The Return of the Shadow. Christopher Tolkien

a wedding-feast of memorable splendour; he disappeared (together with his wife) shortly before his hundred-and-eleventh birthday, and was never seen again. The folk of Hobbiton and Bywater were cheated of a funeral (not that they had expected his for many a year yet), so they had a good deal to say. His residence, his wealth, his position (and the dubious regard of the neighbourhood) were inherited by his son Bingo, just before his own birthday (which happened to be the same as his father’s). Bingo was, of course, a mere youngster of 39, who had hardly cut his wisdom-teeth; but he at once began to carry on his father’s reputation for oddity: he never went into mourning for his parents, and said he did not think they were dead. To the obvious question: ‘Where are they then?’ he merely winked. He lived alone, and was often away from home. He went about a lot with the least well-behaved members of the Took family (his grandmother’s people and his father’s friends), and he was also fond of some of the Brandybucks. They were his mother’s relatives. She was Primula Brandybuck⁴ of the Brandybucks of Buckland, across Brandywine River on the other side of the Shire and on the edge of the Old Forest – a dubious region.⁵ Folk in Hobbiton did not know much about it, or about the Brandybucks either; though some had heard it said that they were rich, and would have been richer, but for a certain ‘recklessness’ – generosity, that is, if any came your way.

Anyway, Bingo had lived at Bag-end Underhill now for some [16 >] 33 years⁶ without giving any scandal. His parties were sometimes a bit noisy, perhaps, but hobbits don’t mind that kind of noise now and again. He spent his money freely and mostly locally. Now the neighbourhood understood that he was planning something quite unusual in the way of parties. Naturally their memories awoke and their tongues wagged, and Bingo’s wealth was again guessed and re-calculated at every fireside. Indeed the magnificence of the preparations quite overshadowed the tales of the old folk about his father’s vanishments.

‘After all,’ as old Gaffer Gamgee of Bagshot Row⁷ remarked, ‘them goings-on are old affairs and over; this here party is going to happen this very month as is.’ It was early September and as fine as you could wish. Somebody started a rumour about fireworks. Very soon it was accepted that there were going to be fireworks such as had not been seen for over a century, not since the Old Took died.

      It is interesting to see the figures 111 and 33 emerging, though afterwards they would be differently achieved: here, Bilbo was 111 when he left the Shire, and Bingo lived on at Bag End for 33 years before his farewell party; afterwards, 111 was Bilbo’s age at the time of the party – when it had become his party again – and 33 Bingo’s (Frodo’s) age at the same time.

In this passage we also see the emergence of a very important piece of topography and toponymy: Buckland, the Brandywine, and the Old Forest. For the names first written here see note 5.

For the account in this version of the preparations for the Party, the Party itself, and its immediate aftermath, my father followed the emended second version (pp. 19–25) extremely closely, adding a detail here and there, but for the most part doing little more than copy it out (and of course changing ‘Bilbo’ to ‘Bingo’ where necessary). I give here a list of interesting – though mostly extremely minor – shifts in the new narrative. The page references are to those of the second version.

(20–1) ‘B under a crown’ on the waggon driven by Men becomes ‘B painted in yellow’, and ‘B’ was emended on the text to ‘D’ (i.e. ‘Dale’).

      When the Men came down the Hill again, it is added that ‘the elves and dwarves did not return’; and ‘the draught of cooks’ who arrived were ‘to supplement the elves and dwarves (who seemed to be staying at Bag-end and doing a lot of mysterious work)’.

      The notice refusing admittance on the door of Bag End now appears, and ‘a special entrance was cut in the bank leading to the road; wide steps and a large white gate were built’ (as in FR). Gaffer Gamgee comes in again: ‘he stopped even pretending to garden.’

The day of the party was still a Saturday (September 22nd).

      Many of the toys (‘some obviously magical’) that had come from Dale were ‘genuinely dwarf-made’.

(22) It is Bingo, not Gandalf, who at the end of the fireworks says ‘That is the signal for supper!’; and though it was said at first, as in the second version, that the total of 144 guests did not include the host and Gandalf, this was struck out (see p. 106, note 12).

      A new Hobbit family-name enters in the list of guests: ‘and various Burroweses, Slocums, Bracegirdles, Boffinses and Proudfoots’; but ‘Slocums’ was then changed to ‘Hornblowers’, which was also added in to the text at subsequent points in the chapter. The Bolgers appear in pencilled additions, and are present from the start in the fourth version. In his letter to the Observer newspaper published on 20 February 1938 (Letters no. 25) my father said: ‘The full list of their wealthier families is: Baggins, Boffin, Bolger, Bracegirdle, Brandybuck, Burrowes, Chubb, Grubb, Hornblower, Proudfoot, Sackville, and Took.’ – The Grubbs, connexions of Bingo’s grandfather, became by a pencilled change connexions of his grandmother; and the Chubbs, in a reverse change, were first said to be connexions of his grandmother and then of his grandfather.

Where in the first and second versions it is said that some of the hobbits at the party came from ‘the other side of the shire’, it is now said that some of them ‘did not even live in that county’, changed to ‘in that Shire’; and ‘in that Shire’ was retained in the fourth version. The use of ‘that’ rather than ‘the’ suggests that the later use (cf. the Prologue to LR, p. 14: ‘The Hobbits named it the Shire, as the region of the authority of their Thain’) was only in the process of emergence.

The coldness between the Bagginses of Bag End and the Sackville-Bagginses had now lasted, not 20 years as in the first two versions, but ‘some seventy-five years and more’: this figure depends on 111 (Bilbo’s age when he finally disappeared) less 51 (he was ‘about fifty years old or so’ at the time of his great adventure, according to The Hobbit), plus the 16 years of Bingo’s solitary residence at Bag End. ‘Seventy-five’ was emended to ‘ninety’ (a round figure), which belongs with the change of 16 to 33 (p. 30).

(23) Bingo was liable to allude to ‘the absurd adventures of his “gallant and famous” father’.