A 'darker' Hobbit
 

Among all the fuss surrounding CoH we seem to have forgotten the other major Tolkien related publishing event of this year.

I found this on a search about the 'Mr Baggins: A History of the Hobbit' (the equivalent, I suppose of HoM-e for TH):

Mr Baggins is due to be published in two volumes in May & June.

I'm assuming that this '3rd edition' will basically show Tolkien's attempt to re-write TH along the lines of what we have in The Quest of Erebor. Of course, its difficult to discuss the details of a book that hasn't been published yet, but it just got me wondering whether we'd consider such a 're-write' as 'better' than the version we have. If Rateliff is correct that this version, if completed, would have been the '3rd Edition' then this 'darker' version would have replaced the one we have - in the same way that the 2nd edition would have replaced the 1st.

Would we have missed the 'lighter' version of the story - the 'children's book'? Personally, I'm looking forward to reading 'Mr Baggins' as much as CoH.

Any thoughts?

(Oh, & btw, there's a new edition of Mr Bliss out in October)

Interesting news davem, I for one enjoy the lighter version too, but I would definitely like to read this more recent one too.
Perhaps a sort of attempt to close the gap between the LotR and The Hobbit, as far as the language used or the style of writing is concerned. I enjoyed the chapter in the UT with all the extra-information, so I'll be looking forward to purchasing the book :)

I'm perfectly happy with the version we have now to be honest, though of course I'll want to read this. I'm not sure if my contentment is due to familiarity or not, but I do know that the version I have read so often has a special place, and any new version wouldn't be able to take that away. A bit like 'New Coke' was never going to replace the original flavour I've grown to love. ;) Sometimes, a rest is better than a change...

It's quite annoying actually that Tolkien was such a perfectionist - had he not been so obsessed with redrafting maybe he would have published more work in his lifetime? But then this begs the question, would it have been as good? :confused:

I didn't know about this and I am delighted. I find The Hobbit cloying now- though I found it still "works" well read aloud to young children - and have often wished he had written a grown up version in the style of The Quest of Erebor which would fit better with the LOTR ..but then I also wish he had rewritten some of the early chapters to fit in with the rest of LOTR....

Hopefully this updated version will make it possible to take the story more seriously in our discussions here. As it is, it's way too old to be relevant to the post-LotR Middle-earth. There might actually be some useful information about dragons, Mirkwood elves, the Necromancer or Beorn in this revision.

That's a good point and I've wondered about it before, but unlike us, most people have trouble reading LOTR, let alone all the other manuscripts etc that we drag up. I think it's better to have used a lot of time on one story and made it amazing, than skimp for economics and make it many average ones.

I think that's why the LOTR movies were so good, they actually wanted to make a good movie, shot on location, with handmade armour and stuff etc. You could argue that the actual SCRIPTS were rubbish but at least it looks good... ;)

Would you have been happy with it as a 'replacement' though? Because that would have been what happened - we'd simply not have the existing Hobbit, it would merely be a curious collector's item for sale at high prices on eBay (as V1 is now).

Did you read The Hobbit first? I've got the feeling you did? This does have a point....;)

Would kids who read The Hobbit at an early age as a 'kids' book' still be caught up with the same enthusiasm for Tolkien if they read a darker book? Would they read it at all? It's one of those books that any parent, no matter how 'puritanical', would feel comfortable giving to a child to read, but I'm not sure they would feel the same about a darker story.

The thought of having the early chapters of LotR re-written fills me with abject horror though!

I've absolutely NO problem with the Hobbit 'not fitting' - I mean, nor does the Sil, and thinking along those lines leaves us with a 'canon' of one book, which is just stupid to my mind. Few if any writers produced a lifetime's body of work which was entirely consistent in tone, voice and style, and I have no problem that Tolkien's work is the same. It's interesting rather than annoying to me. ;)

I have no problem with not fitting per se ... it is the fact that it is so much a children's book withall those asides that makes it just about unreadable for me now .let alone the Tralalalally Elves..... It seems to be the children's version of teh "real story".

Children love dark books - always have done ..... though I do wonder at the sanity of the parents who take very tiny children to the Harry Potter films.... especially latish showings.... but the Hobbit is already pretty dark and the most upsetting thing was the goblins eating the ponies (which Tolkien clearly realised given the high equine survival rate in LOTR). For my money the Barrow Wight and Old Man Willow are two of the scariest part of LOTR and that is in the "Hobbit style bit". It is not content but style...

