CHAPTER XV: THE GATHERING OF THE CLOUDS (#u9db811ae-0daa-55a5-8aaf-0edb99609442)
CHAPTER XVI: A THIEF IN THE NIGHT (#ue7e5ded9-235d-5426-83e4-d4360a30c3b8)
CHAPTER XVII: THE CLOUDS BURST (#u40e1f809-d22b-58c0-99a0-3993856db7b3)
CHAPTER XVIII: THE RETURN JOURNEY (#ue332741b-8316-5776-9bbc-aeacf028a44e)
CHAPTER XIX: THE LAST STAGE (#u2ae4d1d8-59b8-5f71-85ca-9286f8c115c9)
KEEP READING (#u065e84d5-b3a8-52f5-8819-ffffa0150874)
WORKS BY J.R.R. TOLKIEN (#uad82ae7a-fda5-5238-ba20-9161435f803e)
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#u3ea29bbf-cb35-5e82-84ae-188052660f35)
ILLUSTRATIONS (#ulink_24877c71-9eaa-5f6b-aca9-26d82e5b981e)
Thror’s Map (#u8f56c3c1-808c-5887-a9f4-3c1c87760923)
The Trolls
The Mountain-path
The Misty Mountains looking West
Beorn’s Hall
The Elvenking’s Gate
Lake Town
The Front Gate
The Hall at Bag-End
Map of Wilderland
NOTE ON THE TEXT (#ulink_cf1d5ca7-4a91-5654-98b7-2ca8100521d1)
The Hobbit was first published in September 1937. Its 1951 second edition (fifth impression) contains a significantly revised portion of Chapter V, “Riddles in the Dark,” which brings the story of The Hobbit more in line with its sequel, The Lord of the Rings, then in progress. Tolkien made some further revisions to the American edition published by Ballantine Books in February 1966, and to the British third edition (sixteenth impression) published by George Allen & Unwin later that same year.
For the 1995 British hardcover edition, published by HarperCollins, the text of The Hobbit was entered into word-processing files, and a number of further corrections of misprints and errors were made. Since then, various editions of The Hobbit have been generated from that computerized text file. For the present text, that file has been compared again, line by line, with the earlier editions, and a number of further corrections have been made to present a text that, as closely as possible, represents Tolkien’s final intended form.
Readers interested in details of the changes made at various times to the text of The Hobbit are referred to Appendix A, “Textual and Revisional Notes,” of The Annotated Hobbit (1988), and J. R. R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography by Wayne G. Hammond, with the assistance of Douglas A. Anderson (1993).
Douglas A. Anderson
May 2001
AUTHOR'S NOTE (#ulink_dbe53456-861b-5a21-8f7f-5882fd2b5f9c)
This is a story of long ago. At that time the languages and letters were quite different from ours of today. English is used to represent the languages. But two points may be noted. (1) In English the only correct plural of dwarf is dwarfs, and the adjective is dwarfish. In this story dwarves and dwarvish are used
, but only when speaking of the ancient people to whom Thorin Oakenshield and his companions belonged. (2) Orc is not an English word. It occurs in one or two places but is usually translated goblin (or hobgoblin for the larger kinds). Orc is the hobbits’ form of the name given at that time to these creatures, and it is not connected at all with our orc, ork, applied to sea-animals of dolphin-kind.
Runes were old letters originally used for cutting or scratching on wood, stone, or metal, and so were thin and angular. At the time of this tale only the Dwarves made regular use of them, especially for private or secret records. Their runes are in this book represented by English runes, which are known now to few people. If the runes on Thror’s Map are compared with the transcriptions into modern letters† (#ulink_e9c1039c-b182-519b-824c-af1b327a2fd1) †, the alphabet, adapted to modern English, can be discovered and the above runic title also read. On the Map all the normal runes are found, except
for X. I and U are used for J and V. There was no rune for Q (use CW); nor for Z (the dwarf-rune
may be used if required). It will be found, however, that some single runes stand for two modern letters: th, ng, ee; other runes of the same kind (
ea and
st) were also sometimes used. The secret door was marked D
. From the side a hand pointed to this, and under it was written:
The last two runes are the initials of Thror and Thrain. The moon-runes read by Elrond were:
On the Map the compass points are marked in runes, with East at the top, as usual in dwarf-maps, and so read clockwise: E(ast), S(outh), W(est), N(orth).
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