So, I was delighted to see my book THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT share a three-way review in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, in which it is praised with great praise. Of the other two books, I've got one (THE BATTLE OF MALDON / THE HOMECOMING) but read it in snatches and need to go back and read it front to back. The second, Groom's TOLKIEN IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY I have heard about but have not yet ordered: a lack I intend to remedy over the next few days. The third is my own book: it's heartening to see that the reviewer, Liz Braswell, picked up on the crucial point: THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT is an attempt to record and present the creative process. And who wouldn't feel pleased by praise such as this?:
This book belongs on the shelf of every serious
Tolkien fan --or anyone interested in the hard task
of creating novels, fitting comfortably alongside
--Stephen King's "On Writing"
https://www.wsj.com/articles/science-fiction-fantasy-tolkien-forever-6965044d?fbclid=IwAR0yElx60pX9E5TDeI6MqlZCtPe3iYlo0zqPn4x04PR9vjofDRu2pPZuPQg
Science Fiction & Fantasy: Tolkien Forever
Reviews of ‘Tolkien in the Twenty-First Century,’ ‘The History of the Hobbit’ and Tolkien’s own ‘The Battle of Maldon.’
By
Liz Braswell
Aug. 4, 2023 11:08 am ET
N o one has had a greater impact on the genre of fantasy than J.R.R. Tolkien. And it happens that 2023, the 50th anniversary of his death, has become an unofficial “year of Tolkien,” commemorated with three important books on the man, the myth and his legends.
My introduction to “The Hobbit” was in the late 1970s or early ’80s, visiting my (much) older brother at orchestra camp. All of his fellow campers, long-haired and serene (elves, if you will), were reading the book. By the end of 2003, most of America—not just the odd young- adult musician—was familiar with the world of “The Lord of the Rings” thanks to Peter Jackson and his enormously popular films.
For the few who remain unfamiliar with the original R.R. of fantasy, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) was an academic first and a novelist second. He held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, where he was a philologist and literary expert on texts written in a surprising number of European languages. (He also worked on the Oxford English Dictionary, contributing mostly to also worked on the Oxford English Dictionary, contributing mostly to words starting with “wa,” like “waggle,” “waistcoat” and “wake-wort.”)
The first book in the 2023 lineup will give you a taste of the man’s diverse career and lexical proficiency: “The Battle of Maldon, together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth,” edited by Peter Grybauskas. “The Battle” is a fragment of poetry from the end of the first millennium that Tolkien translated from Old English. It tells the story of an aging and possibly foolish Anglo-Saxon chief—Byrhtnoth—who politely but unwisely lets Viking invaders cross the river so that the two armies could battle on dry ground, which dooms the Anglo-Saxons.
Not to be outdone by his centuries-old peers, Tolkien wrote his own ancient-style poetry. “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son” is about two people looking for the slain Anglo-Saxon leader’s body after the battle, a sort of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” for the Sutton-Hoo set. If you were to choose only one of these new books to gain some insight into the prolific smorgasbord of his multifaceted writing, this is peak Tolkien.
“The History of the Hobbit,” by John D. Rateliff, is three inches thick and weighs two and a half pounds. (Full disclosure: I did not read every page for this review. I did, however, use it to prop up my laptop while writing it.) All joking aside, this is an intriguing and very punctilious look at the process of writing. One quality that characterizes Tolkien’s fiction is the “inevitability” of the story. Both “The Hobbit” (1937) and “The Lord of the Rings” (1954-55) flow seamlessly from beginning to end, filled with subplots and mythology that make sense and details that track. But it wasn’t originally written so precisely: “The most famous scene Tolkien ever wrote”—the riddle game between Bilbo and Gollum—“was drafted in 1944, sent to [publishers] Allen & Unwin in 1947, and published in the ‘second edition’ of The Hobbit in 1951.” What was in Bilbo’s “pocketses” wasn’t even in the original book! (Also, Gandalf’s original name was “Bladorthin.” Yikes.) While not even diving into the “Quenta Silmarillion,” the history of Middle-Earth that Tolkien was working on at the same time, “The History of the Hobbit” includes five different “phases” of the book’s creation, many, many plot notes, and a scheme that shows original word choices along with Tolkien’s final text—which was sometimes penned in on top of rubbed-out pencil. This book belongs on the shelf of every serious Tolkien fan—or anyone interested in the hard task of creating novels, fitting comfortably alongside Stephen King’s “On Writing.”
And finally comes “Tolkien in the Twenty-First Century: The Meaning of Middle-Earth Today” by Nick Groom. This fascinating book explores “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” from their genesis through all the different major adaptations of the Tolkien “legendarium.”
It starts off neatly summarizing Tolkien’s life and influences—such as his friendship with W.H. Auden and C.S. Lewis—and explains his guiding belief that languages and words “are custodians of ancient cultures and thus infuse the present with the past.” Yet although Tolkien was a devout Catholic, there is no specific mention of religion, churches or God in his books. Perhaps, Mr. Groom hazards, because “in Middle-Earth . . . the divine is not separated from the commonplace.” The reader will learn a great deal about the licensing of Middle-Earth, a realm I thought I already knew fairly well. There were plans for a “Lord of the Rings” film starring the Beatles, for instance, directed by Stanley Kubrick. Another fever dream of a movie would have had Galadriel seduce Frodo, and a 12-minute animated monstrosity released in 1966 has a princess named Mika and a dragon named Slag. Along with these tidbits of non-Silmarillion history are interpretations and conclusions about the original literature itself. As we learned from “The Battle of Maldon,” Tolkien’s fiction was informed by his scholarship; in “The Return of the King,” Aragorn rallies the troops for a hopeless attack on Mordor, which fits in very nicely with the ideals of Northern courage and the Anglo-Saxon sense of futilely fighting the inevitable. At the same time, one of the strongest themes in “The Lord of the Rings” is the importance of collaboration and friendship. Fellowship, if you will. Saving the world is too great a task for a single hero and must be shared. Mr. Groom goes on to suggest that Tolkien’s fiction could be considered postmodern, as it deals with the “re-enchantment” of a world relentlessly disenchanted by modernism. And while he also rightly points out that “the mediaeval period in the popular imagination had been deeply coloured by Tolkien’s Middle-Earth and its reworkings,” I would like to have seen Mr. Groom poke into how Tolkien not only defined how fantasy literature is written but crystallized it—possibly to the detriment of other visions.
Each of these very different books offers a brilliant peek or deep dive into very different aspects of the man who changed speculative fiction forever. Choose your own adventure into the world of J.R.R. Tolkien.
P.S.: Thanks to DAA for the link.
