Yet however neat the final product, at that point in late 1937, and for long afterwards, Tolkien had no clear plan at all, certainly nothing even remotely like the schema outlined at the start of this chapter. It is an interesting, and for any intending writer of fiction rather an encouraging experience, to read through the selections from Tolkien’s many drafts now published in volumes VI-IX of The History of Middle-earth (The Return of the Shadow, The Treason of Isengard, The War of the Ring, and Sauron Defeated), and to note how long it was before the most obvious and seemingly inevitable decisions were made at all. Tolkien knew, for instance, that Bilbo’s ring now had to be explained and would become important in the story, but he still had no idea of it as the Ring, the Ruling Ring, the Ring-with-a-capital-letter, so to speak: indeed he remarked at an early stage that it was ‘Not very dangerous’ (see The Return of the Shadow, p. 42). Another element arrived at early on was the character who would become Strider, the Ranger, but in several opening drafts this role of guard and guide is taken not by a man, still less by one of the Dúnedain, but by a weatherbeaten hobbit called Trotter, distinguished by his wooden shoes. Tolkien remained strongly attached to this character, and even more strongly attached to the name Trotter, though he was quite perplexed as to how to explain him. In The Return of the Shadow we see Tolkien wondering whether Trotter might perhaps be Bilbo in disguise; or maybe a relative, a cousin, one of the ‘quiet lads and lasses’ led off by Gandalf ‘into the Blue for mad adventures’. Reading these drafts one often feels like saying, as Tolkien had done over the idea of fairy-hobbit marriages, ‘This is, of course, absurd’ (for all critics have 20/20 vision, in hindsight). However Christopher Tolkien notes that more than two years after his father started work on the sequel, he was still ‘without any clear conception of what lay before him’ (The Treason of Isengard, p. 18). ‘Giant Treebeard’ was at this stage hostile, and was the character responsible for the imprisonment of Gandalf, rather than Saruman, who had not yet appeared (The Return of the Shadow, p. 363). There was ‘not a hint’ of Lothlórien or of Rohan (The Return of the Shadow, p. 411), even by the time the Fellowship had reached Moria; Tolkien knew no more than his characters what lay the other side of the mountains. Perhaps the most surprising of the many surprises revealed by the early drafts is that in August 1939, with Tolkien about halfway through what would become Book II, of the eventual six Books, he thought that the work was about three-quarters done, see The Return of the Shadow, p. 370. It is as if he anticipated finishing not at the end of The Lord of the Rings, but at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring. The most determined hindsight, reading these drafts, can find no trace at all of the outline given above.
One critical factor in the development of the whole seems to have been the introduction of the Riders of Rohan, like Treebeard seen originally as enemies, allies of Sauron (The Return of the Shadow, p. 422) – Tolkien was indeed to keep this idea vestigially present in the completed work as a rumour, which Boromir indignantly rejects in II/2, but which is still present in the minds of Aragorn and his companions when they meet the Riders for the first time on the prairie at III/2. However, once they did appear, the Riders expanded the story markedly, and also gave Tolkien an easy way of tapping once more into the source-material of ancient literature. At about the same time he formed the idea of creating a set of linguistic correspondences within Middle-earth, and in the process providing a sensible explanation of the names used in The Hobbit. Tolkien knew (none better) that the dwarf-names he had used in The Hobbit came from Old Norse; but if one thought about it, it was clearly impossible that anything like these names could have survived from the far past of the Third Age. Old Norse is indeed an old language, but not so old that we cannot see its descent from something even older. As far back as Tolkien’s Third Age whatever was the ancestor of Old Norse would be quite unrecognizable. The dwarf-names of The Hobbit must accordingly in strict logic be translations, and so must the hobbit-names; but in that case the real original hobbit-names and dwarf-names ought to have been related to each other in at least the same sort of way as modern English and Old Norse (which are in fact related, even quite closely related). The Riders could then be conceived of as being something linguistically in between hobbits and dwarves, as speaking (and in every detail except one, as being) Old English. Théoden realizes early on that there is some sort of connection between the hobbits and his people, a closer one than there is between the hobbits and the Northern men from whom the dwarves have borrowed their names and the language they use in public; his ancestors and theirs must at some time have lived in close association. Tolkien had worked out this set of relationships by about early 1942 (see The Treason of Isengard, p. 424), and could see his way at last to integrating it with the elvish languages and legends on which he had worked for so long already: this gave his story a clearer shape. However one thing which remains certain is that he was still not working from a plan, an overall design. He was writing his way into the story. Other great works have been written the same way, like Dickens’s novels, composed and published in serial instalments – Tolkien’s notes often look rather like Dickens’s, with both writers in the habit of jotting down a string of possible names for a character till they struck one which seemed to fit. But Tolkien, even more than Dickens, had no conscious idea of where he was going. Seven months after starting work on The Lord of the Rings, he complained that he still had no story (The Return of the Shadow, p. 108). The amazing thing is that this did not stop him trying to write one.
Back-tracking
Tolkien did in fact have several resources when he began work in December 1937. One was the backlog of material which would in the end become the Silmarillion. As mentioned above, he had already sent some of this to Stanley Unwin, and though it had been rejected for separate publication, he could clearly continue to use it, as he had here and there in The Hobbit, to give a sense of depth and background to his main story. Thus Aragorn, in the chapter ‘A Knife in the Dark’ (I/11), not only sings a song of Beren and Lúthien, but also gives an extensive paraphrase of the legend concerning them, which had formed a major part of the package rejected by Unwin. Later Bilbo in Rivendell, in the chapter ‘Many Meetings’ (II/1), sings a song of Eärendil. Both poems were based on ones which Tolkien had already written and published separately, if only in university magazines of limited circulation. This indeed was a further resource available to Tolkien in 1937. Most of the more than a dozen poems in The Hobbit had been light-hearted or frivolous, like the elf-song in chapter 3 or the songs for taunting spiders in chapter 8, but some, especially the ongoing ballad which the dwarves start in chapter 1 and extend or modify according to their mood in chapters 7 and 15, had shown how poetry could be mixed in to narrative. Between 1923 and 1937 Tolkien had not only written but published a small body of poems which did not arise out of his Silmarillion legendarium, but which were available for re-use. However, his most important and unexpected resource in 1937, though it was not unconnected with the poems just mentioned, was a strong interest in place, and in place-names.
Place-names, like riddles and fairy-tales and nursery-rhymes, form yet another connection with antiquity in which Tolkien took strong personal interest. They were especially valuable to him for two reasons. One is that most people do not think much about names, but accept them as a given. They are accordingly unlikely to meddle with them, or change them except by the slow and natural processes of language change of which they are unconscious; which means that names may well contain unusually authentic testimony to history or to old tradition. Tolkien suggested to me once that the name of the village Hincksey, outside Oxford, might contain within it the name of the old hero Hengest, the founder of England (<