Quote:
Originally Posted by The Squatter of Amon Rûdh
If anything the real problem consists in the tone of LR, which is novelistic and simply inconsistent with the conceit that it is a translation of historical documents by different authors. In my opinion, The Hobbit suffers in the same way, since well-adjusted people do not refer to themselves in the third person in their own diaires. Perhaps that was the argument presented in Tolkien Studies.
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The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings are claimed by Tolkien to be retellings from the
Red Book of Westmarch in which presumably he retells the tales originally written in the first person in the third person. Never is it indicated that the original text supposedly used by Tolkien was written in the third person.
Though it might be supposed to be.
Julius Ceasar’s
Commentaries on the Gallic War and
Commentaries on the Civil Wars are both written in the third person and speak mostly about Caesar’s activities. I have never encountered any scholar who claims that this means the works are not genuinely written by Caesar. Similarly if the Red Book was supposedly also written in the third person, this would indicate nothing about how well-adjusted the authors were.
Traditionally the first five books of the Bible were written in the 3rd person by Moses and the next book was written by Joshua in the third person.
Works which are presented as though they were derived from an original document but are in fact simply fiction are very common. In the 4th century appeared “The Chronicle of the Trojan War” in Latin, supposedly written by Dictys of Crete, claiming to be a translation of an account of the Trojan War written by a contemporary. Similar was a work attributed to Daries Phrygius.
The medieval “Prose Lancelot” claimed to be an adaptation from an older work written by contemporaries of King Arthur, and later works, such as the “Post-Vulgate Arthurian Cycle” and the “Prose Tristan” claimed to also come from the same source. The 14th century
Perceforest, an account of early kings of Britain, claims to be a translation from ancient Greek of a manuscript found in an abbey near the river Humber
. The fantasy author James Branch Cabell attributes some of his works to a non-existent 15th century writer Nicholas de Caen and fantasy author Willam Goldman pretends that his book
A Princess Bride is an abridgement of a work by a non-existent author S. Morgenstern.
Other works that claim, sometimes not explicitly, to be from a manuscript are Mark Twain’s
Huckleberry Finn, Herman Melville’s
Moby Dick, Jonathan Swift’s
Gullivar’s Travels, William Hope Hodgson’s
The House on the Borderland, Jan Potocki’s
The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, a well as many others.
The problem with Brljak’s hypotheses is that nowhere does Tolkien or any of the other authors I mention put much or any emphasis on various copies of the supposed original manuscript. Tolkien does mention various versions of the Red Book, but places these versions, when he mentions them, early in the Fourth Age.
The works do not attempt to use supposed variant versions of these manuscripts, except for Ťolkien’s use of two versions of the riddle games in
The Hobbit, and the two versions are apparently found in most if not all manuscript versions.
Brljak’s claim that a transfer of the original documents through an untold number of copiests is of primary importance for understanding Tolkien seems to me to be nonsense. Tolkien never mentions any details of the manuscript transmission beyond the early Fourth Age. The matter of transmission is more important in the Sherlock Holmes stories where the supposed author Doctor Watson admits to having fictionalized his accounts to protect the innocent.