The Peoples of Middle-earth Read online

  Mr Gilson observes that this text, clearly to be associated with work on the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen (see p. 263), seems to be the only place where the name Aragorn is translated; and he mentions my father’s letter of 17 December 1972 to Mr Richard Jeffery (Letters no. 347), who had asked whether Aragorn could mean ‘tree-king’. In his reply my father said that it ‘cannot contain a “tree” word’, and that ‘“Tree-King” would have no special fitness for him’. He continued:

  The names in the line of Arthedain are peculiar in several ways; and several, though Sindarin in form, are not readily interpretable. But it would need more historical records and linguistic records of Sindarin than exist (sc. than I have found time or need to invent!) to explain them.

  PART ONE

  THE PROLOGUE AND APPENDICES TO THE LORD OF THE RINGS

  I

  THE PROLOGUE

  It is remarkable that this celebrated account of Hobbits goes so far back in the history of the writing of The Lord of the Rings: its earliest form, entitled Foreword: Concerning Hobbits, dates from the period 1938–9, and it was printed in The Return of the Shadow (VI.310–14). This was a good ‘fair copy’ manuscript, for which there is no preparatory work extant; but I noticed in my very brief account of it that my father took up a passage concerning Hobbit architecture from the chapter A Short Cut to Mushrooms (see VI.92, 294–5).

  Comparison with the published Prologue to The Lord of the Rings will show that while much of that original version survived, there was a great deal still to come: the entire account of the history of the Hobbits (FR pp. 11–15) in section 1 of the Prologue, the whole of section 2, Concerning Pipe-weed, and the whole of section 3, Of the Ordering of the Shire, apart from the opening paragraph; while corresponding to section 4, Of the Finding of the Ring, there was no more than a brief reference to the story of Bilbo and Gollum (VI.314).

  In order to avoid confusion with another and wholly distinct ‘Foreword’, given in the next chapter, I shall use the letter P in reference to the texts that ultimately led to the published Prologue, although the title Foreword: Concerning Hobbits was used in the earlier versions. The original text given in The Return of the Shadow I shall call therefore P 1.

  My father made a typescript of this, P 2, and judging from the typewriter used I think it probable that it belonged to much the same time as P 1 – at any rate, to a fairly early period in the writing of The Lord of the Rings. In my text of P 1 in The Return of the Shadow I ignored the changes made to the manuscript unless they seemed certainly to belong to the time of writing (VI.310), but all such changes were taken up into P 2, so that it was probably not necessary to make the distinction. The changes were not numerous and mostly minor,1 but the whole of the conclusion of P 1, following the words ‘his most mysterious treasure: a magic ring’ (VI.314), was struck out and replaced by a much longer passage, in which my father recounted the actual story of Bilbo and Gollum, and slightly altered the final paragraph. This new conclusion I give here. A part of the story as told here survived into the published Prologue, but at this stage there was no suggestion of any other version than that in The Hobbit, until the chapter Riddles in the Dark was altered in the edition of 1951. With all these changes incorporated, the typescript P 2 was a precise copy of the original version (see note 7).

  This ring was brought back by Bilbo from his memorable journey. He found it by what seemed like luck. He was lost for a while in the tunnels of the goblins under the Misty Mountains, and there he put his hand on it in the dark.

  Trying to find his way out, he went on down to the roots of the mountains and came to a full stop. At the bottom of the tunnel was a cold lake far from the light. On an island of rock in the water lived Gollum. He was a loathsome little creature: he paddled a small boat with his large flat feet, and peered with pale luminous eyes, catching blind fish with his long fingers and eating them raw. He ate any living thing, even goblin, if he could catch and strangle it without a fight; and he would have eaten Bilbo, if Bilbo had not had in his hand an elvish knife to serve him as a sword. Gollum challenged the hobbit to a Riddle-game: if he asked a riddle that Bilbo could not guess, then he would eat him; but if Bilbo floored him, then he promised to give him a splendid gift. Since he was lost in the dark, and could not go on or back, Bilbo was obliged to accept the challenge; and in the end he won the game (as much by luck as by wits). It then turned out that Gollum had intended to give Bilbo a magic ring that made the wearer invisible. He said he had got it as a birthday present long ago; but when he looked for it in his hiding-place on the island, the ring had disappeared. Not even Gollum (a mean and malevolent creature) dared cheat at the Riddle-game, after a fair challenge, so in recompense for the missing ring he reluctantly agreed to Bilbo’s demand that he should show him the way out of the labyrinth of tunnels. In this way the hobbit escaped and rejoined his companions: thirteen dwarves and the wizard Gandalf. Of course he had quickly guessed that Gollum’s ring had somehow been dropped in the tunnels and that he himself had found it; but he had the sense to say nothing to Gollum. He used the ring several times later in his adventures, but nearly always to help other people. The ring had other powers besides that of making its wearer invisible. But these were not discovered, or even suspected, until long after Bilbo had returned home and settled down again. Consequently they are not spoken of in the story of his journey. This tale is chiefly concerned with the ring, its powers and history.

