The History of the Hobbit, Part 1: Mr. Baggins Review

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(More customer reviews)Return to Bag End is the second part of John D. Rateliff's History of the Hobbit. It begins with page 469 and contains the Index for both volumes, so its important to start with Volume I, Mr. Baggins.
Return to Bag End begins with the thirteen dwarves and their hobbit companion's arrival at The Lonely Mountain. Rateliff has identified five phases in the writing of The Hobbit, and this volume begins towards the end of the second phase. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit in fits and spurts over a period of several years, and finally finished it in its first published form by the end of the third phase. Rateliff's fourth phase took place in the late 1940s, when Tolkien had nearly finished The Lord of the Rings and needed to rewrite part of The Hobbit to eliminate some inconsistencies. The most important of these inconsistencies dealt with the matter of how Bilbo came to possess the Ring. In the first published version Gollum gave Bilbo the Ring as a gift. Now Tolkien, to make the Ring darker and more ominous, had Bilbo purloin it from Gollum. Then in 1960 came the fifth phase, when Tolkien attempted to make The Hobbit even closer in tone and spirit to The Lord of the Rings by essentially rewriting it. He wisely abandoned this attempt after a few chapters when a friend advised that while it was brilliant, it wasn't The Hobbit.
As in the first volume, Return to Bag End abounds with fascinating textual notes and short essays interpolated with Tolkien's own words. These include some intriguing speculations, including one on whether the Arkenstone was a Silmaril and another on the ultimate fate of dwarves after their deaths. There are also several Appendices, one on the Denham Tracts, a nineteenth century list of imaginary beings which mentioned "hobbit" several years before Tolkien was even born; another on Tolkien's own speculations on the origin of the word hobbit which includes one of my own favorite childhood stories: "The Hobyahs;" and others dealing with the origins of dwarf names and with Tolkien's correspondence with Arthur Ransome.
Both volumes of The History of the Hobbit are essential additions to Tolkien scholarship. They will provide much fascinating reading and speculation for many years to come for all lovers of Middle-earth.

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First published in 1938, The Hobbit is a story that "grew in the telling," and many characters and events in the published book are completely different from what Tolkien first wrote to read aloud to his young sons as part of their "fireside reads." For the first time, The History of the Hobbit reproduces the original version of one of literature's most famous stories, and includes many little-known illustrations and previously unpublished maps for The Hobbit created by Tolkien himself. Also featured are extensive annotations and commentaries on the date of composition, how Tolkien's professional and early mythological writings influenced the story, the imaginary geography he created, and how he came to revise the book in the years after publication to accommodate events in The Lord of the Rings.

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