"GL1" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol06)

significance beyond its being a dozen dozens, a gross.
A few other points may be noticed. Gandalf was present at the dinner-
party; Gaffer Gamgee had not yet emerged, but 'old Rory Brandybuck'
makes his appearance (in place of Inigo Grubb-Took, note 8 above); and
Bilbo does not disappear with a blinding flash. At each stage the number
of hobbit clans named is increased: so here the Brandybucks emerge, and

the Bracegirdles were pencilled in, to appear in the third version as
written.

(iii)
The Third Version.

The third draft of 'A Long-expected Party' is complete, and is a good
clear manuscript with relatively little later correction. In this section
numbered notes again appear at the end (p. 34).
Discussion of the change made to Bilbo's speech in the second version
has already indicated the central new feature of the third: the story is now
told not of Bilbo, but of his son. On this substitution Humphrey Carpenter
remarked (Biography p. 185):

Tolkien had as yet no clear idea of what the new story was going to be
about. At the end of The Hobbit he had stated that Bilbo 'remained
very happy to the end of his days, and those were extraordinarily long.'
So how could the hobbit have any new adventures worth the name
without this being contradicted? And had he not explored most of the
possibilities in Bilbo's character? He decided to introduce a new
hobbit, Bilbo's son - and to give him the name of a family of toy koala
bears owned by his children, 'The Bingos'.(1) So he crossed out 'Bilbo'
in the first draft and above it wrote 'Bingo'.

This explanation is plausible. In the first draft, however, my father wrote
that the story of the birthday party 'merely serves to explain that Bilbo
Baggins got married and had many children, because I am going to tell
you a story about one of his descendants' (in the second version we are
given no indication at all of what was going to happen after the party -
though there is possibly a suggestion of something similar in the words
(p. 22) 'Now really we must hurry on, for all this is not as important as it
seemed'). On the other hand, there are explicit statements in early notes
(p. 41) that for a time it was indeed going to be Bilbo who had the new
'adventure'.
The first part of the third version is almost wholly different from the
two preceding, and I give it here in full, with a few early changes
incorporated.

A long-expected party.

When Bingo, son of Bilbo, of the well-known Baggins family,
prepared to celebrate his [fifty-fifth >] seventy-second (3) birthday
there was some talk in the neighbourhood, and people polished up