I’m reading
The Return of the Shadow for the first time and have heard some things about it on other discussions, but I discovered one fact I hadn’t heard before – in his first version of ‘The Long-Expected Party’, Tolkien ends with Bilbo announcing his intention to marry!! That was a real surprise, and I started thinking about the difference it would have made if he had actually done so, and the hero had been one of his descendants.
For one thing, it would have destroyed our discussions on the comparison between the Ring and a relationship with a woman! Had Bilbo not been a bachelor, that theory wouldn’t have worked. I wonder, could that have been – in the back of Tolkien’s mind, even subconscious, perhaps – a reason he changed that?
Bilbo married… doesn’t that make a fascinating subject for conjecture?! What kind of wife would he have chosen – a typical homebody Hobbit woman, as opposites often attract each other? Or would he have chosen someone like his mother Belladonna, with an adventurous streak? Would she have gone on his travels with him, even on his last trip to Rivendell? Or would she have died ‘conveniently’ after raising their children? How would she have reacted to the Ring? Would she have seen its inherent danger intuitively, nagged him about it, or tried to use it herself? Or would he have used it to get away when he was tired of listening to her?
Perhaps some of those questions occurred to Tolkien and that was his reason for eliminating a wife from Bilbo’s life – it would have been too complicated. The explanation he gives within the context of the first version of Chapter 1 is interesting:
Quote:
Then how could he get married? He was not going to just then – he merely said ‘I am going to get married’. I cannot quite say why. It came suddenly into his head. Also he thought it was an event that might occur in the future – if he travelled again amongst other folk, or found a more rare and more beautiful race of hobbits somewhere.
(my emphasis on ‘said’ )
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Isn’t that interesting?! Bilbo was not even considering a normal hobbit wife – apparently he felt himself to be too different to find a compatible soul near his home. I wonder, does ‘other folk’ mean another race? Would he have gone so far as to wish for a ‘fairy wife’?!
The explanation of hobbit marriage customs is most amusing!
Quote:
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They kept it (always officially and very often actually) a dead secret for years who they were going to marry, even when they knew. Then they suddenly went and got married and went off without an address for a week or two (or even longer).
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I can’t help but think that Tolkien was drawing on his own experience here – that sounds like something he would have liked to do! (And I imagine there are many males who would agree… )
Even more interesting – the neighbours chalked up Bilbo’s sudden disappearance (in
The Hobbit) to having gone and gotten married! They couldn’t figure out to whom, though, since no one else had disappeared.
Quote:
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Even after a year they would have been less surprised if he had come back with a wife. For a long while some folk thought he was keeping one in hiding, and quite a legend about the poor Mrs Bilbo who was too ugly to be seen grew up for a while.
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Isn’t that absolutely hilarious?!