Читать книгу The Return of the Shadow - Christopher Tolkien - Страница 14

III

OF GOLLUM AND THE RING

I have suggested that by this stage my father knew a good deal more about the Riders and the Ring than Bingo did, or than he permitted Gildor to tell; and evidence for this is found in the manuscript draft referred to on p. 48. This begins, at any rate, as a draft for a part of the conversation between Bingo and Gildor, but the talk here moves into topics which my father excluded from the typescript version (pp. 62–5). Gildor is not yet named, in fact, and indeed it was apparently in this text that he emerged as an individual: at first the conversation is between Bingo and an undifferentiated plural ‘they’.

The passage begins with an apparently disconnected sentence: ‘Since he did not tell his companions what he discovered I think I shall not tell you.’ (Does this refer to what Bingo discovered from the Elves?) Then follows:

‘Of course,’ they said, ‘we know that you are in search of Adventure; but it often happens that when you think it is ahead, it comes up unexpectedly from behind. Why did you choose this moment to set out?’

‘Well, the moment was really inevitable, you know,’ said Bingo. ‘I had come to the end of my treasure. And by wandering I thought I might find some more, like old Bilbo, and at least should be able more easily to live without any. I thought too it might be good for me. I was getting rather soft and fat.’

‘Yes,’ they laughed, ‘you look just like an ordinary hobbit.’

‘But though I can do a few things – like carpentry and gardening: I did not feel inclined somehow to make other people’s chairs, or grow other people’s vegetables for a living. I suppose some tiny touch of dragon-curse came to me. I am gold-lazy.’

‘Then Gandalf did not tell you anything? You were not actually escaping.’

‘What do you mean? What from?’

‘Well, this black rider,’ they said.

‘I don’t understand them at all.’

‘Then Gandalf told you nothing?’

‘Not about them. He warned Bilbo a long time ago about the Ring, of course.¹ “Don’t use it too much!” he used to say. “And only use it for proper purposes. I mean, do not use it except for jest, or for escaping from danger and annoyance – don’t use it for harm, or for finding out other people’s secrets, and of course not for theft or worse things. Because it may get the better of you.” I did not understand.

‘I seldom saw Gandalf after Bilbo went away. But about a year ago he came one night, and I told him of the plan I was beginning to make for leaving Bag-end. “What about the Ring?” he asked. “Are you being careful? Do be careful: otherwise you will be overcome by it.” I had as a matter of fact hardly ever used it – and I did not use it again after that talk until my birthday party.’

‘Does anyone else know about it?’

‘I cannot say; but I don’t think so. Bilbo kept it very secret. He always told me that I was the only one who knew about it (in the Shire).² I never told anyone else except Odo and Frodo who are my best friends. I have tried to be to them what Bilbo was to me. But even to them I never spoke of the Ring until they agreed to come with me on this Journey a few months ago. They would not tell anyone – though we often speak of it among ourselves. – Well, what do you make of it all? I can see you are bursting with secrets, but I cannot guess any of them.’

‘Well,’ said the Elf. ‘I don’t know much about this. You must find Gandalf as quick as you can – Rivendell I think is the place to go to. But it is my belief that the Lord of the Ring³ is looking for you.’

‘Is that bad or good?’

‘Bad; but how bad I cannot say. Bad enough if he only wants the ring back (which is unlikely); worse, if he wants payment; very bad indeed if he wants you as well (which is quite likely). We fancy that he must at last after many years have found out that Bilbo had it. Hence the asking for Baggins.⁴ But somehow the search for Baggins failed, and then something must have been discovered about you. But by strange luck you must have held your party and vanished just as they found out where you lived. You put off the scent; but they are hot on it now.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Servants of the Lord of the Ring – [?people] who have passed through the Ring.’

This ends a sheet, and the following sheet is not continuous with what precedes; but as found among my father’s papers they were placed together, and on both of them he wrote (later) ‘About Ring-wraiths’. The second passage is also part of a conversation, but there is no indication of who the speaker is (whoever it is, he is obviously speaking to Bingo). It was written at great speed and is extremely difficult to make out.

