I would remove the bathing at Crickhollow scene. The whole time I’m reading or hearing it, all I can think is, “Really? This is what you want to talk about, JRR?”
So the Blue Mountains were more important than the Iron Hill dwarfs? Also, this line jumped out at me from the Wikipedia page re dwarfs: “few ever served the Enemy of free will.” But that’s my own personal interest, not in the line of the thread.
I sure get the feeling he was just blathering away in serial adventure land, a la The Hobbit, until the Prancing Pony. A skillful editor would have cut everything before that by three quarters The main scenes pre-Bree that advance the plot are those around Bilbo’s party and The Shadow of the Past. Farmer Maggot, Tom Bombadil, the Old Forest, the Barrow Wights, and all that carefree hobbiting could have been radically condensed without detracting from the narrative at all.
Nah, I like the carefree hobbiting. The whole book’s an exploration of unnecessary details and worldbuilding, the plot’s just something to hang all that on, in my opinion. Besides, the characters worrying about baths and angry farmers and such everyday trivial things really emphasises the contrast with what happens next, and who they become by the end.
Not a Bombadil fan though, I will admit.
I agree with Filbert, except that I’m a huge fan of Bombadil. I think he makes the world significantly deeper and more mysterious than it would have been otherwise.
Tolkien was building a mythology. Mythologies aren’t completely consistent, with all the loose ends nearly tied off. Yes, Bombadil is a loose end. And yes, I’ve spent a certain amount of time trying to make him fit in. That has increased, not decreased, my joy in the books.
Sure, it coulda been edited that way, but I agree that it wood significantly changed the books into something I liked less. Of course, this is from a guy who prefers the Hobbit over the trilogy, despises the movies, and has never been able to make it through the Silmarillion.
I’ve mentioned the following a couple of times on this board, and been met with resounding silence, so apparently it’s not very interesting, but…
I think Tolkien was explicitly building a synthetic myth cycle. Organic myth cycles are built from bits and pieces of various mythic traditions, some of which don’t really fit together, so you get inclusions that create inconsistencies and contradictions. Tom Bombadil always struck me as being just such an inclusion.
It always seemed to me like Tom Bombadil and Goldberry and Old Man Willow were characters from small scale, local folklore, that got syncretistically subsumed into the far more epic War of the Rings myth cycle, which in turn was part of the truly cosmic Silmarillion cycle. The result was that they just don’t quite fit into the rest of the story. But that seemed exactly like the kind of thing that happens with real world myth cycles, so it seemed to me like Tolkien was doing that very deliberately to create a sense of an organic myth cycle.
It also seemed to me like the Hobbits themselves, with their obscure origins, and their Regency Era Little Englandish Shire, in the midst of an epic sturm-und-drang Dark Ages world, were also inclusions from a different mythology. Probably the same one that produced Tom Bombadil, et al. It’s just that the Hobbits were more completely assimilated into the War of the Ring cycle. (In fact, I always got the impression that Tom himself was a sort of Hobbit, or at least kin to them).
Over the years, it seems that, whenever I hear someone mention something they don’t like about LOTR, something they wish had been changed or left out, there’s always someone else who says, “But I love that part!”
Life in the SDMB.
I agree with both these comments. The carefree hobbits of the beginning are not the hobbits who come back to the Scouring of the Shire. And Tom just says that not everything in Middle-Earth is neat and tidy. Where he fit into the Great Music, I don’t know, but that’s part of the omnisicence of Ilúvatar.
ETA: the carefree hobbiting compared to what they go through is similar to Tolkein’s own life-experience in the Great War. Of his circle of friends from Oxford undergrad, only two survived: him and one other. From bucolic England to the hell of the Western Front had an impact on him, and the progression of the hobbits illustrates it. The War of the Ring touched even the Shire, just as the Great War touched England, even though it was uninvaded.
I’ve no problem with him as a strange loose end, it’s just that I can’t help thinking I’d be able to put up with a guy who rhymed and sang absolutely everything for about a day, max, before either making earplugs or strangling him.
I am surprised no-one else addressed this, but maybe I missed it. LotR is a “tale that grew in the telling” and if you are interested, the History of Middle Earth series is all about the growth. I believe The Return of the Shadow covers the early drafts of Fellowship of the Rings.
Originally, it was much closer in tone to Hobbit. Elements of the first draft remain in the published version, elements such as the fox smelling hobbits out in the night and thinking “WTF?” Originally Strider was a hobbit, and I don’t think the significance of the One Ring was there originally.
The Return of the Shadow is a fascinating look at the creative process.
As to changes in Lord of the Rings, the book obviously is the way it is in large part because of 2 major influences on Tolkien:
- His Christianity
- His experience in WWI
In particular, the experience of men going off and leaving the women behind, living in a stressful and basically all-male environment, and then coming back and finding the world changed has a lot to do with his own life experience. The relationship between Sam and Frodo has a lot to do with the relationships between lieutenants and their batmen in the trenches.
And I very much appreciated Farmer Maggot. Yes, yes, we all know that a Glorfindel or a Gandalf or an Aragorn can face down the Black Riders… but so can a common farmer who takes his duty of hospitality seriously and refuses to let someone compromise his principles just because they’re creepy and scary. And he didn’t even need to go on an Epic Quest to do it. In some ways, I think that’s an even more important part of the story than the Epic Heroes.
Truuuue, although TBF it’s made pretty clear that the Black Riders “undercover” looking for Bagginses in their initial foray into the Shire were nowhere near as “creepy and scary” as they became in subsequent confrontations.
If a Black Rider had really tried to scare a regular mortal, even one as wise and gutsy as Farmer Maggot, he would have got either his own way or a dead mortal, or both.
(But you have a point that many mortals didn’t put up anywhere near as much resistance to even the lowest creepyscary setting of Black Riderness, so by all means good on Farmer M.)
Same here. I didn’t need him in the movies, that edit makes perfect sense, but I appreciate him and all that interlude in the book.
The only time I tried to read LOTR, I struggled through as far as Tom Bombadil, then chucked the book across the room.
Yeah, you gave up too soon. I always advise any first-time readers to hang in there until the hobbits get to Bree. That’s when it takes off.
And promptly crashes under its own weight.
Sorry, I have tried several times over the decades to read LotR, and just can’t do it. I’ve even tried skipping around and starting in different places in the narrative (since the plot is part of the Human Experience these days) and it doesn’t help. The book is ponderous, boring and not worth the slightest effort. Jackson did the world a tremendous favor by cranking out 3 very good movies from the source material.
The only material I find more boring and impenetrable than LotR is Russian “literature.”
Obviously, this is a minority opinion. 'Tis a small thing, but mine own.
d&r
I"ve had the same problem with the Aubrey / Maturin novels. I’ve tried reading two or three of them, and find them boring. Tastes vary, obviously.
Same here. I find them pretty mediocre and not worth reading. (But I love Marryat and Forester.)