This is another interesting bit I found from Rateliff:

Clearly here we are dealing with the first draft of the story, & these primary world references were removed before the story was sent to the publisher. But one can see a continuum here - we have at the start a very 'fairystoryish' world, filled with references to 'exotic' places like the Hindu Kush & the Gobi Desert, & at the end, by the time of the proposed '3rd edition' an attempt to fully integrate TH into the Legendarium, not just in terms of style, but also of language.

I think in a way we can see the process repeated in LotR - the early chapters, as Mith points out, are very close in style to TH as we have it, while by the end we are completely in the world of the Sil. Hence, if this 3rd ed. of TH had been completed One can only assume that the early chapters (or at least the first chapter) of LotR would also have required re-writing as that would have seemed 'out of place'.

Lal's point is interesting - given a 3rd ed Hobbit would have replaced the one we have, how many fans would have been drawn into Tolkien's world? Would any of us really want to sacrifice that innocent world, where there was less noise & more green, simply to have something that 'fitted' better with LotR? Its not so much the 'darker' style that would have 'excluded' children, perhaps, as the more adult style & language that would have resulted - its not a book that parents would have chosen to read to their children.

And of course, one would have to wonder (given the reaction of A&U's reader to the Sil legends Tolkien offered as a sequel to TH) whether, if TH had been in a more 'adult' style in the first place, we'd have anything of Middle-earth at all. It seems that publishers were much more 'tolerant' of 'fantastical' literature back then when it was aimed at children (not discounting, of course, the works of Dunsany & Morris).

http://www.amazon.com/History-Hobbit...4574185&sr=8-1

960 pages?! Can that be right?

In any case, I am looking very much forward to a darker, more adult and more LOtR-consistent "Mr. Baggins." In my opinion, it won't detract at all from previous editions of "The Hobbit." Personally, I would like to introduce my children to the original (2nd edition) and let them discover LOtR, Sil, and the "new" Hobbit" later and at their own pace...

Perhaps this will settle the "dwarves set off on this quest with no weapons" problem, which was always one of the oddest things for me.

Interesting news. I'm eager to read this eventually.

Well, its in two volumes http://www.amazon.co.uk/History-Hobb...4587559&sr=1-2

& http://www.amazon.co.uk/History-Hobb...4587559&sr=1-3

Who is the editor ..someone from Marquette?

Edit:
*Googles* .... yes in a way.....

John D Rateliff. bit more here:
http://www.tolkienlibrary.com/press/...thehobbit2.htm

This is magnificent news! I had heard that a book was being prepared, but never expected it to release this year, the same year of CoH. 2007 will be the greatest year for Tolkien publication since the release of The Silmarillion, some thirty years ago.

Now I can't decide which I'm looking forward to the most: CoH or HoH.

Hurin has always been one of my favorite Tolkien characters, and First Age stories are generally more appealing to me. However, nearly 1,000 pages of unpublished late-era Tolkien is pretty amazing, even if it is just Hobbit rewrites. I mentioned the possibility of some new light shed on certain Hobbit peculiarities before, but knowing that we'll be receiving two fat volumes has really got my imagination excited.

I have been waiting for this book for many years--back when it was assigned to another author. To be truthful, I'm more excited about this than CoH, but I am probably in the minority.

I actually don't have a problem with "another" Hobbit. We already have 3 Hobbits: the original, the revised, and the parts in UT discussing Bilbo and such. Most of us see the revised as the "real" Hobbit though there are still folk around who cut their teeth on the first one. I suspect the revisions will not take the place of anything....but just be another alternative. We already have this situation in terms of other things in the Legendarium...the same story in Silm and HoMe with different viewpoints. I honestly don't think it will knock out the original.

Plus won't that 960 pages read more like HoMe (discussions of variant text from different periods) rather than the Hobbit itself. Discuss of variants is interesting but doesn't tug at the heart the way a "real" book does.

By the way, I am glad you put up this thread. I am looking forward to discussing the book when it comes out.

