of all of the Father Christmas letters, written over the course of more than two decades, could be fitted into just a chapter or two of The Hobbit. Simply put, The Hobbit is the longest work Tolkien had completed up until that time, a distinction it held until eventually succeeded by its own sequel, The Lord of the Rings.

It is important to note that in addition to his own tales for his children, Tolkien also read to them books by others, some of which contributed recognizable elements to Bilbo’s tale. Tolkien openly acknowledged the influence of George MacDonald (“George Macdonald . . . has depicted what will always be to me the classic goblin. By that standard I judge all goblins, old or new”; OFS 250, see also HoH 856) and suggested that his Hobbits might owe something to E. A. Wyke-Smith’s Marvellous Land of the Snergs (OFS 249–250). In addition, Tolkien is known to have been very fond of the work of Lewis Carroll (particularly his verse), and of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (whose Mole End and its inhabitant seem to have helped inspire not just Bag End but probably contributed to Bilbo himself). Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle books, sharing with The Hobbit many examples of talking with animals in their own languages, were also favorites in the Tolkien household (HoH 286). And, beyond such modern works, Tolkien also drew heavily if unobtrusively upon fairy-tale and folk tale, as noted by the great British folklorist Katharine Briggs (Briggs 1977, 401).

The most important thing The Hobbit shares with the classics of the golden age of children’s literature is that, like them, it is meant to appeal to a wide audience of both young and adult readers. Humphrey Carpenter, writing in the mid-1980, believed that Tolkien’s book harkened back to that golden age but came too late to belong to it (1985, 210–213). I would argue that The Hobbit was both inspired by, and won itself a place in, the classics of children’s literature. It was, in its own right, a milestone marking the transition between the classics of the Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian era on one hand and the modern masters on the other (e.g., Briggs herself, Mary Norton, Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper, Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman). As C. S. Lewis noted in the first published review of The Hobbit, back in October 1937: “Prediction is dangerous: but The Hobbit may well prove a classic.” How right he was. The Hobbit is as much a classic as The House on Pooh Corner or The Golden Compass.

The Lord of the Rings’ Influence on The Hobbit

No sooner had The Hobbit been published than Tolkien came under pressure to write a sequel, the book that would ultimately become The Lord of the Rings. And no sooner had Tolkien begun that sequel than the new story began to exert pressure upon the earlier book, most significantly in the rewriting of the crucial Gollum chapter to bring

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The Hobbit in line with Tolkien’s evolving concept of the One Ring’s power.22 This revision was followed in turn by a short piece known as “The Quest of Erebor” in which Gandalf retells events of “An Unexpected Party” (the opening chapter of The Hobbit) from his own point of view; originally written as part of Appendix A in The Lord of the Rings, it was excluded for reasons of length.23 Then finally around 1960 Tolkien undertook to rewrite The Hobbit entirely in the style of The Lord of the Rings, but abandoned the project when the story reached Rivendell.24

Ultimately, aside from the crucial Gollum chapter, Tolkien decided to respect The Hobbit’s autonomy – it had, after all, originally been written as a stand-alone book – keeping such changes to a minimum. For example, he did not add material affirming the Necromancer’s identity as Sauron, or bring the events with the White Council and Dol Guldur from their place on the fringe of the story. More importantly, he did not alter the Ring itself, allowing it to remain a simple ring of invisibility, such as are told of “in old old tales” (H 81), rather than prefiguring within the earlier book its sinister aspects. Just as he earlier decided to let The Lord of the Rings develop beyond the style and mode of The Hobbit, so that it transcended its origins as “The New Hobbit” now he chose to refrain from rewriting Bilbo’s tale into the style of The Lord of the Rings, which would have reduced The Hobbit into a mere prelude to larger work.

Conclusion: Tolkien’s Other Masterpiece

The Lord of the Rings is widely recognized as a masterpiece. It is less often acknowl-edged that Tolkien wrote not one but two masterpieces, and that The Hobbit also deserves that designation. In it he achieved his mature, characteristic style, and its deft, evocative, and sometimes amusingly breezy prose (“since you are sitting comfort-ably at home, and have not the danger of being eaten to disturb your thinking”; H 73) opened up the mode and style he was to use to such good effect in the sequel. Like Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, or Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, we have here a pair of novels by the same author in which the earlier, shorter work in each case deserves recognition in its own right, not just in light of its even greater successor. Even notorious Tolkien-bashers such as Edmund Wilson, Catharine Stimpson, and Harold Bloom conceded that The Hobbit had a charm of its own.

