It had been discovered by my far ancestor, Thrain the Old, but now they mined and they tunnelled and they made huger halls and greater workshops…’Īt the same time, in the next sentence, ‘my grandfather was King under the Mountain’ was changed to ‘my grandfather was King under the Mountain again.’ ‘Long ago in my grandfather Thror’s time our family was driven out of the far North, and came back with all their wealth and their tools to this Mountain on the map. The present text of THE HOBBIT reads here: There they mined and they tunnelled and they made huge halls and great workshops…’ ‘Long ago in my grandfather’s time some dwarves were driven out of the far North, and came with all their wealth and their tools to this Mountain on the map. In the third edition of 1966 the opening of Thorin’s story in Chapter I was changed to introduce Thrain I into the text. Names are often repeated in dynasties, and the genealogies show that a distant ancestor of Thror was referred to, Thrain I, a fugitive from Moria, who first discovered the Lonely Mountain, Erebor, and ruled there for a while before his people moved on to the remoter mountains of the North. On Thror’s Map is written HERE OF OLD WAS THRAIN KING UNDRE THE MOUNTAIN yet Thrain was the son of Thror, the last King under the Mountain before the coming of the dragon. Years later, my father mentioned in the prefatory note that appeared in the second (1951) edition:Ī final note may be added, on a point raised by several students of the lore of the period. The only solution I can propose for this is that having, for whatever reason, hesitated so long between alternatives, when my father was drafting “The Council of Elrond” Thorin – Thror – Thrain seemed as ‘right’ as Thorin – Thrain – Thror, and he did not check it with THE HOBBIT. I mention it, of course, because in the early manuscripts of THE LORD OF THE RINGS the genealogy reverts to Thorin – Thror – Thrain despite the publication of Thorin – Thrain – Thror in THE HOBBIT. It is hard to believe that this extraordinary concern was unnconnected with the words on ‘Thror’s map’ in THE HOBBIT: ‘Here of old was THRAIN King under the Mountain’ but the solution of this conundrum, if it can be found, belongs with the textual history of THE HOBBIT, and I shall not pursue it further. Taum Santoski and John Rateliff have minutely examined the proofs and shown conclusively that instead of correcting this one error my father decided to extend Thorin – Thror – Thrain right through the book but that having done so he then changed all the occurrences back to Thorin – Thrain – Thror.
At one point, however, Thror and Thrain were reversed in my father’s typescript, and this survived into the first proof. There is no question that the genealogy as first devised in THE HOBBIT was Thorin Oakenshield – Thrain – Thror (always without accents). Were there originally two Dwarves named Thrain in the original HOBBIT, or just one? One of the key points of the “there was only one Thrain” argument comes at the end of this passage in THE TREASON OF ISENGARD in the chapter “The Council of Elrond (2)” where Christopher Tolkien writes: How many Thrains did Tolkien put into the first edition of THE HOBBIT?
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