Just to clarify: technically there are already three 'versions' or editions, the 1st (1937), 2nd (1951) and 3rd (1966), in the last of which Tolkien cleaned up some passages, mostly to integrate better with The Lord of the Rings. To get really geeky, each publisher of the 3rd Edition used a slightly different text (finally resolved by Doug Anderson).

Technically yea, but its not the '3rd edition' that Tolkien originally envisioned - I should have been clearer. Can't help wondering whether that '3e' would have been a 'Myths Transformed' kind of mistake on Tolkien's part - suppose we'll be able to form our own opinions on that when the work finally sees the light. Of course, it seems the Hobbit movie will be this very 'darker', more 'adult' version of the story...

Like Child I too am more excited by 'Mr Baggins' than by CoH - after all many of us have read CoH in its various versions, so it won't exactly be 'new' to us. Its not just the 3e version that I'm looking forward to reading, but also the original draft - which, as I said, seems much more 'fairystory' like.

Yes, you're definitely right. I am kind of a nut about collecting Hobbits (books...not live ones) When I started collecting Tolkien books, I was trying to get "everything" Tolkien wrote, but that proved impossible as the different editions and reprints exploded. More recently, I've focused on the different editions and translations of The Hobbit. There is a difference between #2 and #3 but I don't think of it in the same way as the major difference in the storyline between #1 and #2, or the extra material in UT.

There's some really great art out there in Hobbit translations....artists that most English-speaking readers are less familiar with...which makes these fun to collect.

Davem -- And I thought I was the only one counting the days till these volumes came out. They've been delayed so many times....for years and years....even more than Hammond's guides. It will be interesting to see what JR does. There's another web group he posts on and I've kind of quietly watched the progress of the book that way.

The other book I am really waiting on is this: J.R.R. Tolkien: Interviews, Reminiscences, and Other Essays (Hardcover)
by Douglas A. Anderson (Author), Marjorie J. Burns. It's been promised several times but still doesn't have a publication date.

It's a very different type of book but this description sounds interesting:

Oldest son Michael??? Hmm..

I'm with oblo, Child and davem on this one - I do look forward to the new Hobbit! Now that's partially because I'm not such a huge Sil fan - I think these books will be easier going than HoME. After all, the time in which Tolkien wrote the Hobbit is definitely more compact, so there should be more development than actual contradiction.

I've found out that there's a new book by Tom Shippey coming up: Selected Essays on Tolkien. I hope to get more information and to be able to buy it at the German Tolkien Seminar in May. We've also been informed of another interesting book: Inside Language: Linguistic and Aesthetic Theory in Tolkien by Ross Smith. More on that too when I see it.

I think I should say that I find it impossible to see The Hobbit as part of LOTR or The Silmarillion - every time I read about the Elves saying "Most astonishing wonderful!" or anything like that I just lose the illusion. I see The Hobbit as its own story set in its own universe; the Trolls can speak and have second names, the animals can talk, the Goblins are separate from Orcs and the Necromancer is not Sauron but a dark, myserious sorcerer in a distant land. I also dislike the idea that the writing style of TH is 'childish' - it is just a different writing style than what Tolkien wrote most of his other work in; it can be read perfectly well by teenagers and adults.

So in some ways, I am looking forward to seeing what LOTR version of the TH would be like - but I somehow prefer the original version.

I argued this very point a while back - based on things Verlyn Flieger said in a talk at the Tolkien 2005 conference in Birmingham, but it seemed just about everybody disagreed with me.

But you were right. Thjere's littled dout (per John Rateliff) that The Hobbit originally had no more connection to the legendarium than did Roverandom- although it wound up being drawn in. Even so, the borrowing of names like Elrond and the very inchoate Thu/Sur of the Fall of Numenor were really just throwaways, not intended especially seriously.

Clearly. Yet one can understand Tolkien's problem once the Hobbit sequel becomes LotR & the culmination of Legendarium. This is why I'm so fascinated to read his attempt to make it 'fit'. The drive for internal consistency seems to have dogged Tolkien for most of his creative life & is quite probably one of the main reasons he published so little on M-e.

I can't help wondering what would have happened if circumstances had been different & it had been Roverandom that had been picked up by A&U instead of TH, & what would have happened if they had asked for a sequel to that....