Yes, if the Ring overcomes you, you yourself become permanently invisible – and it is a horrible cold feeling. Everything becomes very faint like grey ghost pictures against the black background in which you live; but you can smell more clearly than you can hear or see.⁵ You have no power however like a Ring of making other things invisible: you are a ringwraith. You can wear clothes. [> you are just a ringwraith; and your clothes are visible, unless the Lord lends you a ring.] But you are under the command of the Lord of the Rings.⁶

I expect that one (or more) of these Ringwraiths have been sent to get the ring away from hobbits.

In the very ancient days the Ring-lord made many of these Rings: and sent them out through the world to snare people. He sent them to all sorts of folk – the Elves had many, and there are now many elfwraiths in the world, but the Ring-lord cannot rule them; the goblins got many, and the invisible goblins are very evil and wholly under the Lord; dwarves I don’t believe had any; some say the rings don’t work on them: they are too solid. Men had few, but they were most quickly overcome and …… The men-wraiths are also servants of the Lord. Other creatures got them. Do you remember Bilbo’s story of Gollum?⁷ We don’t know where Gollum comes in – certainly not elf, nor goblin; he is probably not dwarf; we rather believe he really belongs to an ancient sort of hobbit. Because the ring seems to act just the same for him and you. Long ago [?he belonged] …. to a wise, cleverhanded and quietfooted little family. But he disappeared underground, and though he used the ring often the Lord evidently lost track of it. Until Bilbo brought it out to light again.

Of course Gollum himself may have heard news – all the mountains were full of it after the battle – and tried to get back the ring, or told the Lord.

At this point the manuscript stops. Here is a first glimpse of an earlier history of Gollum; a suggestion of how the hunt for the Ring originated; and a first sketching of the idea that the Dark Lord gave out Rings among the peoples of Middle-earth. The Rings conferred invisibility, and (it is at least implied) this invisibility was associated with the fate (or at least the peril) of the bearers of the Rings: that they become ‘wraiths’ and – in the case of goblins and men – servants of the Dark Lord.

Now at some very early stage my father wrote a chapter, without number or title, in which he made use of the passage just given; and this is the first drafting of (a part of) what ultimately became Chapter 2, ‘The Shadow of the Past.’ As I have noticed, in the second of these two passages marked ‘About Ring-wraiths’ it is not clear who is speaking. It may be Gildor, or it may be Gandalf, or (perhaps most likely) neither the one nor the other, but indeterminate; but in any case I think that my father decided when writing the draft text of the second chapter that he would not have Gildor discussing these matters with Bingo (as he certainly does in the first of these ‘Ring-wraith’ passages, p. 74), but would reserve them for Gandalf’s instruction, and that this was the starting-point of the chapter which I now give, in which as I have said he made use of the second ‘Ring-wraith’ passage. Whether he wrote this text at once, before going on to the third chapter (IV in this book), seems impossible to say; but the fact that Marmaduke is mentioned shows that it preceded ‘In the House of Tom Bombadil’, where ‘Meriadoc’ and ‘Merry’ first appear. This, at any rate, is a convenient place to put it.

Subsequently my father referred to it as a ‘foreword’ (see p. 224), and it is clear that it was written as a possible new beginning for the book, in which Gandalf tells Bingo at Bag End, not long before the Party, something of the history and nature of his Ring, of his danger, and of the need for him to leave his home. It was composed very rapidly and is hard to read. I have introduced punctuation where needed, and occasionally put in silently necessary connective words. There are many pencilled alterations and additions which are here ignored, for they are anticipations of a later version of the chapter; but changes belonging to the time of composition are adopted into the text. There is no title.

One day long ago two people were sitting talking in a small room. One was a wizard and the other was a hobbit, and the room was the sitting-room of the comfortable and well-furnished hobbit-hole known as Bag-end, Underhill, on the outskirts of Hobbiton in the middle of the Shire. The wizard was of course Gandalf and he looked much the same as he had always done, though ninety years and more⁸ had gone by since he last came into any story that is now remembered. The hobbit was Bingo Bolger-Baggins, the nephew (or really first cousin once removed) of old Bilbo Baggins, and his adopted heir. Bilbo had quietly disappeared many years before, but he was not forgotten in Hobbiton.

