The Return of the Shadow. Christopher Tolkien

small logs of wood on the fire and puffing it with his mouth. Immediately the wood blazed up and filled the room with dancing light. ‘No, I don’t think you need or should go alone. Why not ask your three best friends to, beg them to, order them to (if you must) – I mean the three, the only three who you have (perhaps indiscreetly but perhaps with wise choice) told about your secret Ring: Odo, Frodo, and Marmaduke [written above: Meriadoc]. But you must go quickly – and make it a joke, Bingo, a joke, a huge joke, a resounding jest. Don’t be mournful and serious. Jokes are really in your line. That’s what Bilbo liked about you (among other things), if you care to know.’

      ‘And where shall we go, and what shall we steer by, and what shall be our quest?’ said Bingo, without a trace of a smile or the glimmer of a jest. ‘When the huge joke is over, what then?’

      ‘At present I have no idea,’ said Gandalf, quite seriously and much to Bingo’s surprise and dismay. ‘But it will be just the opposite of Bilbo’s adventure – to begin with, at any rate. You will set out on a journey without any known destination; and as far as you have any object it will not be to win new treasure but to get rid of a treasure that belongs (one might say) inevitably to you. But you cannot even start without going East, West, South, or North; and which shall we choose? Towards danger, and yet not too rashly or too straight towards it. Go East. Yes, yes, I have it. Make first for Rivendell, and then we shall see. Yes, we shall see then. Indeed, I begin to see already!’ Suddenly Gandalf began to chuckle. He rubbed his long gnarled hands together and cracked the finger-joints. He leant forward to Bingo. ‘I have thought of a joke,’ he said. ‘Just a rough plan – you can set your comic wits to work on it.’ And his beard wagged backwards and forwards as he whispered long in Bingo’s ear. The fire burned low again – but suddenly in the darkness an unexpected sound rang out. Bingo was rocking with laughter.

      NOTES

       1 My father’s own thought is surely transparent here. Bingo introduces the subject of the Ring as if it had some connection with the Riders, whereas he is obviously intended to appear as quite unable even to guess at their significance; and there is no suggestion in the drafts that the Ring had been mentioned before this point.

       2 (in the Shire): my father first wrote ‘except Gandalf’. The words ‘(in the Shire)’ probably mean no more than that: i.e., no one save Bilbo and Bingo, and outside the Shire only Gandalf, and anyone else whom Gandalf might possibly have told.

3 This is probably the first time that the expression The Lord of the Ring was used; and The Lord of the Rings occurs below (note 6). (My father gave The Lord of the Ring as the title of the new work in a letter to Allen and Unwin of 31 August 1938).

4 Hence the asking for Baggins: this is not mentioned in the manuscript drafts, but see the typescript version, p. 54 and note 9. The following sentence, ‘But somehow the search for Baggins failed, and then something must have been discovered about you’ perhaps explains the story that Frodo Took met a Black Rider on the North Moor as early as the previous spring (see p. 71).

       5 My father first wrote here that the clothing of one who has thus become permanently invisible was invisible also, but rejected the statement as soon as written.

6 This seems to be the first appearance of the expression The Lord of the Rings; see note 3.

       7 After this sentence my father wrote: ‘Gollum I think some sort of distant kinsman of the goblin sort.’ Since this is contradicted in the next sentence it was obviously rejected in the act of writing; he crossed it out later.

8 ninety years and more: see pp. 31–3.

9 At no point in this text is there any further mention of Bingo’s ‘worry’; and the advice that he asks is entirely based on what Gandalf now tells him and which is obviously entirely new to him. There is also no further reference to the ‘strange signs and portents of trouble brewing’ spoken of in the next sentence, nor any explanation of Gandalf’s remark (p. 81) that ‘Gollum is very likely the beginning of our present trouble.’

      10 This ends the first page of the manuscript. At the head of the second page my father wrote in pencil: ‘Gandalf and Bingo discuss Rings and Gollum’, and ‘Draft: Later used in Chapter II’, and he numbered the pages (previously unnumbered) in Greek letters, beginning at this point. Thus the first page is left out. But these pencillings were clearly put in long after, and in my view they cast no doubt on the validity of the opening section as an integral part of the text. May be it had at one time become separated and mislaid; but as the papers were found it was placed with the rest.

11 Rumour of the Party – decided on between Gandalf and Bingo at the end of this text – began to circulate early in September (p. 30).

      12 In The Hobbit (Chapter I) Gandalf told Thorin at Bag End that he found his father Thrain ‘in the dungeons of the Necromancer’. In the Tale of Years in LR Appendix B this, Gandalf’s second visit to Dol Guldur, took place in the year 2850, forty years before Bilbo’s birth; it was then that he ‘discovered that its master was indeed Sauron’ (cf. FR p. 263). But here the meaning is clearly that Gandalf went to the land of the Necromancer after Bilbo’s acquisition of the Ring. Later my father altered the text in pencil to read: ‘for I went back once more to the land of the Necromancer.’

13 Here the earlier draft concerning the Rings is used: see p. 75.

      14 See FR p. 60 and LR Appendix A pp. 357–8.

      15 This is the first germ of the story of the death of Isildur.

16 This is also derived from the text referred to in note 13.

      17 This sentence as first written ended: ‘and he wanted to hand it on to someone else.’ It is to this that the following sentence refers.

      18 The passage beginning ‘There was a queer fate’ was an addition, and ‘That is why I let Bilbo keep the ring so long’ refers to the sentence ending ‘… peculiar to Bilbo and his great Adventure.’

      19 Cf. the draft passage given on p. 75: ‘Of course Gollum himself may have heard news – all the mountains were full of it after the battle – and tried to get back the ring.’

      20 The first mention of the Fiery Mountain and the Cracks of Earth in its depths.

      It will be seen that a part of the ‘Gollum’ element in ‘The Shadow of the Past’ (Chapter 2 in FR) was at once very largely achieved, even though Dígol* (later Déagol) is Gollum himself, and not his friend whom he murdered, though Gandalf had never seen him (and so no explanation is given of how he knows his history, which of its nature could only be derived from Gollum’s own words), and though it is only surmised that he went at last to the Dark Lord.

      It is important to realise that when my father wrote this, he was working within the constraints of the story as originally told in The Hobbit. As The Hobbit first appeared, and until 1951, the story was that Gollum, encountering Bilbo