'I shall' and 'I will' at The Council of Elrond

'I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way.'

These are perhaps some of the best known words said by Frodo in all of The Lord of the Rings, often quoted and commented upon. 'I shall', however, is the normal way to express the future tense in the first person singular. Before commenting upon the choice Tolkien made here in preferring 'will' to 'shall', it will be useful to examine the times character say 'I shall' and 'I will' throughout the discussion in The Council of Elrond. Let's start with 'I shall'. It is the default, and there are only three instances.

(a) And now that part of the tale that I shall tell is drawn to its close. (FR 2.ii.245)

(b) It was hot when I first took it, hot as a glede, and my hand was scorched, so that I doubt if ever again I shall be free of the pain of it. (252, emphasis original, indicating quotation of a written document)

(c) I had thought of putting: and he lived happily ever afterwards to the end of his days. It is a good ending, and none the worse for having been used before. Now I shall have to alter that: it does not look like coming true.... (269)

The speakers here are, in order, Elrond, Isildur (as quoted by Gandalf), and Bilbo, three very different characters. Each use of 'shall' here indicates nothing more or less than the speaker's opinion of what is or is not going to happen. There is little to say or argue about here so far.

Turning to 'I will', we find nineteen instances uttered by nine speakers: Elrond, Isildur, Aragorn, Bilbo, Gandalf, Radagast, Boromir, Gwaihir, and Frodo.

(A) 'And I will begin that tale, though others shall end it.' (Elrond, 242)

(B) '"This I will have as weregild for my father, and my brother," (Isildur, 243)

(C) 'And this I will say to you, Boromir, ere I end.' (Aragorn, 248)

(D) 'But now the world is changing once again. A new hour comes. Isildur's Bane is found. Battle is at hand. The Sword shall be reforged. I will come to Minas Tirith.' (Aragorn, 248)

(E) 'Very well,' said Bilbo. 'I will do as you bid. But I will now tell the true story, and if some here have heard me tell it otherwise' – he looked sidelong at Glóin – 'I ask them to forget it and forgive me.' (Bilbo, 249)

(F) 'But for my part I will risk no hurt to this thing: of all the works of Sauron the only fair. It is precious to me, though I buy it with great pain. (Isildur, 253)

(G) 'And now I will answer Galdor's other questions. What of Saruman? (Gandalf, 256)

(H) '"I will go to Saruman," I said. (Gandalf, 257)

(I) '"I will do that," he said....' (Radagast, 257)

(J) "Well, the choices are, it seems, to submit to Sauron, or to yourself. I will take neither. Have you others to offer?" (Gandalf 260)

(K) '"Then I will bear you to Edoras, where the Lord of Rohan sits in his halls," he said; "for that is not very far off." (Gwaihir, 261)

(L) 'Nor is it now, I will swear,' said Boromir. 'It is a lie that comes from the Enemy.' (Boromir, 262)

(M) "If this delay was his fault, I will melt all the butter in him. I will roast the old fool over a slow fire." (Gandalf, 263)

 

(N) 'I fear to take the Ring to hide it. I will not take the Ring to wield it.'

    'Nor I,' said Gandalf. (Elrond, followed by Gandalf, 267)

(O) 'I will take the Ring,' he said, 'though I do not know the way.' (Frodo, 270)

(P) 'But if you take it freely, I will say that your choice is right....' (Elrond, 270)

In contrast to the three instances of 'I shall', 'I will' quite clearly communicates intent, desire, or choice (whether acceptance or refusal). Particularly interesting is that Isildur twice uses 'I will' (B, F) of what he intends to do or not do in connection with the Ring, in contrast with his use of 'I shall' (b) to denote what he expects will be the case with the pain the Ring has caused him. Mark also Elrond's explicit and Gandalf's implicit use of 'I will' to indicate their refusal of the Ring (N). Elrond makes clear (P) that his approval of Frodo's choice or intention is conditional (O). Elrond, moreover, has previously expressed an opinion about the wisdom of 'taking' the Ring:

'Isildur took it! That is tidings indeed.' [said Boromir]

    'Alas! yes,' said Elrond. 'Isildur took it, as should not have been.' (243)

On this showing, Frodo's 'I will take the Ring' occupies a much greyer area than it seems to do at first glance. His courage and his humility are still there, just as they always have been, but the ambiguity and the peril of 'I will' are also in keeping with the desire he had felt only the night before to strike Bilbo when he reached out for the Ring which Frodo was quite reluctant to show him (231).

I hope to study these uses of 'I shall' and 'I will' further in a later post, which will also explore the distinction more widely in The Lord of the Rings.

A couple of comments on The Inimitable Prancing Pony Podcast

On a recent episode (starting at 3:30) of The Prancing Pony Podcast, Alan and Shawn were discussing the question of whether the Ringwraiths had possession of their own rings or whether Sauron had them. Near the end Alan made an interesting point, to which I think I can add some support. Alan noted that on Weathertop Frodo could not see the rings of the Black Riders, even though the One Ring enabled him to see much about them that was invisible to everyone else present. 

As Alan admitted, this is an argument from silence. But it becomes far more persuasive when we recall that Frodo could see Galadriel's ring when Sam could not, which she attributes specifically to Frodo being the Ring-bearer (FR 2.vii. 365-66). These two points together strike me as pretty compelling, especially when added to the other evidence that Sauron held the Rings of the Nine.

On another episode (starting at 1:34:00) a question arose about the scene in Rivendell in which Bilbo tries to touch the Ring and Frodo sees him momentarily as a Gollum-like creature whom he wishes to strike. I have just a couple of observations here and a question.

• Frodo in this scene is in exactly the same place as Bilbo was in the scene with Gandalf in A Long-expected Party. Both are on the brink of violence towards someone they care deeply for because they see that person as a threat to their possession of the Ring. What Bilbo likely sees in Frodo at this moment is himself. Something similar will happen with Frodo and Sam in Mordor.
• One powerful effect of the Ring is to distort the reality of its bearer even when it is not being worn. Presumably this is connected to the temptations others not in possession of it feel.
• What are we to make of the way Frodo-the-narrator chose to represent this scene?

'When winter first begins to bite -- Echoes and Re-echoes of Chaucer at FR 2.iii.273

In The Road to Middle-earth Tom Shippey argues (184-85) that the poem Bilbo recites to Frodo in The Ring Goes South 'in rhythm and theme ... echoes the magnificent coda to Love's Labour's Lost' :

When winter first begins to bite
and stones crack in the frosty night,
when pools are black and trees are bare,
'tis evil in the Wild to fare;

(FR 2.iii.273) 

When icicles hang by the wall
 And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom bears logs into the hall
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp'd and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,

(LLL 5.2) 

As far as rhythm and theme go there can be little argument, but I would suggest that we can say more here. For the words of Bilbo's poem echo the opening lines of þe Clerkes Compleinte, Tolkien's little known parody of the opening lines of Chaucer's Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Tolkien's Middle English original is followed by my rendering into Modern English:

þe Clerkes Compleinte 

Whanne þat Octobre mid his schoures derke
Þe erþe haþ dreint, and wetė windes cherke
& swoghe in naked braunches colde and bare,
& þ’oldė sonne is hennes longe yfare; 

The Clerk's Complaint 

When October with his showers dark
The earth has drowned, and wet winds creak
And sigh in naked branches cold and bare,

And the old sun has from here far fared;

The dark waters, the cracking stone and the creaking, naked branches, the cold of winter, the rhyme of bare and yfare tell the tale plainly: in composing Bilbo's verse Tolkien echoes his own echoes of Chaucer.* 

* þe Clerkes Compleinte is most easily found in J. Fitzgerald's A "Clerkes Compleinte": Tolkien and the Division of Lit. and Lang. Tolkien Studies 6 (2009) 41-57.

I have not yet completed my research on this connection yet, so I am unsure whether someone else has already noted it. Even so, I believe it is interesting enough to mention.

Still on my Precious (FR 1.ii.47)

'Though [Bilbo] had found out that the thing needed looking after; it did not seem always of the same size or weight; it shrank or expanded in an odd way, and might suddenly slip off a finger where it had been tight.’

‘Yes, he warned me of that in his last letter,’ said Frodo, ‘so I have always kept it on its chain.’

While it would be nice to know how long ago Frodo received this letter, we can tell that it was one of at least two, and, since Frodo doesn't know where Bilbo is, there seems to have been no return or forwarding address included. (B. Baggins, c/o Master Elrond, The Last Homely House, Rivendell, Eriador.) Bilbo did not want to be found.