Bingo of course was always thinking about him; and when Gandalf paid him a visit their talk usually came back to Bilbo. Gandalf had not been to Hobbiton for some time: since Bilbo disappeared his visits had become fewer and more secret. The people of Hobbiton had not in fact seen or at any rate noticed him for many years: he used to come quietly up to the door of Bag-end in the twilight and step in without knocking, and only Bingo (and one or two of his closest friends) knew he had been in the Shire. This evening he had slipped in in his usual way, and Bingo was more than usually glad to see him. For he was worried, and wanted explanations and advice.⁹ They were now talking of Bilbo, and his disappearance, and particularly about the Ring (which he had left behind with Bingo) – and about certain strange signs and portents of trouble brewing after a long time of peace and quiet.¹⁰

‘It is all very peculiar – and most disturbing and in fact terrifying,’ said Bingo. Gandalf was sitting smoking in a high chair, and Bingo near his feet was huddled on a stool warming his hands by a small wood-fire as if he felt chilly, though actually it was rather a warm evening for the time of the year [written above: at the end of August].¹¹ Gandalf grunted – the sound might have meant ‘I quite agree, but it can’t be helped,’ or else possibly ‘What a silly thing to say.’ There was a long silence. ‘How long have you known all this?’ asked Bingo at length; ‘and did you ever talk about it to Bilbo?’

‘I guessed a good deal immediately,’ answered Gandalf slowly, as if searching back in memory. Already to him the days of the journey and the Dragon and the Battle of Five Armies began to seem far off – in an almost legendary past. Perhaps even he was at last getting to feel his age a little; and in any case many dark and curious adventures had befallen him since then. ‘I guessed much,’ he said, ‘but soon I learnt more, for I went, as Bilbo may have told you, to the land of the Necromancer.’¹² For a moment his voice faded to a whisper. ‘But I knew that all was well with Bilbo,’ he went on. ‘Bilbo was safe, for that kind of power was powerless over him – or so I thought, and I was right in a way (if not quite right). I kept an eye on him and it, of course, but perhaps I was not careful enough.’

‘I am sure you did your best,’ said Bingo, meaning to console him. ‘O dearest and best friend of our house, may your beard never grow less! But it must have been rather a blow when Bilbo disappeared.’

‘Not at all,’ said Gandalf, with a sudden return to his ordinary tones. He sent out a great jet of smoke with an indignant poof and it coiled round his head like a cloud on a mountain. ‘That did not worry me. Bilbo is all right. It is you and all these other dear, silly, charming, idiotic, helpless hobbits that trouble me! It would be a mortal blow if the dark power should overcome the Shire, and all these jolly, greedy, stupid Bolgers, Bagginses, Brandybucks, Hornblowers, Proudfoots and whatnot became Wraiths.’

Bingo shuddered. ‘But why should we?’ he asked; ‘and why should the Lord want such servants, and what has all this to do with me and the Ring?’

‘It is the only Ring left,’ said Gandalf. ‘And hobbits are the only people of whom the Lord has not yet mastered any one.

‘In¹³ the ancient days the dark master made many Rings, and he dealt them out lavishly, so that they might be spread abroad to ensnare folk. The elves had many, and there are now many elfwraiths in the world; the goblins had some and their wraiths are very evil and wholly under the command of the Lord. The dwarves it is said had seven, but nothing could make them invisible. In them it only kindled to flames the fire of greed, and the foundation of each of the seven hoards of the Dwarves of old was a golden ring. In this way the master controlled them. But these hoards are destroyed, and the dragons have devoured them, and the rings are melted, or so some say.¹⁴ Men had three rings, and others they found in secret places cast away by the elf-wraiths: the men-wraiths are servants of the Lord, and they brought all their rings back to him; till at last he had gathered all into his hands again that had not been destroyed by fire – all save one.

‘It fell from the hand of an elf as he swam across a river; and it betrayed him, for he was flying from pursuit in the old wars, and he became visible to his enemies, and the goblins slew him.¹⁵ But a fish took the ring and was filled with madness, and swam upstream, leaping over rocks and up waterfalls until it cast itself on a bank and spat out the ring and died.

