The History of the Hobbit, Part Two: Return to Bag-End by J.R.R. Tolkien

The History of the Hobbit, Part Two: Return to Bag-End Reviews

• 
  Kam Yung Soh

  If you're read ""The Hobbit"" and are interested in how the text for the story was developed, this is the book for you.
  
  This book includes the initial manuscripts and revisions to the text done by Tolkien. Rateliff highlights the various changes; some small, some major and some that Tolkien appear to have added without initial planning to resolve plot points as they developed.
  
  Rateliff also shows how Tolkien's interest in philology and his (then unpublished) mythology for Middle-Earth influenced the names, places and events that take place in "The Hobbit". The most critical of the changes include how Bilbo gets the ring (which was not yet The One Ring) from Gollum, how Smaug the dragon was to be killed and the events that occur afterwards (the location and composition of armies in The Battle of Five Armies).
  
  Also of interest in this book was Tolkien's abortive attempt in the 1960s to rewrite "The Hobbit" to match the tone and style of "The Lord of the Rings" (removal of the first-person narration, tighter match with the dates, mythology and geography as found in "Rings"); an attempt that he, fortunately, abandons to the delight of this fan of "The Hobbit".
  
  This book is a good companion to Douglas A. Anderson's "The Annotated Hobbit", which Rateliff also references. That book and this one will give the reader a very good appreciation into how "The Hobbit" was written and revised.
• 
  Mitch

  It's so funny to me that there are five appendices AND an addendum in this book.
• 
  Mike Gonzalez

  23
• 
  Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

  For (roughly) the first half of this volume, Rateliff carries his presentation of Tolkien's manuscripts/typescripts (and notes, and mini-essays commenting on aspects of the manuscripts, and notes on the mini-essays...) to the conclusion of the story, beginning where Part 1 ended (at Lake-town).
  
  Both here and in volume 1, there are interesting differences between the 'script and what eventually was published as the First Edition of _The Hobbit_: to take a simple example, the dwarf we know as Thorin Oakenshield was for the longest name known as Gandalf, while the wizard manipulating events is named Bladorthin.
  
  But more interesting than the variants that Tolkien wrote are those that, in the event, he did _not_ write. He intended, until quite late in the story, to have Bilbo slay Smaug; The Battle of the Five Armies was originally to be the Battle of the Anduin Vale, in which Dwarfs would play no part, and occur during Bilbo's return journey; when Tolkien finally gave the dragon-slaying to Bard (who was invented on the spot for just that purpose), he had Bard die in Smaug's fall, a decision he retconned pretty quickly.
  
  "So what," you may ask, "takes up the rest of the volumes?" Well: there is the story of the Second Edition, and the Revised Edition of the '60s; but there are other revisions, too, which never saw print (until now). Tolkien became semi-obsessed (the way he did) with the phases of the Moon during the story, realizing that they simply didn't seem to work the way the actual Moon does unless some significant changes were made to the timeline. The dates of Bilbo's departure and return are more-or-less fixed in the published text, as is Bilbo's birthday at Lake-town and the Durin's Day discovery of the Back Door. Furthermore, the distances on the map only made things worse.
  
  In the early '60s, he not only did a passel of calculations to figure out how to make it all work together, he began rewriting _The Hobbit_ from the beginning - not only making the necessary changes, but attempting to rewrite the story from page one to bring it more in line with the tone of _The Lord of the Rings_. Fortunately, he abandoned this shortly after beginning the revision of Chapter 3, but what he _did_ write makes fascinating reading. As someone he showed it to said, "It's very good, but it's not _The Hobbit_". As a result, very little of what he was thinking of eventually made it into the Revised Edition - mostly minor corrections. Rateliff observes that Tolkien realized that _The Hobbit_ was a very different type of book than _LR_, and stopped trying to force it into the wrong mold.
  
  The notes are, as implied, extensive and exhaustive, ranging in length from single brief sentences to divigations lasting several pages. The mini-essays are uniformly interesting, on topics ranging from naming to Tolkien's sources to the implications of some of the choices Tolkien made (and didn't make) in writing his little masterpiece. Worth noting: Rateliff is very generous in his thanks to and acknowledgement of the work others have done in this field, especially Taum Santowski, who was to have been the author-editor of this book but died before he could do it. This has opened for me a few doors for future reading...
  
  All in all, the _History of the Hobbit_ fascinated me from beginning to end (with the exception of a brief excursion into Tolkien's alphabets - I _do_ find those interesting, but they were out of tone for this book).
• 
  Emily

  As with the first volume, this doesn't have the personal touch of Christopher Tolkien's HOME series, but I still enjoyed it very much.
  
  This volume included Tolkien's abortive attempt to update the Hobbit to conform to LOTR, both in tone and in the timeframes and landscapes, which ultimately was not possible without large scale changes to the Hobbit text. In my opinion, the chapters he did update were not improved by the changes, and I'm just as happy that he gave up.
  
