The Return of the Shadow by J.R.R. Tolkien & Christopher Tolkien

Author:J.R.R. Tolkien & Christopher Tolkien [Tolkien, J.R.R. & Tolkien, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9780007348237
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-12-08T23:00:00+00:00

I give here as much of the genealogy of Bilbo and Bingo as is established from the text at this time. The Baggins ancestry is derived from Bilbo’s will (note 22); the names in brackets are those that differ in LR Appendix C, Baggins of Hobbiton.

The Old Took was evidently already known to have had many children beside his ‘three remarkable daughters’ (see note 8).

XV

ANCIENT HISTORY

A chapter titled ‘II: Ancient History’, precursor of ‘The Shadow of the Past’ in FR, was now introduced to follow ‘A Long-expected Party’. It is of central importance in the evolution of The Lord of the Rings: for it was here that there emerged in the actual narrative the concept of the Ruling Ring, and Sam Gamgee as the companion of Bingo (Frodo) on his great journey. There is no trace of earlier drafting, save for a few notes so scrappy and disjointed that they can scarcely be reproduced. In these my father scribbled down salient features of Bingo’s life after Bilbo’s disappearance, and first devised the story of Bingo’s own departure 17 years later, celebrated by a dinner party for Merry, Frodo, and Odo (here apparently said to have been given on the proceeds of the sale of Bag End). Against these notes my father wrote: ‘Sam Gamgee to replace Odo’ (cf. Queries and Alterations, p. 221).

The manuscript is rough, and in places very rough indeed, but legible virtually throughout. There is some emendation from a later phase, here ignored, and a good deal of pencilled change that can in some cases be seen to have been made while the chapter was in progress. These latter I adopt into the text, but in some cases refer in the notes to the text as first written.

The talk did not die down in nine or even ninety-nine days. The second and final disappearance of Mr Bilbo Baggins was discussed in Hobbiton and Bywater, and indeed all over the Shire, for a year and a day, and was remembered much longer than that. It became a fireside story for young hobbits; and eventually (a century or so later) Mad Baggins, who used to disappear with a bang and a flash and reappear with bags of gold and jewels, became a favourite character of legend and lived on long after all the true events were forgotten.

But in the meantime sober grown-ups gradually settled to the opinion that Bilbo had at last (after long showing symptoms of its coming on) gone suddenly mad, and had run off into the blue; where he had inevitably fallen into a pit or a pool, and come to a tragic but hardly untimely end. There was one Baggins the less and that was that.1 In face of the evidence that this disappearance had been timed and arranged by Bilbo himself, Bingo was eventually relieved of suspicion. It was also plain that the departure of Bilbo was a grief to him – more than to any other even of Bilbo’s closest friends. But Gandalf

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