‘There was long ago living by the bank of the stream a wise, cleverhanded and quietfooted little family.¹⁶ I guess they were of hobbit-kind, or akin to the fathers of the fathers of the hobbits. The most inquisitive and curious-minded of that family was called Dígol. He was interested in roots and beginnings; he dived in deep pools, he burrowed under trees and growing plants, he tunnelled into green mounds, and he ceased to look up at flowers, and hilltops, or the birds that are in the upper air: his head and eyes were downward. He found the ring in the mud of the river-bank under the roots of a thorn tree; and he put it on; and when he returned home none of his family saw him while he wore it. He was pleased with his discovery and concealed it, and he used it to discover secrets, and put his knowledge to malicious use, and became sharp-eyed and keen-eared for all that was unpleasant. It is not to be wondered at that he became very unpopular, and was shunned (when visible) by all his relatives. They kicked him, and he bit their feet. He took to muttering to himself and gurgling in his throat. So they called him Gollum, and cursed him, and told him to go far away. He wandered in loneliness up the stream and caught fish with his fingers in deep pools and ate them raw. One day it was very hot, and as he was bending over a pool he felt a burning on the back of his head, and a dazzling light from the water pained his eyes. He wondered, for he had almost forgotten about the sun; and for the last time he looked up and shook his fist at it; but as he lowered his eyes again he saw far ahead the tops of the Misty Mountains. And he thought suddenly: “It would be cool and shady under those mountains. The sun could never find me there. And the roots of those peaks must be roots indeed; there must be great secrets buried there which have not been discovered since the beginning.” So he journeyed by night towards the mountains, and found a hole out of which a stream issued; and he wormed his way in like a maggot in the heart of the hills, and disappeared from all knowledge. And the ring went into the shadows with him, and even the Master lost it. But whenever he counted his rings, besides the seven rings that the Dwarves had held and lost, there was also one missing.’

‘Gollum!’ said Bingo. ‘Do you mean that Gollum that Bilbo met? Is that his history? How very horrible and sad. I hate to think that he was connected with hobbits, however distantly.’

‘But that surely was plain from Bilbo’s own account,’ said Gandalf. ‘It is the only thing that explains the events – or partly explains them. There was a lot in the background of both their minds and memories that was very similar – they understood one another really (if you think of it) better than hobbits ever understood dwarves, elves, or goblins.’

‘Still, Gollum must have been, or be, very much older than the oldest hobbit that ever lived in field or burrow,’ said Bingo.

‘That was the Ring,’ said Gandalf. ‘Of course it is a poor sort of long life that the Ring gives, a kind of stretched life rather than a continued growing – a sort of thinning and thinning. Frightfully wearisome, Bingo, in fact finally tormenting. Even Gollum came at last to feel it, to feel he could not bear it, and to understand dimly the cause of the torment. He had even made up his mind to get rid of it. But he was too full of malice. If you want to know, I believe he had begun to make a plan that he had not the courage left to carry out. There was nothing new to find out; nothing left but darkness, nothing to do but cold eating, and regretful remembering. He wanted to slip out and leave the mountains, and smell the open air even if it killed him – as he thought it probably would. But that would have meant leaving the Ring. And that is not easy to do. The longer you have had one the harder it is. It was especially hard for Gollum, as he had had a Ring for ages, and it hurt him and he hated it, and he wanted, when he could no longer bear to keep it, to hand it on to someone else to whom it would become a burden – [?bind] itself as a blessing and turn to a curse.¹⁷ That is in fact the best way of getting rid of its power.’

‘Why not give it to the goblins, then?’ asked Bingo.

‘I don’t think Gollum would have found that amusing enough,’ said Gandalf. ‘The goblins are already so beastly and miserable that it was wasting malice on them. Also it would have been difficult to escape from the hunters if there was an invisible goblin to reckon with. But I suppose he might have put it in their path in the end (if he had plucked up enough courage to do anything); but for the unexpected arrival of Bilbo. You remember how surprised he was. But as soon as the riddles started a plan formed in his mind – or half-formed. I dare say his old bad habits would have beaten his resolves and he would have eaten Bilbo if it had proved easy. But there was the sword, you remember. In his heart, I fancy, he never seriously expected to get a chance of eating Bilbo.’

