"GL1" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol12)

long, will here be discovered. Bilbo returned to his home at Bag-
End on June 22nd in his fifty-second year, having been away
since April 30th (2) in the year before, and nothing very notable
occurred in the Shire for another sixty years, when Mr. Baggins
began to make preparations for the celebration of his hundred
and eleventh birthday. At which point the tale of the Ring
begins.

Years later my father took up the typescript P 2 again. He made a
number of minor alterations in wording, replaced the opening para-
graph, and rewrote a part of the story of Bilbo and Gollum (improv-
ing the presentation of the events, and elaborating a little Bilbo's
escape from the tunnels); these need not be recorded. But he also intro-
duced a lengthy new passage, following the words (VI.313) 'but that
was not so true of other families, like the Bagginses or the Boffins' (FR
p. 18). This begins 'The Hobbits of the Shire had hardly any "govern-
ment" ...', and is the origin of most of section 3 (Of the Ordering of
the Shire) in the published Prologue, extending as far as 'the first sign
that everything was not quite as it should be, and always used to be'
(cf. FR p. 19).
Much of the new passage survived into the final form, but there are
some interesting differences. In the third paragraph of the section (as
it stands in FR) the new text in P 2 reads:

There was, of course, the ancient tradition in their part of the
world that there had once been a King at Fornost away north of
the Shire (Northworthy the hobbits called it),(3) who had marked
out the boundaries of the Shire and given it to the Hobbits; and
they in turn had acknowledged his lordship. But there had been
no King for many ages, and even the ruins of Northworthy were
covered with grass ...

The name Northworthy (for later Norbury) is not found in the Lord
of the Rings papers, where the earlier 'vernacular' names are the
Northburg, Northbury. See p. 225, annal c.1600.
The fourth paragraph of the section reads thus in the P 2 text:

It is true that the Took family had once a certain eminence,
quite apart from the fact that they were (and remained) numer-
ous, wealthy, peculiar, and of great social importance. The head
of the family had formerly borne the title of The Shirking. But
that title was no longer in use in Bilbo's time: it had been killed
by the endless and inevitable jokes that had been made about it,

in defiance of its obvious etymology. The habit went on, how-
ever, of referring to the head of the family as The Took, and of
adding (if required) a number: as Isengrim the First.

Shirking is of course a reduction of Shire-king with shortening (and
in this case subsequent alteration) of the vowel, in the same way as