Sophia the Thunder Mistress, you wrote:
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I wonder what the final bit signifies then? The destruction of the entire tree and the preservation of just one leaf- LoTR? Has most of Tolkien's 'tree' been underappreciated? Or did he mean to say that the work was truly better in snapshots than as a whole (honestly I find it much better as a whole...)?
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Tolkien begun writing 'The Lord of the Rings' in 1937, and he worked on it for 12 years !!!! [img]smilies/eek.gif[/img] , until 1949. When Tolkien wrote 'Leaf by Niggle', in 1943, he had stopped writing LotR and he thought that he would never be able to finish it.
So, I think that it is more likely that the 'leaf' that remains of Niggle work is 'The Hobbit' (which was already finished and published), than LotR. And that, at that moment, he thought that he would never been able of finishing any other work on Middle Earth, neither LotR, nor the Silmarillion (which would be the rest of the tree).
Luckily for all of us, LotR was published [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img] If not, possibly all the work on Middle Earth would have never been published..., it would have ended like Niggle's tree [img]smilies/frown.gif[/img]