More importantly we see that, even though Bilbo felt better immediately after giving up the Ring, he continued to think of it for some time thereafter. So his asking to see it and attempting to touch it at Rivendell do not mark some suddenly renewed interest induced by the sight of it. Which is not to say he spent all his time thinking about it.

He also made a point of advising Frodo about how easily it could be lost if one took it for granted. How much of that is looking after Frodo, and how much the horror a Ringbearer would naturally feel at the thought of the Ring being lost? One never knows who might pick it up, after all.

The Gaffer should give lessons (FR 1.iii.69)

Gandalf's 'good morning' exchange with Bilbo in the first chapter of The Hobbit is rightly famous as much for its humor as for Bilbo's failure to get the wizard to go away and leave him alone. There is another scene, however, in which a hobbit outside Bag End succeeds in baffling the inquiries of an unwelcome visitor, and sees him off. In Three's Company, as Frodo, Pippin, and Sam are about to leave Bag End, Frodo overhears Gaffer Gamgee speaking to a stranger who proves to be one of Ringwraiths hunting Frodo.

[Frodo] turned to go back, and then stopped, for he heard voices, just round the corner by the end of Bagshot Row. One voice was certainly the old Gaffer’s; the other was strange, and somehow unpleasant. He could not make out what it said, but he heard the Gaffer’s answers, which were rather shrill. The old man seemed put out. 

‘No, Mr. Baggins has gone away. Went this morning, and my Sam went with him: anyway all hisstuff went. Yes, sold out and gone, I tell’ee. Why? Why’s none of my business, or yours. Where to? That ain’t no secret. He’s moved to Bucklebury or some such place, away down yonder. Yes it is – a tidy way. I’ve never been so far myself; they’re queer folks in Buckland. No, I can’t give no message. Good night to you!’ 

Footsteps went away down the Hill.

(FR 1.iii.69)

Bilbo was clearly too polite.

'altogether precious' -- on the beauty of the One Ring

The gold looked very fair and pure, and Frodo thought how rich and beautiful was its colour, how perfect was its roundness. It was an admirable thing and altogether precious.  

(FR 1.ii.60)

A comment by a friend, Kate Neville, on my last post got me thinking. She noted that pure gold was too soft to hold a shape, and that other substances -- in other words, impurities -- must be introduced to make it durable. She also noted that Tolkien clearly knew something about the properties of gold, since he knew the fire of a simple hearth could not melt it. Then Kate asked a marvelous question about the One Ring: 'Was the essence of Sauron the impurity added? And what does that say about the apparently intrinsic beauty of the Ring... Its "precious"-ness?'

When Sauron's body was destroyed in the drowning of Númenor, 'he was robbed now of that shape in which he had wrought so great an evil, so that he could never again appear fair to the eyes of Men' (S 280-81). We can see something similar in Morgoth after his duel with Fingolfin: 'Morgoth went ever halt of one foot after that day, and the pain of his wounds could not be healed; and in his face was the scar that Thorondor made' (S 154). What's intriguing here is that both Morgoth and Sauron have transferred much of their native power out of themselves as a means to exercise dominion, the one into the substance of the world itself, the other into the Ring (Morgoth 399-401). For Sauron at least this transfer seems permanent, since the 'strength and will' (S 287) he had put into the Ring did not return to him when the Ring was destroyed.

Now one might object that while Tolkien seems to have some knowledge of the properties of gold, his knowledge might not go very far. I have heard it said that throwing the Ring into a volcano wouldn't have melted the Ring any more than a hearth would. From what I can see, however, this is not so at all times. Lava can range from 700 to 1,200 ℃ (1,300 to 2,200 ℉), and the melting point of gold is 1,064 ℃ (1,948 ℉). Magma can be even hotter, up to 1,600 ℃ (2,912 ℉). Given that the Sammath Naur is inside Mt Doom, we might well surmise that we are talking about the upper end of the temperature range. 

Another objection would be that the Ring changes size and weight. Bilbo wrote to Frodo and told him as much (FR 1.ii.47): 'it did not seem always of the same size or weight; it shrank or expanded in an odd way, and might suddenly slip off a finger where it had been tight.’ Frodo's experience is somewhat different. When Bombadil returns the Ring to him (FR 1.vii.133), '[i]t was the same Ring, or looked the same and weighed the same: for that Ring had always seemed to Frodo to weigh strangely heavy in the hand.' In Moria, 'at whiles it seemed a heavy weight' (FR 2.iv.312).

Note here the uncertainty introduced by 'seem' in each case, and contrast it with the following statement in Book 4: 'In fact with every step towards the gates of Mordor Frodo felt the Ring on its chain about his neck grow more burdensome. He was now beginning to feel it as an actual weight dragging him earthwards' (TT 4.ii.630, italics mine). This suggests the subjectivity of the perception of the Ring's weight. We may also compare the experience of Sam. He feels the 'weight' of the Ring the instant he puts it on (TT 4.x.733; RK 6.i.898). But, when he picks up Frodo on Mt Doom, 'to his amazement he felt the burden light. He had feared that he would have barely strength to lift his master alone, and beyond that he had expected to share in the dreadful dragging weight of the accursed Ring. But it was not so' (RK 6.iii.941). At the very least examination of these passages calls into question the notion that the actual weight (or size for that matter) of the Ring changes. What seems far more likely is that the Ringbearer's perception changes.

Be that as it may, the One Ring is also a magic ring, imbued with vast power drawn from within himself by a being of angelic stature in his origins. Whatever the exact properties of the gold in the Ring, the infusion of Sauron's 'strength and will' changed it as much as it changed him. But is it not passing strange that this transfer seems to have left Sauron bereft of the ability to regenerate (to borrow a phrase) into a fair form while at the same time conferring a perfect beauty upon the Ring? If this is correct, if Tolkien actually meant this connection, we may see Sauron paying a terrible price for the power to dominate all others: all that remained in him that was fair and fine. The rest was darkness. 

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'I could not take it from him' -- The peril of seizing the Ring

'I could not take it from [Bilbo] without doing greater harm; and I had no right to do so anyway. ' 

(FR 1.ii.48)

'And I could not “make” you – except by force, which would break your mind.' 

(FR 1.ii.60)

So says Gandalf to Frodo in The Shadow of the Past about the consequences of taking the Ring by force. Presumably Gandalf reckons 'breaking the mind' of Bilbo to be the 'greater harm' he would have done, and we can certainly see how paranoid and close to violence Bilbo comes when Gandalf pushes him to leave the Ring to Frodo, as he wished and promised to do until the moment came in which he had to do so (FR 1.i.34). Bilbo laid his hand on the hilt of his sword. Taking hold of a weapon in the middle of a heated argument is not what you'd call a subtle hint. It's a threat. (Trust me.) How much farther would Bilbo have gone if Gandalf had actually tried to take the Ring? 

As for Frodo, who later does have the Ring taken from him by force, one may question whether his mind is broken by losing it in this way. Tom Shippey certainly does in J. R. R. Tolkien, Author of the Century (118), not without reason, but the Frodo who loses the Ring to Gollum is not the same Frodo as the one Gandalf is speaking to in The Shadow of the Past. He has changed in ways both good and bad in the meantime; and he is broken by losing the Ring, in spirit if not in mind, and even if this is not immediately clear: "'It is gone forever,' he said, 'and now all is dark and empty'" (RK 6.ix.1024).

But there is another aspect to seizing the Ring by force, whether that force is physical or not, which the story of Gollum and the words of Gandalf should make us consider. Gollum took the Ring by force from Déagol, claiming the Ring as his due because it was his birthday and committing murder to enforce his claim. His claim to the Ring wasn't even specious. He had 'no right to [take it] anyway'. The violence he does to his own mind and soul is perhaps greater than that which he does to poor Déagol's body. And when he seizes the Ring a second time, from Frodo in the Sammath Naur, he is twice described as 'like a mad thing' (RK 6.iii.946). This should give us pause. For not only would Bilbo have been harmed, had Gandalf taken the Ring taken from him by force, but committing such an act would have been harmful to Gandalf himself. If refraining from unnecessary violence was able to slow the effect of the Ring on Bilbo, not doing so, as the tale of Sméagol and Déagol indicates, only speeds that effect. So, whatever protection from the pull of the Ring Gandalf's motives might have afforded him would have been negated by the harm he would have done himself in harming Bilbo. 

This should come as no surprise. The Ring was made specifically to enable its bearer to dominate the wills of others. To begin one's possession of the Ring with an act of domination, whether physical or spiritual, with good intent or ill, was to court one's own domination by the Ring. We might also find a pattern for Gandalf's wisdom in that of Elrond who, failing to persuade Isildur to cast the Ring into the fire 3,000 years earlier, made no attempt to take the Ring from him by force. He knew better. He knew that to do so was to fall.

