The Return of the Shadow. Christopher Tolkien

Elbereth is first attributed (note 15). Some element of him might be said to be preserved in Sam Gamgee (who of course imparts a new and entirely distinctive air to the developed form of the chapter); it was Frodo Took who with bated breath whispered Elves! when their voices were first heard coming down the road.

      Most remarkable is the fact that when the story of the beginning of the Journey, the coming of the Black Riders, and the meeting with Gildor and his company, was written, and written so that its content would not in essentials be changed afterwards, Bingo has no faintest inkling of what the Riders want with him. Gandalf has told him nothing. He has no reason to associate the Riders with his ring, and no reason to regard it as more than a highly convenient magical device – he slips it on each time a Rider passes, naturally.

Of course, the fact that Bingo is wholly ignorant of the nature of the pursuing menace, utterly baffled by the black horsemen, does not imply that my father was also. There are several suggestions that new ideas had arisen in the background, not explicitly conveyed in the narrative, but deliberately reduced to dark hints of danger in the words of Gildor (that this was so will be seen more clearly at the beginning of the next chapter). It may be that it was the ‘unpremeditated’ conversion of the cloaked and muffled horseman who overtook them on the road from Gandalf to a ‘black rider’ (p. 48), combining with the idea already present that Bilbo’s ring was of dark origin and strange properties (pp. 42–3) that was the impulse of the new conceptions.

From the early rewriting of the conversation between Gildor and Bingo (see p. 63 and note 25) it emerges that Gandalf had warned Bingo not to delay his departure beyond the autumn (though without, apparently, giving him any reason for the warning), and in both forms of the text Gildor evidently knows something about the Riders, says that ‘by what seems strange good luck you went just in time’, and associates them with the Ring: warning Bingo against using it again to escape them, and suggesting that the use of it ‘helps them more than you.’ (The Ring had not been mentioned in their conversation, but we can suppose that Bingo had previously told Gildor that he had used it when the Riders came by.)

The idea of the Riders and the Ring was no doubt evolving as my father wrote. I think it very possible that when he first described the halts of the black horsemen beside the hiding hobbits he imagined them as drawn by scent alone (see p. 75); and it is not clear in any case in what way the use of the Ring would ‘help them more than you.’ As I have said, it is deeply characteristic that these scenes emerged at once in the clear and memorable form that was never changed, but that their bearing and significance would afterwards be enormously enlarged. The ‘event’ (one might say) was fixed, but its meaning capable of indefinite extension; and this is seen, over and over again, as a prime mark of my father’s writing. In FR, from the intervening chapter The Shadow of the Past, we have some notion of what that other feeling was which struggled with Frodo’s desire to hide, of why Gandalf had so urgently forbidden him to use the Ring, and of why he was driven irresistibly to put it on; and when we have read further we know what would have happened if he had. The scenes here are empty by comparison, yet they are the same scenes. Even such slight remarks as Bingo’s ‘I don’t know, and I don’t want to guess’ (p. 55) – in the context, a mere expression of doubt and discomfort, if with a suggestion that Gandalf must have said something, or rather, that my father was beginning to think that Gandalf must have said something – survived to take on a much more menacing significance in FR (p. 85), where we have a very good idea of what Frodo chose not to guess about.

Frodo Took’s story of his meeting with a Rider on the moors in the North of the Shire in the previous spring is the forerunner of Sam’s sudden remembering that a Rider had come to Hobbiton and spoken with Gaffer Gamgee on the evening of their departure; but it seems strange that the beginning of the hunt for ‘Baggins’ should be set so long before (see p. 74 and note 4).

The striking out of Gildor’s words ‘for the matter is outside the concern of such Elves as we are’ (note 27) is interesting. At first, I think, my father thought of these Elves as ‘Dark-elves’; but he now decided that they (and also the Elves of Rivendell) were indeed ‘High Elves of the West’, and he added in Gildor’s words to Bingo on p. 60 (see note 18): they were ‘Wise-elves’ (Noldor or Gnomes), ‘one of the few companies that still remain east of the Sea’, and he himself is Gildor Inglorion of the house of Finrod. With these words of Gildor’s cf. the Quenta Silmarillion §28, in V.332:

      Yet not all the Eldalië were willing to forsake the Hither Lands where they had long suffered and long dwelt; and some lingered many an age in the West and North … But ever as the ages drew on and the Elf-folk faded upon earth, they would set sail at eve from the western shores of this world, as still they do, until now there linger few anywhere of their lonely companies.

      At this time Finrod was the name of the third son of Finwë (first Lord of the Noldor). This was later changed to Finarfin, when Inglor Felagund his son took over the name Finrod (see I.44), but my father did not change ‘of the house of Finrod’ here (FR p. 89) to ‘of the house of Finarfin’ in the second edition of The Lord of the Rings. See further p. 188 (end of note 9).

      The geography of the Shire was now taking more substantial shape. In this chapter there emerge the North Moor(s); the Green Hill Country lying to the south of Hobbiton; the Pool of Bywater (described in rough drafting for the passage as a ‘little lake’); the East Road to the Brandywine Bridge, where the Water joined the Brandywine; the road branching off from it southward and leading in a direct line to Buckland; and the hamlet of Woodhall in the Woody End.

       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