The Peoples of Middle-earth (2 page)

Since the ceaseless 'making' of his world extended from my father's youth into his old age, The History of Middle-earth is in some sense also a record of his life, a form of biography, if of a very unusual kind. He had travelled a long road. He bequeathed to me a massive legacy of writings that made possible the tracing of that road, in as I hope its true sequence, and the un-earthing of the deep foundations that led ultimately to the true end of his great history, when the white ship departed from the Grey Havens.

In the twilight of autumn it sailed out of Mithlond, until the seas of the Bent World fell away beneath it, and the winds of the round sky troubled it no more, and borne upon the high airs above the mists of the world it passed into the ancient West, and an end was come for the Eldar of story and of song.

It has been an absorbing and inspiring task, from the splendours of the Ainulindale or the tragedy of the Children of Hurin down to the smallest detail of changing expression and shifting names.

It has also of its nature been very laborious, and with times of doubt, when confidence faltered; and I owe a great deal to all those who have supported the work with generous encouragement in letters and reviews. Most of all do I owe to my wife Baillie, to whom I dedicate this last volume: but the dedication may stand for the whole. Without her understanding and encouragement over the years, making mutual the weight of such a long and demanding work, it would never have been achieved.

Note on the text.

As a general rule I have preserved my father's often varying usage in the spelling of names (as e.g. Baraddur beside Barad-dur), but in certain cases I have given a standard form (as Adunaic where Adunaic is sometimes written, and Gil-galad rather than Gilgalad). In his late texts he seldom used the diaeresis (as in Finwe), but (in intention at least) always employed N to represent initial ng sounded as in English sing (thus Noldor); in this book I have extended the diaeresis throughout (other than in Old English names, as AElfwine), but restricted N to the texts in which it occurs.

References to The History of Middle-earth are given as in previous volumes in Roman numerals (thus VI.314). For the necessarily abundant references to the published Appendices I have used the letters RK (The Return of the King), the page-numbers being those of the three-volume hardback edition; and occasionally FR and TT for The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers.

To the removal of error (especially in the citation of texts) from The Peoples of Middle-earth, which was completed under great pressure of time, Mr Charles Noad has contributed more perhaps than to any of the previous volumes which he has read independently in proof; and with the conclusion of the work I must express again my gratitude to him for his meticulous, informed, and extraordinarily generous labour. I wish also to record my appreciation of the great skill and care which Mr Norman Tilley of Nene Phototypesetters has again brought to this particularly demanding text - including the 'invisible mending'

of errors in my manuscript tables.

Mr Noad has also made a number of suggestions for the improvement of the text by clarification and additional reference which where possible I have adopted. There remain some points which would have required too much rewriting, or too much movement of text, to introduce, and two of these may be mentioned here.

One concerns the translation of the curse of the Orc from the Dark Tower given on p. 83. When writing this passage I had forgotten that Mr Carl Hostetter, editor of the periodical Vinyar Tengwar, had pointed out in the issue (no. 26) for November 1992 that there is a translation of the words in a note to one of the typescripts of Appendix E (he being unaware of the existence of the certainly earlier version that I have printed); and I had also overlooked the fact that a third version is found among notes on words and phrases 'in alien speech' in The Lord of the Rings. All three differ significantly (bagronk, for example, being rendered both as 'cesspool' and as 'tor-ture (chamber)'); from which it seems clear that my father was at this time devising interpretations of the words, whatever he may have intended them to mean when he first wrote them.

I should also have noticed that the statement in the early texts of Appendix D (The Calendars), pp. 124, 131, that the Red Book 'ends before the Lithe of 1436' refers to the Epilogue to The Lord of the Rings, in which Samwise, after reading aloud from the Book over many months, finally reached its end on an evening late in March of that year (IX.120-1).

Lastly, after the proofs of this book had been revised I received a letter from Mr Christopher Gilson in which he referred to a brief but remarkable text associated with Appendix A that he had seen at Marquette. This was a curious chance, for he had no knowledge of the book beyond the fact that it contained some account of the Appendices; while although I had received a copy of the text from Marquette I had passed it over without observing its significance. Preserved with other difficult and disjointed notes, it is very roughly written on a slip of paper torn from a rejected manuscript. That manuscript can be identified as the close predecessor of the Appendix A text concerning the choice of the Half-elven which I have given on pp. 256-7. The writing on the verso reads:

and his father gave him the name Aragorn, a name used in the House of the Chieftains. But Ivorwen at his naming stood by, and said 'Kingly Valour' (for so that name is interpreted): 'that he shall have, but I see on his breast a green stone, and from that his true name shall come and his chief renown: for he shall be a healer and a renewer.'

Above this is written: 'and they did not know what she meant, for there was no green stone to be seen by other eyes' (followed by illegible words); and beneath it: 'for the green Elfstone was given to him by Galadriel'. A large X is also written, but it is not clear whether this relates to the whole page or only to a part of it.

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 prepara-tory 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 30th (2) 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 (improv-ing 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'