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Works Consulted

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The Dark Lord's Bread and Butter -- 'He'll eat us all'

'Don't take the Precious to Him! He'll eat us all, if He gets it, eat all the world.' 

(TT 4.iii.637)

Whether by chance or by design two prominent traits of Hobbits converge in Bilbo's likening of himself at the Ring-enhanced age of eleventy-one to 'butter that has been scraped over too much bread' (FR 1.i.32). The first is of course the Hobbits' well-known love of food. The other is their habit of jesting about serious matters. As Merry says to Aragorn in The Houses of Healing

'But it is the way of my people to use light words at such times and say less than they mean. We fear to say too much. It robs us of the right words when a jest is out of place.' 

(RK 5.viii.870)

What makes this fascinating is that in The Shadow of the Past, the very chapter after Bilbo makes his comparison, we find Gandalf comparing the action of the Ring and of Sauron himself to eating and devouring no less than four times (FR 1.ii.47, twice on 55, 57). We find the same in Faramir's description of what had happened to the nine men given Rings of Power by Sauron: 'he had devoured them' (TT 4.vi.692); and elsewhere he calls Sauron 'a destroyer who would devour all' (TT 4.v.672). And as we saw in the quote with which I began, Gollum, too, saw things in similar terms. It's not often Gandalf, Faramir, and Gollum agree.

Given all this, Bilbo's choice to compare himself to food is even more psychologically revealing than at first it seems, which makes its presence here a matter of chance, if chance you call it.

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I would very much like to thank Joe Hoffman and Corey Olsen for the friendly banter which we engaged in on the subject of Hobbits and butter, and which in turn led me to this reflection.

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It Comes in Slabs? Hobbits and Butter

‘Why, I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread. That can’t be right. I need a change, or something.’

(FR 1.i.32)

What reader of Tolkien doesn't know Bilbo's famous simile? And who doesn't recall it on that morning years later when Pippin is shocked (shocked!) at the short commons of besieged Minas Tirith?

Pippin looked ruefully at the small loaf and (he thought) very inadequate pat of butter which was set out for him, beside a cup of thin milk. 'Why did you bring me here?' he said.

(RK 5.iv.806)

But how many of us -- I'm looking at you, Joe Hoffman -- have ever wondered if we could quantify just how much butter a hobbit would deem adequate? 

They were washed and in the middle of good deep mugs of beer when Mr. Butterbur and Nob came in again. In a twinkling the table was laid. There was hot soup, cold meats, a blackberry tart, new loaves, slabs of butter, and half a ripe cheese: good plain food, as good as the Shire could show, and homelike enough to dispel the last of Sam's misgivings (already much relieved by the excellence of the beer).

(FR 1.ix.154, emphasis added)

It.Comes.In.Slabs.

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Revising The Hobbit in Life and Fiction

In the summer of 1950 Tolkien received from Allen & Unwin, his publishers, proofs of the forthcoming second edition of The Hobbit (Letters no. 128). To his surprise he found that without consulting him they had removed the original Chapter 5, Riddles in the Dark, and substituted a new version, which he had sent to them three years earlier as 'a specimen of rewriting' (Letters no. 111) and which he had not originally meant to have published as written (no. 128). This new version, as many know, presents a very different portrayal of Gollum, Bilbo, and the Ring, one far more in keeping with the dark power invested in the Ring in The Lord of the Rings.** In a brilliant stroke Tolkien recast the version given in the first edition of The Hobbit as a lie Bilbo told Gandalf and the dwarves. 

With mischief in his heart, however, Tolkien did not stop there. For in the Prologue we meet the following comment on The Red Book: 

This [first] account Bilbo set down in his memoirs, and he seems never to have altered it himself, not even after the Council of Elrond. Evidently it still appeared in the original Red Book, as it did in several of the copies and abstracts. But many copies contain the true account (as an alternative), derived no doubt from notes by Frodo or Samwise, both of whom learned the truth, though they seem to have been unwilling to delete anything actually written by the old hobbit himself.

(FR Pr. 13)

Publishers are much more pliant when they are your fictional characters. Take that, Rayner and Stanley Unwin!

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**  For a side by side presentation of Chapter 5 in the first (1937) and second (1951) editions, see here.

Dwarf-ridden

'Dwarves!' said Bilbo in pretended surprise. 

'Don't talk to me!' said Smaug. 'I know the smell (and taste) of dwarf -- no one better. Don't tell me that I can eat a dwarf-ridden pony and not know it! You'll come to a bad end, if you go with such friends, Thief Barrel-rider.'

(Annotated Hobbit 281)

The most obvious interpretation of 'dwarf-ridden pony' in this, or perhaps even most contexts, is 'ridden by a dwarf'.

But that's not the only possibility, and in a conversation so full of riddling and wordplay as that of Bilbo and Smaug we might want to consider the following.

From Old English bӕddryda, or bedreda, comes the modern 'bedridden.' From 'bedridden' by analogy descend various words, e.g., 'bird-ridden' (1835), 'bug-ridden' (1848), 'bureaucracy-ridden' (1861), 'capitalist-ridden' (1844), 'caste-ridden' (1840), 'chair-ridden' (1885), 'chamber-ridden' (1856), 'child-ridden' (1843), 'class-ridden' (1842), 'conscience-ridden' (1617), 'crime-ridden' (1801), 'devil-ridden' (1707), and, not to belabor the point 'dragon-ridden' (1922) 'pixie-ridden' (1893), and even 'Nazi-ridden' (1942). A search in the OED for *ridden reveals these and over a hundred other such formations from the beginning of the alphabet to the end, only a few of which -- such as 'overridden' the past participle of 'override' -- have other than a decidedly negative connotation. The noun modified by the *ridden adjective is oppressed, beset, infested, or otherwise disabled by the first part of the compound.

From Smaug's perspective, then, ponies ridden by dwarves are also infested by dwarves, vermin-ridden, as it were. The dragon's wordplay in this sentence is followed up in the next, as he promises Bilbo, who came from 'the end of a bag', that with friends like dwarves he will come to a bad end. The tongue of the worm doesn't miss a turn, any more than the pen of Tolkien does. 

***

Note: I would like to thank my friends, Shawn Marchese and Alan Sisto, of The Prancing Pony Podcast, since it was while listening to their reading of this passage on my way to work this morning that the other interpretation of 'dwarf-ridden' occurred to me.

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'I sit beside the fire and think' -- Home, Hearth, Hobbits

For Tolkien Reading Day, 25 March 2018

I sit beside the fire and think
of all that I have seen,
of meadow-flowers and butterflies
in summers that have been; 

Of yellow leaves and gossamer
in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun
and wind upon my hair. 

I sit beside the fire and think
of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall ever see. 

For still there are so many things
that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring
there is a different green. 

I sit beside the fire and think
of people long ago,
and people who will see a world
that I shall never know. 

But all the while I sit and think
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door.

Ever since the first time I read 'I sit beside the fire and think' as a young boy, it's been my favorite. It has always spoken to me of home, just as I think it does to Bilbo, but it speaks in a more complex and poignant way than most other hobbit songs.

Of these, Pippin's 'Sing hey! for the bath at close of day' (FR 1.v.101) is probably the most purely hobbit-like. In a simple meter -- iambic tetrameter, which seems characteristic of hobbit poetry* -- it embraces the beauty and pleasures of water in its various forms, but emphasizes the special joy and even nobility of the hot bath 'that washes the weary mud away'.  Few things could conjure a more comforting image of home than Water Hot which so thoroughly redeems our weariness that we end up playfully splashing water with our feet, or even, as in Pippin's case, creating a fountain.

Similarly in Three Is Company the hobbits sing a song -- 'Upon the hearth the fire is red' -- which begins and ends by evoking hearth and home, roof and bed (FR 1.iii.77-78). Yet Bilbo wrote the words to this song, and his experiences gave him a deeper perspective. '[N]ot yet weary are our feet' tells us that we are not ready for home and bed. Adventure and discovery await us before then. We never know where we may find 'the hidden paths that run / Towards the Moon or to the Sun'. All that we may meet on our journey, however, will in the end fade before the lights of hearth and lamp that summon us home to bed and board.

Immediately after the end of this song, however, the approach of a Black Rider impresses the dangers of the journey upon them. After their last near encounter earlier in the day the hobbits had seen Bilbo's warning about the perils of stepping out the front door take on new meaning, as it must when Ringwraiths show up down the lane. Adventures are too often 'not a kind of holiday ... like Bilbo's' (FR 1.ii.62), nor, as events at Crickhollow will show, do front doors keep all perils out (FR 1.xi.176-77).

