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Old 06-01-2002, 10:44 AM   #1
littlemanpoet
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Pipe Should Frodo have been JRRT's New Alfwine?

JRRT always intended for Frodo to go west over the sea, to Tol Eressea. Any of you who have read the Books of Lost Tales know that Alfwine was JRRT's character who magically left England and came to Tol Eressea. Is there any evidence to support my wild notion that Tolkien intended Frodo to be his new Alfwine in the Silmarillion he intended to publish? Even if there was no evidence to support this, do you think it would have been a good idea? Why or why not?
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Old 06-02-2002, 06:08 PM   #2
Child of the 7th Age
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Littlemanpoet --

I think I rate this question as 12 out of 10 in difficulty! I had to read and dig a while, before I even felt semi-competent to offer an opinion, and there are many who know HoMe better than I who could probably offer a much better opinion. But here goes.....

No, I do not think Tolkien ever considered using Frodo in the manner of an Elf-friend to retell and pass on the stories of the Silm after he reached Tol Eressea. I have several reasons for this.

First, when Bilbo passed on his materials to Frodo, there were apparently four volumes. One volume was the private diaries which Frodo went on to finish and this became the heart of the Hobbit and the Lotr. When Frodo gave this volume to Sam and asked him to finish it, there were 79 and one half chapters completed plus blank pages. When Sam finished his share there would be 81 complete chapters. This corresponds to the 81 chapters of the Hobbit and the LotR together. (I even counted them to make sure.)

But there were three other volumes given by Bilbo to Frodo called Translations from the Elvish by BB. Later, in the appendix, we learn these concerned the Elder Days and "were little used by Frodo." These were apparently the material which Bilbo transcribed while he was in Rivendell and used the ancient libraries there. Although these volumes are never explicitly called the Silm, it seems pretty clear that they were a translation of the ancient stories.

So, if Bilbo had already translated the stories, it would be impossible for Frodo to later assume the role you suggest.

Take a look in The Lost Road, HoMe V, p. 21, note 7. Here, it's clear that, even after the publication of LotR, Tolkien was still toying with the idea of using Aelfwine as the Elf-friend narrator/translator for the ancient tales. In interpreting a passage that might suggest Tol Eressea had been swallowed up at the same time as Numenor, Christopher Tolkien says this was impossible:

Quote:
...this would be very stange, for it would imply the abandonment of the entire story of Aelfwine's voyage to Toleressea in ages after; yet Aelfwine as recorder and pupil was still present in my father's writings after the completion of the LotR.
If Tolkien was still working with Aelfwine, then he wouldn't be shifting over to Frodo.

Charles Noad's "On the Construction of the Silmarillion" in Tolkien's Legendarium (a GREAT book of criticism and comment on HoMe) says the same thing. He goes through volmes X-XII of HoMe and comes up with lots of references that show Tolkien, as late as 1958 or possibly 1960, still had Aelfwine and sometimes even Elendil as the translator and transmitter of Elvish lore.

Finally, by the time Tolkien died in 1973, there was, according to his son, "no trace or suggestion of any 'device' or 'framework' (i.e. the Elf-friend translator) in which it (i.e. the Silm) was to be set. Lost Tales, p. 5) He went on like this:

Quote:
I think that in the end he concluded nothing would serve , and no more would be said beyond an explanation of how (within the imagined world) it came to be recorded.
So, the whole motif of the Elf-friend transmitter was lost.

Plus there's another factor. Tolkien was in many respects extremely ambivalent about hobbits (quite unlike myself!) Someday, I would like to post a thread on this--JRRT can definitely see their limitations and has some quite negative things to say about Sam later in his life.

There's an unpublished letter written July 28, 1955 from Tolkien to Mrs. Bernard Smith in Newark,Delaware. (I copied it off of e-bay where it was being sold). It said:

Quote:
I do not suppose I shall write any more about hobbits; but the success of "The Lord of the Rings" has been quite surprising to the publishers as to me (possibly more so) so it seems likely also that they will wish to publish the Legends of the Frist and Second Ages (written first, but refused).
That doesn't sound like Tolkien planned to do anything more with Frodo.

Now, as to what I would have liked......HeHe....that is a different thing.

I'm convinced that people who read the Silm tend to fall into two groups--the hobbits and the elves. The Elves love and adore Silm. The hobbits scratch their heads and have some trouble. I am afraid I fall into the hobbit group. Interestingly, I have less trouble reading HoMe than the Silm, but that's another issue.

I know that many people would throw tomatoes at me if I suggested this. Personally, I would have loved if Tolkien had taken a hobbit Elf-friend and used him to reinterpret and transmit the stories of the Silm. And to see Frodo again would be quite a treat. An Elf-friend, by definition, stands half in and half out of the land of Faerie. I find it easier to gain access through such an intermediary figure. In LotR, we see things largely, though not entirely, through the eyes of the hobbits, e.g. Frodo in Lorien; Merry and Pippin re the Ents; Sam's continuing comments on the nature of Elves. I find this approach much easier and emotionally satisfying than the Silm, but many--perhaps most--would disagree with me.

The entire tone and writing of the Silm would be different, that is if the Elf-friend did anything beyond being a mere translator which was apparently the limited role that Bilbo took in regard to the ancient stories.

So I'm quite sure what would please me personally would not please many of the Tolkien communiy who are very serious about Elves and Elvish history! (Gets ready for flying tomatoes!)

It would, however, be an amazing piece of fanfic to rewrite the Silm from the perspective of a hobbit.

sharon, the 7th age hobbit
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Old 06-02-2002, 07:48 PM   #3
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sharon,

I don't think your preference for seeing things through a hobbit's eyes is at all odd. I suspect the balance between hobbits and elves will be fairly well split, or at least, there will be some people who will have a hard time choosing which perspective they prefer... I'm waffling a bit myself...

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