Unfinished Tales - J. R. R. Tolkien [203]
Gandalf then explained to them his doubts at that time concerning Sauron’s first move, and his fears for Lórien and Rivendell (cf. p. 416). In this version, after saying that a direct stroke against Sauron was even more urgent than the question of Smaug, he went on:
‘That is why, to jump forward, I went off as soon as the expedition against Smaug was well started, and persuaded the Council to attack Dol Guldur first, before he attacked Lórien. We did, and Sauron fled. But he was always ahead of us in his plans. I must confess that I thought he really had retreated again, and that we might have another spell of watchful peace. But it did not last long. Sauron decided to take the next step. He returned at once to Mordor, and in ten years he declared himself.
‘Then everything grew dark. And yet that was not his original plan; and it was in the end a mistake. Resistance still had somewhere where it could take counsel free from the Shadow. How could the Ringbearer have escaped, if there had been no Lórien or Rivendell? And those places might have fallen, I think, if Sauron had thrown all his power against them first, and not spent more than half of it in the assault on Gondor.
‘Well, there you have it. That was my chief reason. But it is one thing to see what needs doing, and quite another to find the means. I was beginning to be seriously troubled about the situation in the North when I met Thorin Oakenshield one day: in the middle of March 2941, I think. I heard all his tale, and I thought: “Well, here is an enemy of Smaug at any rate! And one worthy of help. I must do what I can. I should have thought of Dwarves before.”
‘And then there was the Shire-folk. I began to have a warm place in my heart for them in the Long Winter, which none of you can remember. * They were very hard put to it then: one of the worst pinches they have been in, dying of cold, and starving in the dreadful dearth that followed. But that was the time to see their courage, and their pity one for another. It was by their pity as much as by their tough uncomplaining courage that they survived. I wanted them still to survive. But I saw that the Westlands were in for another very bad time again, sooner or later, though of quite a different sort: pitiless war. To come through that I thought they would need something more than they now had. It is not easy to say what. Well, they would want to know a bit more, understand a bit clearer what it was all about, and where they stood.
‘They had begun to forget: forget their own beginnings and legends, forget what little they had known about the greatness of the world. It was not yet gone, but it was getting buried: the memory of the high and the perilous. But you cannot teach that sort of thing to a whole people quickly. There was not time. And anyway you must begin at some point, with some one person. I dare say he was “chosen” and I was only chosen to choose him; but I picked out Bilbo.’
‘Now that is just what I want to know,’ said Peregrin. ‘Why did you do that?’
‘How would you select any one Hobbit for such a purpose?’ said Gandalf. ‘I had not time to sort them all out; but I knew the Shire very well by that time, although when I met Thorin I had been away for more than twenty years on less pleasant business. So naturally thinking over the Hobbits that I knew, I said to myself: “I want a dash of the Took” (but not too much, Master Peregrin) “and I want a good foundation of the stolider sort, a Baggins perhaps.” That pointed at once to Bilbo. And I had known him once very well, almost up to his coming of age, better than he knew me. I liked him then. And now I found that he was “unattached” – to jump on again, for of course I did not know all this until I went back to the Shire. I learned that he had never married. I thought that odd,