We may also discover a little noticed counterpoint to the hobbits' song in the hymn** to Elbereth sung by the elves whose arrival drives off the Black Rider. The longing for their home '[i]n a far land beyond the Sea', which lies at this song's heart, balances the exile of the elves against the security the hobbits (wrongly) feel is their due in their own Shire (FR 1.iii.83). Though the elves know where to find those 'hidden paths', they linger 'in this far land beneath the trees.' Their 'chance meeting' with Frodo, who regards his own journey as a flight into 'exile' for himself and his companions, brings face to face those whose age-long exile is nearly over with one who senses that his home will soon be forever lost to him, if indeed it has not already been lost.

If we take a further step back towards that home, we come to the first song that Frodo sings, Bilbo's 'The road goes ever on and on', which he recalls, not from conscious memory, but from some deeper place beyond all names. Yet, as many have remarked, Frodo's version differs in a single word from the one Bilbo recited as he left Bag End seventeen years earlier. Bilbo sets off on the road, 'pursuing it with eager feet'  (FR 1.i.35), but Frodo's feet are 'weary' from the start (FR 1.iii.73). Recall 'the weary mud' in Pippin's bath song, to be washed off at journey's end. Recall the 'not yet weary' feet of Bilbo's walking song. These songs better suit the 'eager' feet of Bilbo, who embraces both journey and journey's end: 'I want to see the wild country again before I die, and the Mountains' (FR 1.i.33). That Frodo has a different attitude towards his journey is part of the tragic situation in which he finds himself, for which the Ring is largely, though perhaps not solely, to blame. Like Merry, who 'loved the thought of [mountains] marching on the edge of stories brought from far away', Frodo may have 'longed to shut out [their] immensity in a quiet room by a fire' (RK 5.iii.x.791). If  so, that was not to be.

Bilbo's embrace of journey and journey's end alike is also visible in 'I sit beside the fire and think', yet this poem is also firmly tied to the idea of hearth and home by the repetition of the initial line to begin the third and fifth quatrains and the variation of it in the first line of the last. It is the song of someone whose days of adventure are over, but for whom memory and reflection on the time he spent journeying enrich the life he now lives by hearth and home. Nor need we think of this poem as applying only to Bilbo in his years in Rivendell, where he introduces us to the poem. We can also easily imagine it across the decades he spent in the Shire after his return, dawdling with his book, walking the countryside with Frodo and talking of adventure, 'learning' young Sam Gamgee his letters and telling him tales of the Elves. The walking song he composed the words to, the evolution and distillation of 'The road goes ever on' from the poem we first see at the end of The Hobbit, and his meditations on the 'dangerous business' of stepping out of one's home and into the road, all point to the close connection between 'there' and 'back again'. So, too, does his exchange with Sam and Frodo at Rivendell:

'Books ought to have good endings.[said Bilbo] How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after?'  

'It will do well, if it ever comes to that,' said Frodo. 

'Ah!' said Sam. 'And where will they live? That's what I often wonder.' 

(FR 2.iii.273-74)

And Bilbo's last quatrain, especially its final words, is significant in that it comes after the bow to approaching death in 'a spring that I shall never see'. For tales goes on despite death.  With 'I listen for returning feet / and voices at the door' Bilbo also accepts that his part in the tale has already ended and that others will carry it on and bring the word of their journeys back to him. In just this way he awaits the return of Sam and Frodo. In this way, too, Sam and Frodo, who both finally expect not to survive their quest, imagine that their part in the great tale in which they have found themselves will come to an end for them, but that others will have their own parts to play later on. It is no accident that the book itself ends with Sam at home in his chair by the fire. 

At the last, that is what all the tales are about.

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Works Consulted

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* 'I sit beside the fire and think' is not in iambic tetrameter, but in alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, which is more characteristic of Elvish poetry, and likely shows the influence of such poetry on Bilbo.

** If alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and trimeter distinguish Elvish poetry, one may rightly ask why the hymn to Elbereth is not in this meter, or in the single lines of heptameter which also occur (e.g., 'Nimrodel'). The answer lies in the fact that the song is mediated through the understanding of the hobbits -- as the text explicitly says at FR 1.iii.83: 

It was singing in the fair elven-tongue, of which Frodo knew only a little, and the others knew nothing. Yet the sound blending with the melody seemed to shape itself in their thought into words which they only partly understood. This was the song as Frodo heard it...

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All citations reference the single volume fiftieth anniversary edition of The Lord of the Rings, Houghton Mifflin (2004).

Impossible Dates, in Greece, Rome and the Shire.

Today (23 September) is the birthday of Augustus Caesar, and yesterday was the birthday of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins. So it is entirely meet, fitting, and proper to write about a little known parallel between the Rome and the Shire. 

cum aliquos numquam soluturos significare uult, 'ad K(a)l(endas) Graecas soluturos' ait. 

When [Augustus] wished to indicate that some people would never pay their debts, he said that they would pay them 'on the Greek Kalends.' 

Suetonius, Augustus, 87.1

The first day of every Roman month was known as 'the Kalends' of that month (hence our 'calendar'). Since Greeks did not use the Roman calendar, there could be no 'Greek Kalends'. 

Meanwhile in the Shire the first day of a non-existent month also gave rise to a joke:

It will be noted if one glances at a Shire Calendar, that the only weekday on which no month began was Friday. It thus became a jesting idiom in the Shire to speak of 'on Friday the first' when referring to a day that did not exist. or to a day on which very unlikely events such as the flying of pigs or (in the Shire) the walking of trees might occur. In full the expression was 'on Friday the first of Summerfilth'.

(RK App. D 1109 n. 2)

The month 'Summerfilth' does not exist. It is a play on 'Winterfilth', which is roughly equivalent with October, a name Tolkien derived, Winterfylleþ, the first month of Winter among the Anglo-Saxons.

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Works Consulted

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A Low Place in the Hedge -- FR 1.i.36

'The Hill: Hobbiton-across-the-Water' -- © The Tolkien Estate

He paused, silent for a moment. Then without another word he turned away from the lights and voices in the fields and tents, and followed by his three companions went round into his garden, and trotted down the long sloping path. He jumped over a low place in the hedge at the bottom, and took to the meadows, passing into the night like a rustle of wind in the grass.

Frodo and Pippin jump over the same low spot seventeen years later (FR 1.iii.70).  Now I had never really thought about this until now, but we're talking hobbits here. That must have been a very low spot indeed for Bilbo and the others to jump over it. 

Think about it.

Like a foot tall.

More of a shrubbery, really.

With Tolkien's eye for detail it is no surprise to find just such a low spot (⇧) in the hedge in his painting of the Hill.  I would like to thank Kate Neville and her eagle eye for pointing me to the correct "low spot" when I had initially believed it was another. (see Kate's comments below.)

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Works Consulted

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The Problem with Tauriel

Unlike many fans of Tolkien I had no problem with Tauriel as a new character developed for the Hobbit films. My opinion of Jacksons' achievement with her is in general much higher than my opinion of his success overall. It was a series of films with moments I loved -- the unexpected party and riddles in the dark scenes in particular -- and one performance I thought was splendid -- Martin Freeman as Bilbo --  but which I thought wasted the assembled talent and the possibilities in the story.  Stephen Fry, a longtime favorite of mine, was dreadfully disappointing, and the scene with the goblins beneath the Misty Mountains was as ridiculous as the scene in the mines in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. In fact my reaction to these three bloated movies is aptly summed up in the words of Dáin Ironfoot, as portrayed by Billy Connolly. When the were-worms burst out of the earth before the climactic battle, he cries out in exasperation: 'Oh, come on.'

From the start, however, Tauriel seemed competent, smart, and tough in herself regardless of others. Even in that cringing scene in which the contents of Kili's trousers (now there's a word Tolkien would have chosen to use) are the subject, if not the object, of banter, the goal seemed to be to portray that kind of cagey toughness and wit which Lauren Bacall played so well in To Have and Have Not. Sexy, poised, unafraid.

But she is more than that, too. She looks beyond the borders of her land to see the troubles of the larger world, just as the real Galadriel did before she diminished and went into New Zealand* and turned blue.  Tauriel grasps things that the inward looking males of Mirkwood do not wish to acknowledge. She see that her people may be able to fence themselves in, but cannot forever fence the world out. Like Éowyn she fights well and bravely and fearlessly, but unlike her she already knows how to heal. She understands her own heart.