‘But he never gave Bilbo the ring,’ said Bingo. ‘Bilbo had got it already!’

‘I know,’ said Gandalf. ‘And that is why I said that Gollum’s ancestry only partly explained events. There was, of course, something much more mysterious behind the whole thing – something quite beyond the Lord of the Rings himself, peculiar to Bilbo and his great Adventure. There was a queer fate over these rings, and especially over [?this] one. They got lost occasionally, and turned up in strange places. This one had already slipped away from its owner treacherously once before. It had slipped away from Gollum too. That is why I let Bilbo keep the ring so long.¹⁸ But for the moment I am trying to explain Gollum.’

‘I see,’ said Bingo doubtfully. ‘But do you know what happened afterwards?’

‘Not very clearly,’ said Gandalf. ‘I have heard a little, and can guess more. I think it certain that Gollum knew in the end that Bilbo had somehow got the Ring. He may well have guessed it soon. But in any case the news of the later events went all over Wilderland and far beyond, East, West, and South and North. The mountains were full of whispers and reports; and that would give Gollum enough to think about.¹⁹ Anyway, it is said that Gollum left the mountains – for the goblins had become very few there, and the deep places more than ever dark and lonely, and the power of the ring had left him. He was probably feeling old, very old, but less timid. But I do not think he became less wicked. There is no news of what happened to him afterwards. Of course, it is quite likely that wind and the mere shadow of sunlight killed him pretty quickly. But it is possible that it did not. He was cunning. He could hide from daylight or moonlight till he slowly grew more used to things. I have in fact a horrible fancy that he made his slow sneaking way bit by bit to the dark tower, to the Necromancer, the Lord of the Rings. I think that Gollum is very likely the beginning of our present trouble; and that through him the Lord found out where to look for this last and most precious and potent of his Rings.’

‘What a pity Bilbo did not stab the beastly creature when he said goodbye,’ said Bingo … .

‘What nonsense you do talk sometimes, Bingo,’ said Gandalf. ‘Pity! It was pity that prevented him. And he could not do so, without doing wrong. It was against the rules. If he had done so he would not have had the ring, the ring would have had him at once. He might have been a wraith on the spot.’

‘Of course, of course,’ said Bingo. ‘What a thing to say of Bilbo. Dear old Bilbo! But why did he keep the thing, or why did you let him? Didn’t you warn him about it?’

‘Yes,’ said Gandalf. ‘But even over Bilbo it had some power. Sentiment............... He liked to keep it as a memento. Let us be frank – he continued to be proud of his Great Adventure, and to look on the ring now and again warmed his memory, and made him feel just a trifle heroic. But he could hardly have helped himself anyway: if you think for a moment, it is not really very easy to get rid of a Ring once you have got it.’

‘Why not?’ said Bingo, after thinking for a moment. ‘You can give it away, throw it away, or destroy it.’

‘Yes,’ said Gandalf – ‘or you can surrender it: to the Master. That is if you wish to serve him, and to fall into his power, and to greatly increase his power.’

‘But no one would wish to do that,’ said Bingo, horrified.

‘Nobody that you can imagine, perhaps,’ answered Gandalf. ‘Certainly not Bilbo. That is what made it difficult for him. He dared not throw it away lest it get into evil hands, and be misused, and find its way back to the Master after doing much evil. He would not give it away to bad folk for the same reason; and he would not give it away to good folk or people he knew and trusted because he did not wish to burden them with it, any sooner than he was obliged. And he could not destroy it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, how would you destroy it? Have you ever tried?’

‘No; but I suppose one could hammer it, or melt it, or do both.’

‘Try them,’ said Gandalf, ‘and you will find out what Bilbo found out long ago.’

Bingo drew the Ring out of an inner pocket, and looked at it. It was plain and smooth without device, emblem, or rune; but it was of gold, and as he looked at it it seemed to Bingo that its colour was rich and beautiful, and its roundness perfect. It was very admirable and wholly precious. He had thought of throwing it into the hot embers of the fire. He found he could not do so without a struggle. He weighed the Ring in his hand, and then with an effort of will he made a movement as if to throw it in the fire; but he found he had put it back in his pocket.