Notes

1 Although in Dodgson’s case we do know the exact date of that picnic, thanks to his being an obsessive diarist: July 4, 1862.

2 “I can still see the corner of my house in 20 Northmoor Road where it happened” (BBC 2 1968; HoH xii). Incidentally, the 1930 date

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is confirmed by an interview with Arndis Þorjarnardóttir (1999), an Icelandic au pair girl who joined the Tolkien household in 1930. She recalled that when she arrived they had just moved into the new house and that Tolkien started writing The Hobbit while she was there. I am grateful to Nancy Marie Walker’s blog, God of Wednesday, for drawing this interview to my attention.

3 Stanley Unwin memo, made after a meeting with Tolkien on October 27, 1937 to discuss future publications following The Hobbit: “He mentioned that THE HOBBIT took him two or three years to write because he works very slowly” (A&U archive; HoH xviii, xxxviii).

4 C. S. Lewis, letter of February 4, 1933 to Arthur Greeves: “Since term began I have had a delightful time reading a children’s story which Tolkien has just written” (HoH xv, xvii). Note that Lewis specifies the work has just been written.

5 Much later, Tolkien’s two eldest sons asserted that they remembered their father telling them the story of The Hobbit while still in their previous house (i.e., no later than 1929). However, their accounts not only con-tradict Tolkien’s own statements about the book’s origins but include elements that con-tradict other well-documented facts (see HoH xiii–xv). It seems likely that, nearly a half-century after the events in question, their memories had conflated the stories Tolkien made up and told his children from their earliest childhood (Carpenter 1977, 161ff.) with The Hobbit.

6 See Tolkien’s letter to The Observer, printed in the February 20, 1938 issue (HoH xviii).

7 As Doug Anderson points out, it’s been featured in Bartlett’s Quotations since 1980 (Anderson 2002, 29).

8 Note that Gandalf is actually more consistent as a Dwarf-name, since like almost all the other Dwarf-names in The Hobbit it derives from the Old Norse name-list known as the Dvergatal, whereas Bladorthin is Elven (spe-cifically, Noldorin, the language that came to be called Sindarin), as might be thought more appropriate to a wizardly type.

9 Or son of Thror, son of Thrain; Tolkien went back and forth as to which was the right

sequence, right up until the point when the story was in page proofs.

10 That the “Home Manuscript” Tolkien circu-lated in the early/mid-1930s was a complete text is indicated by the fact that none of those known to have read it at this stage make any mention of it being unfinished in their later recollections; Lewis, in fact, specifically cri-tiques the conclusion in his letter to Greeves (HoH xvii–xviii). A 13-year-old Christopher Tolkien described the composite work in 1937 thus: “He wrote it ages ago . . . but the ending chapters were rather roughly done, and not typed out at all; he finished it about a year ago” (HoH xix); this is an admirably accurate description of the composite “Home Manuscript.”

11 The book was also read aloud to the Inklings (Letters 28), but this probably occurred in the summer or early fall of 1936, as he was com-pleting the typescript and preparing the text for official submission to the publisher.

12 He was listed in Who’s Who as far back as 1924, before he had even taken up the Raw-linson and Bosworth professorship at Oxford.

13 Most of our information regarding this sequence comes from an Elaine Griffiths interview, broadcast as part of a 1974 BBC Radio Oxford program on Tolkien, produced by Humphrey Carpenter (Griffiths 2001).

14 Tolkien’s legendarium also had an impact on his scholarship: his great contribution to Old English studies in “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (see ch. 2) came about from his treating the Beowulf-poet as a fellow author and examining his aesthetic choices accordingly, which resulted in shifting the focus on the poem from historical document to literary work.

15 Among the many works exploring Beowulf’s influence on Tolkien’s work, see Adams (1978) for a detailed setting-out of the Grendel/Gollum parallels. For a sustained argument investigating Beowulf’s influence specifically on The Hobbit, see Christensen (1969).

