The Return of the Shadow. Christopher Tolkien

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ The Hobbit, then changed to ‘Messrs. Iago Grubb and Folco Burrowes (Bingo’s lawyers)’.

      The conclusion of the third version I give in full.

      The fact is Bingo’s money had become a legend, and everybody was puzzled and anxious – though still hopeful. How he would have laughed. Indeed he was as near laughing as he dared at that very moment, for he was inside a large cupboard outside the dining-room door, and heard most of the racket. He was inside, of course, not for concealment, but to avoid being bumped into, being totally invisible. He had to laugh rather privately and silently, but all the same he was enjoying his joke: it was turning out so much like his expectation.

I suppose it is now becoming all too plain to everyone but the anxious and grabsome hobbits. The fact is that (in spite of certain things in his after-dinner speech) Bingo had grown suddenly tired of them all. A violent fit of Tookishness had come over him – not of course that all Tooks had much of this wayward quality, their mothers being Chubbs, Hornblowers, Bolgers, Bracegirdles, Grubbs and what not; but Tooks were on the whole the most jocular and unexpected of Hobbits. Also I can tell you something more, in case you have not guessed: Bingo had no money or jewelry left! Practically none, that is. Nothing worth digging up a nice hobbit-hole for. Money went a prodigious way in those days, and one could get quite a lot of things without it; but he had blown his last 500 ducats on the birthday party. That was Brandybucksome of him. After that he had nothing left but the buttons on his waistcoat, a small bag-purse of silver, and his ring. In the course of 33 years he had contrived to spend all the rest – what was left, that is, by his father, who had done a bit of spending in fifty years⁹ (and had required some travelling-expenses).

Well, there it is. All things come to an end. Evening came on. Bag-end was left empty and gloomy. People went away – haggling and arguing, most of them. You could hear their voices coming up the Hill in the dusk. Very few gave a thought to Bingo. They decided he had gone mad, and run off, and that was one Baggins the less, and that was that. They were annoyed about the legendary money, of course, but meanwhile there was tea waiting for them. There were some, of course, who regretted his sudden disappearance – a few of his younger friends were really distressed. But not all of them had said good-bye to him. That is easily explained, and soon will be.

      Bingo stepped out of the cupboard. It was getting dim. His watch said six. The door was open, as he had kept the key in his pocket. He went out, locked the door (leaving the key), and looked at the sky. Stars were coming out.

      ‘It is going to be a fine night,’ he said. ‘What a lark! Well, I must not keep them waiting. Now we’re off. Goodbye!’ He trotted down the garden, jumped the fence, and took to the fields, and passed like an invisible rustle in the grasses.

NOTES

       1 I find it difficult to believe this, yet if it is not so the coincidence is strange. If Bingo Baggins did get his name from this source, I can only suppose that the demonic character (composed of monomaniac religious despotism and a lust for destruction through high explosive) of the chief Bingo (not to mention that of his appalling wife), by which my sister and I now remember them, developed somewhat later.

2 The substitution was not made in the first draft, but in pencilled corrections to the end of the second version (p. 27).

3 The change of ‘fifty-fifth’ to ‘seventy-second’ was made at the same time as the 16 years during which Bingo lived at Bag End after his parents’ departure were changed to 33 (note 6). These changes were made before the chapter was finished, since later in it, in Bingo’s farewell speech, the revised figures are present from the first writing. When at the outset he wrote ‘fifty-fifth birthday’ and ‘16 years’ my father was presumably intending to get rid of the idea, appearing in rewriting of the second version (see p. 27), that the number of 144 guests was chosen for an inner reason, since on Bingo’s 55th birthday his father Bilbo would have been 127 (having left the Shire 16 years before at the age of 111, when Bingo was 39).

4 Primula was first written Amalda. In the first version (p. 16) Amalda was the name of Mrs Sackville-Baggins. In the fourth version of ‘A long-expected party’, when Bilbo had returned to his bachelor state, Primula Brandybuck, no longer his wife, remained Bingo’s mother.

5 My father first wrote here: ‘the Brandybucks of Wood Eaton on the other side of the shire, on the edge of Buckwood – a dubious region.’ He first changed (certainly at the time of writing) the name of the Brandybuck stronghold from Wood Eaton (a village in the Cherwell valley near Oxford) to Bury Underwood (where ‘Bury’ is the very common English place-name element derived from Old English byrig, the dative of burg ‘fortified place, town’); then he introduced the name of the river, replaced Bury Underwood by Buckland, and replaced Buckwood by the Old Forest.

6 This change was made at the same time as ‘55’ to ‘72’ for Bingo’s years at the time of the birthday party; see note 3.

7 This is the first appearance of Gaffer Gamgee, living in Bagshot Row (first mentioned in the second version, p. 21).

8 As mentioned in note 3, the later figure of 72 for 55 as Bingo’s age on this birthday, and 33 for 16 as the number of years in which he lived on alone at Bag End after Bilbo’s departure, which appear as emendations in the early part of the text, are in the later part of the chapter present from the first writing.

9 One would expect ‘sixty’ (111 less 51): see pp. 31, 252.

      Note on Hobbit-names

      It will be seen that delight in the names and relations of the hobbit-families of the Shire from which the ramifying genealogies would spring was present from the start. In no respect did my father chop and change more copiously. Already we have met, apart from Bilbo and Bungo Baggins and Belladonna Took who appeared in The Hobbit:

       Baggins: Angelica; Inigo; Semolina

       Bolger: Caramella (replacing Caramella Took)

       Bracegirdle: Hugo

       Brandybuck: Amalda > Primula; Marmaduke; Orlando > Prospero; Rory

       Burrowes: Folco; Orlando (replacing Orlando Grubb)

       Chubb: Cosimo

       Grubb: Gorboduc > Orlando; Iago

       Grubb-Took: Inigo

       Proudfoot: Sancho

       СКАЧАТЬ