Quote:
Originally Posted by Pitchwife
....Why? Because the change in role and importance the ring underwent between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, becoming The One Ring, is retroactive within the fictional universe. Once the ring 'turned out' to be the One Ring it always was the One Ring, and the story in the First Edition where Gollum was ready to give Bilbo the ring willingly becomes a figment of Bilbo's desire to make himself look better and affirm his right to the ring....
Once again, it's clear and has been amply demonstrated that this isn't what Tolkien intended at the time of writing TH. Whether this is a problem depends on whether you hold auctorial intention to be more important than a text's power to acquire and generate new meanings through its history.
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You have hit on what made Tolkien the writer he was. Tolkien was the one of the greatest synthesizers the literary world has ever known. He wrote
The Hobbit showing an inkling of distant previous eras, and these eras were already well-developed in his 1st Age tales and lays which would eventually be made into
The Silmarillion. The antecedent Silmarillion works synthesized Biblical, Welsh, Greek and Finnish works or languages, just as The Hobbit borrowed from Beowulf and the Voluspa.
So what does Tolkien do after publishing
The Hobbit? In writing a sequel, he magnifies the tale of Bilbo Baggins and the other characters. Gandalf goes from pitching pinecones to defeating a Balrog. Cozy Erebor becomes the decrepit but magnificent Khazad-dum. The dispossessed Bard with the black arrow becomes the dispossessed Aragorn with shards and a lineage that predates the Age. Oh, and a magic ring that grants invisibility becomes the One Ring, the manifestation of all evil, created by an eternal foe, Sauron, who was borrowed from the 1st Age, but now was hiding out as a necromancer in Dol Guldur but really has a far greater keep in Mordor. And Gollum become more than just a riddle-spouting side-character, but one of the prime movers of the new book, held in thrall by the Ring, he destroys it and it destroys him.
Tolkien's genius is borrowing and embellishing, In
Lord of the Rings he was masterful with the synthesis and the imagination to connect the dots.