The Road to Middle-earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien created a new mythology

Bilbo’s ring certainly came into the story. But it is (according to a note written perhaps a couple of months after starting) ‘Not very dangerous, when used for good purpose’, see Shadow p. 42. As Christopher Tolkien points out, the ring remains for some time no more than a ‘highly convenient magical device’, the ‘central conception of the Ruling Ring’ being ‘not yet present’; the moment when this ‘central idea’ came to Tolkien is still not clear, see Shadow pp. 70, 87, 227. Meanwhile the character who was to become Aragorn, or Strider, begins his career as ‘a queer-looking, brown-faced hobbit’ called Trotter, who always wears wooden shoes, first encountered just like Aragorn in The Prancing Pony in Bree. ‘Trotter’ gave Tolkien immense trouble: at least three times he wrote ‘Who is Trotter?’ as a note to himself, and came up with repeated discrepant guesses – he was a cousin of Bilbo, he was a hobbit who was also a Ranger, he was an elf in disguise – only to fix eventually on him as a human and descendant of the Men of the North. Even after the character had become fixed as the tall and long-legged Aragorn, though, Tolkien stuck determinedly to the increasingly inapposite name ‘Trotter’, even writing in the defence of it which was to survive into the finished version of The Lord of the Rings as the defence of ‘Telcontar’ (see respectively for the above Shadow pp. 137, 210, 214, 223; Treason p. 6; War p. 390; and LOTR p. 845). As Christopher Tolkien repeatedly notes, his father could be extremely tenacious in holding on to a scene through several revisions, while at the same time sharply altering its context and meaning. But in these early stages it would be truer to say that Tolkien was ‘sleeepwalking’ his way towards a plot than that he was proceeding according to a plan. I look back with some shame (see ‘Preface’ to this edition) on my early attempt to diagnose one from Tolkien’s finished product. No wonder the Professor would have liked to ‘talk more’ with me ‘about design as it appears or may be found’! He would have told me that the design I was anxious to find simply wasn’t there, not from the beginning and possibly not at all. Nevertheless, to quote Bilbo, ‘Not all those who wander are lost’. While Tolkien did not have a grand design or central conception, had made no plans for a sequel to The Hobbit, and could not directly use his ‘Silmarillion’ material, he was not entirely without pre-existing resources. Something of what was going on in his mind is revealed by one of the major differences between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings: their use of maps and names.

Maps and Names

In The Hobbit names are astonishingly rare. There are of course the twelve dwarves, all taken from the Dvergatal poem, and apprehended I suspect by most readers as a homogeneous unit broken only by Fili and Kili, who are young, Bombur, who is fat, Balin, who is kindly, and Thorin, who is boss. There are few elf-names, and none of those which do occur – Bladorthin, Dominion, Girion, Galion, Moria, Esgaroth – is at all prominent in the story. The Elvenking remains anonymous in The Hobbit and is identified as Thranduil only in The Lord of the Rings p. 234. The only hobbit surnames given are Baggins, Took and Sackville-Baggins (this last to prove an anomaly in Middle-earth and a failure of tone), with ‘Messrs Grubb, Grubb and Burrowes’ the auctioneers at the very end. Elrond, Azog, Radagast, the ravens’ onomatopoeic Roäc and Carc – these all but complete The Hobbit’s list. A common practice for Tolkien at this stage was simply to make names out of capital letters. Thus Bilbo lives in a tunnel which goes ‘not quite straight into the side of the hill – The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it’. The stream at the foot of The Hill is called The Water, the hobbits’ town on The Water is called Hobbiton (near Bywater), and so on into Wilderland, where we find the Misty Mountains, the Long Lake, the Lonely Mountain, a river called Running and a valley called Dale. Even ‘Gandalf’ is actually a name of this type. It also comes from the Dvergatal, where it is near Thráinn, Thorinn and Thrór, but Tolkien evidently regarded it with some suspicion since it contained the element -álfr, while it was his opinion that elves and dwarves cohabited only in the pages of the OED. So what was ‘Gandalf’ doing in a dwarves’ roster, and anyway what was a ‘gand-’? If Tolkien looked in the Icelandic Dictionary of R. Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfusson he would have found the opinions that the meaning of gandr was ‘somewhat dubious’ but probably ‘anything enchanted or an object used by sorcerers’, while gandálfr was either ‘a wizard’ or maybe a ‘bewitched demon’. He concluded, clearly, that this dictionary definition was once again wrong, and that gandr meant ‘wand’ or ‘staff (the common property of wizards as one can tell even from Shakespeare’s Prospero or Milton’s Comus). Accordingly when Gandalf first appears ‘All that the unsuspecting Bilbo saw that morning was an old man with a staff’ (my italics).2 He turns out not to be an elf, but by the end of The Lord of the Rings it is clear he comes from Elvenhome. ‘Gandalf’ is in fact, then, not a name but a description, as with Beorn, Gollum, the Necromancer, and other people, places and things in The Hobbit.

Since The Silmarillion, with its developed nomenclature, was already in existence, it would be wrong to say that Tolkien in the 1930s was not interested in names. It does look, though, as if he was not sure how to bring them into fiction, especially if they were English names. Yet the point had caught his attention. As The Hobbit neared completion he focused on the problem with sudden clarity – as one can see from Farmer Giles of Ham, not published till 1949, but composed apparently in the period 1935–8, i.e. overlapping with the final production of The Hobbit (see Bibliography, pp. 73–4). This throws many interesting sidelights on Tolkien’s fictional development. For one thing it is the only one of his stories set unmistakably in England, and while its history is that of nursery-rhyme* its geography is remarkably clear. Ham is now Thame, a town in Buckinghamshire twelve miles east of Oxford. Worminghall is four miles away and Oakley, which had its parson eaten, five. The capital of the Middle Kingdom, ‘some twenty leagues distant from Ham’, sounds like Tamworth, the historical capital of the Mercian kings, sixty-eight miles from Thame as the crow flies (a league, NB, is three miles). Farthingho in Northamptonshire, where once ‘an outpost against the Middle Kingdom was maintained’, is on a direct line between those two places about a third of the way from Thame – proof of the ‘Little Kingdom’s’ lack of territorial ambition. Wales, where the giants live, and the (Pennine) mountains where the dragons live are on this parochial scale suitably far off. And when Farmer Giles refuses to listen to tales about the folk ‘North over the hills and far away, beyond the Standing Stones and all’, he means Warwickshire, probably, whose boundary with Oxfordshire runs by the Rollright Stones.

All in all it is extremely unfair of the imagined ‘editor’ of Farmer Giles to criticise its imagined ‘author’ for feeble geography; that ‘author’, like Tolkien, ‘lived himself in the lands of the Little Kingdom’ and knew what he was writing about. But what is the point of this sudden precision? Evidently, Tolkien wanted to recreate a timeless and idealised England (or rather Britain) in which the place and the people remained the same regardless of politics. The story of Farmer Giles is therefore largely the triumph of native over foreign (for in Giles’s court ‘the vulgar tongue came into fashion, and none of his speeches were in the Book–latin’), as simultaneously of worth over fashion and of heroic song and popular lay over pompous pernickety rationalistic scholarship. In all these ways Farmer Giles

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