Quote:
Originally Posted by Troelsfo
That statement (“The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own.”) is in ‘The Tower of Cirith Ungol’...
|
Ah thank you Troelsfo. I mixed things up there [I think I mixed up
The Land of Shadow with another quote in which the term Uru-hai is mentioned, but that's a different ball of twine]. Anyway you are correct, that's the statement I meant [Frodo's statement] and where it can be found.
Quote:
... about which Christopher Tolkien notes that his “father returned to the story of Frodo and Sam more than three years after he had ‘got the hero into such a fix’ (as he said in a letter of November 1944, VIII.218) ‘that not even an author will be able to extricate him without labour and difficulty.’” (Sauron Defeated (HoMe 9), part 1 ch. II, p.18). In their J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Chronology, Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond explain, under the entry for 14 August — 14 September 1948, that Tolkien in period used his son Michael's farm in Woodcote as a retreat while Michael and family were on holiday, and that he there Minor details have been cut by me (‘[...]’)
Frodo's statement enters at the earliest in the first fair copy manuscript, denoted D in Christopher Tolkien's explanations in Sauron Defeated.
So all in all we can say within a week or so when precisely Tolkien made that statement: during his stay at Payables Farm in Woodcote, he would continue through to the abandoned epilogue, so I think it is a fair guess that he would have finished drafting ‘The Tower of Cirith Ungol’ during the first week of his stay.
|
Good digging! I'm perhaps wrong -- or didn't dig deep enough myself -- but I have a vague memory of not finding Frodo's statement in any of the draft texts represented in
HME, so that while one could date the writing of this chapter with some certainty, does it remain possible that this statement [specifically] was a later addition at some unknown point?
I don't have
Sauron Defeated at hand at the moment, but when you write:
'... Frodo's statement enters at the earliest in the first fair copy manuscript, denoted D in Christopher Tolkien's explanations in Sauron Defeated.'
... does this rule out that it entered later? I'm just wondering if we could possibly have a scenario like:
A) Tolkien writes out the chapter but it doesn't yet include this statement [old idea still in place]
B) Tolkien begins new version of the Annals [Annals of Aman] [old idea still in place]
C) Darker tale from Eressea enters in revision to the
Annals of Aman [Orcs thought to be from Elves]
D) At some point before the main story of
The Return of the King goes to print, Tolkien adds Frodo's statement to this chapter.
That would seem [to me] a bit more 'tidy' as far as the external chronology goes, in conjunction with this change in thinking... but again I'm not sure it's possible and may be missing something.