Even so, despite Jackson's success with her character per se, her story went off the rails like an express train. The idea that she had to have some kind of love interest was a flaw from the beginning. It profoundly, almost contemptuously, underestimated the intelligence of the fans in general and women in particular. Still, an underplayed ending to her story might have approached success (faint praise, I know). Yet her preposterous exchange with Thranduil over Kili's body --- 'Why does it hurt so much?' 'Because it was real' -- exploded the credibility of her character, sacrificing all the good of it for one of the clumsiest weepy endings I can recall seeing. One need only compare Bilbo's scene with Thorin, and the silent witness he bears to the toll of the battle, to know how much better it could have been handled. But Bilbo's response to the losses around him has its origin in the pen of Tolkien, who could write and knew death on the battlefield too well.

So the problem with Tauriel is that creating a good character is not the same as writing a good story for her. Consider how much more firmly the makers of Wonder Woman reined in this aspect of her story, so that there even the banter about the needfulness of men to women subserves the larger tale of Diana's realization of her own heroic stature in a world both larger and lesser than her home, a world which the women of Themiscyra have long fenced out. Had Jackson resisted the temptation to follow the traditional cinematic playbook that requires female characters to have a love interest -- had he even asked himself what Tolkien would have done with her -- Tauriel's story might have proved meaningful instead of maudlin. 

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*No offense to the good folk of New Zealand, which seems a wonderful place. I very nearly moved there long ago.

Troilus and WHO? (RK 6.x.892-93)

Then Pippin stabbed upwards, and the written blade of Westernesse pierced through the hide and went deep into the vitals of the troll, and his black blood came gushing out. He toppled forward and came crashing down like a falling rock, burying those beneath him. Blackness and stench and crushing pain came upon Pippin and his mind fell away into a great darkness.  

'So it ends as I guessed it would,' his thought said, even as it fluttered away, and it laughed a little within him ere it fled, almost gay it seemed to be casting off at last all doubt and care and fear.  And even then as it winged away into forgetfulness it heard voices, and they seemed to be crying in some forgotten world far above: 

'The Eagles are coming! The Eagles are coming!' 

For one moment more Pippin's thought hovered.  'Bilbo!' it said. 'But no!  That came in his tale, long, long ago. This is my tale, and it is ended now. Good-bye!'  And his thought fled far away and his eyes saw no more. 

(RK 6.x.892-93)

What first drew my attention here is the peculiar use of 'thought' in the second and fourth paragraphs, which is quite similar to its use in the famous scene in which Gollum's two 'thoughts' struggle with each other while Sam listens, fascinated and appalled (TT 4.ii.632-34). While there 'thought' seems very close to what we would call 'personality,' here 'consciousness' is a better fit. The word 'consciousness' did not enter English before the 17th Century, and the meaning in question here -- 'the totality of the impressions, thoughts, and feelings, which make up a person's conscious being. In pl. = conscious personalities' (OED sv. 5, emphasis original) -- seems to have awaited the invention of Locke.  Given Tolkien's linguistic predilections, it is not hard to see why he would have preferred 'thought', since MED þoht (3c, d) offered the requisite meanings.  

I am as yet, however, unaware of any use of þoht to describe situations similar to those we see in these two passages of Tolkien.  (If any reader knows of one, please, do let me know.)  So I began to think that perhaps I should look for passages with similar elements.  Almost immediately Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde came into my mind, specifically the scene in which Troilus dies:

1800   The wraththe, as I began yow for to seye,
       Of Troilus, the Grekes boughten dere;
       For thousandes his hondes maden deye,
       As he that was with-outen any pere,
       Save Ector, in his tyme, as I can here.
1805   But weylawey, save only goddes wille,
       Dispitously him slough the fiers Achille.

       And whan that he was slayn in this manere,
       His lighte goost ful blisfully is went
       Up to the holownesse of the seventh spere,
1810   In convers letinge every element;
       And ther he saugh, with ful avysement,
       The erratik sterres, herkeninge armonye
       With sownes fulle of hevenish melodye.

       And doun from thennes faste he gan* avyse
1815   This litel spot of erthe, that with the see
       Embraced is, and fully gan* despyse
       This wrecched world, and held al vanitee
       To respect of the pleyn felicitee
       That is in hevene above; and at the laste,
1820   Ther he was slayn, his loking doun he caste;

       And in him-self he lough right at the wo
       Of hem that wepten for his deeth so faste;
       And dampned al our werk that folweth so
       The blinde lust, the which that may not laste,
1825   And sholden al our herte on hevene caste.
       

(Troilus and Criseyde, V.1800-1825)

(*gon (11a) = 'proceed to', 'set about', 'go to', as in 'go to sleep'.)

Now clearly Pippin's experience here is meant to remind us first of all of Bilbo's at the Battle of Five Armies, when the Eagles came and Bilbo was knocked unconscious, but woke to find himself 'not yet one of the fallen heroes' (Hobbit 298-99). But there's more to it than that. Bilbo has no 'thought' as he loses consciousness. His reflections come after he revives. 

What happens to Pippin's 'thought' is far more like the experience of Troilus' 'goost': both of them laugh and undergo a profound change in attitude towards the troubles of the world of which they are letting go. Each of them believes his tale is over. True, Pippin is not in fact dying, but he thinks he is. So, the contrast between him and Troilus is also noteworthy. His 'thought' flies 'away', but Troilus' 'goost' rises heavenward. Troilus looks back down at the 'woe / of hem that wepten for his deeth so faste' and dismisses it; Pippin hears the 'voices...crying from some forgotten world above' (emphasis added) and dismisses them and the hope the coming of the Eagles should offer. These directions reflect the differences in world view in each work. Chaucer's Troy is Medieval and Christian, whereas Tolkien's Middle-earth is pre-Christian and without any concept of a heaven above. Hence also Tolkien drew on a word like þoht rather than 'goost'. Whether hobbits have any notion at all of a continued existence after death is unknown and doubtful. And perhaps as a final bit of the absurdity that has often attended this once 'fool of a Took', Pippin is ignominiously squashed by a troll he has killed himself, while Troilus, a great warrior, is killed by the greatest of all warriors. In both cases, however, the dignified serenity both Troilus and Pippin attain with their last thoughts is remarkable. For neither of them could be said to have possessed that before.

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Works Consulted

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Gollum before The Taming of Sméagol (V)

In the first study of this series I proposed considering only the references to Gollum that we find in The Lord of the Rings proper, that is, excluding not only The Hobbit but also the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings. My reasons for doing so are quite simple. First, there can be no certainty that a first time reader of The Lord of the Rings will have already read The Hobbit or even the Prologue. Second, Tolkien rewrote The Hobbit to suit the darker and more tormented creature into which Gollum had evolved in The Lord of the Rings. Thus, the portrayal of Gollum in this work has to stand or fall on its own, however much consideration of other material might enhance our understanding of it.  Having now completed our analysis of how Tolkien laid the groundwork for Gollum's arrival in the Tale itself, we can in all fairness explore the larger context and its relationship to The Lord of the Rings. 

Now Tolkien's original public, in 1954 and 1955, will have included many who knew only the first edition of The Hobbit (1937), as well as some who knew only the second (1951); and by discussing both versions of Bilbo's story the Prologue very clearly addresses both sets of these readers. As a result, what is a straightforward narrative of how Bilbo came by the Ring in each edition, becomes a more complex tale of lies and silent dishonesty, theft and hatred, near murder and sudden pity, which reveals more about the corruption worked by the Ring than either edition does if taken alone.

As Tolkien wrote with silken understatement on his proposed revisions in 1947, the year he submitted them to Allen and Unwin, '[...] if The Hobbit ran so the Sequel would be a little easier to <conduct> as a narrative (in Ch, II [i.e., The Shadow of the Past]), though not necessarily "truer".' (Rateliff, The History of the Hobbit, 732). 'Not necessarily "truer" ' is a fascinating comment, which suggests that some doubt may attach even to the second version. It brings to mind how Bilbo is still attempting to justify how he got the Ring many years after the wizard had already 'badgered' him into telling 'the truth' (FR 1.i.33); and Gandalf called the lies Bilbo and Gollum told about how they came by the Ring 'too much alike for comfort' (1.ii.48). If, as Gandalf also says, 'Gollum is a liar, and you have to sift his words' (1.ii.56), what does that mean for Bilbo, whom we know to be a liar as well? It is quite possible that Bilbo never told the whole truth until the Council of Elrond, years after he had let the Ring pass to Frodo and had been bitterly confronted with the spiritual and moral effect it was having on him. For only then can he say that he 'understand[s] now' and ask forgiveness for his lies (2.i.232; ii.249).

