The New Arrivals!

So, Friday brought some long-awaited arrivals: three boxes filled with four copies each of the new, improved, one-volume second edition of THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT. These are my author's copies, mailed to me from Glasgow near the end of October; I assume they got delayed by all the holiday mail in-between. At over 5 kgs each,* they're a pretty hefty bundle.

Two are already spoken for, and the rest go on the smallish stack downstairs of my remaining copies of the first edition (the trade paperback version).

Horray!

--John R.

........................

Here's what Janice had to say about it, reposted from her Facebook:

Thump:

The sound of John's author copies of the 1 volume The History of the Hobbit arriving on the door step.

We've now got 13 hobbits. I wonder where we can find a dwarf to make up our lucky number?

*each box that is, not each book

The Geekiest of the Geeks

Thanks to Janice, for pointing out the following link to me, in which THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT* heads the list of the geekiest gifts of the season:

http://geekout.blogs.cnn.com/2011/12/27/our-geekiest-gifts-this-holiday-season/

Here's what their first contributor, Nikki Rau-Baker, has to say about the book:

"A must for anyone gearing up for the upcoming big-screen version of The Hobbit:"The History of The Hobbit" by John D. Rateliff, covers the beginnings of The Hobbit with such tidbits of information as the original names of the dwarves and the shocking revelation that the leader was initially called Gandalf."

--to which I have just two words to say: Woo and Hoo!

--John R.

current audiobook: THE WAR LOVERS [2011]**

current reading: THE CANARY MURDER CASE by S. S. Van Dine [1927]***

*the new one-volume edition, I assume -- geeks being early adaptors, they'd want H.o.H. 2.0

**(T.R., Lodge, Hearst, &c)

***a re-reading

Bilbo's Clue (clew)

So, here's something I came across a while back that I found interesting and thought I'd share.

In the original edition of RETURN TO BAG-END,* I noted in my discussion of Bilbo's riddling self-identifications of himself to Smaug that while most refer to v. specific events, there was an exception:

I am the clue-finder --this could refer to any of several episodes.

It might mean Bilbo finding the key to open the trolls' lair (page 97,

Chapter II) but more likely refers to his discovering the exact application

of the moon-runes on Thror's Map and thus enabling Thorin & Company

to find the keyhole at the exact moment on Durin's Day (Chapter XI).

Thanks to Anders Stenstrom, we can now narrow this down, and the passage should read as follows in the new edition:

I am the clue-finder -- this probably alludes to Bilbo's finding

the spider-thread and using it to guide his friends through the tangles

of Mirkwood in Chapter VIII, since 'clue' originally meant a ball of thread,

specifically the one used by Theseus to navigate the labyrinth

(Concise OED Vol I, page 434, under the spelling 'clew').

I am grateful to Anders Stenstrom for drawing this

etymology to my attention.

At the time I first drafted replacement text for this passage and posted it among the Errata on my website (Sacnoth's Scriptorium) [circa 2008, I think], I thought Anders' explanation was convincing, but more recently I came across some more information in quite another context that makes me certain of it. I was listening to an audiobook of an account of a famous murder from the early days of Scotland Yard, THE SUSPICIONS OF MR. WHICHER** by Kate Summerscale, which includes the following passage:

"The word 'clue' derives from 'clew', meaning a ball of thread or yarn.

It had come to mean 'that which points the way' because of the Greek myth

in which Theseus uses a ball of yarn, given to him by Ariadne, to find his way

out of the Minotaur's labyrinth. The writers of the mid-nineteenth century

still had this image in mind when they used the word. 'There is always a

pleasure in unravelling a mystery, in catching at the gossamer clue which

will guide to certainty', observed Elizabeth Gaskell in 1848. William Wills,

Dickens' deputy, paid tribute in 1850 to Whicher's brilliance by observing

that the detective found the way even when 'every clue seems cut off'. 'I

thought I had my hand on the clue', declared the narrator of The Woman

in White in an installment published in June 1860. 'How little I knew,

then, of the windings of the labyrinth which were still to mislead me!'

A plot was a knot, and a story ended in a 'denouement', an unknotting.

--page 88.

Of course, it this identification is correct (and I think it is), then Bilbo here is making reference to something that's no longer in the published story, since the whole 'Theseus theme' dropped out of the Mirkwood chapter and was replaced in the final book by the Enchanted River section. This it can now be identified as another fossil in the story, preserving evidence of an earlier version of the tale.