EDIT

Personally, I love TH, & wouldn't change it at all, but I hold to my guns on its inconsistency with the rest of the Legendarium. When I dared to raise my head above the parapet & say that 'tra-la-la-lally'ing Elves, & 'cockerney' trolls didn't fit into the Legendarium I got a good few responses from other posters attempting to 'prove' that they were perfectly consistent, & 'why shouldn't the Elves in Rivendell 'tra-la-la-lally the night away', or Trolls refer to their victims as 'Poor little blighters'?.....

I wonder whether those things will be seen to have survived into the proposed, 'more consistent' '3rd ed.'....

Yeah, and we still argue about this one even now. :P

Mostly as I just don't have this difficulty fitting in The Hobbit with the rest of Tolkien's work on Middle-earth. I thought Verlyn Flieger was being unfair to say it was full of 'Pigwiggenry' and thought "Tut-tut! What a soundbite that is!". Course I'm interested to see the rewrites, but The Hobbit as it is was quite Perilous enough for my view of Middle-earth anyway. It also has some nice grown up satire on English ways, which is most un-kiddy, and is easily dark enough to fit in, considering it is mostly about a smaller quest, not about the culmination of the Third Age and apocalyptic battles and returning high kings and the destruction of evil overlords and whatnot. And it has a ruddy great Dragon in it, which counts for plenty in my book. ;)

The third (1966) edition of The Hobbit that did come out has the Wood-elves lingering ‘in the twilight of our Sun and Moon’ while the Light-elves, Deep-elves and Sea-elves are living for ages in Faerie. But I would not consider that change a ‘mistake’. ;)

The question that occurs to me is whether he wanted to change TH simply in order to make it 'fit' better with the rest of the Legendarium, or whether he actually felt that it wasn't good enough in itself. His comment from 1937 that he seems to imply the latter

It seems from this comment that he was 'disappointed' with the book to some degree even before LotR was started. Even as a 'children's' book he seemed to have felt disappointed with it - in a 1967 interview with Philip Norman he states:

So TH wasn't written for Tolkien's own children, & the style is 'bad' (in Tolkien's own words) because it was written 'as if one was talking to children'. He seems to be saying that he only wrote it isn that style 'because he didn't want to be made fun of'. Strange admission, & one that seems to go completely against his position re Fairy Story as set out in OFS - that Fairy Stories are not for children. In this comment he seems to be saying the very opposite - that the 'immediate' audience for such stuff are children & that when you write such things you say they're 'for children' to avoid being made fun of.

So, up to the time he produced TH he saw children as the primary audience for such stories, but not too long afterwards he could stand up in front of an audience & state that Children are not the primary audience - adults are. I wonder what happened to cause the change?

Whatever, from his words, it seems that both the syle & much of the content of TH displeased Tolkien, & this seems to have been at least partly behind his desire to re-write it.

Hobbit detective story
 

I was interested by the views that The Hobbit just doesn't fit into the Legendarium and wanted to add my tupennyworth.

There are clear inconsistencies, like the cockney trolls and camp elves, but I would invoke a variant of the 'translator conceit' to cover these. If we imagine that The Hobbit was added in to the Red Book more or less complete by Frodo from Bilbo's story, then the question becomes, what was Bilbo writing?

I think that Bilbo was writing a children's story for his nephews and nieces, based on his adventures but in a less serious tone than we see in UT, for example. Therefore The Hobbit is a Frodo's childhood bed-time story. Of course, it is great story all by itself, but when we try to link it in to the Legendarium, I think it becomes the basis for detective work. In my opinion most of it is 'true' in Middle Earth terms but some aspects were altered by Bilbo either for dramatic effect or covering his tracks (such as the ring incident).

For example, I'd like to think that Bilbo 'really was' captured by the Trolls but that he invented most of their speech and names either because the original was not understandable or too foul for young ears! I can see Bilbo with an admiring circle of young Hobbits gathered round the fire one winter's evening doing all the Troll voices in proper fairy tale style and when some young Took or Brandybuck asked the name of the troll, inventing 'Bert' on the spur of the moment.

We have just got the second volume of The History of the Hobbit - Return to Bag End and davem is reciting bits out of the unfinished revised version that Tolkien attempted during the 1960s (picture the scene - he is laying on the settee with the book, accompanied by a cat, telling me things in a shocked tone of voice...).

