The Peoples of Middle-earth (51 page)

lasted not much more than ten years, and from say 40 or a little before to near 240 (two hundred years) the capacity for toil (and for fighting) of most Dwarves was equally great.

This is followed by the information attributed to Gimli concerning the Dwarf-women, which was preserved in Appendix A (RK p. 360).

There is no difference in substance in the present text, except for the statements that they are never forced to wed against their will (which

'would of course be impossible'), and that they have beards. This latter is said also in the 1951 revision of the Quenta Silmarillion (XI.205, $5).

It is then said that Dwarves marry late, seldom before they are ninety or more,(18) that they have few children (so many as four being rare), and continues:

To these they are devoted, often rather fiercely: that is, they may treat them with apparent harshness (especially in the desire to ensure that they shall grow up tough, hardy, unyielding), but they defend them with all their power, and resent injuries to them even more than to themselves. The same is true of the atti-tude of children to parents. For an injury to a father a Dwarf may spend a life-time in achieving revenge. Since the 'kings' or heads of lines are regarded as 'parents' of the whole group, it will be understood how it was that the whole of Durin's Race gathered and marshalled itself to avenge Thror.

Finally, there is a note on the absence of record concerning the women of the Dwarves:

They are seldom named in genealogies. They join their husbands' families. But if a son is seen to be 110 or so years younger than his father, this usually indicates an elder daughter.

Thorin's sister Dis is named simply because of the gallant death of her sons Fili and Kili in defence of Thorin II. The sentiment of affection for sister's children was strong among all peoples of the Third Age, but less so among Dwarves than Men or Elves among whom it was strongest.

The concluding passage in Appendix A, concerning Gimli and Legolas, was derived from the old text of the Tale of Years (p. 244), which had now of course been abandoned.

NOTES.

1. Since Kheled-zaram and Kibil-nala as the Dwarvish names of Mirrormere and Silverlode entered early in the history of the writing of The Lord of the Rings (see VII.167, 174), it seems clear that the naming of Mirrormere Kibil-nala here was a slip without significance, and is unlikely to have any connection with the curious appearance of the name Zigilnad for Silverlode in the draft typescript of Durin's Folk (p. 279).

2. 'thrice': the Durin who was slain by the Balrog in Moria is named in the accompanying genealogical table 'Durin III'.

3. Thorin Oakenshield was not the 'last of the direct line of Durin'; no doubt my father meant that he was the last in the unbroken descent of the kings from father to son (cf. 'the right line was broken' a few lines below).

4. This addition was roughly written in the margins, with a number of corrections, and the passage from 'They were victorious ...'

to 'Dain their kinsman went away to the Iron Hills' is put in the present tense.

5. The extension of the line beyond Thror appears to have had its starting-point in my father's explanation of the words on Thror's Map in. The Hobbit ('Here of old was Thrain King under the Mountain') as referring not to Thrain son of Thror but to a remote ancestor also named Thrain: see VII.160.

6. My father's method of composition at this time was to continue typing, without rejecting anything, as the sentences developed. A characteristic if extreme case is seen in Dain's words to Thrain at the end of the Battle of Azanulbizar:

Only I have passed seen looked through the Shadow of the Gate. Beyond the Shadow it waits for you still. The world must change and some other power than ours must come, Durin's Bane before Some other power must come than ours must come, before Khazad-dum Durin's folk walk again in

By crossing out unwanted words and putting directions on the typescript he produced the passage that stands in Appendix A (RK p. 356).

7. In a draft for this passage my father wrote at this point the following, which was not repeated: 'The Ring-wearer became rich especially in gold: that is his dealings brought him wealth according to what he traded in: if in lead, lead, if in silver, silver, if in gems, then gems more abundant and of greater size and worth.'

