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Loading... The History of the Hobbit Part Two: Return to Bag-Endby John D. Rateliff, J. R. R. Tolkien
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Belongs to SeriesThe History of the Hobbit (book 2) Awards
The History of the Hobbit presents for the first time, in two volumes, the complete unpublished text of the original manuscript of J.R.R.Tolkien's The Hobbit, accompanied by John Rateliff's lively and informative account of how the book came to be written and published. As well as recording the numerous changes made to the story both before and after publication, it examines - chapter-by-chapter - why those changes were made and how they reflect Tolkien's ever-growing concept of Middle-earth.As well as reproducing the original version of one of literature's most famous stories, both on its own merits and as the foundation for The Lord of the Rings, this new book includes many little-known illustrations and previously unpublished maps for The Hobbit by Tolkien himself. Also featured are extensive annotations and commentaries on the date of composition, how Tolkien's professional and early mythological writings influenced the story, the imaginary geography he created, and how Tolkien came to revise the book years after publication to accommodate events in The Lord of the Rings.This second volume picks up Bilbo Baggins' story half-way through his journey and chronicles how, after much adversity, he must still face the mighty dragon, Smaug, carry out the burglary for which he has been recruited, and return safely home to Bag-End. But not everything goes to plan... No library descriptions found.  |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.912Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1901-1945LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.21)
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Wikipedia in English (3)
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This isn't so much a second volume as a second half of Rateliff's book; the first numbered page is 469! So the two really need to be read as a single unit. Having recovered from this discovery, I still enjoyed the detail on Tolkien's construction of the original text of The Hobbit, the subsequent revisions to bring the Gollum episode and other elements better in line with The Lord of the Rings, and finally his abandonment of an attempt to rewrite the entire thing to get rid of some of the continuity errors (eg, what did the dwarves do with their musical instruments after they played them in Bag End?) at the behest of an unnamed female friend who persuaded him to let the text be.
Rateliff incudes more nuggets of analysis of the story's roots in literature and in Tolkien's other writing, in which the Father Christmas Letters, written around the same time, are a prominent source. The best bits were in the first volume, but I did find it interesting to note that Tolkien drew more illustrations of Smaug than of any other character in his legendarium, and Rateliff teases out Tolien's fascination with dragons from the first thing he could recall ever writing, as a small child, through Beowulf and the early versions of what was to become the Silmarillion, to Smaug. There's also an interesting reflection on whether the Arkenstone is a Silmaril: it is, and at the same time it isn't, and the fact that we ask the question at all says interesting things about concepts of canonicity.
The two volumes are really for completists only, but strongly recommended for them. (