The Hobbit - Chapter 01 - An Unexpected Party

[davem]

No, I'm not going back on what I said & joining in as a regular - just popping my head round the door...

Originally Posted by Child

I know Davem has mentioned that he views The Hobbit as outside Tolkien's Legendarium. His statement struck me. I suppose that could be so, depending on how you define "Legendarium". But my gut feeling is that it's difficult to exclude the Hobbit from this wider body of writings. The story is just too important in how it set up the main characters and the story line for LotR. Frankly. I have an easier time including The Hobbit as part of the Legendarium than I do some of the earliest material in The Book of Lost Tales, which seems to be radically different than the later writings by Tolkien. I can't think about Bilbo in The Hobbit without considering what was to happen to him later. Maybe that's right or wrong but it's a given I can not change.

Now I keep remembering things In LotR or in Unfinished Tales, and demanding to know why Tolkien changed this, or how something in The Hobbit foreshadows something else in LotR. In a way that's too bad, since I've lost the immediacy of the text.

And that's the problem I have with including TH in the Legendarium. I wish Tolkien had left it as it was - with the original Riddles in the Dark chapter, the references to Policemen & Tinkers, et al.

Of course, Bilbo's story is referred to in LotR (& The Quest of Erebor), so it is part of the Legendarium. This version of it, however, should be kept to one side as a children's story, a kind of 'Fantasia' on Middle-earth, an introduction if you like - imo, of course.

The line Esty quotes: 'One morning long ago in the quiet of the world, where there was less noise and more green..' is so evocative (as is the reference to 'the wild were-worms in the Last Desert), that the 'Tookish' part of me wants to run off & see Mountains!

I love getting lost in the world of TH but I think its overshadowed by LotR & The Sil if you include it in with them & that simple sense of wonder it inspires can disappear if you're trying to force it to fit. So, for me LotR & the Sil are the 'true' account of events in Middle-earth, while TH is a version of it that has passed down through various hands, minds & voices. In many ways its more magical than the Legendarium because of the unexplained vistas. The borders of the story of TH could open up onto any landscape - its only LotR that 'fixes' it in a particular place & time & removes it from the world of fairy story & takes it up into the realm of high myth - which, for me, is a place it doesn't belong.

Anyway.....