8. This is where the story of how Thrain came to Dol Guldur was first told.

9. The deaths of Frerin and Fundin, and the retreat to the wood where Thorin cut the oak-bough from which he got his name (RK

p. 355 and footnote), had not been mentioned in the draft typescript in the account of the Battle of Azanulbizar. The story that Thorin carried an unpainted shield of oak wood disappeared.

10. The tone and total effect of the original version, as my father dashed it down, is rather different from that of the subsequent texts, where the expression becomes a little more reserved. To give a single example, when Thorin (later Gloin) sneered at 'those absurd little rustics down in the Shire' (cf. Unfinished Tales p. 333), Gandalf riposted: 'You don't know much about those folk, Thorin. If you think them all that simple because they pay you whatever you ask for your bits of iron and don't bargain hard like some Men, you're mistaken. Now I know one that I think is just the fellow for you. Honest, sensible, and very far from rash - and brave.'

11. A begins with the words 'In the morning Thorin said to Mithrandir ...', and continues as in the third version B (Unfinished Tales p. 328): here it was Thorin who invited Gandalf to his home in the Blue Mountains, whereas in the earliest text (p. 282) it was Gandalf who proposed it. I do not know why A should have begun at this point.

12. There is here a direction to 'see LR I 65171' (read '70'), which was thus already in print.

13. From this was derived a passage in the earliest version of the story:

'Well then, I was I suppose "chosen". But as far as I was aware, I had my reasons for what I did. Don't be abashed if I say that the chief in my mind was unconcerned with you: it was, well

"strategic". When I met Thorin at Bree I had long known that Sauron was arisen again in Dol Guldur, and every day I expected him to declare himself.'

14. 'Educated' is the word that Gandalf used in the original version of the passage given from the text B in Unfinished Tales p. 331.

'In 2941 I already saw that the Westlands were in for another very bad time sooner or later. Of quite a different sort. And I would like the Shire-folk to survive it, if possible. But to do that I thought they would want something a bit more than they had had before. What shall I say - the clannish sort of stocky, sturdy family feeling was not quite enough. They were become a bit parochial, forgetting their own stories, forgetting their own beginnings, forgetting what little they had known about the greatness and peril of the world - or of the allies they had in it. It was not buried deep, but it was getting buried: memory of the high and noble and beautiful. In short, they needed education! I daresay he was "chosen", and I was chosen to choose him, but I picked on Bilbo as an instrument. You can't educate a whole people at once!'

15. The reference is to Gandalf's first appearance in The Hobbit: 'He had not been down that way under The Hill for ages and ages, not since his friend the Old Took died, in fact, and the hobbits had almost forgotten what he looked like.' - On the date of 'The Quest of Erebor' given here, 2942, see the Note below.

16. It was not until text B of The Quest of Erebor that Gandalf's account of his finding Thrain in Dol Guldur was moved back in the story (see Unfinished Tales p. 324), though still in that version Gandalf returned to it again at the end (ibid. p. 336).

17. It will be found in the genealogical table that the life-span of all the 'kings of Durin's Folk' from Thrain I to Nain II varied only between 247 and 256 years, and no Dwarf in the table exceeded that, save Borin (261) and Dwalin, who lived to the vast age of 340 (the date of his death appears in all the later texts of the table, although the first to give dates seems - it is hard to make out the figures - to make him 251 years old at his death).

18. In the genealogical table all the 'kings of Durin's Folk' from Nain I to Thorin Oakenshield were born either 101 or 102 (in one case 100) years after their fathers.

Note on the date of the Quest of Erebor.

Among the papers associated with the original manuscript of the story my father set down some notes headed 'Dates already fixed in printed narrative are these.'

Bilbo born 2891 (1291). He was visited in 2942 by Thorin II, since that autumn he was 51 (Lord of the Rings Chapter I): therefore Battle of Five Armies was in same year, and Thorin II died then.

Thrain must have 'gone off' (to seek Erebor) in 2842 ('a hundred years ago', Hobbit p. 35). (It is thus assumed that after wandering he was caught in 2845 and died in dungeons 2850.)