However that may be, the simultaneous existence of two versions -- the one a lie, the other not necessarily truer -- argues that simple 'retcon' was not the point. Had it been so, we would expect the second version to suppress and supersede the first entirely. How do these two texts allow us to construe Gollum, and Bilbo, too, for, as we have seen here, it is from his behavior in A Long-expected Party that we glean our first impressions of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings? Since the 1937 Hobbit has long been out of print and the oft announced facsimile has not yet appeared, direct comparison of the two texts of Riddles in the Dark is not as easy as one could wish. We are not without resources, however. John Rateliff's The History of the Hobbit and Douglas Anderson's The Annotated Hobbit are works of the first importance. Also of great worth is Bonniejean Christensen's Gollum's Character Transformation in The Hobbit, the first work I know of to study the texts side by side. I would also gratefully draw the reader's eye to the parallel presentation of both versions in their entirety found here.  Being able to read each one from start to finish without the need for notes or substitutions, and then to compare them directly, is an invaluable tool.

With the exception of a dozen or so words, the 1937 and the 1951 texts of Riddles in the Dark are identical for almost the first 3,500 words. Before examining the differences, which quite naturally garner most of the attention, I'd like to look first at the words that are the same, because in both cases they establish a foundation for the rest of the action, and because Tolkien clearly decided there was no need to change them. The first 3,500 words take the story to the point where Gollum shrieks his last wrong answer -- 'String, or nothing!' -- and Bilbo, sword in hand, puts his back to the wall.  What can we see then in this section?

Bilbo spares hardly a thought for the ring he finds in the darkness -- 'a turning point in his career, but he didn't know it [....] it did not seem of any particular use at the moment' -- because he is too given over to the misery of being lost and cut off from his friends. His mind turns to the idea of frying bacon and eggs at home, a comforting thought if his hunger had not made him 'miserabler'. Next the hope of homely solace his pipe promises is 'shattered' by a lack of matches, leaving him 'crushed'. So though his thought seeks back beyond the moment for comfort, it fails to find any in the usual places. Yet his search is not wholly vain. For he finds his 'sword' from the storied elven city of Gondolin, so small that he had forgotten he had it, but its legendary connections and his sudden grasp of its usefulness against goblins comfort him. They enable him to go on. In the sword Bilbo 'comes upon' another ancient artifact, endowed with a certain power, which he has discovered only belatedly and which he had forgotten he possessed, and it helps him to continue on his journey. The same will be true of the ring. Most importantly at this moment, however, is that Bilbo has reached beyond the normal hobbitish comforts of food and pipe-weed to take hold of a wider and deeper world, one in which he 'explore[s ...] caves, and wear[s] a sword instead of a walking-stick' just as he had fancied he might do while still in Bag End (Hobbit 24).^[1] 'Go forward? Only thing to do. On we go.' And now that Bilbo has in this way recovered from his initial desperation, and by means of the sword and its associations found the courage to move forward, his native hobbit talents -- resilience, stealthiness, sense of direction underground -- and his native hobbit fund of 'wisdom and wise sayings' come to the fore.  A turning point indeed.

Advancing through the darkness steadily, though not without fear of 'goblins or half-imagined things', Bilbo is brought to a halt by a lake that blocks his path. We are told that the water may be home to 'nasty, slimy things with big bulging eyes [...] strange things' and 'other things more slimy than fish' and in the tunnels are still 'other things', which had been there before the goblins and still lived in 'odd corners, slinking and nosing about' (emphases mine). By this lake beneath the mountains, in this darkness full of things, lives Gollum, 'darker than the darkness', who catches and eats both fish and goblin, 'which he thought good, when he could get it'. His origins are a mystery, and even the goblins keep away from his lake, 'for they had a feeling that something unpleasant was lurking down there' (emphasis mine).

Thus, as we see later in The Lord of the Rings, the reader is prepared for Gollum's entrance. For he is both like and unlike those things in the lake and the tunnels; he preys on the blind fish whom he can see with his 'pale lamp-like eyes'; and though he does not seem to be one of the original residents of the tunnels, he, too, slinks and noses about the odd corners of the darkness. But he also practices something that is not quite cannibalism, but also not quite not, on the goblins whom he 'throttles from behind'.  Mysterious, monstrous, and murderous describe him, but don't disclose precisely what he is.

Yet we also may see similarities to Bilbo: in the darkness of the tunnels Gollum retains his sense of direction, and he can move stealthily.  As with Bilbo his eating habits and opinions on food also receive emphasis. These similarities furnish a common stage upon which the riddles and the well-known, supposedly inviolable, rules of the ancient Riddle Game play themselves out. Together with the memories of sunlight on daisies and of his grandmother when they lived 'in a hole in a bank by a river' (Hobbit 85-86) -- which suggest that Gollum was not always darker than darkness and a devourer of squeaking baby goblins (92, 95) -- these similarities establish a link not just between Gollum and Bilbo, but between Gollum and, as it were, humanity. Gollum may be depraved and monstrous, but he is not a monster per se, a creature of a different order like trolls or goblins, Mirkwood spiders or dragons. He was not born this way:

'Praps ye sits here and chats with it a bitsy, my preciousss. It likes riddles, praps it does, does it?' He was anxious to appear friendly, at any rate for the moment, and until he found out more about the sword and the hobbit, whether he was quite alone really, whether he was good to eat, and whether Gollum was really hungry. Riddles were all he could think of. Asking them, and sometimes guessing them, had been the only game he had ever played with other funny creatures sitting in their holes in the long, long ago, before the goblins came, and he was cut off from his friends far under under the mountains. 

'Very well, said Bilbo, who was anxious to agree, until he found out more about the creature, whether he was quite alone, whether he was fierce or hungry, and whether he was a friend of the goblins. 

"You ask first," he said, because he had not had time to think of a riddle. 

So Gollum hissed: 

    What has roots as nobody sees,
    Is taller than trees,
       Up, up it goes,
       And yet never grows? 

'Easy!' said Bilbo. 'Mountain, I suppose.' 

'Does it guess easy? It must have a competition with us, my preciouss! If precious asks, and it doesn't answer, we eats it, my preciousss. If it asks us, and we doesn't answer, [...]'

(Hobbit 84)

Sharing the riddles, they have some kind of cultural heritage in common. So again Gollum is not wholly alien. More than that -- whatever Tolkien may have envisioned Gollum to be when first writing the story -- he also comes of a people who dwelt in holes. Not only are Bilbo and Gollum both playing for time here, but the close parallelism of the sentences describing their thinking -- 'anxious...until...whether...whether...whether' -- reinforces how alike they are. Yet these similarities open a dangerous door, when the most chilling difference between them turns their 'chat' into a 'competition' in which Bilbo's life is the stake.

This brings us to the first divergence in the texts, which begins directly after 'If it asks us, and we doesn't answer':

'we gives it a present, gollum.' (1937) 

or

'then we does what it wants, eh? We shows it the way out, yes!' (1951)

To begin with, in both of these statements there is a severe dissonance between the two parts of the wager: Bilbo is supper, or gets a present; Bilbo is supper, or gets shown out. Having introduced us to Gollum by first indicating his strangeness and monstrosity, and by then tempering that impression through the suggestion that he and Bilbo are not so different after all, Tolkien now brings that strangeness and monstrosity rushing back again with the shockingly unequal terms of the contest. For, while being eaten is clearly not a good result for Bilbo, not getting to eat him is scarcely an equivalent evil for Gollum. There are, as it were, other fish in the sea.

Then, too, there is the absurdity of his sincere offer of a present and, though Bilbo wins the contest in a questionable fashion, Gollum's distress at being unable to find it and his many apologies as he shows Bilbo the way out instead. As John Rateliff has pointed out, in the 1937 Hobbit Gollum is more honorable than Bilbo (Rateliff, 166-67). And it seems clear that Bilbo felt that even a ghastly cannibalistic creature like Gollum could be trusted to abide by the rules of the Riddle Game. Else Bilbo would not have begun 'to wonder what Gollum's present would be like' when it appeared he was about to lose. It isn't until Gollum begins to paw at him and Bilbo asks his unexpected and unfair final question -- 'What have I got in my pocket?' -- that Bilbo becomes unsure of 'how the game was going to end, whether Gollum guessed right or not' (89-90). And even then, with his back to the wall and his sword out, Bilbo asks 'What about the present?', which he felt that he had won 'pretty fairly' and had a right to by the time honored children's law of 'finding's keeping'. Yet the narrator is dismissive of Bilbo's fears, and asserts that even for creatures like Gollum the rules of the Riddle Game are inviolable.^[2] 

As frightening and dangerous as Gollum is in the 1937 Hobbit, his firmly abiding by the rules of the game which he himself initiated (no doubt thinking he would win) renders him harmless in this instance and almost admirable (but not quite entirely so since he considers cheating). Indeed Bilbo, having realized that he already possessed the present Gollum had meant to give him, prevaricates and manipulates his dismayed competitor: 

'The ring would have been mine now, if you had found it; so you would have lost it anyway. And I will let you off on one condition.' 