--JDR

current reading: BLOOMSBURY PIE: THE MAKING OF THE BLOOMSBURY BOOM by Regina Marler [1997]

*pages 521-522

**subtitle: A SHOCKING MURDER AND THE UNDOING OF A GREAT VICTORIAN DETECTIVE [2008]. It is Summerscale's thesis, which she demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt, that this particular 1860 murder inspired the whole genre of the 'English Country House' murder mystery and exerted enormous influence on the detective story, esp. Wilkie Collins' THE MOONSTONE [1865].

errata

Anders

Mr. Whicher

THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT, second edition

Good news I've been wanting to announce for a while. It's now official: HarperCollins is reprinting my THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT (MR. BAGGINS/RETURN TO BAG-END) this fall as a single-volume book. Not long after the book was first published I sent in a little new material (which had arrived just a little too late for inclusion) in case there was ever a reprint, so I hope this Addendum can now be included. More later. For now, here's the link to the book's entry on amazon.co.uk:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/History-Hobbit-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0007440820/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1301024856&sr=8-5

Woo-hoo!

--John R.

The Mythopoeic Award

So, last night at the awards banquet at Mythcon, THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT won this year's Mythopoeic Award. These awards are given out each year by the Mythopoeic Society, a group devoted to celebrating the work of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. There are four awards in all; the one I won is the Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies, with the others being the Fantasy award (for the year's best fantasy novel), the Children's Literature (actually, Young Adult) award, and the non-Inklings fantasy scholarship award. Here's a link to all four of this year's winners:

http://www.mythsoc.org/awards/2009/

And here's another link listing the five finalists. Scroll down to the end to get the 2009 nominees; as you can see, there was stiff competition:

http://www.mythsoc.org/awards/scholarship/


This is quite an honor -- previous winners include such works as Garth's TOLKIEN & THE GREAT WAR, Shippey's AUTHOR OF THE CENTURY and ROAD TO MIDDLE-EARTH, Verlyn's A QUESTION OF TIME, Wayne & Christina's ART & ILLUSTRATOR, Doug's THE ANNOTATED HOBBIT, and others going all the way back to Kocher's MASTER OF MIDDLE EARTH and beyond. I've actually contributed to works that won the award before, in 2002 (TOLKIEN'S LEGENDARIUM) and 1997 (THE RHETORIC OF VISION), but this time I'll get the actual award -- a statue of a lion, unofficially known as an 'Aslan' -- to put on the mantle by my grandfather's clock.

Woo-hoo!

ahem. let me repeat that.

WOO-HOO!


Finally, while I wasn't able to attend this year's Mythcon, here's my acceptance speech that I would have delivered if I'd been there.


"Thag you very buch."

If I were as laconic as Mr. Baggins himself at the celebrations in Lake Town, I'd just stop there and be done with it. But, as the nine-hundred-plus pages of my History of the Hobbit suggest, such is not the case.

And so, on this festive occasion, I would like to thank the Society, and the Awards Committee, and Mythcon itself for this very great honor. I wish I could be among you to accept this award in person. Having first joined the Society more than thirty years ago—in the same year in which Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper shared the award for their then-new biography of C. S. Lewis—I honestly never imagined then that a decade later I would attend my first Mythcon. Or that two years after that I would help run another, or that I would present chapters from this book at two other Mythcons, much less one day receive this award.

I had originally thought of taking this opportunity to thank all the people who helped me on my book. But on second thought this might, like Bilbo's 'eleventy-first' party speech, drag on a bit for those esteemed Mythconners at this banquet, especially since it would be in the form of a person, who isn't here, thanking other people, who are also not here.

I do want to seize this opportunity, though, to thank one person whose acknowledgement inadvertently got left out from the original (UK) printing of my book. David Bratman's name should have appeared among those people before whom I presented earlier drafts of various chapters from this eternal work-in-progress from time to time, since I benefitted greatly from his encyclopedic knowledge and attention to detail. Even though this was fortunately fixed in time for the American edition, I still wanted to thank him here and now.

As for my book itself, what can I say that I have not already said, at length, within its pages? I took as my inspiration C. S. Lewis's words to J. R. R. Tolkien, back around the spring of 1936, that there were too few of the sort of books they liked to read in the world and that they needed to write some themselves. This is essentially what I have done: written the book I'd like to discover on a bookstore's or library's shelf. For a time I feared that I was the only one who would want to read it. This award has quelled those fears.

After he plowed through The History of The Hobbit, Charles Noad wrote "surely nothing remains to be said." Happily he was wrong. Trying to get to the bottom of a Tolkien story is like staring into an ent's eyes: deep wells very much in the present but filled with the memory of ages. But who wouldn't drink deep of that well, given the chance? So: the work goes on. And so my thanks for this encouragement, and this honor. Thank you very much.

—John D. Rateliff

Sunday, July 19th, 2009.