John Ratliff in his
The History of the Hobbit: Part Two: Return to Bag End includes as
The Fifth Phase a previously unpublished beginning of yet another revised version of
The Hobbit. In this version Tolkien is removing all the chattiness of the narrator and attempting to fix all internal errors of chronology and contradictions with
The Lord of the Rings.
When Tolkien sent the beginnings of this rewriting to an unnamed friend for comment she responded with something like “this is wonderful, but it’s not
The Hobbit.” Tolkien, presumably aware of other authorial attempts to revise a work which to most readers did not improve it, stopped work on the project.
But apparently someone had pointed out to Tolkien that his two owl calls reference is in error.
The original text says:
‘Now scuttle off, and come back quickly if all is well. If not, come back if you can! If you can’t, hoot twice like a barn owl and once like a screech-owl, and we will do what we can.’
Off Bilbo had to go, before he could explain that he could not hoot even once like any kind of owl any more than fly like a bat.
Tolkien’s intended revision was:
‘Off you go, stealthy mind you! Come back quick, if all is well. If not, come back, if you can. If you can’t, give a signal: the cry of a night-hawk, and two hoots like an owl, and we will do what we can’. With that he pushed the hobbit forward.
So off Bilbo had to go, before he could explain that he had never heard a night-hawk. ‘I wish I could fly like a bat’, he thought.