A 'darker' Hobbit

[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

I wonder, are there other writers who have done this kind of revision/editting in 'second' editions?

I don't know so much about writers themselves but after they're dead things have been re-printed alongside with the "originals"... as the markets have many times been saturated already. So surely to make the cash-machine sing in the first place...

In Finland there was a case just a few years ago when a piece central to Finninsh 20th century literature, Väinö Linna's "The Unknown Soldier", was reprinted by the name of "A War Novel". It had in it all the things that the editor for the publishing company had took out from the original version printed in italics (like some versions of Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita" under Sovjet cencorship).

In the end it turned out that most of the deletions were mainly literary shortcuts and indeed "betterments", not political choices as so many people had foreseen...

So these markets as well seem to work more on profit than artistic integrity... so sad as it is.

Would there be this discussion without today's competition of quartal performance by all the publishers as well which seem even to include a possibility of taking in the cash-flow from all the Tolkien fans with a third version of the Hobbit?