Now without revealing too much for those of you who are also reading this or are waiting for the postman/Father Christmas/Birthday presentses to bring it, he has told me, knowing full well my reaction, that Tolkien altered one of my favourite sections, the agonising greeting scene between Gandalf and Bilbo. And that is not all. Suffice to say I am very pleased that Tolkien did not complete this revision and publish it. :eek:

And I have revived this thread because I have to ask:

What if it had been published?

The changes are really quite shocking. Yes, it might fit into the legendarium better (and thus have saved davem a lot of grief some time ago - remember his argument? It still rages in our house. ;) ), but really, so much of the colour and humour has been lost that I don't like it. Would we have been looking at the text we all know and love so well as a mere comic curiosity?

Mercy, don't tease us like that; we Americans won't get the book for a while longer yet!

I know Tolkien grew to despise the style of TH, but I still think it's most astonishing wonderful. Based on what Lal has said about his "3rd edition" revisions thus far, it's probably a good thing he never completed them -- though I would love to have a Hobbit that fit perfectly into the Legendarium, to compare with the one we all know and love.

I've been rereading Tolkien's letters a lot lately (a marvelous volume, that: enlightening about M-E and about so many other things; Tolkien had a lot of wisdom that never made it into his books) and it seems clear to me that he envisioned TH as being part of the Legendarium. Wish I could provide direct quotes, but my volume is not with me at present.

Probably that's the main reason he wanted to revise it so extensively, though; because he viewed it as a part of his Legendarium, but felt that its style was unworthy.

Well, sadly, I've said all that and not expressed an original thought. But all this issue of revision does raise a question to me. Much of the controversy among Tolkienites regarding the (possibly) impending Hobbit film centers around the essential change in tone that PJ or whoever would make. But can it not be argued that changing TH from a light G or PG into a heavy PG-13 is in line with Tolkien's desires? Perhaps the movie (if and when it gets made, which I believe it will) will be much more faithful to JRRT's vision than any would expect.

I cannot wait to get these books and see what Tolkien had in mind for his 3rd edition.

As Rateliff points out the main effect is to make Gandalf less 'eccentric' & more like the Gandalf we know from LotR, & Bilbo actually a lot stupider - at one point he comments that the Lonely mountain must be a few days journey away! Bree & the Rangers get a mention, but its the 'rationalising' Tolkien attempts that break the spell to a great degree - the Dwarves leave a bag of instruments in the porch, rather than pulling them out of nowhere, the Trolls are still speak 'cockerney' & there is more development of the journey to Rivendell, in an attempt to match the journey time of the Hobbits & Strider. And the mentions of an 'engine' & a 'pop gun' are gone (of course, removing the 'engine' reference from TH makes the reference to an 'express train' in LotR more glaring & out of place).

Basically, Tolkien begins re-writing the story from the start, but before long he is simply making alterations to odd sentences, & getting himself into more & greater difficulties. Rateliff points out that TH is set in a 'fairytale' world where moonphases & details of time & distance are not really that important, but LotR is a more 'realistic' work & what emerges is that TH could not have been rewritten in the style of LotR without completely destroying the magic.

One of my favourite lines 'less noise & more green' is lost. Interesting addition to the inns of the Shire: The 'All-welcome Inn at the junction of the Northway & East Road. "So called because much used by travellers through the Shire, especially by Dwarves".

Apparently Tolkien gave the manuscript, as far as it went, to a friend, who responded 'Its good, but its not The Hobbit.' Chapter 1 is renamed 'A Well-Planned Party', & the Narrator (irritating or charming depending on your point of view) disappears. In the end Tolkien seems to have lost interest simply because such a re-telling would have meant a total re-write, & ultimately a whole new story. Interesting to read but ultimately a dead end, sadly.

As to the proposed movie adopting a more 'adult' style in telling the story, well, Tolkien couldn't do it without breaking the spell, so I doubt PJ & co could....

Note the different title of Chapter 1 - 'A Well planned Party' as opposed to 'An Unexpected Party' in the original. Clearly the party was unexpected by Bilbo, & so the focus was to be on him as hero of the story. The change to making the party 'well planned' puts the emphasis more on Bilbo as 'victim' of the machinations of others. Bilbo becomes less intelligent in the story, more at the mercy of others.

