Given the fluid nature of the unpublished myths, where Tolkien was willing to
play around with concepts and occasionally contemplate major changes in the legends,
we should ask the obvious question: is the elven-king Bilbo meets Thingol
himself or an entirely new character closely modelled upon him – an analogue, as it
were? The answer seems to be both: just as the status of The Hobbit itself hovered
in Tolkien’s mind between being part of the legendarium and standing apart from
it, so too within the book the identification of the elvenking straddles both options
and cannot conclusively be resolved either way. Even after Tolkien eventually, towards
the end of work on The Lord of the Rings, committed to the decision that the
wood-elf king was a separate character, he never fully reworked the original story
to completely support that decision.
To understand, then, exactly how the wood-elf king in The Hobbit relates to the
earlier stories, it is necessary (as so often) to make the mental effort to exclude from
our minds knowledge of what Tolkien later resolved while working on the sequel,
or that subsequent layer created as much as twenty years afterwards will prevent us
from seeing clearly what he was doing at the time he created the character – that is,
when writing the story of Mr. Baggins’ adventures as a stand-alone work deriving
in varying degrees from his already voluminous writings about Middle-earth. Seen
in this light, while the Elvenking strongly resembles King Thingol in general, the
evidence for and against the identification is contradictory. Two elements Tolkien
goes out of his way to include in the narrative support the argument that the two
kings are one and the same, while two unstated facts argue against it because of the
dissonance they would create between things we know to be true of Thingol that do
not appear to apply to the Elvenking.
The first passage that strengthens the identification between the Elvenking and
Thingol Greycloak is Tolkien’s mention of the three kindreds of the elves (see part ii
of this chapter’s commentary, starting on p. 405 above). This places the wood-elves
within the context of the old mythology, and we should not overlook the precision
of Tolkien’s phrasing that most of the wood-elves are descended from ancient elves
who never went to ‘the great FairyLand of the west’. In fact, only one Sea-elf in
the whole legendarium ever visited Valinor and returned to live in Middle-earth, this
being the figure originally known as Linwë Tinto (BLT I.106), then Tinwë Linto
(ibid., pages 130–1) or Tinwelint (‘The Tale of Tinúviel’, BLT II.8), then from ‘The
Lay of Leithian’, onwards as King Thingol. It’s possible that this is an oblique allusion
to the idea, expressed in the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’, that some of the
Gnomes (Noldor) returning to Middle-earth ‘take service with Thingol and Melian
of the Thousand Caves in Doriath’ (HME IV.23).36 It cannot, as it might first seem,
be an early form of the idea presented in The Lord of the Rings that Sindar (grey-elf)
lords settled among and ruled over Silvan (wood-elf) populations, since those rulers
would be Sindar like Celeborn who had never left Middle-earth. Given the Elvenking’s
general similarity to Thingol, it seems far more likely then that this passage is
a deliberate allusion to Thingol.
Thingol’s story is even more explicitly evoked in the account of the old enmity
between the dwarves and the elves (p. 315):
. . . [the wood elves] did not love dwarves. They had had wars in ancient days
with dwarves, and accused them of stealing their treasure (& the dwarves accused
them of the same, and also of hiring dwarves to shape their gold & silver,
and refusing to pay them after!).
The original ending to the first typescript of the Mirkwood chapter (1/1/30:4) expands
upon this somewhat:
. . . they did not love dwarves and thought he was an enemy. In ancient days
they had had wars with some of the dwarves whom they accused of stealing
their treasure. It is only fair to say that the dwarves gave a different account
and said that they only took what was their due, for the elf-king had bargained
with them to shape his raw gold and silver and had after refused to give them
their pay. If the elf-king had a weakness it was for treasure, especially for silver
and white gems, for though his hoard was rich yet he had not as great a treasure
as other elf-lords of old, since his people neither mined nor worked metal
or jewels, nor did they trade, nor till the earth more than they could help. All
this was well known to every dwarf, though Thorin’s family37 had had nothing
to do with the old quarrel I have spoken of.
This in turn is followed closely in the revised ending of the Mirkwood chapter (1/
1/58:17), which, in addition to a few small revisions of punctuation and phrasing,
achieves the text of the published book:
. . . though his hoard was rich, he was ever eager for more, since he had not
yet as great a treasure as other elf-lords of old38 . . . All this was well known to
every dwarf, though Thorin’s family had had nothing to do with the old quarrel
I have spoken of. Consequently Thorin was angry at their treatment of him,
when they took their spell off him and he came to his senses; and also he was
determined that no word of gold or jewels should be dragged out of him.
(compare DAA.220).
