The Peoples of Middle-earth Read Free Page B

discovered. Bilbo returned to his home at Bag-End on June 22nd in his fifty-second year, having been away since April 30th (2) in the year before, and nothing very notable occurred in the Shire for another sixty years, when Mr. Baggins began to make preparations for the celebration of his hundred and eleventh birthday. At which point the tale of the Ring begins.

    Years later my father took up the typescript P 2 again. He made a number of minor alterations in wording, replaced the opening paragraph, and rewrote a part of the story of Bilbo and Gollum (improv-ing the presentation of the events, and elaborating a little Bilbo's escape from the tunnels); these need not be recorded. But he also introduced a lengthy new passage, following the words (VI.313) 'but that was not so true of other families, like the Bagginses or the Boffins' (FR
    p. 18). This begins 'The Hobbits of the Shire had hardly any "government" ...', and is the origin of most of section 3 (Of the Ordering of the Shire) in the published Prologue, extending as far as 'the first sign that everything was not quite as it should be, and always used to be'
    (cf. FR p. 19).
    Much of the new passage survived into the final form, but there are some interesting differences. In the third paragraph of the section (as it stands in FR) the new text in P 2 reads:

    There was, of course, the ancient tradition in their part of the world that there had once been a King at Fornost away north of the Shire (Northworthy the hobbits called it),(3) who had marked out the boundaries of the Shire and given it to the Hobbits; and they in turn had acknowledged his lordship. But there had been no King for many ages, and even the ruins of Northworthy were covered with grass ...

    The name Northworthy (for later Norbury) is not found in the Lord of the Rings papers, where the earlier 'vernacular' names are the Northburg, Northbury. See p. 225, annal c.1600.
    The fourth paragraph of the section reads thus in the P 2 text: It is true that the Took family had once a certain eminence, quite apart from the fact that they were (and remained) numerous, wealthy, peculiar, and of great social importance. The head of the family had formerly borne the title of The Shirking. But that title was no longer in use in Bilbo's time: it had been killed by the endless and inevitable jokes that had been made about it, in defiance of its obvious etymology. The habit went on, however, of referring to the head of the family as The Took, and of adding (if required) a number: as Isengrim the First.

    Shirking is of course a reduction of Shire-king with shortening (and in this case subsequent alteration) of the vowel, in the same way as Shirriff is derived from Shire-reeve; but this was a joke that my father decided to remove - perhaps because the choice of the word 'king'
    by the Hobbits seemed improbable (cf. p. 232 and note 25, and Appendix A (I, iii), RK p. 323).(4)
    The new passage in P 2 does not give the time of the year of the Free Fair on the White Downs ('at the Lithe, that is at Midsummer', FR
    p. 19), and nothing is said of the letter-writing proclivities of Hobbits.
    To the mention of the name 'Bounders' my father added '(as they were called unofficially)'; the word 'unofficially' he subsequently removed, thus in this case retaining the joke but not drawing attention to it.
    It seems to me all but certain that this new element in the text is to be associated with the emergence of the Shirriffs in the chapter The Scouring of the Shire - where the office is shown to have been long established 'before any of this began', as the Shirriff Robin Small-burrow said to Sam (RK p. 281). The fact that the term 'Thain' had not yet emerged does not contradict this, for that came in very late (see IX-99, 101, 103). I have concluded (IX.12-13) that Book Six of The Lord of the Rings was written in 1948.
    At the end of this passage on the ordering of the Shire, which as already noted (p. 5) ends with the words 'the first