That's pretty grim, actually. It sounds like a cheap motel :(

I do have to laugh that Tolkien retained his Cockernee trolls. One of the usual criticisms levelled at TH as 'not being part of the legendarium' is the use of the trolls in this way - Flieger even brought this out in support of her own argument against TH being suitable for the legendarium! So clearly Tolkien himself thought that Cockernee Trolls were perfectly alwight. ;)

Makes you wonder - the changes, once you get into them, are not very nice at all. It's like hearing about an ugly motorway being driven through a much loved piece of ancient woodland. Maybe we should stop griping about the style of The Hobbit being so different and hence it not 'fitting in'?

Well, I don't think the word "spell" would come into play even if PJ gave us a Hobbit that did have cockney trolls and tralalalalling elves.

But they're only annoying if TH is read in the light of LotR. As part of TH as a stand alone tale (which is what it was meant to be) they fit. Reading Tolkien's attempt to revise TH shows that it can't be done. I'm sure many of those who are looking forward to a TH movie are assuming that it will be in the style of the LotR movies. It probably will be, but it won't be TH as we know it. The assumption, & one that Tolkien shared when he began the revison apparently, is that TH is an 'adult' story like LotR but simply written in a whimsical 'children's story' style. It isn't. The story is what it is. To rewrite it as an 'adult' story & make it fit with the LotR movies will result in something that is 'almost, but not quite entirely, unlike The Hobbit.'

That is one viewpoint. The other is that JRRT simply tired of it and went on to something else .... probably something else which was not finished either. His not completing the rewrite of THE HOBBIT may speak more to his work habits and changing interest in the world of ME than it does that such a HOBBIT rewrite simply cannot be done.

Regardless, all of this certainly will give a sheen of credibility to any efforts by Jackson or other film makers to make a more adult HOBBIT which fits in better to the style and approach of LOTR films.

You have to read the section to see why he gave up, & why it couldn't be done. The attempted re-write simply doesn't work.

Possibly. To me it will show they haven't learned the lesson Tolkien learned. I wonder how many of those who want a 'Hobbit' movie actually want a movie in the style of the book, & how many want a 'grown-up' version. It strikes me that those who want such a 'grown-up' version don't actually want a Hobbit movie at all & perhaps dislike the fact that TH is a children's book. TH is a fairy tale, full of fairy tale characters & situations. It can't be re-written in another style. I repeat - the friend who Tolkien lent the manuscript to told him 'Its good, but its not The Hobbit'. And it is 'good' in its own way - not great (& TH is a 'great' book) - but good, or at least interesting. But a movie in that style would not be The Hobbit at all.

To my mind attempting to do what a far more creative person than you attempted & failed to do doesn't lend credibility to the attempts of lesser minds -& I don't want to argue that point: read 'Return to Bag End' & you'll see he did fail to re-write TH in the style of LotR because it couldn't be done - & if the inventor of M-e couldn't achieve that I don't see how anyone else could.

Again, you seem to impart JRRT with superhuman almost god-like qualities that no other single human could ever hope to match. If JRRT did not do it then no one can. Nonsense. There are many type of creativity and talent. Some is evidenced in writing of books, others in making of films. To say that one is "far more creative" and to use a phrase like "lesser minds" is simply silly.

JRRT himself felt that LOTR was not a filmable book. Other creative minds proved him wrong.

I will not use such value loaded terms as "lesser" in making that comparison.

It's at least worth a debate, anyway. Just be careful not to fall off topic about whether LOTR was indeed shown to be a "filmable" book, which is another thread in itself.

On the one hand, I'm inclined to agree with davem that if Tolkien couldn't do it, why should PJ bother trying? On the other, StW makes the good point that JRRT is in the end a fallible human like the rest of us. I think surely that the issue of the difference in mediums between a book and a movie should come into play here. Is PJ making a PG-13 Hobbit essentially the same as JRRT writing a PG-13 Hobbit? Or do the differences in the two forms of art make it possible for PJ to succeed where Tolkien failed?

I haven't made up my mind either way on this issue, honestly. And of course, though I've learned a lot about the book/movie differences, I'm still rather a novice in that area. Not to mention that I haven't even read Tolkien's "darker Hobbit." I'll let somebody else talk now.