  One of the things Tolkien particularly regretted about the Hobbit in his later years is the intrusive authorial voice, but to me, that's one of the book's especial charms.
• 
  A.J. Anderson

  I read this book first when I was just sixteen years old. By the end of it, I was smoking a pipe and looking for an adventure. It just tapped into some part of my adolescent brain. I read it again a few weeks ago. Just so beautifully written and conceived. The characters are consistent and reliable... and they are not all killed off unexpectedly!
• 
  J.W. Donley

  Another info overload. I especially enjoyed the unfinished draft where he attempts to make the style match that of LOTR.
• 
  Nicholas Whyte

  
  http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2197888.html[return][return]This isn't so much a second volume as a second half of Rateliff's book; the first numbered page is 469! So the two really need to be read as a single unit. Having recovered from this discovery, I still enjoyed the detail on Tolkien's construction of the original text of The Hobbit, the subsequent revisions to bring the Gollum episode and other elements better in line with The Lord of the Rings, and finally his abandonment of an attempt to rewrite the entire thing to get rid of some of the continuity errors (eg, what did the dwarves do with their musical instruments after they played them in Bag End?) at the behest of an unnamed female friend who persuaded him to let the text be.[return][return]Rateliff incudes more nuggets of analysis of the story's roots in literature and in Tolkien's other writing, in which the Father Christmas Letters, written around the same time, are a prominent source. The best bits were in the first volume, but I did find it interesting to note that Tolkien drew more illustrations of Smaug than of any other character in his legendarium, and Rateliff teases out Tolien's fascination with dragons from the first thing he could recall ever writing, as a small child, through Beowulf and the early versions of what was to become the Silmarillion, to Smaug. There's also an interesting reflection on whether the Arkenstone is a Silmaril: it is, and at the same time it isn't, and the fact that we ask the question at all says interesting things about concepts of canonicity.[return][return]The two volumes are really for completists only, but strongly recommended for them.
• 
  Antoine

  This volume covers the last few chapters of the novel as first composed, and then deals with the rather complex post-publication history of the book: the happy accident through which the new version of "Riddles in the Dark" was inserted in the 1949 edition, as well as Tolkien's intensive, but abortive 1960 effort to rewrite the entire novel along the lines of Lord of the Rings, a change which would have not only altered the style, but substantially amplified the content of the earlier novel. However, a trusted friend indicated (quite rightly) that although the revised chapters were quite good, the resultant novel would not be The Hobbit. As other readers have noted, this material is especially interesting to the long time fan, even if (on balance) I am glad that the novel was left largely unchanged. How interesting to find out, for instance that the Forsaken Innn, mentioned in the Weathertop chapters of LR, was formerly known as the "Last Inn" and was fairly newly abandoned at the time of Bilbo's journey, when Thorin & Co camped in its ruins a few days before meeting the Trolls. Or that the Trolls had pulled down the Last Bridge in a (largely unsuccessful) effort to waylay travelers... As I mentioned of part one, Ratelif is a more imaginative and detached critic than Christopher Tolkien, well suited to the somewhat complicated needs of the first published tale of Middle-Earth.
• 
  Lisa

  In the second volume of the The History of the Hobbit, we reach the conclusion to the story and from there, the post-publication changes Tolkien sought to make.
  
  One of the most notable pieces of content this book offer is the exploration of published and unpublished revisions Tolkien considered after the completion of the sequel-that-grew. Notable content of this book is the exploration of the revisions (both published and unpublished) based on writing of
  The Lord of the Rings. This includes an effort to rewrite the entire Hobbit into something more in-line with Lord of the Rings. This is particularly interesting while we wait for Peter Jackson's film adaptation of The Hobbit.
  
  While I don't recommend this for readers with a passing interest in Tolkien, this is a must-read for Tolkien geeks and fans.
• 
  Michael

  Part two of the two-volume study of the writing of Tolkien's first published entry in the Middle-earth legendarium. The book follows the history of The Hobbit's inception, first drafts and incomplete fragments, plot notes and uncertainties, as well as exploring the relations between the story's elements and real prehistory, mythology and folklore, and Tolkien's own (then unpublished) ever-evolving body of work. Actually contained within these pages is a transcription of the first draft with notes on subsequent changes. It is interesting to read about all the genius and depth of the work, as well as the doubts and indecision faced by the famed author. In this second volume, later revisions to the text are covered, as well as the abortive text for a new re-writing of the book in to bring it in line in terms of style with The Lord of the Rings, as well as several interesting appendices centering around the origin of the word hobbit. Definitely a must read for the Tolkien enthusiast.
• 
  Tommy Grooms

  [I’m writing a review of both volumes]
  John Rateliff’s History of The Hobbit is an important contribution to the literary history of Tolkien’s legendarium, at home on the shelf alongside Christopher Tolkien’s 12-volume History Of Middle-earth series. The draft text itself is less insightful than the HOME material simply because The Hobbit in comparison to LOTR or the Silmarillion sprang into being almost fully formed, but Rateliff’s thorough scholarship of the background behind the story (he’s also less reticent than Christopher in positing various guesses at Tolkien’s mind at work) brings a familiar text even greater vitality.
• 
  Robert

  A pretty amazing look at the details, sources, and evolution of the Hobbit. You have to be very into the Hobbit to want to plow through all this detail. I happily am.
• 
  Stephen Smith

  The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (1982)
• 
  Sarah

  See The History of the Hobbit Part One: Mr Baggins.
• 
  Huma

  Bought this volume as its PRR.100 price tag was a great bargain. Maybe I'll read it someday when I have picked up Volume I too.
• 
  Liesl de Swardt

  Excellent. Wonderful insight into the process of inventing Middle Earth