Gandalf laughed. ‘You see? You have always regarded it as a great treasure, and an heirloom from Bilbo. Now you cannot easily get rid of it. Though as a matter of fact, even if you took it to an anvil and summoned enough will to strike it with a heavy hammer, you would make no dint on it. Your little wood-fire, of course, even if you blew all night with a bellows would hardly melt any gold. But old Adam Hornblower the smith down the road could not melt it in his furnace. They say only dragonfire can melt them – but I wonder if that is not a legend, or at any rate if there are any dragons now left in which the old fire is hot enough. I fancy you would have to find one of the Cracks of Earth in the depths of the Fiery Mountain, and drop it down into the Secret Fire, if you really wanted to destroy it.’²⁰

‘After all your talk,’ said Bingo, half solemnly and half in pretended annoyance, ‘I really do want to destroy it. I cannot think how Bilbo put up with it for so long, if he knew as much – but he actually used it sometimes, and joked about it to me.’

‘The only thing to do with such perilous treasures that Adventure has bestowed on you is to take them lightheartedly,’ said Gandalf. ‘Bilbo never used the ring for any serious purpose after he came back. He knew that it was too serious a matter. And I think he taught you well – after he had chosen you as his heir from among all the hobbits of his kindred.’

There was a long silence again, while Gandalf puffed at his pipe in apparent content, though under his lids his eyes were watching Bingo intently. Bingo gazed at the red embers, that began to glow as the light faded and the room grew slowly dark. He was thinking about the fabled Cracks of Earth and the terror of the Fiery Mountain.

‘Well?’ said Gandalf at last. ‘What are you thinking about? Are you making any plans or getting any ideas?’

‘No,’ said Bingo coming back to himself, and finding to his surprise that he was in the dark. ‘Or perhaps yes! As far as I can see I have got to leave Hobbiton, leave the Shire, leave everything and go away and draw the danger after me. I must save the Shire somehow, though there have been times when I thought it too stupid and dull for anything, and fancied a big explosion or an invasion of dragons might do it good! But I don’t feel like that now. I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering and adventures bearable. I shall feel there is some foothold somewhere, even if I can’t ever stand on it myself again. But I suppose I must go alone. I feel rather minute, don’t you know, and extremely uprooted, and, well, frightened, I suppose. Help me, Gandalf, best of friends.’

‘Cheer up, Bingo, my lad,’ said Gandalf, throwing two small logs of wood on the fire and puffing it with his mouth. Immediately the wood blazed up and filled the room with dancing light. ‘No, I don’t think you need or should go alone. Why not ask your three best friends to, beg them to, order them to (if you must) – I mean the three, the only three who you have (perhaps indiscreetly but perhaps with wise choice) told about your secret Ring: Odo, Frodo, and Marmaduke [written above: Meriadoc]. But you must go quickly – and make it a joke, Bingo, a joke, a huge joke, a resounding jest. Don’t be mournful and serious. Jokes are really in your line. That’s what Bilbo liked about you (among other things), if you care to know.’

‘And where shall we go, and what shall we steer by, and what shall be our quest?’ said Bingo, without a trace of a smile or the glimmer of a jest. ‘When the huge joke is over, what then?’

‘At present I have no idea,’ said Gandalf, quite seriously and much to Bingo’s surprise and dismay. ‘But it will be just the opposite of Bilbo’s adventure – to begin with, at any rate. You will set out on a journey without any known destination; and as far as you have any object it will not be to win new treasure but to get rid of a treasure that belongs (one might say) inevitably to you. But you cannot even start without going East, West, South, or North; and which shall we choose? Towards danger, and yet not too rashly or too straight towards it. Go East. Yes, yes, I have it. Make first for Rivendell, and then we shall see. Yes, we shall see then. Indeed, I begin to see already!’ Suddenly Gandalf began to chuckle. He rubbed his long gnarled hands together and cracked the finger-joints. He leant forward to Bingo. ‘I have thought of a joke,’ he said. ‘Just a rough plan – you can set your comic wits to work on it.’ And his beard wagged backwards and forwards as he whispered long in Bingo’s ear. The fire burned low again – but suddenly in the darkness an unexpected sound rang out. Bingo was rocking with laughter.