'Yes, what iss it? What does it wish us to do, my precious?'  

'Help me get out of these places.' 

Now Gollum had to agree to this, if he was not to cheat. He still very much wanted just to try what the stranger tasted like; but now he had to give up all idea of it. Still, there was the little sword; and the stranger was wide awake and on the look out, not unsuspecting as Gollum liked to have things which he attacked. So perhaps it was best after all. 

Now we should not be too hard on Bilbo here. That would be missing the point about Gollum as well as Bilbo. For using cunning and lies to escape from a dangerous creature is as old as heroic tales themselves. It is a mark of the hero's intellectual prowess. We need only cite the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus, the cyclops, in Book Nine of The Odyssey. There Odysseus is trapped underground with a cannibalistic adversary, as remarkable for his one eye as Gollum is for his two. Odysseus uses his wits to save himself along with many of his men, though he also commits the nearly disastrous mistake of telling the creature his true name. (There's an interesting parallel to explore here, if someone else hasn't already done so.) Bilbo is clever enough to find a way to use the rules of the game against Gollum, so that Gollum feels he has no choice but to fulfill his part of the bargain: " 'Must we give it the thing, preciouss? Yess, we must! We must fetch it, preciouss, and give it the present we promised.' "  To be sure, he remains aware of Bilbo's sword, but that seems more to confirm him in the decision he's has already made than to decide him.

Still the last we see of Gollum, and the last any public reader ever expected to see before 1954, is him fulfilling the obligation imposed on him by the terms of the contest he had proposed.  So he is a strange creature, frightening, dangerous, capable of monstrous acts to satisfy his hunger, but not so different from hobbits that he can't be dealt with. Unlike the Gollum we meet later in The Lord of the Rings, who haunts Frodo's tracks from Moria onward and who cannot be gotten rid of, this Gollum goes away once he has lived up to his promise. To have met him makes for a good story, which is precisely what Bilbo makes of it.

The 1951 version, with which we are all familiar, tells another story. How different from the positive, near sprightly 'We gives it a present!' is the concessive, almost disappointed 'then we does what it wants, eh? We shows it the way out, yes!' Not very convincing. Every reference to the 'present' disappears. Bilbo's curiosity about what kind of present it would be becomes a 'hope that the wretch would not be able to answer'. When Gollum seems about to be stumped by the egg riddle, Bilbo now pushes him about his 'guess' instead of his 'present'. And when Gollum finally loses the match, Bilbo is much more interested in what he has won, and more pushy about getting it, whereas in 1937 it had been more a matter of principle:

(1937) 'What about the present?' asked Bilbo, not that he cared very much, still he felt that he had won it, pretty fairly, and in very difficult circumstances too. 

(1951) 'Well?' he said. 'What about your promise? I want to go. You must show me the way.'

By removing the ring as a present one of the most intriguing, and touching, links between Bilbo and Gollum in the 1937 Hobbit vanishes without a trace: that Gollum had received as a birthday present the very ring he meant to give Bilbo as a present for winning their contest; and Gollum, dismayed that he cannot find it, splutters profuse apologies. There's a charm in this, that he was going to pass on the present that he had received. Nor does the 1937 text cast the least doubt cast upon Gollum's claim that it was his birthday present. 

But from Gandalf we know that Gollum's story was a lie, even if he had all but convinced himself of its truth -- he was still telling the tale over 75 years later -- and only he could have told Bilbo (FR 1.ii.48, 56). So the 'birthday present' part of the story is no invention of Bilbo's. What is more, in the 1951 version the introduction of the ring as belonging to Gollum, and his assertion that it was his birthday present serves to darken the narrative. Whereas in the 1937 Gollum went to fetch his 'birthday present' to give it to Bilbo, in the 1951 he goes off to get it so he can kill and eat Bilbo. That is what his 'birthday present' is good for -- just ask the 'small goblin-imp' he had dined on earlier that day -- and that is his sole motive for fetching it. So what had supplied a charming touch in the first edition is turned on its head in the second to illustrate Gollum's treachery and ghoulish appetites. The transformation is so complete in fact that we might well wonder if Tolkien had this in mind when he said the second version was not necessarily truer.

Indeed the whole new section introduced in the 1951 text -- from Bilbo's demand that Gollum fulfill his promise to Gollum's discovery that his ring was lost -- does not just explain Gollum's motives and provide details about his use of the ring and its effects on him. It also contains information that Bilbo could not have known (what Gollum was thinking) at the time, or at any time before Gandalf learned them from Gollum decades later (how Gollum handled the ring), or finally before Gandalf had disclosed to him that this ring was connected to Sauron ('the Master who ruled them all'). Just as Gandalf had detected the falsity of Bilbo's initial story that he had won the ring because it was too much like Gollum's tale that it had been a present -- 'The lies were too much alike for comfort' (FR 1.ii.48) -- so we, too, may come to believe that Bilbo's new version is too much like the version Gandalf tells Frodo decades later. It is also true, however, that the claim that Gollum meant to cheat all along seems to have existed before Gandalf spoke to Frodo about it, since Frodo himself advances that claim (FR 1.ii.54).

This argues the existence of three and perhaps four versions of the story: the first coming down to us in the 1937, which represents what Bilbo 'told the dwarves and put in his book'; the second being that which he told Gandalf and then Frodo (FR 1.i.40); the third being the tale as he told it at the Council of Elrond when he had come to 'understand things a little better now' (FR 2.ii.249); and the fourth -- which may or may not be the same as the third -- coming down to us in the 1951 text, and which was preserved in 'many copies' of the Red Book as 'the true account (as an alternative), derived no doubt from notes by Frodo and Samwise, both of whom learned the truth' (FR Pr. 13). In this context, which Tolkien's own assertion that the later version was 'not necessarily "truer" ' has provided us, it will be interesting to note that, while Bilbo says that the tale he tells at the Council of Elrond is 'the true story', Gandalf says only that Bilbo's and Gollum's versions 'agree' (FR 2.ii.254).

What we should take away here is not that none of these accounts are reliable, but that anyone who possesses the Ring, even briefly, is susceptible to its dire influence. Viewed together from the perspective of The Lord of the Rings, both the 1937 and the 1951 versions show this influence. In the first tale Bilbo substantially whitewashes Gollum's character in order to support the story of the 'present'; in the second he blackens Gollum's name by adding grisly emphasis to his cannibalism and by portraying him as intending to break his promise the moment he had the opportunity to do so.^[3]  The falsehoods Bilbo told to justify himself and his possession of the Ring in the 1937 have their analog in the falseness of Gollum in the 1951. Tolkien, moreover, meant for both of these versions of what happened that day to survive. Otherwise he would have just suppressed the 1937 version entirely, and not incorporated it into The Lord of the Rings as a lie Bilbo told, or inserted an account into the Prologue to explain variant manuscript traditions of the Red Book from which the 1937 and 1951 texts purportedly descend. For 'many copies' are not all copies. Together, their layered textuality tells a richer and more complete tale about Bilbo, Gollum, and the Ring than either could have done alone.

But this is not all. For with the 'revelation' that Gollum was not a funny little creature of gruesome appetites who nevertheless kept his promises, a new door opens. Not a drop of the 'bless us and splash us' Gollum survives. He is now shrewd, horrid, and terrifying, recalling with pleasure the squeak of the goblin child he had devoured earlier that day, and seething with a rage at the loss of his precious that boils over when he realizes the truth of what Bilbo has in his pocket. Bilbo, a bit highhanded until now in demanding the fulfillment of Gollum's promise, flees for his life at the last possible moment, and now it is a murderous creature with glowing eyes that pursues him through the darkness.

At this instant Gollum becomes for the reader what we have seen him portrayed to be in our studies of him in the first half of The Lord of the Rings.  At this instant Bilbo, with rage and murder at his heels, discovers the power of the Ring and the tables turn. He becomes the pursuer, and invisibility gives power to his fear and desperation, the power of murder with impunity, just as it had to Gollum. But, unseen, Bilbo can also glimpse what was invisible to him before.^[4] 

Not only does the unfairness of invisibly murdering an unarmed opponent from behind hit Bilbo hard,^[5] overwhelming his fear of Gollum and the goblins and his desperation to escape and rejoin his friends. He is also struck, and far more profoundly, by the 'sudden understanding' of how desperate, fearful, and alone Gollum is: the horror of that life -- to which possession of the Ring has now brought Bilbo perilously closer -- allows pity through the door the Ring has opened.

