I’m currently plowing thru “The Return of the Shadow”, or JRRT’s first draft of Fellowship of the Ring, and I’m finding some of the characters whose existance was snuffed out in re-writes quite charming.
Not Bingo Bolger-Baggins for some reason. He seems to me to be a younger version of Bilbo, and a bit too comic.
And Frodo Took just sets off too much cognitive dissonance.
Nor Trotter. His actual identity makes it hard to warm to him as a Ranger.
And Odo Took seems about as bright as Pippin ever was, but without the endearing character traits.
But Marmaduke Brandybuck, now there’s a hobbit Prince among common hobbits.
And the mysterious Vigo, what would he have become?
Or Obo Took-Took? What the hell was up with that?
It really is fascinating to read the intial drafts of the tale, and note both the wild variances and key points which didn’t change.
Anyone else had the pleasure of reading the earlier versions of LOTR?
Return of the Shadow. Volume VI of the “History of Middle Earth Series” or HOMES. Part I of “The History of the Lord of the Rings”. Part II is “The Treason of Isengard”. Part III is “The War of the Ring” and Part IV is “Sauron Defeated”.
Available online and at better bookstores everywhere!
I read it, and what I found interesting was how the professor didn’t seem to like the early incarnation of Pippin very well. The gist of it was, well, he’s a coward and he’ll probably end up dead. Wow. I’m glad the character evolved into something likable.
I forgot about Vigo though. It’s been a while…
Interesting that Merry was pretty much always Merry quite early on, though.
You know, it was only your well-deserved reputation as a Tolkien scholar that stopped me thinking this was a leg-pull.
Then I thought, well what about the great thread ‘if LotR was written by another…’.
So here are the silly responses :eek:
Presumably Bingo lived in a House!
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Frodo Took.
Frodo Took who?
Frodo Took the Ring!
Trotter - any relation to the Peckham Trotters?
Odo Took - the legendary shapeshifter (got a bucket, anyone?)
Vigo - a common spelling mistake. Clearly you mean Viggo.
Oh, not so much a coward as “hobbit-sensible”, which means dumb like a bag of hammers. Odo seemed to combine the less desirable traits of Pippin and Sam, who were absent until about the 6th draft or so.
I’m still a bit spooked by the description of all those “elf-wraiths” wandering the world, having been overcome by their rings.
I’d just like to say that I have returned from a window of the well-known virtual bookstore named after a female warrior tribe, where I ordered Return of the Shadow.
So I feel respectable.
Now to the funny business…
That’s a lovely hobbit child, Mrs. Took. What are you going to call him?
Thank you! Well we hope he’ll be musically inclined and [posh accent ON] my husband and I [posh accent OFF] want to remember the night we met - it was at Echo Point.
So we’re calling him Oboe Took (Took)
Not to hijack your thread, but what about all those elf spirits wandering around that never went into the West? I mean, that creeped me a bit as well. And how they’re different than other spirits, because they wouldn’t actually care to get a mortal’s attention, unless of course, there was something wrong with them (the spirit that is). :eek:
I don’t have an answer about the hobbits that didn’t make the cut (they either were not well-enough developed, got their identities switched about too much to give a clear idea of who they really were or had their key features recycled into surviving hobbits). (Bingo and Trotter were just wrong; Took-Took sounds like something you’d say to call chickens.)
What I really want is the complete and definitive story about the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took.
[sub](I finished HOMES a couple of weeks ago, but no one in my house properly appreciates this achievement. If you’ve got any extra lying around, maybe I could get some props for it here?)[/sub]
Obviously Obo Took-Took was the viewpoint character of Ramble On, who bemoans that he “met a girl so fair, but Gollum, the evil one, crept up and slipped away with her-her, her, yeah!”
Why am I reminded of Led Zeppelin?