NOTES

1 My father’s own thought is surely transparent here. Bingo introduces the subject of the Ring as if it had some connection with the Riders, whereas he is obviously intended to appear as quite unable even to guess at their significance; and there is no suggestion in the drafts that the Ring had been mentioned before this point.

2 (in the Shire): my father first wrote ‘except Gandalf’. The words ‘(in the Shire)’ probably mean no more than that: i.e., no one save Bilbo and Bingo, and outside the Shire only Gandalf, and anyone else whom Gandalf might possibly have told.

3 This is probably the first time that the expression The Lord of the Ring was used; and The Lord of the Rings occurs below (note 6). (My father gave The Lord of the Ring as the title of the new work in a letter to Allen and Unwin of 31 August 1938).

4 Hence the asking for Baggins: this is not mentioned in the manuscript drafts, but see the typescript version, p. 54 and note 9. The following sentence, ‘But somehow the search for Baggins failed, and then something must have been discovered about you’ perhaps explains the story that Frodo Took met a Black Rider on the North Moor as early as the previous spring (see p. 71).

5 My father first wrote here that the clothing of one who has thus become permanently invisible was invisible also, but rejected the statement as soon as written.

6 This seems to be the first appearance of the expression The Lord of the Rings; see note 3.

7 After this sentence my father wrote: ‘Gollum I think some sort of distant kinsman of the goblin sort.’ Since this is contradicted in the next sentence it was obviously rejected in the act of writing; he crossed it out later.

8 ninety years and more: see pp. 31–3.

9 At no point in this text is there any further mention of Bingo’s ‘worry’; and the advice that he asks is entirely based on what Gandalf now tells him and which is obviously entirely new to him. There is also no further reference to the ‘strange signs and portents of trouble brewing’ spoken of in the next sentence, nor any explanation of Gandalf’s remark (p. 81) that ‘Gollum is very likely the beginning of our present trouble.’

10 This ends the first page of the manuscript. At the head of the second page my father wrote in pencil: ‘Gandalf and Bingo discuss Rings and Gollum’, and ‘Draft: Later used in Chapter II’, and he numbered the pages (previously unnumbered) in Greek letters, beginning at this point. Thus the first page is left out. But these pencillings were clearly put in long after, and in my view they cast no doubt on the validity of the opening section as an integral part of the text. May be it had at one time become separated and mislaid; but as the papers were found it was placed with the rest.

11 Rumour of the Party – decided on between Gandalf and Bingo at the end of this text – began to circulate early in September (p. 30).

12 In The Hobbit (Chapter I) Gandalf told Thorin at Bag End that he found his father Thrain ‘in the dungeons of the Necromancer’. In the Tale of Years in LR Appendix B this, Gandalf’s second visit to Dol Guldur, took place in the year 2850, forty years before Bilbo’s birth; it was then that he ‘discovered that its master was indeed Sauron’ (cf. FR p. 263). But here the meaning is clearly that Gandalf went to the land of the Necromancer after Bilbo’s acquisition of the Ring. Later my father altered the text in pencil to read: ‘for I went back once more to the land of the Necromancer.’

13 Here the earlier draft concerning the Rings is used: see p. 75.

14 See FR p. 60 and LR Appendix A pp. 357–8.

15 This is the first germ of the story of the death of Isildur.

16 This is also derived from the text referred to in note 13.

17 This sentence as first written ended: ‘and he wanted to hand it on to someone else.’ It is to this that the following sentence refers.

18 The passage beginning ‘There was a queer fate’ was an addition, and ‘That is why I let Bilbo keep the ring so long’ refers to the sentence ending ‘… peculiar to Bilbo and his great Adventure.’

19 Cf. the draft passage given on p. 75: ‘Of course Gollum himself may have heard news – all the mountains were full of it after the battle – and tried to get back the ring.’

20 The first mention of the Fiery Mountain and the Cracks of Earth in its depths.

It will be seen that a part of the ‘Gollum’ element in ‘The Shadow of the Past’ (Chapter 2 in FR) was at once very largely achieved, even though Dígol* (later Déagol) is Gollum himself, and not his friend whom he murdered, though Gandalf had never seen him (and so no explanation is given of how he knows his history, which of its nature could only be derived from Gollum’s own words), and though it is only surmised that he went at last to the Dark Lord.

