I mention it, of course, because in the early manuscripts of THE LORD OF THE RINGS the genealogy reverts to Thorin – Thror – Thrain despite the publication of Thorin – Thrain – Thror in THE HOBBIT. It is hard to believe that this extraordinary concern was unnconnected with the words on ‘Thror’s map’ in THE HOBBIT: ‘Here of old was THRAIN King under the Mountain’ but the solution of this conundrum, if it can be found, belongs with the textual history of THE HOBBIT, and I shall not pursue it further. Taum Santoski and John Rateliff have minutely examined the proofs and shown conclusively that instead of correcting this one error my father decided to extend Thorin – Thror – Thrain right through the book but that having done so he then changed all the occurrences back to Thorin – Thrain – Thror. At one point, however, Thror and Thrain were reversed in my father’s typescript, and this survived into the first proof. There is no question that the genealogy as first devised in THE HOBBIT was Thorin Oakenshield – Thrain – Thror (always without accents). Were there originally two Dwarves named Thrain in the original HOBBIT, or just one? One of the key points of the “there was only one Thrain” argument comes at the end of this passage in THE TREASON OF ISENGARD in the chapter “The Council of Elrond (2)” where Christopher Tolkien writes: ![]() How many Thrains did Tolkien put into the first edition of THE HOBBIT?
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