LotR -- Book 1 - Chapter 04 – A Short Cut to Mushrooms

[Aiwendil]

Davem wrote:

In short, the early drafts are among the worst things he ever set down on paper

I'm not sure I agree. Certainly they are not quite as good as the final version, and certainly if one inserted them into the finished version of LotR, one would have far inferior product. But in their own way I think they are not so bad. If LotR had turned out to be simply a sequel to The Hobbit, in more or less its style and on its scale, they might not have worked too badly. What I think these early drafts really show is how long it took Tolkien to figure out what sort of a book it was he was writing.