It is important to realise that when my father wrote this, he was working within the constraints of the story as originally told in The Hobbit. As The Hobbit first appeared, and until 1951, the story was that Gollum, encountering Bilbo at the edge of the subterranean lake, proposed the riddle game on these conditions: ‘If precious asks, and it doesn’t answer, we eats it, my preciousss. If it asks us, and we doesn’t answer, we gives it a present, gollum!’ When Bilbo won the contest, Gollum held to his promise, and went back in his boat to his island in the lake to find his treasure, the ring which was to be his present to Bilbo. He could not find it, for Bilbo had it in his pocket, and coming back to Bilbo he begged his pardon many times: ‘He kept on saying: “We are ssorry: we didn’t mean to cheat, we meant to give it our only present, if it won the competition”.’ “‘Never mind!” he [Bilbo] said. “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 to get out of these places”, said Bilbo.’ And Gollum did so; and Bilbo ‘said good-bye to the nasty miserable creature.’ On the way up through the tunnels Bilbo slipped on the ring, and Gollum at once missed him, so that Bilbo perceived that the ring was as Gollum had told him – it made you invisible.

This is why, in the present text, Gandalf says ‘I think it certain that Gollum knew in the end that Bilbo had got the ring’; and why my father had Gandalf develop a theory that Gollum was actually ready to give the ring away: ‘he wanted … to hand it on to someone else … I suppose he might have put it in [the goblins’] path in the end … but for the unexpected arrival of Bilbo … as soon as the riddles started a plan formed in his mind.’ This is all carefully conceived in relation to the text of The Hobbit as it then was, to meet the formidable difficulty: if the Ring were of such a nature as my father now conceived it, how could Gollum have really intended to give it away to a stranger who won a riddle contest? – and the original text of The Hobbit left no doubt that that was indeed his serious intention. But it is interesting to observe that Gandalf’s remarks about the affinity of mind between Gollum and Bilbo, which survived into FR (pp. 63–4), originally arose in this context, of explaining how it was that Gollum was willing to let his treasure go.

Turning to what is told of the Rings in this text, the original idea (p. 75) that the Elves had many Rings, and that there were many ‘Elfwraiths’ in the world, is still present, but the phrase ‘the Ring-lord cannot rule them’ is not. The Dwarves, on the other hand, at first said not to have had any, now had seven, each the foundation of one of ‘the seven hoards of the Dwarves’, and their distinctive response to the corruptive power of the Rings enters (though this was already foreshadowed in the first rough draft on the subject: ‘some say the rings don’t work on them: they are too solid.’) Men, at first said to have had ‘few’, now had three – but ‘others they found in secret places cast away by the elf-wraiths’ (thus allowing for more than three Black Riders). But the central conception of the Ruling Ring is not yet present, though it was, so to say, waiting in the wings: for it is said that Gollum’s Ring was not only the only one that had not returned to the Dark Lord (other than those lost by the Dwarves) – it was the ‘most precious and potent of his Rings’ (p. 81). But in what its peculiar potency lay we are not told; nor indeed do we learn more here of the relation between the invisibility conferred by the Rings, the tormenting longevity (which now first appears), and the decline of their bearers into ‘wraiths’.

The element of moral will required in one possessed of a Ring to resist its power is strongly asserted. This is seen in Gandalf’s advice to Bilbo in the original draft (p. 74): ‘don’t use it for harm, or for finding out other people’s secrets, and of course not for theft or worse things. Because it may get the better of you’; and still more expressly in his rebuke to Bingo, who said that it was a pity that Bilbo did not kill Gollum: ‘He could not do so, without doing wrong. It was against the rules. If he had done so he would not have had the ring, the ring would have had him at once’ (p. 81). This element remains in FR (pp. 68–9), but is more guardedly expressed: ‘Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so.’

The end of the chapter – with Gandalf actually himself proposing the Birthday Party and Bingo’s ‘resounding jest’ – was to be quickly rejected, and is never heard of again.