Interesting stuff, Sardy!
Actually, there is evidence that Tolkien
was initially referring to Valinor. I have a second edition, 8th impression Hobbit from 1956. My passage looks even more intriguing than yours.....
Quote:
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Not the Gandalf who was responsible for so many quiet lads and lasses going off into the Blue for mad adventures, anything from climbing trees to stowing away aboard ships that sail to the Other Side?
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The caps on "other side" aren't mine....it's the way the passage was originally written by Tolkien. The term "other side" could be any of a number of distant seaports in Middle-earth, not necessarily Valinor. But I honestly don't think "Other Side" could be anything but the blessed West. I am assuming that "Other Side" had caps in the first edition as well, though I don't know for sure, since I don't own one of those.
Here's my guess as to what happened.... When Tolkien sat and told stories to his sons and daughter, he could be just as wild as he wanted and didn't have to worry about harmonizing with the rest of the Legendarium. Initially, that is what he put on paper when he wrote down The Hobbit. But, in the course of all his revisions, he realized that hobbits stowing away for Valinor wouldn't work. What kind of loyal Maia would Gandalf be if he was really shipping Hobbits off to the West?
Manwe would have had a fit! So somewhere along the way, the caps on "Other Side" went, although the caps on "Blue" remained. It's interesting that the changes regarding the Ring and Gollum were done sometime before the change was made to the "Other Side". I'd love to know exactly when the caps changed. But my guess is that the Professor was backing away from the informal stories he used with his own children and bringing the work more in line with the rest of the Legendarium.
Our only visible remains of those wandering hobbits are the references in the Took pedigree in the appendix of LotR to Isengar who was "said to have gone to sea in his youth" and Hildifons who "went off on a journey and never returned".
There is something else about your quote that intrigues me. We are talking "lads and lasses"--males and females. There aren't too many instances in LotR of girls going off on mad adventures, but here is one of them. Perhap this was put in for the sake of Priscilla? In any case, the lasses survived even after the other changes were made.
P.S. If a hobbit really did stow away, I would think that he/she would have been discovered on the journey outward. Then the Elven ship would have to turn around and come back to the Havens and let the unwanted passenger disembark. What a great rpg/fanfiction this would make!