The Return of the Shadow. Christopher Tolkien

down. ‘I am so sleepy,’ he said, ‘that I shall fall down on the road. What about a place for the night?’

Here the original opening draft ends. Notably, the hobbits are setting out expressly for Rivendell, and Bingo has been there several times before; cf. the note given on p. 42: ‘Bilbo … settles down in Rivendell. Hence Bingos frequent absences from home.’ But there is no indication, nor has there been any, why they should be in any particular hurry.

      It is clear that when the hobbits struck the East Road they took to it and walked eastward along it. At this stage there is no suggestion of a side road to Buckland, nor indeed that Buckland played any part in their plans.

A revised beginning followed. Drogo Took was dropped, leaving Odo and Frodo as Bingo’s companions (Frodo now in all probability a Took). The passage concerning Rivendell has gone, and instead the plan to go first ‘to pick up Marmaduke’ appears. The description of the walk from Hobbiton is now much fuller, and largely reaches the form in the typescript text (p. 50); it is interesting to observe here the point of emergence of the road to Buckland:

      After a rest on a bank under some thinly clad birches they went on again, until they struck a narrow road. It went rolling away, pale grey in the dark, up and down – but all the time gently climbing southward. It was the road to Buckland, climbing away from the main East Road in the Water Valley, and winding away past the skirts of the Green Hills towards the south-east corner of the Shire, the Wood-end as the Hobbits called it. They marched along it, until it plunged between high hedges and dark trees rustling their dry leaves gently in the night airs.

Comparison of this with the description of the East Road in the first draft (‘rolling away pale grey into the darkness, between high hedges and dark wind-stirred trees’) shows that the one was derived from the other. Perhaps as a result, the crossing of the East Road is omitted; it is merely said that the Buckland road diverged from it (contrast FR p. 80).

After Odo’s words (typescript text p. 50) ‘Or are you fellows going to sleep on your legs?’ there follows:

The Road goes ever on and on

       down from the Door where it began:

       before us far the Road has gone,

       and we come after it, who can;

       pursuing it with weary feet,

       until it joins some larger way,

       where many paths and errands meet,

       and whither then? – we cannot say.

There is no indication, in the manuscript as written, who spoke the verse (for which there is also a good deal of rough working); in the typescript text (pp. 52–3) it is given to Frodo and displaced to a later point in the story.

      The second draft then jumps to the following day, and takes up in the middle of a sentence:

      … on the flat among tall trees growing in scattered fashion in the grasslands, when Frodo said: ‘I can hear a horse coming along the road behind!’

      They looked back, but the windings of the road hid the traveller.

      ‘I think we had better get out of sight,’ said Bingo; ‘or you fellows at any rate. Of course it doesn’t matter very much, but I would rather not be met by anyone we know.’

      They [written above at the same time: Odo & F.] ran quickly to the left down into a little hollow beside the road, and lay flat. Bingo slipped on his ring and sat down a few yards from the track. The sound of hoofs drew nearer. Round a turn came a white horse, and on it sat a bundle – or that is what it looked like: a small man wrapped entirely in a great cloak and hood so that only his eyes peered out, and his boots in the stirrups below.

      The horse stopped when it came level with Bingo. The figure uncovered its nose and sniffed; and then sat silent as if listening. Suddenly a laugh came from inside the hood.

      ‘Bingo my boy!’ said Gandalf, throwing aside his wrappings. ‘You and your lads are somewhere about. Come along now and show up, I want a word with you!’ He turned his horse and rode straight to the hollow where Odo and Frodo lay. ‘Hullo! hullo!’ he said. ‘Tired already? Aren’t you going any further today?’

      At that moment Bingo reappeared again. ‘Well I’m blest,’ said he. ‘What are you doing along this way, Gandalf? I thought you had gone back with the elves and dwarves. And how did you know where we were?’

      ‘Easy,’ said Gandalf. ‘No magic. I saw you from the top of the hill, and knew how far ahead you were. As soon as I turned the corner and saw the straight piece in front was empty I knew you had turned aside somewhere about here. And you have made a track in the long grass that I can see, at any rate when I am looking for it.’

      Here this draft stops, at the foot of a page, and if my father continued beyond this point the manuscript is lost; but I think it far more likely that he abandoned it because he abandoned the idea that the rider was Gandalf as soon as written. It is most curious to see how directly the description of Gandalf led into that of the Black Rider – and that the original sniff was Gandalf’s! In fact the conversion of the one to the other was first carried out by pencilled changes on the draft text, thus:

Round a turn came a white [> black] horse, and on it sat a bundle – or that is what it looked like: a small [> short] man wrapped entirely in a great [added: black] cloak and hood so that only his eyes peered out [> so that his face was entirely shadowed] …

If the description of Gandalf in the draft is compared with that of the Black Rider in the typescript text (p. 54) it will be seen that with further refinement the one still remains very closely based on the other. The new turn in the story was indeed ‘unpremeditated’ (p. 44).

Further rough drafting begins again with the workings for the song Upon the hearth the fire is red and continues through the second appearance of the Black Rider and the coming of the Elves to the end of the chapter. This material was followed very closely indeed in the typescript text and need not be further considered (one or two minor points of interest in the development of the narrative are mentioned in the Notes). There is however a separate section in manuscript which was not taken up into the typescript, and this very interesting passage will be given separately (see p. 73).

I give here the typescript text – which became an extremely complex and now very battered document. It is clear that as soon as, or before, he had finished it my father began revising it, in some cases retyping pages (the rejected pages being retained), and also writing in many other changes here and there, most of these being very minor alterations of wording.¹ In the text that follows I take up all these revisions silently, but some earlier readings of interest are detailed in the Notes at the end of it (pp. 65 ff.).

       II

       Three’s Company and Four’s More ²