Free Sauron Defeated by J. R. R. Tolkien

shall now be all fulfilled', where in RK he said: 'This is the end at last.'
    At the end of the chapter, after the words 'Down like lashing whips fell a torrent of black rain' (RK p. 224), the first text moves at once to
    ' "Well, this is the end, Sam," said a voice by his side.' Here my father wrote in the margin soon after: 'Put in here (or in next chapter?) vision of the cloudwrack out of Baraddur [?growing] to shape of a vast black
    [?man] that stretches out a menacing unavailing arm and is blown away.' The word 'man' is very unclear but I cannot see how else it could be read. Later at this point in the manuscript he wrote 'Fall of Ringwraiths' with a mark of insertion, and the passage 'And into the heart of the storm, with a cry that pierced all other sounds...' appears in C.
    Lastly, Sam's feelings were thus described in B: 'If he felt anything in all that ruin of the world, it was perhaps most of all a great joy, to be servant once again, and know his master [added: and surrender to him the leadership].' This was repeated in C, but rejected and replaced by the reading of RK. In Frodo's final words he did not, in the original text, speak of forgiving Gollum.(5)
    NOTES.

    1. The fair copy- manuscript C is entitled 'Mount Doom' and numbered 'LIV' (see pp. 31, 37), the number changed subsequently to 'LII' (see p. 25).
    2. Sam's vain use of the Phial when he entered the Sammath Naur (RK p. 222) appears in B. The addition concerning the Phial and the box was made later to text C.
    The passage in which Sam remembered paddling in the Pool at Bywater with the children of Farmer Cotton (RK p. 216) is also absent from B. This is one of the few passages in this chapter for which a separate draft is found (before its introduction into text C), and here the names of the Cotton children are seen emerging.
    3. three was changed in pencil to two on the manuscript (C), but three survived.
    4. In both B and C, despite the earlier statement (as in RK p. 219) that the road came 'high in the upper cone ... to a dark entrance', it is said in the passage corresponding to that in RK p. 222 that the road 'with a last course passed across the base of the cone and came to the dark door', where in RK 'with a last eastward course
    [it] passed in a cutting along the face of the cone and came to the dark door'.
    In B there is a little sketch of Mount Doom which my father struck through, and here the entrance to the Sammath Naur is placed about a third of the way up the cone (which is here shorter in relation to the base than in the drawing reproduced on p. 42).
    The road here disappears round the eastern side of the cone, below the door, and seems (the drawing is hard to make out) to reappear further up, coming from the left (east) and ending at the door.
    5. A couple of points concerning names in this chapter may be mentioned. In the opening paragraph both B and C have 'He heard the scuffling and cries die down as the troops passed on into the Narch', where RK has 'passed on through the Isenmouthe'; see p. 33. The name Sammath Naur does not appear in B, but enters in C without any initial hesitation as to its form.
    (Mount Doom.)
    Note on the Chronology.

    The chronology was still a day behind that of RK (see p. 36). At nightfall of the day on which they escaped from the orc-band at the Isenmouthe my father wrote in the margin of text B '18 ends'; this was March 19 in RK (in The Tale of Years 'Frodo and Samwise escape and begin their journey along the road to the Barad-dur'). The reference to the passing of the Cross Roads by the Captains of the West and the burning of the fields of Imlad Morghul (so spelt) is however present in B at the same point as in RK (p. 212): see VIII.432.
    In B, against the words 'There came at last a dreadful evening; and even as the Captains of the West drew near the end of the living lands, the two wanderers came to an hour of blank despair' (cf. RK p. 212), my father wrote 'end of 22'. This was the same date as in RK,