  Bilbo, it is told, following his own account and the ending he himself devised for his memoirs (before he had written most of them), ‘remained very happy to the end of his days, and those were extraordinarily long.’ They were. How long, and why so long, will here be discovered. Bilbo returned to his home at Bag-End on June 22nd in his fifty-second year, having been away since April 30th2 in the year before, and nothing very notable occurred in the Shire for another sixty years, when Mr. Baggins began to make preparations for the celebration of his hundred and eleventh birthday. At which point the tale of the Ring begins.

  Years later my father took up the typescript P 2 again. He made a number of minor alterations in wording, replaced the opening paragraph, and rewrote a part of the story of Bilbo and Gollum (improving the presentation of the events, and elaborating a little Bilbo’s escape from the tunnels); these need not be recorded. But he also introduced a lengthy new passage, following the words (VI.313) ‘but that was not so true of other families, like the Bagginses or the Boffins’ (FR p. 18). This begins ‘The Hobbits of the Shire had hardly any “government” …’, and is the origin of most of section 3 (Of the Ordering of the Shire) in the published Prologue, extending as far as ‘the first sign that everything was not quite as it should be, and always used to be’ (cf. FR p. 19).

  Much of the new passage survived into the final form, but there are some interesting differences. In the third paragraph of the section (as it stands in FR) the new text in P 2 reads:

  There was, of course, the ancient tradition in their part of the world that there had once been a King at Fornost away north of the Shire (Northworthy the hobbits called it),3 who had marked out the boundaries of the Shire and given it to the Hobbits; and they in turn had acknowledged his lordship. But there had been no King for many ages, and even the ruins of Northworthy were covered with grass …

  The name Northworthy (for later Norbury) is not found in the Lord of the Rings papers, where the earlier ‘vernacular’ names are the Northburg, Northbury. See p. 225, annal c.1600.

  The fourth paragraph of the section reads thus in the P 2 text:

  It is true that the Took family had once a certain eminence, quite apart from the fact that they were (and remained) numerous, wealthy, peculiar, and of great social importance. The head of the family had formerly borne the title of The Shirking. But that title was no longer in use in Bilbo’s time: it had been killed by the endless and inevitable jokes that had been made about it, in defiance of its obvious etymology. The habit went on, however, of referring to the head of the famil
y as The Took, and of adding (if required) a number: as Isengrim the First.

  Shirking is of course a reduction of Shire-king with shortening (and in this case subsequent alteration) of the vowel, in the same way as Shirriff is derived from Shire-reeve; but this was a joke that my father decided to remove – perhaps because the choice of the word ‘king’ by the Hobbits seemed improbable (cf. p. 232 and note 25, and Appendix A (I, iii), RK p. 323).4

  The new passage in P 2 does not give the time of the year of the Free Fair on the White Downs (‘at the Lithe, that is at Midsummer’, FR p. 19), and nothing is said of the letter-writing proclivities of Hobbits. To the mention of the name ‘Bounders’ my father added ‘(as they were called unofficially)’; the word ‘unofficially’ he subsequently removed, thus in this case retaining the joke but not drawing attention to it.

  It seems to me all but certain that this new element in the text is to be associated with the emergence of the Shirriffs in the chapter The Scouring of the Shire – where the office is shown to have been long established ‘before any of this began’, as the Shirriff Robin Smallburrow said to Sam (RK p. 281). The fact that the term ‘Thain’ had not yet emerged does not contradict this, for that came in very late (see IX.99, 101, 103). I have concluded (IX.12–13) that Book Six of The Lord of the Rings was written in 1948.

