When winter first begins to bite

When winter first begins to bite was a brief "Hobbit adage" that Bilbo Baggins recited in The Fellowship of the Ring.

History

When Bilbo, Frodo Baggins, Peregrin Took, Meriadoc Brandybuck, Samwise Gamgee, and Gandalf were discussing the Council of Elrond and the upcoming journey to Mordor. Bilbo observed that they will be traveling in the winter because Frodo decided to wait until his birthday to start his journey to Rivendell as a way of honoring Bilbo. When Bilbo found out, he disapproved of his decision because he would never have given Bag End to the Sackville-Baggins on his birthday. Bilbo then lamented in a poem how Frodo would be traveling during the winter.

When winter first begins to bite
and stones crack in the frosty night,
when pools are black and trees are bare,
'tis evil in the Wild to fare.

Sometime during the writing of the Red Book of Westmarch, someone scribbled a strange verse in the marginalia of "the page recording Bilbo's When winter first begins to bite", though how they relate is untold.

The wind so whirled a weathercock
He could not hold his tail up;
The frost so nipped a throstlecock
He could not snap a snail up.
'My case is hard!' the throstle cried,
And 'All is vane' the cock replied;
And so they set their wail up.

In other versions

The first drafts of When winter first begins to bite were written sometime between late August 1940 and the autumn of 1941 at the same time as the poem "I sit beside the fire and think".

Originally, Bilbo stated to Frodo that he was going to go off "just when winter's beginning to bite", but this was changed immediately to Bilbo's poem.

The scribble said to be written in the marginalia of the Red Book was actually originally the first stanza of a longer poem that Tolkien wrote five years before on November 5 of 1956. Tolkien wrote two illegible drafts on "a compliments slip from the London office of the 3M Company" in addition to a legible draft on the back "of a memo by D.S. Parsons, Sub-Warden of Merton College" in Oxford.

Inspiration

Bilbo's poem was likely inspired by a poem in Act V, Scene 2 of William Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, a set play which was used in 1915 at Oxford for Tolkien's final examinations.

Background

Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond explain in their commentary on Tolkien's Preface that the term "weathercock" is another word for a weathervane, a bird-shaped indicator of the direction of the wind, while "throstlecock, or throstle for short, is an old-fashioned name for a song thrush". They also suggest that the scribble was written by Bilbo, though how they came to this conclusion is untold.