This quarrel is clearly an allusion to the Lost Tale known as ‘The Nauglafring: The
Necklace of the Dwarves’, the last of the tales (in terms of the cycle’s internal chronology)
to be written out in full (BLT II.221–51). This story changed greatly in its
details and tone but remained consistent in its overall outlines from The Book of Lost
Tales through ‘The Sketch of the Mythology’ into the 1930 Quenta, the last completed
version of the tale.39
The 1926 summary of the tale runs thusly:
Húrin and outlaws come to Nargothrond, whom none dare plunder for dread
of the spirit of Glórung [the dragon] or even of his memory. They slay Mîm
the Dwarf who had taken possession and enchanted all the gold. [After transporting
it to Doriath] Húrin casts the gold at Thingol’s feet with reproaches.
Thingol will not have it, and bears with Húrin, until goaded too far he bids him
begone. Húrin wanders away . . .
The enchanted gold lays its spell on Thingol. He summons the Dwarves of
Nogrod and Belegost to come and fashion it into beautiful things, and to make
a necklace of great wonder whereon the Silmaril shall hang. The Dwarves
plot treachery, and Thingol bitter with the curse of the gold denies them their
reward. After their smithying they are driven away without payment. The
Dwarves come back; aided by treachery of some Gnomes [that is, Noldor or
Deep Elves] who also were bitten by the lust of the gold, they surprise Thingol
on a hunt, slay him, and surprise the Thousand Caves and plunder them. Melian
they cannot touch . . .
[On the return journey to their homelands] The Dwarves are ambushed at a
ford by Beren and the brown and green Elves of the wood, and their king slain,
from whose neck Beren takes the ‘Nauglafring’ or necklace of the Dwarves,
with its Silmaril. It is said that Lúthien wearing that jewel is the most beautiful
thing that eyes have ever seen outside Valinor. But Melian warned Beren of
the curse of the gold and of the Silmaril. The rest of the gold is drowned in the
river.
But the ‘Nauglafring’ remains hoarded secretly in Beren’s keeping . . .
—‘The Sketch of the Mythology’ [1926] HME IV.32–3.
Besides prefiguring all the trouble that will erupt later in The Hobbit over
Smaug’s hoard, and the curse of possessiveness that falls upon Thorin in the end,
this passage clearly describes the same quarrel which lay between the wood-elves
and our dwarves in The Hobbit: dwarves hired to shape silver and gold (the Book of
Lost Tales version stresses the amount of unwrought gold in the hoard; cf. Note 38)
for an elvenking who then refuses them payment, an ensuing war, and lasting bitterness
over the whole incident, with each side nursing grudges as to the rightness of
their cause – the ‘(Later) Annals of Beleriand’, which are associated with the 1937
Quenta Silmarillion, goes so far as to claim ‘and there hath been war between Elf
and Dwarf since that day.’ If we were to go by Tolkien’s later writings in The Lord
of the Rings and published Silmarillion then in the account in The Hobbit the elfking
who bargained with the dwarves to shape his raw gold and silver and the elfking
of the next sentence who had a weakness for treasure are two separate people
(Thingol and Thranduil, respectively), but this is clearly untenable: nothing in Tolkien’s
prose here justifies the assumption of a complete shift in antecedent between
identical nouns used as the subjects of two consecutive sentences. Moreover the
phrase ‘as other elf-lords of old’ clearly implies that our Elvenking is himself one
among their number, not a newcomer of latter days but directly involved with the
elf-dwarf wars of ancient days.40 In short, there can be no doubt that here Tolkien
is stating it was the same king of the wood-elves whom Bilbo meets who had
quarreled and warred with the dwarves long ago, events that the Silmarillion tradition
unequivocally ascribes to King Thingol. Furthermore, in a letter written many
years later Tolkien explicitly said that this particular passage in The Hobbit is a reference
to ‘the quarrel of King Thingol, Lúthien’s father, with the Dwarves’ – JRRT
to Christopher Bretherton, 16th July 1964; Letters p. 346.
This very identification, however, raises the first of the two disconnects between
Thingol and the Elvenking that form the major objections to the possibility that the
two characters might be one and the same at different points in Middle-earth’s history.
A key part of Thingol’s legend was the account of his death at the hands of
the dwarves he had cheated, the sudden and shameful death of one of the greatest of
all the elves over a petty quarrel. If our Elvenking is Thingol, then how can he still
be alive at the time of our story? Either Tolkien has removed the quarrel from the
Thingol legend and given it to a new character, modifying it so that the chief elven
protagonist survives, or he is making the same modification while leaving Thingol
as its protagonist, thus extending Thingol’s story forward into a much later era and
setting aside the old account of Thingol’s death and the destruction of Doriath. That
he was willing to recast his stories in ways with far-reaching consequences we know
from other evidence, a prime example being his decision no more than five years
earlier between the original and revised versions of the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’
to change Beren from an elf to a human (HME IV.23–5).