The History of LotR - Chapter-by-Chapter Companion

[Child of the 7th Age]

Davem,

I've read this essay and it's a good one. It's easy to see from his analysis that the change in the narrator voice is gradual. With each draft there is a subtle shift in emphasis.

I will need to think about your more general query on the narrator. Meanwhile, I wanted to share some ideas. There were several things that struck me as I read through the earliest drafts:

• Tolkien used notes and outlines to brainstorm: these are often the earliest statement of the ideas and themes that were to assume such importance in his story (and which we love to talk about).
• Not surprisingly, the ideas put forward in the notes and outlines sometimes weren't integrated into the characters and narrative till weeks or even months later.
• Also not surprising, later and earlier ideas continue to co-exist in a single draft of a chapter so sometimes you have a very strange mix.

Here's one instance. There was a set of notes produced in the first six weeks of Tolkien's writing, certainly certainly prior to February 1, 1938. In this, Tolkien made several points about the nature of the Ring and Bilbo's inability to resist it:

Not very dangerous when used for good purpose. But it exacts its penalty. You must either lose it, or yourself. Bilbo could not bring himself to lose it.

(The italics are Tolkien's.....)

In another brief scheme dating from the same period...

Ring must eventually go back to Maker, or draw you towards it. Rather a dirty trick handing it on?

In the first quote, JRRT still maintained the Ring could be used for a good purpose: this idea would change later. But he already saw the Ring as an irresistable lure, pulling whoever uses it towards its Maker. The interesting thing is that the actual writing of the chapter didn't directly reflect Bilbo's dilemma until draft 6. Indeed, in draft 5, Bilbo is shown freely giving the Ring to Gandalf: it is Bilbo's idea and not Gandalf's to give the Ring to Bingo. It's only in draft #6 that Bilbo admits he can't throw it away and even has trouble leaving it behind. From the way CT structures his book, it seems that drafts #5 and 6 were compiled many months later than the first four or the notes I cited.

One example of strange things being mixed together is a draft called "Of Gollum and the Ring". This was apparently written in those first six weeks: at one point it was intended as the foreward for the entire book. It was a discussion between Bingo and Gandalf that supposedly took place before the party. Parts of it eventually became Shadows of the Past.

Some of this draft reads like a continuation of The Hobbit. For example, Gandalf advises Bingo that the only way to be protected against the evil of the Ring is to treat it as a joke. Gandalf also says one of the main reasons Bilbo liked Bingo was that the younger Hobbit was very good at jokes! Gandalf advised constructing a comic plan, a jest, so that he could slip out of Hobbiton, fooling the Hobbits and apparently the Ring. The last sentence reads: "Bingo was rocking with laughter." This does not exactly sound like any book I know!

Yet there are other parts of these same notes that eerily foreshadow what will happen in the story. The draft contains references to so many themes and incidents that were important in the book. Among these were the idea of destroying the Ring in Mount Doom, the importance of 'pity' in saving Bilbo, the stretching of life under the Ring, the relative invulnerability of the Hobbits to the Dark Lord, the phrase "Lord of the Rings", etc.. There is even a paragraph that sounds something like "providence" explaining how Bilbo got the Ring:

There was, of course, something much more mysterious behind the whole thing -- something quite beyond the Lord of the Rings himself, peculiar to Bilbo and his great Adventure. There was a queer fate over these rings, and especially [?this] one. They got lost occasionally, and turned up in strange places. This one had already slipped away from its owner treacherously once before. It had slipped away from Gollum too. That is why I let Bilbo keep the ring so long.

Sound familiar? However did he come up with so many of these themes and ideas in the first six weeks of writing?