Dain II is said (LR I p. 241) 'to have passed his 250th year' in 3018. He was then, say, 251, therefore he was born in 2767 [the date given in the genealogy, RK p. 361].

My father had given the date of Bilbo's birth in 2891 in the Tale of Years (p. 238), and he here referred to it as a date 'fixed in printed narrative' (The Fellowship of the Ring was published in July 1954, and The Two Towers in November). But without Volume III the date is fixed in the following way: Frodo left Bag End in September 3018

(Gandalf's letter that he finally received at Bree was dated 'Midyear's Day, Shire Year, 1418'), and he left on his fiftieth birthday (FR p. 74), which was seventeen years after Bilbo's farewell party (when Frodo was 33); the date of the party was therefore 3001. But that was Bilbo's 111th birthday; and therefore he was born in - 2890. It seems only possible to explain this as a simple miscalculation on my father's part which he never checked, - or rather never checked until now, for in another note among these papers he went through the evidence and arrived at the date 2890 for Bilbo's birth, and therefore 2941 for Thorin's visit to him at Bag End. This new date had been reached by the time that the earliest version of The Quest of Erebor was written.

PART TWO.

LATE WRITINGS.

LATE WRITINGS.

It is a great convenience in this so largely dateless history that my father received from Allen and Unwin a quantity of their waste paper whose blank sides he used for much of his late writing; for this paper consisted of publication notes, and many of the pages bear dates: some from 1967, the great majority from 1968, and some from 1970.

These dates provide, of course, only a terminus a quo: in the case, for instance, of a long essay on the names of the rivers and beacon-hills of Gondor (extensively drawn on in Unfinished Tales) pages dated 1967

were used, but the work can be shown on other and entirely certain grounds to have been written after June 1969. This was the period of The Disaster of the Gladden Fields, Cirion and Eorl, and The Battles of the Fords of Isen, which I published in Unfinished Tales.

It was also a time when my father was moved to write extensively, in a more generalised view, of the languages and peoples of the Third Age and their interrelations, closely interwoven with discussion of the etymology of names. Of this material I made a good deal of use in the section The History of Galadriel and Celeborn (and elsewhere) in Unfinished Tales; but I had, of course, to relate it to the structure and content of that book, and the only way to do so, in view of the extremely diffuse and digressive nature of my father's writing, was by the extraction of relevant passages. In this book I give two of the most substantial of these 'essays', from neither of which did I take much in Unfinished Tales.

The first of these, Of Men and Dwarves, arose, as my father said,

'from consideration of the Book of Mazarbul' (that is, of his representations of the burnt and damaged leaves, which were not in fact published until after his death) and the inscription on the tomb of Balin in Moria, but led far beyond its original point of departure.

From this essay I have excluded the two passages that were used in Unfinished Tales, the account of the Druedain, and that of the meeting of the Numenorean mariners with the Men of Eriador in the year 600 of the Second Age (see pp. 309, 314). The second, which I have called The Shibboleth of Feanor, is of a very different nature, as will be seen, and from this only a passage on Galadriel was used in Unfinished Tales; I have included also a long excursus on the names of the descendants of Finwe, King of the Noldor, which was my father's final, or at any rate last, statement on many of the great names of Elvish legend, and which I used in the published Silmarillion. I have also given a third text, which I have called The Problem of Ros; and following these are some of his last writings, probably in the last year of his life (p. 377).

A word must be said of these 'historical-philological' essays. Apart from the very last, just referred to, they were composed on a typewriter. These texts are, very clearly, entirely ab initio; they are not developments and refinements of earlier versions, and they were not themselves subsequently developed and refined. The ideas, the new narrative departures, historical formulations, and etymological constructions, here first appear in written form (which is not to say, of course, that they were not long in the preparing), and in that form, essentially, they remain. The texts are never obviously concluded, and often end in chaotic and illegible or unintelligible notes and jottings.