Tuesday, September 21, 2010

There and Back Again

On this day in 1937 J.R.R Tolkien’s The Hobbit was published. The "new Hobbit," The Lord of the Rings, didn't see publication until 1954. Then Tolkien went back and revised some aspects of The Hobbit to make them consistent with the larger story.

From Chapter I: "An Unexpected Party":
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hail like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats—the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill—The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it—and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (be had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were all on the lefthand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden, and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river. ....
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1966, p. 11.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous11:31 AM

    I would have shared this on Facebook, but you're requiring me to share all my personal information to do that. So no. Just no.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sorry. How am I doing that? Something at Facebook?

    ReplyDelete

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