Greetings all -- I have a few things to share in general, along with some thoughts about the Prologue. As forewarned, this and every other post will be long.
First, I’ll tell you a little about the copy of the book I’m reading. For now, I’m working with the three-volume Houghton Mifflin edition -- these are decent sized paperback volumes, of the “trade paperback” size. I think this is formally speaking the “fifth edition” of The Lord of the Rings -- the editions that received the tiny fixes to the text made by Christopher Tolkien in 1994, which I think may finally have resolved the weird differences between UK and US editions that crept in due to J.R.R.’s slightly haphazard attempts to emend printer’s errors. The book I’m holding is an old enough edition that it doesn’t have any images on it from the films -- instead, the cover of Fellowship bears a really lovely Alan Lee painting of Rivendell, which you can see here: http://www.theonering.com/galleries/professional-artists/the-fellowship-of-the-ring/rivendell-alan-lee Gorgeous stuff.
I am making the distinction about what copy I’m holding just because it will probably be part of the fun over this journey -- my wife and I at one time owned at least 11 complete copies of The Lord of the Rings, although multiple cross-country moves and occasional (and fortunately brief) bouts of prudence have knocked us down to maybe 8 or so. They run the gamut from beat-up old Ballantine editions to quite fancy hardcover boxed sets, and I will probably amuse myself (and hopefully you) by hopping between editions now and then, and sharing a little about them. The book I’m starting with is of a nice size for sitting in a rocking chair with, it’s the newest (and presumably final) revision of the text, and it doesn’t have Elijah Wood’s face on it. I love you, Elijah, but I don’t want your face on my book.
Now, the prologue -- let’s marvel briefly at the sheer confidence of a writer, in the act of launching a three-volume novel, presuming that it is best begun with a 15 page prologue that, among other things, details the precise deployment of the Hobbit police force (such as it is), the likely botanical origins of the Southfarthings’ pipeweed, and the names of the authors (along with publication dates) of the fictional documents that Tolkien pretends to be translating in the form of the novel you are about to read. It is fascinating stuff to the Tolkien nerd (guilty as charged) but it is nearly impossible to imagine diving into it as someone who has no idea what lies before them. The man had guts. I can no longer remember, of course, my first experience with these books -- I was 7 or 8, I think, and well out of my depth -- and so I can’t recall if the Prologue threw me off at all.
I notice many things this time around, but for brevity I’ll stick to a couple of interesting moments. The first is the description of hobbit society, which, on page 5 (of this edition), is described thus: “There in that pleasant corner of the world they plied their well-ordered business of living, and they heeded less and less the world outside where dark things moved, until they came to think that peace and plenty were the rule in Middle-earth and the right of all sensible folk. . . . They were, in fact, sheltered, but they had ceased to remember it.” Tolkien is at some pains here to impress on us how unready the world of hobbits is for the catastrophes that are about to land on its doorstep -- later in the prologue there’s quite a bit about the bounders, about how little hobbits seem to know about the outside world, etc. I can’t help but think of our own society -- do you? The metaphor isn’t perfect, of course -- and Tolkien will rigidly reject any suggestions of allegory in any case -- but I think of how sheltered our lives have been, collectively, from the spread of disease that until the last fifty years had been so regularly a part of human history. Our current predicament would not be so unfamiliar to almost any of our ancestors -- a disease we cannot cure and barely know how to treat, an inability to respond other than to hide from its spread and hope, etc. And yet it feels shockingly foreign to us -- a Black Rider clopping up the road from Bree. Well, I’ll get to him, and surely this reading of LOTR will be a “pandemic reading” of the text -- it’s inevitable, I think. I promise not to drag COVID-19 into the mix too often, though, if I can help it.
The other fun thing I want to comment on is one of the weirder things about Tolkieniana -- the section of the prologue that explains how Bilbo got the ring in the first place. To the average reader, it might seem a little funny -- the account shared here is quite detailed, which you wouldn’t think it would have to be. The Lord of the Rings is a sequel to a best-selling book -- of course some of its readers don’t know the story of The Hobbit, but most would, and the initial audience for LOTR would have largely been people who knew and loved The Hobbit (that was what the publishers, Allen & Unwin, were banking on, having badgered Tolkien about a sequel almost immediately after The Hobbit’s publication in 1937, and not getting one for well over a decade thereafter). This section of the prologue really labors over communicating the fact that Bilbo lied to the Dwarves about how he got the Ring, and even wrote down this false account which appears in the original Red Book of Westmarch (LOTR’s fictional source manuscript). What is Tolkien up to?
Well, as some of you know -- and I can see you smiling right now -- the wild thing here is that in the first edition of The Hobbit, the best-selling edition that created the market for LOTR in the first place, Gollum straight up gives Bilbo the Ring as a present. Yeah, I know. Tolkien hadn’t worked out at that point what the Ring was. Once he gets into LOTR, he realizes that there’s absolutely no way Gollum would or could have simply handed it over, but he’s got a problem -- tens of thousands of copies of The Hobbit are out there saying he did. So, he rewrites it: he completely changes the famous “Riddles in the Dark” chapter, and makes some other minor corrections, but they don’t make it into print until 1951. So he’s got to put this into the Prologue so his readers, who THINK they know how Bilbo got the Ring, know the actual story -- and he’s got to explain that the only reason they got bad information is because the first edition of The Hobbit was based on a faulty manuscript of the Red Book of Westmarch. Wild, eh?
One of my favorite memories of being Education Librarian at Northeastern Illinois University was in the Fall of 2012 -- my colleague/friend/officemate, Kimberly, was interested in the Hobbit films that were coming out. I can’t remember if she hadn’t actually read the book yet (I’m fairly sure she had), or if maybe her husband hadn’t, or someone else she knew? Anyway, she asked if we owned a copy in our children’s collection, and I said I was sure we did, and went to get it. When I got back to our office, I commented to her that the book looked pretty old, and she asked if maybe it was a first edition? I said I was sure we didn’t have a first edition lying around….but then I got curious enough to check, and guess what? It wasn’t a first edition, first impression -- I wasn’t holding a $40,000 book, but a book that was worth at least a couple thousand. And what did I do, of course? I turned immediately to the Riddles in the Dark chapter, and Kimberly and I had a very fun time flipping through it, looking at how different the story came across, before I carried it gently downstairs to have it reassigned to the locked cases in Special Collections.
Anyway, the Prologue was fun -- it got my mind going about hobbits in general, and the lovely and gentle rhythms of their normal lives. I’m glad Tolkien gives me the chance to immerse myself a bit in the Shire as it was, before we get dropped into the sequence of events that threatens and ultimately shatters its tranquility, if only for a season. Tomorrow, onwards to a birthday party.