Bilbo almost stopped breathing, and went stiff himself. He was desperate. He must get away, out of this horrible darkness, while he had any strength left. He must fight. He must stab the foul thing, put its eyes out, kill it. It meant to kill him. No, not a fair fight. He was invisible now. Gollum had no sword. Gollum had not actually threatened to kill him, or tried to 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 without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering. All these thoughts passed in a flash of a second. He trembled. And then quite suddenly in another flash, as if lifted by a new strength and resolve, he leaped. 

(Hobbit 97)

As Gandalf says to Frodo years later, hinting at divine intervention, there was more than one power at work in Bilbo's finding the Ring (FR 1.ii.56). Even without this hint, however, it is hard to avoid seeing some measure of the same in Bilbo's back to back flashes, of insight and inspiration, and harder still not to think of the phrase 'a leap of faith' when reading the final sentence of this paragraph. Not that Bilbo has undergone some kind of religious conversion here, or that Tolkien means to suggest that he has, but he has changed; and by calling this notion to our minds Tolkien suggests a larger spiritual context of which Bilbo, like Frodo later, is himself unaware. 

And this is of course the third major change in the 1951 text. First we saw the increased savagery and treachery of Gollum in company with the elimination of his 'present' to Bilbo. Then the ring became the One Ring.  Now, on the very precipice of murder, Bilbo finds insight and pity, and 'a new strength and resolve'.  This leads directly, as it was meant to do, to Gandalf's attempts to elicit Frodo's pity for Gollum, and his flat assertion of the importance of Bilbo's pity:

'I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it. And he is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many -- yours not least.'

(FR 1.ii.59)

Here we always think first of Frodo, and then of the fact that the Ring is destroyed because Bilbo showed pity and mercy to Gollum. But we should also remember that Gollum is one of those many to whose fate Gandalf refers. For in the midst of all his concerns about Sauron and the Ring, Gandalf has not forgotten him. Bilbo's putting his hand on the Ring in the darkness was, ultimately, what brought Gollum out from under the mountains, and what gave Gandalf the hope -- not much hope, as he says, nor yet a hope forlorn -- that Gollum could be cured. The 'something else' that Gandalf said was at work in Bilbo's finding the Ring was at work here, too. Indeed the memories that the Riddle Game sparked in him, which are also evoked by their absence in Bilbo's flash of insight, and by Gandalf at Bag End with Frodo, all point to Gollum's corruption and the possibility -- and difficulty -- of his cure:

[...] Gollum brought up memories of ages and ages and ages before, when he lived with his grandmother in a hole in a bank by a river, "Sss, sss, my preciouss," he said. "Sun on the daisies it means, it does."

But these ordinary above ground everyday sort of riddles were tiring for him. Also they reminded him of days when he had been less lonely and sneaky and nasty, and that put him out of temper. What is more they made him hungry [...].

(Hobbit 97)

and

[...] a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering.

(Hobbit 97)

and

‘But there was something else in it, I think, which you don’t see yet. Even Gollum was not wholly ruined [...]. There was a little corner of his mind that was still his own, and light came through it, as through a chink in the dark: light out of the past. It was actually pleasant, I think, to hear a kindly voice again, bringing up memories of wind, and trees, and sun on the grass, and such forgotten things.

‘But that, of course, would only make the evil part of him angrier in the end – unless it could be conquered. Unless it could be cured.’ Gandalf sighed. ‘Alas! there is little hope of that for him. Yet not no hope.

(FR 1.ii.55)

The contrast between these two passages in The Hobbit and that from The Lord of the Rings shows the beginning and growth of the idea of the darkness of Gollum's days and its hopelessness before Bilbo discovered pity in his condition. The first passage, present in the 1937 and retained in the 1951, shows that darkness at its full. Even pleasant memories reinforce the horror. In the second passage, introduced in the 1951, Bilbo peers into that darkness and turns away from the path to murder. The third passage, part of a conversation in which Gandalf vainly encourages Frodo to pity Gollum as Bilbo had done, builds upon the two that went before to suggest that Gollum may yet return from the darkness of his soul just as he emerged from the shadows beneath the Misty Mountains.

Nevertheless, the narrative of The Hobbit moves onward so swiftly, without the least glance back at Gollum, and the characterization of him has been so powerfully negative, that it is not easy to see even the potential for something else. Nor, moreover, does the hint of something else become detectable until Gandalf's conversation with Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. Even then, Frodo's reaction to the suggestion that Gollum was a hobbit, that he was to be pitied, and that he might be better cured than killed is as fierce as only denial can be. Here, too, the story moves swiftly on, and every mention of Gollum until he appears in The Taming of Sméagol emphasizes the danger he poses. Even in the Prologue, written with a certain air of historiographical detachment, he is 'loathsome', murderous, cannibalistic, and 'his heart was black and treachery was in it' (FR Pr. 11-12).

In the end Gandalf's hope that Gollum might be cured proves vain, but its failure should neither obscure nor invalidate the suggestion of the text that by guiding Bilbo's hand to the Ring that day beneath the Misty Mountains the other 'power' which was at work made redemption something possible to hope for. It was a near run thing, that moment on the stairs of Cirith Ungol when Gollum nearly repented (TT 4.viii.714-15), and Tolkien called it 'perhaps the most tragic moment of the Tale' (Letters, # 246, p. 330). Indeed the echo of tragedy sounds first in the moment of Bilbo's horror and pity. Yet tragedies don't begin with one feckless friend murdering another over a 'birthday present' fished comically out of a river. Like the hint at a leap of faith at the paragraph's end, the echo of tragedy here in Bilbo's moment of horror and pity again suggests a larger spiritual context, one characterized by 'Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker' (FR 1.ii.56, emphases original), one which, as here, uses evil against itself to create a greater good and beauty (Silm. 17, 98).

Thus, we can see that the darkness within Gollum is present from the first, no matter how much of a shock the Gollum of The Lord of the Rings must have been to those who had read the 1937 Hobbit. It is, however, clearly with the 1951 text that the truly evil Gollum we hear so much of in the first half of The Lord of the Rings makes his debut. That's no surprise. What is unexpected is the way in which the two portrayals of Gollum in the first two editions of The Hobbit work together to create a fuller portrait of Gollum, Bilbo, and the Ring's power over them. Tolkien's decision not to do anything as ordinary as repudiate the earlier version, but to retain it as a lie, side by side with the newer version, which is itself 'not necessarily "truer" ' is nothing short of a brilliant example of Tolkien's eccentric genius in the telling of Tales. Then the characterization expands with the perspective of the story. For not only does he suggest in passing the slim chance that Gollum might repent of his evil and be cured -- an essential point for a Christian like Tolkien -- but he weaves that possibility into the long game of the plot and the role of providence within history, where it will lie forgotten until Frodo meets Gollum, and comes to understand the pity of Bilbo.  Yet, if in the end the burden of his deeds and the corruption of the Ring proved too much for him, if in the end he could not be saved, that was of old the fate of Arda Marred.

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Gollum Before the Taming of Sméagol (I)

Gollum Before the Taming of Sméagol (II)

Gollum Before the Taming of Sméagol (III)

Gollum Before the Taming of Sméagol (IV)

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^[1] See Olsen (2012) 85-87, 109. Necessarily, all page numbers cited above for The Hobbit derive from the 1951 edition.

^[2] Since we are concerned with the perception of the reader, the identity of the narrator here, whether Bilbo or some later writer need not detain us here. It is also true that, regardless of the narrator, the accounts of Bilbo underlie the texts, with perhaps an admixture of what Gandalf learned from Gollum.

^[3] Note Bilbo's words to Gandalf on the night of his farewell party: 'Gollum would have killed me, if I hadn't kept it' (FR 1.i.34), which strongly suggest that Bilbo's admission of 'the true story' to Gandalf years before had included a claim of Gollum's motives. This 'agrees' with Frodo's assertion about his intentions (FR 1.ii.54).

^[4] For a discussion of the question of invisibility, see most recently Jane Beal, Why is Bilbo Baggins Invisible? The Hidden War in The Hobbit, The Journal of Tolkien Research (2015) vol. 2, iss. 1, article 8.

^[5] 'No, not fair' brings Bilbo's rush of breathless fear, indeed near panic, to a dead halt.