  At the end of this passage on the ordering of the Shire, which as already noted (p. 5) ends with the words ‘the first sign that everything was not quite as it should be, and always used to be’, the addition to P 2 continues (with a later pencilled heading ‘Tobacco’):5

  There is one thing more about these hobbits of old that must be mentioned: they smoked tobacco through pipes of clay or wood. A great deal of mystery surrounds the origin of this peculiar custom …

  From this point the remainder of section 2 in the final form of the Prologue was achieved in P 2 with only a very few minor differences: ‘Old Toby’ of Longbottom was Tobias (not Tobold) Hornblower (on which see p. 69), and the date of his first growing of the pipe-weed was 1050 (not 1070), in the time of Isengrim the First (not the Second); the third of the Longbottom varieties was ‘Hornpipe Twist’ (not ‘Southern Star’); and it is not said of sweet galenas that the Men of Gondor ‘esteem it only for the fragrance of its flowers’. There is also a footnote to the words ‘about the year 1050 in Shire-reckoning’:

  That is about 400 years before the events recorded in this book. Dates in the Shire were all reckoned from the legendary crossing of the Brandywine River by the brothers Marco and Cavallo.

  Later changed to Marcho and Blanco, these names do not appear in the narrative of The Lord of the Rings: they are found only in the further long extension to the Prologue concerning Hobbit-history (FR p. 13) and in the introductory note to Appendix C, Family Trees (RK p. 379).

  For the history of the passage on pipe-weed, which began as a lecture on the subject delivered by Merry to Théoden at the ruined gates of Isengard, see VIII.36–9. After much development my father marked it ‘Put into Foreword’ (VIII.38 and note 36).6 – On Isengrim Took the First and the date 1050 see VIII.45, note 37. When this addition to P 2 was written the old genealogical tree of the Tooks (given and discussed in VI.316–18), found on the back of a page from the ‘Third Phase’ manuscript of A Long-expected Party, was still in being.7

  As has been seen (p. 4), in P 2 as revised the story of Bilbo and Gollum was still that of the original edition of The Hobbit, in which Gollum fully intended to give Bilbo the Ring if he lost the riddle-contest (see VI.86). The curious story of how the rewritten narrative in the chapter Riddles in the Dark came to be published in the edition of 1951 is sufficiently indicated in Letters nos.111, 128–9. In September 1947 my father sent to Sir Stanley Unwin what he called a ‘specimen’ of such a rewriting, not intending it for publication, but seeking only Sir Stanley’s comments on the idea. Believing that it had been rejected, he was greatly shocked and surprised when nearly three years later, in July 1950, he received the proofs of a new edition with the rewriting incorporated. But he accepted the fait accompli. Beyond remarking that the full correspondence makes it very clear how, and how naturally, the misunderstandings on both sides that led to this result arose, there is no need to say any more about it here: for the present purpose its significance lies in the conclusion that the revision of P 2 cannot have been carried out after July 1950. In fact, I believe it to belong to 1948 (see pp. 14–15).

  From the revised and extended text P 2, now in need of a successor, my father made a new typescript (P 3). This was again an uncharacteristically exact copy. It received a good deal of correction, in the earlier part only, but these corrections were restricted to minor alterations of wording and a few other details, such as the change of ‘Northworthy’ to ‘Norbury’ and of the date of Bilbo’s departure with Gandalf and the Dwarves to April 28th (note 2). From this in turn an amanuensis typescript was made (P 4), but this my father barely touched. These texts both bore the original title, Foreword, Concerning Hobbits.

  The next stage was a very rough manuscript, P 5, without title (but with Concerning Hobbits added later), and without either the section on pipe-weed or that on the story of Bilbo and Gollum, which while constantly moving the detail of expression further towards the final form held still to the original structure, and retained such features as the Shirking.8 To convey the way in which the text was developed (with minute attention to tone, precision of meaning, and the fall of sentences) in successive stages I give this single brief example.

  P 1 (VI.311)

  And yet plainly they must be relatives of ours: nearer to us than elves are, or even dwarves. For one thing, they spoke a very similar language (or languages), and liked or disliked much the same things as we used to. What exactly the relationship is would be difficult to say. To answer that question one would have to re-discover a great deal of the now wholly lost history and legends of the Earliest Days; and that is not likely to happen, for only the Elves preserve any traditions about the Earliest Days, and their traditions are mostly about themselves – not unnaturally: the Elves were much the most important people of those times.

