In the original 1937 edition of “The Hobbit” Gollum was genuinely willing to bet his ring on the riddle game, the deal being that Bilbo would receive a “present” if he won. Gollum in fact was dismayed when he couldn’t keep his promise because the ring was missing. He showed Bilbo the way out as an alternative, and they parted courteously.

As the writing of LotR progressed (1937-1949)  the nature of the Ring changed. No longer a “convenient magical device”, it had become an irresistable power object, and Gollum’s behavior now seemed inexplicable, indeed, impossible. 

Tolkien resolved the difficulty by re-writing the chapter into its present form, in which Gollum had no intention whatsoever of giving up the Ring but rather would show Bilbo the way out if he lost. Also, Gollum was made far more wretched, as befitted one enslaved and tormented by the Ruling Ring. At the same time, however, Bilbo’s claim to the Ring was seriously undercut.

Care must be taken when noting this last point.

There are two issues involved, well summarized in the Lord of the Rings Prologue: “The Authorities, it is true, differ whether this last question was a mere ‘question’ and not a ‘riddle’ … but all agree that, after accepting it and trying to guess the answer, Gollum was bound by his promise” (Fellowship, pg. 21). Thus, it was Bilbo’s winning of the game that was questionable. Given that he had in fact won, albeit on a technicality, he was fully entitled to the prize, which, in the old version, was the ring. In the new version, however, he had no claim to the Ring at all, whether he had won or not, because the Ring was not the stake of the game.

The textual situation thus reached was that there now existed two versions of the episode. Tolkien deftly made this circumstance part of the story by suggesting that the first time around **Bilbo was lying** (under the influence of the Ring) to strengthen his claim. (Bilbo had written this version in his diary, which was “translated” by Tolkien and published as “The Hobbit”; hence the error in the early editions, later “corrected”.) This new sequence of events inside the story is laid out clearly in “Of the Finding of the Ring” (Prologue) and is taken for granted thereafter for the rest of the story.

“The Hobbit” as now presented fits the new scenario remarkably well, even though Tolkien, for quite sound literary reasons, left this entire matter of Bilbo’s dishonesty out (it was an entirely irrelevant complication which would have thrown everything out of balance). The present attempt to step back and view the entire picture is made more involved by the fact that there were two separate pieces of dishonesty perpetrated by Bilbo.

The first, made explicit, was that when he initially told his story to Gandalf and the Dwarves he left the ring out entirely — this no doubt was what inspired Gandalf to give Bilbo the “queer look from under his bushy eyebrows” (Hobbit, pg. 99). Later, (after the spider episode) he revealed that he had the Ring, and it must have been at this point that he invented the rigamarole about “winning a present”. There is, however, no hint in the text of this second piece of dishonesty (as noted above, it would have been a grave literary mistake). Readers are therefore given no indication that when “Balin … insisted on having the Gollum story… told all over again, with the ring in its proper place” (Hobbit, pg. 163) that Bilbo didn’t respond with the “true” story, exactly as described in Ch V.

In this regard, “Of the Finding of the Ring” in the Prologue is a necessary prelude to Lord of the Rings.

By William D.B. Loos and Wayne G. Hammond Jr.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

This may seem like a joke, but it is a fair question. Who prescribed the order of the alphabet?

Unfortunately, it’s not a question that is easy to answer. The ABC order as we know it now has survived more or less intact for upwards of 3,000 years.

The alphabet used in English, and with some variations in most other European languages, comes from Semitic speakers who adapted it from Egyptian hieroglyphics about 4,000 years ago. The rudiments of modern alphabetic order first appeared about 600 years later in Syria. With minor changes in letter order at each step, the alphabet passed from the Semites to the Greeks to the Etruscans to the forebears of the Romans to us. 

The roots of ABC order are found in the cuneiform script of Ugaritic, the Semitic language of an ancient city in Syria. The letter shapes of this script aren’t obviously related to our alphabet’s direct ancestors, but the alphabetic order from a 14th-century BC inscription is virtually identical to later Hebrew and Phoenician letter lists, and the letter names are related.

A Greek borrowed the 22 Phoenician letters around 800 BC - but sort of botched the job leaving many idiosyncratic errors . Among other mistakes, he got several sibilant letters mixed up, and by the time things calmed down S and Z were the wrong shape and S was out of order. The same joker, or one who followed closely, gave exclusively vowel sounds to four letters theretofore primarily consonantal: ancestors of A, E, I, and O. Later Greeks added letters to the end, two of which interest us: chi, ancestral X, which over time acquired our modern “ks” sound; and upsilon, ancestral U.

The Etruscans borrowed the Greek alphabet about 700 BC. They retained the letter order but dispensed with the Semitic-derived letter names, which is why we say “ay, bee,” not “alpha, beta.” (British zed, from zeta, is a holdout.)

Latin borrowed the Etruscan alphabet about 600 BC. The Etruscans had no G sound and thus no corresponding letter, so eventually Latin G evolved from C - fittingly, because Etruscan C (pronounced “k”) had come from the Greek gamma (pronounced “g” as in, well, gamma). Rather than sitting next to its sib, G took slot seven, replacing underutilized Z. Centuries later Z came back to transliterate Greek zeta and Y was introduced to represent upsilon. As newbies, Y and Z had to sit in the back.

The modern English alphabet is the 23-letter Latin assortment with three additions hastened by the invention of movable type. W starts showing up in English letter lists in the 16th century, replacing the previous literal double U (or V) that denoted our current W sound. Naturally it was placed next to the then-undifferentiated U/V. The I/J and U/V cleavages came later - though the different shapes had existed for centuries, they weren’t considered distinct letters in English until around 1700.

So the roots of ABC order trace back to 14th-century BC Ugaritic. But why that order? Scholars don’t know. The identity of the sage who first ordered it, and why that order, is lost to time.  

From Cecil Adams