The Peoples of Middle-earth Read Online Free PDF Page B

once.
    'But as I have told you, I found it impossible to question Bilbo on the point without making him very angry. So I let it be, for our friendship's sake. His touchiness was proof enough for me.
    I guessed then that the ring had an unwholesome power over its keeper that set to work quickly. Yes, even on Bilbo the desire for ownership had gripped at once, and went on growing. But fortunately it stayed at that, and he took little other harm. For he got the ring blamelessly. He did not steal it; he found it, and it was quite impossible to give it back: Gollum would have killed him at once. He paid for it, you might say, with mercy, and gave Gollum his life at great risk. And so in the end he got rid of the thing, just in time.
    'But as for Gollum: he will never again be free of the desire for it, I fear. When I last saw him, he was still filled with it, whin-ing that he was tricked and ill-used. [But when he had at last told me his history ...

    In the following (final) typescript of the chapter the rider is not present; but my father added a note at this point 'Take in rider' - and then struck it out. It was clearly at this time that he wrote the note referred to above, 'Alternative, if the only reference to this is made in Chapter II': he meant, if no more was to be said of the matter in Chapter H than Gandalf's words 'I put the fear of fire on him, and wrung the true story out of him, bit by bit, with much snivelling and snarling' - i.e., without the rider just given. If that rider was to be rejected, then a passage on the subject must be given in the Prologue.
    This was ultimately his decision; and the second of the two texts appended to P 6 is exactly as it stands in the published Prologue, p. 22: 'Now it is a curious fact that this is not the story as Bilbo first told it to his companions ...'(17)

    The Note on the Shire Records entered in the Second Edition. In one of his copies of the First Edition my father noted: 'Here should be inserted Note on the Shire Records'; but he wrote against this later: 'I have decided against this. It belongs to Preface to The Silmarillion.'
    With this compare my remarks in the Foreword to The Book of Lost Tales Part One, pp. S-6.

    I have given this rather long account of the history of the Prologue, because it is one of the best-known of my father's writings, the primary source for knowledge of the Hobbits, on which he expended much thought and care; and also because it seems of special interest to see how it evolved. in relation to the narrative of The Lord of the Rings. I will here briefly recapitulate some elements that seem to me to emerge from this history.
    While it is not strictly demonstrable, I think it extremely likely that my father returned after many years to the original form of the Prologue (or Foreword as he still called it) about the time, or soon after it, when he was writing the long first draft that went from Many Partings through Homeward Bound and The Scouring of the Shire to The Grey Havens, that is to say in the summer of 1948 (IX.12 - 13, 108). I have pointed to a number of indications that this was so.
    On the one hand, we see the appearance, at successive stages in the writing of the Prologue, of the Shirriffs in the revision of the old P 2
    text (p. 6); of the word smial in P 5 (p. 11); of the Battle of Greenfields in P 6 (see pp. 9-11); of the title of Thane (Thain) in the same text (p. 11). On the other hand, all these first appear in The Scouring of the Shire - and in two cases, the Battle of Greenfields and the title of Thain, they were absent from the original draft of that chapter. I believe that my father's return to the Shire at the end of The Lord of the Rings provided the impulse for his renewed work on the Prologue and its subsequent extension by stages. Moreover it is seen from the history of this text how much of the account of Hobbits and their origins actually emerged after the narrative of The Lord of the Rings was completed - most notably,