The Family

I’ve been reading the History of the Hobbit set. I’m not finished, but I’m all full of observations .. and it’s been a while since anyone posted anything.

But first, a total aside … Chris –
Some time ago, we lost the line saying who posted what. Mom wrote a question about that, and for some reason her post got put in with the links (under all our wish lists). And seeing it there is just one of those little details that has become overwhelmingly distracting to me. Could you move the post into the post space, out of the link space? And .. why doesn’t the authorship of each post show up any more? That was a pretty useful thing; not sure why WordPress would have gotten rid of it. Weird.

Anyway .. musings on book ..

It’s a two book set, but there’s no real distinction between the two. They just split it in the middle so the binding would be reasonable. I’m of mixed minds about where they put the split. They went with split that would give them two books of the closest to the same length. However, it isn’t really a logical split in the contents. I’m of mixed minds about that.

I thought that it was going to be tracking the various sources of the material that led to the Hobbit. But what it is instead is the text from the various draft versions of the Hobbit, from the first surviving outlines to post-publication edits.

From the standpoint of the story, perhaps not very interesting. In fact, sections of it are very jarring … for almost the entirety of the first draft, Gandalf is the name of the chief dwarf and the name of the wizard is Blandorthin. It’s very disconcerting.

But as I read it, I’m thinking more and more about how fascinating the process is, and how there are so few places where the process is really exposed like this. There are so many lit classes that study all these finished works, and you may even read about the process in an author’s bibliography, but to see it spread out like this is something entirely different.

We generally see Tolkien’s work as being original, for instance. But in these first drafts, you can see the footprints of other stories – Dr. Doolittle, for example – so clearly. And then you can see in the developing versions how those sources are glossed and changed and gradually merged into Tolkien’s world, becoming original when they weren’t originally so.

I think of works like Eragon, which is soooooo derivative that it’s almost a joke. Nice enough story – ingredients from well over a dozen sources – but without the crafting that would have made those ingredients part of the Eragon universe, rather than noticable liftings from all these other story traditions.

I think this book would make such a great textbook for a composition class … read The Hobbit, then use the History to trace the evolution of a single chapter. I think that would be so much more interesting, informative, and educational than merely studying the finished works.