"GL2" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol07)

and Gandalf looking in through the window. The new conversation
almost reaches the form in FR (pp. 285 - 7), and only the following
differences need be mentioned. Gandalf speaks of 'the Elves of
Mirkwood', not of 'Thranduil's folk in Mirkwood', and he does not
say that 'Aragorn has gone with Elrond's sons' (who had not yet
emerged); and Bilbo's remarks about the season of their departure
were first written:

'... you can't wait now till Spring, and you can't go till the scouts
come back. So off you go nice and comfortable just when winter's
beginning to bite.'
'Quite in the Gandalf manner,' said Pippin.
'Exactly,' said Gandalf.

This was replaced at once by Bilbo's verse (When winter first begins to
bite) that he speaks here in FR. Lastly, Gandalf says: 'In this matter
Elrond will have [the decision >] much to say, and your friend
Trotter, Aragorn the tarkil, too' (FR: 'and your friend the Strider').
While still writing the opening of the chapter, my father hesitated
about the structure. One possibility seems to have been to keep the
new conversation in Bilbo's room but to put it back into the end of
'The Council of Elrond', ending at Sam's remark 'And where will they
live? That's what I often wonder'; another, to cut out the conversation
among the hobbits, and Gandalf's intervention at the window, almost
in its entirety. He went so far as to provide a brief substitute passage;
but decided against it.(6)
The chronology in FR, according to which the Company stayed
more than two months in Rivendell and left on 25 December, had not
yet entered. In the second version of 'The Council of Elrond', which
continued for some distance into the narrative of 'The Ring Goes
South', 'the hobbits had been some three weeks in the house of Elrond,
and November was passing' when the scouts began to return; and at
the Choosing of the Company the date of departure was settled for
'the following Thursday, November the seventeenth' (pp. 113, 115).(7)
In the new text the same was said ('some three weeks ... November
was passing'), but this was changed, probably at once, to 'The hobbits
had been nearly a month in the house of Elrond, and November was
half over, when the scouts began to return'; and subsequently (as in
FR p. 290) Elrond says: 'In seven days the Company must depart.' No

actual date for the leaving of Rivendell is now mentioned, but
it had been postponed to nearer the end of the month (actually to
24 November, see p. 169).
The account of the journeys of the scouts moves on from the
previous versions (VI.415 - 16 and VII.113 - 14), and largely attains the
text in FR, apart from there being, as at the beginning of the chapter,
no mention of Aragorn's having left Rivendell, nor of the sons of
Elrond. Those scouts who went north had gone 'beyond the Hoarwell
into the Entishlands', and those who went west had 'searched the
lands far down the Greyflood, as far as Tharbad where the old North