The Hobbit at 89: Gollum Once Meant to Give the Ring Away
Woody Magazine
We write the things that aren't news
Sept. 21, 2026 (Mon.)
The Hobbit at 89: Gollum Once Meant to Give the Ring Away
The chapter he wrote in 1937 is gone from the book. Tolkien turned it into a story Bilbo made up.
In Three Lines
- The Hobbit went on sale 89 years ago today in a run of 1,500 copies. Chapter five in the book you can buy now is not the one that was printed.
- Tolkien rewrote it while writing the sequel, sent the pages as a sample he never meant to publish, and later found them sitting in the proofs of a new printing.
- The first version was not withdrawn. Tolkien kept it by making it a story Bilbo made up, so both accounts survive.
On this day in 1937, the London firm of George Allen and Unwin put 1,500 copies of The Hobbit on sale. It had decided to publish the book on the advice of a ten-year-old.
We tend to assume a classic stays the book it was. That assumption is reasonable enough, since new printings rarely change the sentences. But chapter five in the copy you can buy today is not the chapter that went on sale in 1937. Gollum says different things in it, and Bilbo comes away with the ring a different way.
Think of a set of minutes that has already been printed and handed around. When you find an error, you have two options. Print the minutes again, or write down that the person taking them got it wrong. Tolkien took the second.
The manuscript was read by a ten-year-old
In mid-1936, Susan Dagnall of Allen and Unwin borrowed a typescript from J.R.R. Tolkien, who taught Old English at Oxford. He revised it and sent it to the firm that October.
Stanley Unwin, who ran the firm, believed children were the right judges of children's books. So he handed the typescript to his ten-year-old son, Rayner, and paid him a shilling to write a report. That shilling was the first money the company spent on the book.
The report was short. The maps made illustrations unnecessary, Rayner wrote, and any child between five and nine would enjoy it. That page settled the matter. Years later Rayner said that in those days, if he called a book good enough, it got published.
Sept. 21, 1937: 1,500 copies
The book sold at once, and the following year it took the New York Herald Tribune prize for the best juvenile book of the season. Tolkien's friend C.S. Lewis praised it that October in the Times Literary Supplement, where reviews then ran unsigned.
Unwin wanted a sequel. Tolkien began a new hobbit story that December. It reached readers in 1954 as The Lord of the Rings.
The ring changed
The ring changed character while he wrote. It began as a convenient trinket that made its wearer invisible. By the time the sequel had found its shape, it was the One Ring, made by Sauron, and it did not let its owner go.
That left chapter five stranded. The Gollum of 1937 offers Bilbo a present if he loses the riddle game, and when he cannot find the present, he apologizes again and again. He offers to catch the hobbit some fish by way of consolation. The ring, in other words, was something a creature could hand over.
No keeper of the One Ring behaves that way.
A sample chapter became the book
On Sept. 21, 1947, ten years to the day after publication, Tolkien mailed a letter to Stanley Unwin. He had written it in late July and held it back, feeling it made too much fuss about his own work. With it he enclosed a rewritten chapter five.
It would be neater if Tolkien had decided to fix his book. He had not. He did not send the pages to be printed. It was for Unwin and Rayner to look at, and he added that the new version would make his task simpler rather than better.
Nothing came back. Nearly three years passed. In the summer of 1950 the publisher sent him proofs of a new printing, and the sample was sitting in the text. Writing on Aug. 1, Tolkien told the firm that none of this was what he had expected. How the pages traveled from the letter into the type is not recorded.
The second edition appeared in 1951, fourteen years after the first. Every edition printed since rests on that chapter.
Gollum used to apologize
Set the two versions side by side and the distance is easy to see.
- Lose the game and he owes a present, becomes lose the game and he shows the way out.
- He apologizes for the missing present, becomes he was fetching the ring in order to kill Bilbo with it.
- They part quietly after he guides Bilbo out, becomes he screams that Bilbo is a thief and will be hated forever.
- He would never cheat at the riddle game, becomes he cannot be trusted to keep any promise at all.
The Gollum of 1937 kept the rules, and felt sorry once he lost.
The 1937 version reads as the gentler story, and no wonder.
How Bilbo ends up with the ring changes too. In 1937 he works out that the lost present is the ring in his pocket, says nothing, decides that finding is keeping, and asks to be shown the way out instead. In 1951 he is chased, trips in the dark, and escapes by jumping clean over Gollum's head.
A lie about ownership
Tolkien did not discard the earlier chapter. Writing The Lord of the Rings, he pulled it inside the story. The 1937 chapter became an account Bilbo invented.
It is fair to ask why an honest hobbit would lie at all. Here is what Bilbo told the dwarves and Gandalf. Gollum had promised him a present if he won the riddle game. When Gollum went to fetch it, the present was gone. Bilbo realized it was the ring he had picked up, and since he had won, it was already his by right.
The lie sits on how he got it. More exactly, it sits on ownership. A thing you found and a thing you won are not the same thing.
Gandalf did not believe him, and got the truth out of him only after questioning that strained the friendship for a while. What unsettled the wizard was the shape of the lie. It ran too close to the way Gollum had always insisted the ring was his birthday present. A hobbit who had been honest his whole life had not been honest first.
Bilbo never altered his memoir, not even after the Council of Elrond. The true account in the copies appears to come from notes by Frodo and Sam. Both of them learned what had happened, and neither could bring himself to delete a line the old hobbit had written by hand.
So two editions outside the book match two copies inside it. The 1937 text is what Bilbo wrote. The 1951 text is what was added later.
Tolkien did not throw out the chapter he got wrong. He put a writer behind it and let that writer take the blame. Instead of printing the minutes again, he wrote down who had taken them. We are left holding both stories. One of them is true, and one of them is a lie.
Sources
- Source ↗ The Tolkien Estate, John D. Rateliff, "The Hobbit"
- Source ↗ HarperCollins 200th anniversary archive, "The Hobbit"
- Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, nos. 111 (Sept. 21, 1947) and 128 (Aug. 1, 1950)
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Prologue, section 4, and "The Shadow of the Past"
- Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion (2005)
- Douglas A. Anderson, ed., The Annotated Hobbit, revised and expanded edition (2002)
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