Tolkien Almost Wrecked The Hobbit

The 1960 Hobbit Is Worse Than The Original... And Happily Got Scrapped

In 1960, J. R. R. Tolkien sat himself down to revise The Hobbit. Much of the book had been composed thirty years before. Tolkien was not happy with it. In the intervening years he had finished The Lord of the Rings, which had become a sensation. During the writing of the trilogy, Tolkien had modified the world he had created in The Hobbit somewhat, and he longed for complete consistency between the books. His writing style had changed as well. The Hobbit had been written when his children were little. They were all grown up now, and had been to war and back. The ring displays the tonal shift: in The Hobbit, the ring is all boon and no bane. It’s a bit of magic that helps the hero on his quest, as in so many fairy stories. In The Lord of the Rings, the ring is power and corruption, an evil no creature can safely wield. Tolkien had already in 1947 modified the story of how Bilbo acquires the ring, giving Gollum’s attachment to the ring far darker overtones. Now he was coming to clean up The Hobbit entirely.

The original dust jacket for The Hobbit, designed by Tolkien.

Tolkien started at the beginning. The 1960 version has now been printed in John D. Rateliff’s The History of the Hobbit (you can support our bookshop by buying it on our website or on Bookshop.org (pick Bookmarx in Steubenville as your bookshop). I give the familiar version followed by the 1960 version:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

1960:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty wet hole, filled with worms and an oozy smell, nor a dry hole, bare and sandy, with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

The changes are subtle, but to my mind no particular improvement. “Nasty dirty wet hole” is a great Anglo-Saxon phrase, and it’s only six syllables, so it’s not like it really needed to be shorter. But this was part of a general modernization of the text, one of whose principles was, make it shorter. Cut.

He continued like this throughout:

This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses have lived in the neighbourhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him.

1960:

The hobbit was very well-to-do, it was said, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses had lived in the neighbourhood of Hobbiton for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him.

Here we see another principle: the new Tolkien dislikes the use of a single word twice in a sentence. “This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit” sounds great to me, but is not acceptable.

This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained – well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.

1960:

This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself saying and doing things altogether unexpected. He got caught up in great events, which he never understood, and he became enormously important, though he never realized it.

Two first editions of the Hobbit, with signature. These are extremely valuable, and for good reason: this is a great book, just the way it is.

This introduces a theme of the 1960 Hobbit, an odd theme indeed: Bilbo was a fool. First of all, this corrupts the value of the book for children, namely that a bookish little homebody can go off on an adventure with knot-muscled bearded types who carry battleaxes and end up being the most important person on the whole expedition. It is also a strange theme for Tolkien, because Bilbo is one of the most remarkable characters in Tolkien’s whole legendarium, the one person who could possess the ring for decades and then simply walk away from it. This says a tremendous amount about his character. But Tolkien rather dislikes him: later he has Bilbo unable to tell what month of the year it is. Tolkien scholar John D. Rateliff finds that Tolkien had adopted the same attitude to Bilbo as is found in the fragment “The Quest of Erebor,” which tells the tale of The Hobbit from Gandalf’s perspective: “It diminishes Bilbo in the reader’s eyes, casting him very much as a silly fellow puffing and bobbing on the mat.”

Gandalf also changes in the 1960 Hobbit. Tolkien completely cuts a nice sentence like this: “Gandalf! If you had heard a quarter of what even the hobbits had heard about him, and that was not a hundredth part of all that there was to hear, you would be prepared for any sort of remarkable tale.” This doesn’t quite sound like it was written in the era of pulp novels and chrome, and so it gets cut.

Gandalf’s wizard dialogue – always taking people’s words more seriously than they themselves do – has always been a favorite of mine:

“Good morning!” said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat.

“What do you mean?” he said. “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?”

“All of them at once,” said Bilbo.

1960:

“Good morning!” said Bilbo cheerily. The sun was shining and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under his bushy eyebrows that bristled beneath the brim of his hat.

“What do you mean?” he said. “That it is a fine morning, and you feel pleased with yourself? Perhaps you wish me to feel pleased too. I may. We’ll see.”

“Indeed I hope you will,” said Bilbo.

All the talk of the meanings of “good morning” – dearly lovable, I think – is gone and it never returns.

From later in their conversation:

“I beg your pardon, I had no idea you were still in business.”

“Where else should I be?” said the wizard. “All the same I am pleased to find you remember something about me. You seem to remember my fireworks kindly, at any rate, and that is not without hope. Indeed for your old grandfather Took’s sake, and for the sake of poor Belladonna, I will give you what you asked for.”

“I beg your pardon, I haven’t asked for anything!”

“Yes, you have! Twice now. My pardon. I give it you. In fact I will go so far as to send you on this adventure. Very amusing for me, very good for you – and profitable, too, if you ever get over it.”

“Sorry. I don’t want any adventures, thank you. Not today. Good morning!”

1960:

“I beg your pardon, I had no idea you were still in business.”

“Where else should I be?” said the wizard. “But you have my pardon. Indeed I am pleased, and it is a good morning. You do remember something about me; and what you say is very promising. For your old grandfather Took’s sake, and for poor Belladonna’s, I will do something for you.”

“You are very kind; but I have not asked for anything, thank you all the same!”

“That doesn’t matter. I have made up my mind. Yes, I think you will do. Yes, I will send you on this adventure. You may be useful; and anyway it will do you good, if you come through.”

“No, no! I am sorry. I don’t want any adventures. Not today, thank you! Good morning!”

This really starts to seem like vandalism: not only is the charm of wizard-talk gone, but Gandalf has become a bossy aloof mastermind, rather than genius who can see in the lowly the worth they cannot see in themselves. The humility which presents as an openness to Providence’s twists and turns – a major theme of The Lord of the Rings – is gone. The chapter – called in the original Hobbit “An Unexpected Party” becomes “A Well-Planned Party,” with Gandalf pulling the levers of power throughout. His appreciation for hobbits, his high estimation of Bilbo, who becomes, as I say, the one person in all Middle-Earth besides Tom Bombadil of the mettle to endure the temptations of the One Ring – gets reduced to “Yes, I think you will do” and “You may be useful.” Even the high value The Lord of the Rings places on consent, on power never being used to coerce, seems swept away: “That doesn’t matter. I have made up my mind.” The emphasis is in the original, and... it doesn’t quite sound like Gandalf anymore.

Tolkien did three chapters of this kind of vandalism, before sending the manuscript off to an unnamed friend. Rateliff reports:

We do not know this person’s identity, but apparently her response was something along the lines of, “This is wonderful, but it’s not The Hobbit.” She must have been someone whose judgement Tolkien respected, for he abandoned the work and decided to let The Hobbit retain its own autonomy and voice rather than completely incorporate it into The Lord of the Rings as a lesser “prelude” to the greater work.

The Romans had a phrase for this: Manum de tabula! “Hands off the canvas.” It refers to an artist knowing when a work is finished and no longer needs to be fiddled with. When Tolkien was writing The Hobbit his children were young, and he read to them: he was in a unique position to write a children’s book. It came off splendidly. There was no need to rewrite the thing. In the Catholic Church we have a phrase for refurbishments by people who believe they know better, but the end result is diminishment: a wreckovation. It begins with an underappreciation of what is there. The Hobbit in general is an underappreciated piece of writing, a case study in how to use the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, and a modern embodiment of precisely the sort of fairy tales Tolkien so admired. In The Lord of the Rings we witness something new, the creation of the modern fantasy novel, with its leaner modern prose and world-creating ambitions. Tolkien would have diminished The Hobbit by reducing it to this form. We should all be grateful that he finally took his hand off the canvas.