16 Although it was not his sole source: the riddle-games in two Edda poems, Vafþrúðnis-mál and Alvíssmál, no doubt also played a part. It was Tolkien’s own innovation, and a brilliant one at that, to make the contest an

The Hobbit 131

exchange of riddles, rather than strictly fol-lowing his Old Norse model in having one character ask all the riddles and the other answer them. It is probably also significant that this particular riddle is found in only one manuscript, being absent from all other sur-viving copies of the saga.

17 Incidently, this same saga was translated in English by Tolkien’s friend and former student Stella Mills; her translation, dedicated to Tolkien, Gordon, and OED lexicographer C. T. Onions, appeared in 1933. It thus seems very likely she was working on it during the period Tolkien was writing The Hobbit.

18 That is, the most direct outside source for the Wood-elves in The Hobbit was probably Sir Orfeo, just as the older and wiser Elves of The Lord of the Rings owe a lot to The Mabinogion and the fierce warlike elves of The Silmarillion tradition most resemble the Tuatha dé Danaan of the Cath Maige Tuired.

19 “though shelved .  .  . the Silmarillion and all that has refused to be suppressed. It has bubbled up, infiltrated, and probably spoiled everything (that even remotely approached ‘Faery’) which I have tried to write since. It was kept out of Farmer Giles with an effort, but stopped the continuation. Its shadow was deep on the later parts of The Hobbit. It has captured The Lord of the Rings, so that that has

become simply its continuation and comple-tion, requiring the Silmarillion to be fully intelligible . . .” (Letters 136–137).

20 The exceptions are notable, though few: Beorn, Gollum, and the Hobbit himself.

21 For example, the Elvenking’s quarrel with the Dwarves seems to be set in the period between when Thingol drives forth the Dwarven crafts-men from his halls and the Dwarves’ return with an army to slay Thingol and despoil Doriath. These events occur in sequential paragraphs in the 1930 “Quenta” (Shaping 133), but in The Hobbit the first has already hap-pened quite some time since (it is referred to as an “old quarrel” at H 157) while the next has not yet happened – and, given the events of The Battle of Five Armies, will never now come to pass.

22 For an account of the series of fortunate events that led to this revision being published as the “second edition” of The Hobbit, see “The 1947 Hobbit” (HoH 760–762).

23 Various drafts of this work have since been published. It is most readily available in Unfinished Tales but another draft appears as an appendix in Anderson (2002, 367–377); for its origin and development, see Peoples (282ff.).

24 For the complete text of this curtailed rewrit-ing, see “The 1960 Hobbit” (HoH 763–838).

Adams, Roberta Albrecht. 1978. “Gollum and Grendel as Cain’s Kinsmen.” M.A. thesis, Stetson University.

Anderson, Douglas A., ed. 2002. The Annotated Hobbit. Rev. edn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

BBC 2. 1968. Tolkien in Oxford, half-hour documen-tary. Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/writers/12237.shtml, accessed August 28, 2013.

Briggs, Katharine. 1977. A Dictionary of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies and Other Supernatu-ral Creatures. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien – A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin.

Carpenter, Humphrey. 1985. Secret Gardens: The Golden Age of Children’s Literature. London: Unwin Paperbacks.

Christensen, Bonniejean. 1969. “Beowulf and The Hobbit: Elegy into Fantasy in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Creative Technique.” Ph.D. dissertation, Uni-versity of Southern California.

Gordon, Eric V. 1956. An Introduction to Old Norse. 2nd edn. Revised by A. R. Taylor. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Griffiths, Elaine. 2001. Interview. Re-issue. Track 12 in J. R. R. Tolkien: An Audio Portrait, by Brian Sibley. BBC Radio Collection.

Shippey, Tom. 2005. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. and expanded edn. London: HarperCollins.

Þorjarnardóttir, Arndis. 1999. “Barnfóstran frá Íslandi og Tolkien-fjölskyldan.” Interviewed by Linda Ásdísardóttir. Morganbladid, February 28, Section A, 26. Available at http://timarit.is/

References

132 John D. Rateliff

view_page_init.jsp?issId=131485&pageId=1928715&lang=is&q=Tolkien and an English translation/synopsis at http://svanurg.blog.is/blog/svanurg/entry/1065767/. Both accessed November 24, 2013.

Tolkien, Christopher, ed. 1960. The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise. London and New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons.

Further Reading

Chickering, Howell D., trans. and ed. 1977. Beowulf. New York: Anchor Books.