The Return of the Shadow. Christopher Tolkien

in this respect he survived into the third version of the chapter.

       9 a small ring: emended from his famous ring.

I have given this text in full, since taken together with the first it provides a basis of reference in describing those that follow, from which only extracts are given; but it will be seen that the Party – the preparations for it, the fireworks, the feast – had already reached the form it retains in FR (pp. 34–9), save in a few and quite minor features of the narrative (and here and there in tone). This is the more striking when we realize that at this stage my father still had very little idea of where he was going: it was a beginning without a destination (but see pp. 42–3).

      Certain changes made to the manuscript towards its end have not been taken up in the text given above. In Bilbo’s speech, his words ‘Secondly, to celebrate my birthday, and the twentieth anniversary of my return’ and the comment ‘No cheers; there was some uncomfortable rustling’ were removed, and the following expanded passage substituted:

      Secondly, to celebrate OUR birthdays: mine and my honourable and gallant father’s. Uncomfortable and apprehensive silence. I am only half the man that he is: I am 72, he is 144. Your numbers are chosen to do honour to each of his honourable years. This was really dreadful – a regular braintwister, and some of them felt insulted, like leap-days shoved in to fill up a calendar.

      This change gives every appearance of belonging closely with the writing of the manuscript: it is clearly written in ink, and seems distinct from various scattered scribbles in pencil. But the appearance is misleading. Why should Bilbo thus refer to old Bungo Baggins, underground these many years? Bungo was pure Baggins, ‘solid and comfortable’ (as he is described in The Hobbit), and surely died solidly in his bed at Bag End. To call him ‘gallant’ seems odd, and for Bilbo to say ‘I am half the man that he is’ and ‘he is 144’ rather tastelessly whimsical.

The explanation is in fact simple: it was not Bilbo who said it, but his son, Bingo Baggins, who enters in the third version of ‘A Long-expected Party’. The textual point would not be worth mentioning here were it not so striking an example of my father’s way of using one manuscript as the matrix of the next version, but not correcting it coherently throughout: so in this case, he made no structural alterations to the earlier part of the story, but pencilled in the name ‘Bingo’ against ‘Bilbo’ on the last pages of the manuscript, and (to the severe initial confusion of the editor) carefully rewrote a passage of Bilbo’s speech to make it seem that Bilbo had taken leave of his senses. It is clear, I think, that it was the sudden emergence of this radical new idea that caused him to abandon this version.

Other hasty changes altered ‘seventy-first’ to ‘seventy-second’ and ‘71’ to ‘72’ at each occurrence, and these belong also with the new story that was emerging. In this text, Bilbo’s age in the opening sentence was 70, as in the first version, but it was changed to 71 in the course of the chapter (note 1 above). The number of guests at the dinner-party was already 144 in the text as first written, but nothing is made of this figure; that it was chosen for a particular reason only appears from the expanded passage of the speech given above: ‘I am 72, he is 144. Your numbers are chosen to do honour to each of his honourable years.’ It seems clear that the change of 71 to 72 was made because 72 is half of 144. The number of guests came first, when the story was still told of Bilbo, and at first had no significance beyond its being a dozen dozens, a gross.

A few other points may be noticed. Gandalf was present at the dinner-party; Gaffer Gamgee had not yet emerged, but ‘old Rory Brandybuck’ makes his appearance (in place of Inigo Grubb-Took, note 8 above); and Bilbo does not disappear with a blinding flash. At each stage the number of hobbit clans named is increased: so here the Brandybucks emerge, and the Bracegirdles were pencilled in, to appear in the third version as written.

      (iii)

       The Third Version

The third draft of ‘A Long-expected Party’ is complete, and is a good clear manuscript with relatively little later correction. In this section numbered notes again appear at the end (p. 34).

      Discussion of the change made to Bilbo’s speech in the second version has already indicated the central new feature of the third: the story is now told not of Bilbo, but of his son. On this substitution Humphrey Carpenter remarked (Biography p. 185):

      Tolkien had as yet no clear idea of what the new story was going to be about. At the end of The Hobbit he had stated that Bilbo ‘remained very happy to the end of his days, and those were extraordinarily long.’ So how could the hobbit have any new adventures worth the name without this being contradicted? And had he not explored most of the possibilities in Bilbo’s character? He decided to introduce a new hobbit, Bilbo’s son – and to give him the name of a family of toy koala bears owned by his children, ‘The Bingos’.¹ So he crossed out ‘Bilbo’ in the first draft and above it wrote ‘Bingo’.²

This explanation is plausible. In the first draft, however, my father wrote that the story of the birthday party ‘merely serves to explain that Bilbo Baggins got married and had many children, because I am going to tell you a story about one of his descendants’ (in the second version we are given no indication at all of what was going to happen after the party – though there is possibly a suggestion of something similar in the words (p. 22) ‘Now really we must hurry on, for all this is not as important as it seemed’). On the other hand, there are explicit statements in early notes (p. 41) that for a time it was indeed going to be Bilbo who had the new ‘adventure’.

      The first part of the third version is almost wholly different from the two preceding, and I give it here in full, with a few early changes incorporated.

       A long-expected party

When Bingo, son of Bilbo, of the well-known Baggins family, prepared to celebrate his [fifty-fifth >] seventy-second³ birthday there was some talk in the neighbourhood, and people polished up their memories. The Bagginses were fairly numerous in those parts, and generally respected; but Bingo belonged to a branch of the family that was a bit peculiar, and there were some odd stories about them. Bingo’s father, as some still remembered, had once made quite a stir in Hobbiton and Bywater – he had disappeared one April 30th after breakfast, and had not reappeared until lunch-time on June 22nd in the following year. A very odd proceeding, and one for which he had never accounted satisfactorily. He wrote a book about it, of course; but even those who had read it never took that seriously. It is no good telling hobbits about dragons: they either disbelieve you, or feel uncomfortable; and in either case tend to avoid you afterwards.

Bilbo Baggins, it is true, had soon returned to normal ways (more or less), and though his reputation was never quite restored, he became an accepted figure in the neighbourhood. He was never perhaps again regarded as a ‘safe hobbit’, but he was undoubtedly a ‘warm’ one. In some mysterious way he appeared to have become more than comfortably off, in fact positively wealthy; so naturally, he was on visiting terms with all his neighbours and relatives (except, of course, the Sackville-Bagginses).