Q:There is a controversy over the number of Thrains J.R.R. Tolkien really included in the first edition of The Hobbit. How important is this controversy, and have you said all you're going to say about it?
A:Is it important? Not really. But some people seem determined to misrepresent the facts of the controversy. At the very least, what I have seen of attempts to "fairly" summarize the arguments leaves me rolling my eyes at what is supposed to be fair.
The question occasionally arises among Tolkien fans of why Tolkien included an explanatory note in the second edition of The Hobbit which points out the mention of Thrain King Under the Mountain on Thror's Map. Many readers infer that Tolkien felt he had made a mistake with the map and was so embarrassed by it that he decided to explain it all away.
Tolkien is no longer around to explain his intentions. We have to infer the sequence of events on the basis of materials which only a very few people have seen, and which even fewer have published any details about. The chief sources of information are some comments by Christopher Tolkien in The History of Middle-earth and the revised edition of Douglas Anderson's The Annotated Hobbit. Both authors have suggested there should only have been one Thrain in the backstory for the first edition of The Hobbit.
Christopher Tolkien noted that his father had, at one point in the course of typing the manuscript for the publisher, reversed the names "Thror" and "Thrain". This mistake, according to Christopher (and confirmed for me by Anderson through private correspondence), extends throughout the book from that point forward. The mistake was not corrected until after the first proof of the book had been sent to Tolkien for comment.
The person who has made the biggest fuss over this controversy insists that the mistake only occurred in one place in the book. His argument is therefore flawed, because it requires that we ignore the published statement of Christopher Tolkien -- that the mistake was repeated throughout the book.
It is impossible to explain things to people who so rationalize their arguments that they distort and "interpret" the facts in favor of their own points of view. It's frankly not worth the effort to try any more.
The bottom line is that the backstory in the first edition of The Hobbit includes Thror's map, and that map establishes a Thrain as King Under the Mountain (not in conjunction with Thror, as some have suggested). So, the first edition of The Hobbit indisputably includes TWO Thrains, not one, and it really doesn't matter if J.R.R. Tolkien made a mistake. The mistake, if that is all it was, went into publication and became part of the first edition canon.
It is probably no coincidence that, after he had written a history for Durin's Folk (to be included in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings) in which there was only one Thrain, Tolkien changed that history to include two Thrains -- sometime after he had received a proof of the second edition of The Hobbit.
Everyone can probably agree that Tolkien noticed the discrepancy between his yet-unpublished history of Durin's Folk and the inclusion of a Thrain, King Under the Mountain on Thror's Map at that time, and he elected to change the as-yet unpublished Lord of the Rings rather than the map. And it would not be until the 1960s, when the third edition of The Hobbit was published, that Tolkien altered the text of the book enough to warrant removing the explanatory note. But in doing so, he didn't add any text referring to the two Thrains.