  P 2 (as revised)

  And yet plainly they must be relatives of ours: nearer to us than Elves are, or even Dwarves. For one thing, they spoke a very similar language (or languages), and liked and disliked much the same things as we used to. What exactly the relationship is would be difficult to say. To answer that question one would have to rediscover much that is now lost and forgotten for ever. Only the Elves now preserve traditions of the Elder Days, and even their traditions are incomplete, being concerned chiefly with Elves.

  P 5

  Yet plainly they are relatives of ours: far nearer to us than are Elves, or even Dwarves. They spoke the languages of Men, and they liked and disliked much the same things as we once did. What exactly our relationship was in the beginning can, however, no longer be told. The answer to that question lies in the Elder Days that are now lost and forgotten for ever. Only the Elves preserve still any traditions of that vanished time, but these are concerned mostly with their own affairs.

  To the manuscript P 5, however, my father added, at the time of writing, much new material. One of these passages was that concerning the martial qualities of the Hobbits, or lack of them, the existence of arms in the Shire (and here the word mathom first appears in the texts of the Prologue), and the ‘curious toughness’ of Hobbit character. This was already fairly close to the published form (FR pp. 14–15), and its most notable omission is the absence of the reference to the Battle of Greenfields; the text reads here:

  The Hobbits were not warlike, though at times they had been obliged to fight to maintain themselves in a hard and wild world. But at this period there was no living memory of any serious assault on the borders of the Shire. Even the weathers were milder …

  The original text of the chapter The Scouring of the Shire had no reference to the Battle of Greenfields: ‘So ended the fierce battle of Bywater, the only battl
e ever fought in the Shire’ (IX.93). In the second text (IX.101) my father repeated this, but altered it as he wrote to ‘the last battle fought in the Shire, and the only battle since the Greenfields, 1137, away up in the North Farthing’. It seems a good guess that (as with the passage concerning the Shirriffs, p. 6) the appearance of the Battle of Greenfields in the Prologue soon after this (see below) is to be associated with the writing of The Scouring of the Shire.

  It is convenient here, before turning to the rest of the new material that came in with the manuscript P 5, to notice a text written on two small slips and attached to the amanuensis typescript P 4. This is the origin of the passage concerning the founding of the Shire in the published Prologue (FR pp. 13–14), but it is worth giving in full.

  In the Year 1 (according to the reckoning of Shire-folk) and in the month of Luyde9 (as they used to say) the brothers Marco and Cavallo, having obtained formal permission from the king Argeleb II in the waning city of Fornost, crossed the wide brown river Baranduin. They crossed by the great stone bridge that had been built in the days of the power of the realm of Arthedain; for they had no boats. After their own manner and language they later changed the name to Brandywine. All that was demanded of the ‘Little People’ was (1) to keep the laws of Arthedain; (2) to keep the Bridge (and all other bridges) in repair; (3) to allow the king to hunt still in the woods and moors thrice a year. For the country had once been a royal park and hunting ground.

  After the crossing the L[ittle] P[eople] settled down and almost disappeared from history. They took some part as allies of the king in the wars of Angmar (sending bowmen to battle), but after the disappearance of the realm and of Angmar they lived mostly at peace. Their last battle was against Orcs (Greenfields S.R. 1347?). For the land into which they had come, though now long deserted, had been richly tilled in days of yore, and there the kings had once had many farms, cornlands, vineyards, and woods. This land they called the Shire [struck out: (as distinct from the Old Home at Bree)], which in their language meant an ordered district of government and business – the business of growing food and eating it and living in comparative peace and content. This name Shire served to distinguish it from the wilder lands eastward, which became more and more desolate, all the way back to the dreadful Mountains over which (according to their own tales) their people had long ago wandered westward; also from the smaller country, the Oldhome at Bree, where they first settled – but not by themselves: for Bree they shared with the Bree-men. Now these folk (of whom the brothers Marco and Cavallo were in their day the largest and boldest) were of a kind concerning which the records of ancient days have little to say – except of course their own records and legends. They called themselves Hobbits. Most other peoples called them Halflings (or words of similar meaning in various languages), when they knew of them or heard rumour of them. For they existed now only in the Shire, Bree, and [?lonely] here and there were a few wild Hobbits in Eriador. And it is said that there were still a few ‘wild hobbits’ in the eaves of Mirkwood west and east of the Forest. Hobbit appears to be a ‘corruption’ or shortening of older holbytla ‘hole dweller’.10 This was the name by which they were known (to legend) in Rohan, whose people still spoke a tongue very like the most ancient form of the Hobbit language. Both peoples originally came from the lands of the upper Anduin.11