"GL1" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol12)

Shirriff is derived from Shire-reeve; but this was a joke that my father
decided to remove - perhaps because the choice of the word 'king'
by the Hobbits seemed improbable (cf. p. 232 and note 25, and
Appendix A (I, iii), RK p. 323).(4)
The new passage in P 2 does not give the time of the year of the Free
Fair on the White Downs ('at the Lithe, that is at Midsummer', FR
p. 19), and nothing is said of the letter-writing proclivities of Hobbits.
To the mention of the name 'Bounders' my father added '(as they were
called unofficially)'; the word 'unofficially' he subsequently removed,
thus in this case retaining the joke but not drawing attention to it.
It seems to me all but certain that this new element in the text is to
be associated with the emergence of the Shirriffs in the chapter The
Scouring of the Shire - where the office is shown to have been long
established 'before any of this began', as the Shirriff Robin Small-
burrow said to Sam (RK p. 281). The fact that the term 'Thain' had
not yet emerged does not contradict this, for that came in very late (see
IX-99, 101, 103). I have concluded (IX.12-13) that Book Six of The
Lord of the Rings was written in 1948.
At the end of this passage on the ordering of the Shire, which as
already noted (p. 5) ends with the words 'the first sign that everything
was not quite as it should be, and always used to be', the addition to
P 2 continues (with a later pencilled heading 'Tobacco'):(5)

There is one thing more about these hobbits of old that must be
mentioned: they smoked tobacco through pipes of clay or wood. A
great deal of mystery surrounds the origin of this peculiar custom ...
From this point the remainder of section 2 in the final form of the Pro-
logue was achieved in P 2 with only a very few minor differences: 'Old
Toby' of Longbottom was Tobias (not Tobold) Hornblower (on which
see p. 69), and the date of his first growing of the pipe-weed was 1050
(not 1070), in the time of Isengrim the First (not the Second); the third
of the Longbottom varieties was 'Hornpipe Twist' (not 'Southern
Star'); and it is not said of sweet galenas that the Men of Gondor
'esteem it only for the fragrance of its flowers'. There is also a footnote
to the words 'about the year 1050 in Shire-reckoning':

That is about 400 years before the events recorded in this book.
Dates in the Shire were all reckoned from the legendary crossing of
the Brandywine River by the brothers Marco and Cavallo.

Later changed to Marcho and Blanco, these names do not appear in
the narrative of The Lord of the Rings: they are found only in the



further long extension to the Prologue concerning Hobbit-history
(FR p. 13) and in the introductory note to Appendix C, Family Trees
(RK p. 379).
For the history of the passage on pipe-weed, which began as a lec-
ture on the subject delivered by Merry to Theoden at the ruined gates