Unfinished Tales - Part Three - III - The Quest of Erebor

[Formendacil]

Look at me being caught up and everything!

Anyway...

"The Quest for Erebor" has always been one of my favourite pieces in Unfinished Tales, largely because it's the closest we ever come to meeting our favourite characters from The Lord of the Rings again--and here we have Gandalf telling another story, just like "The Return of the Shadow" or "The Council of Elrond," with Gimli and the Hobbits hanging out in Minas Tirith.

Perhaps what fascinates me the most about "The Quest for Erebor" at this point is how it dovetails nicely with the "new" version of The Hobbit that's included at the end of Rateliff's History of the The Hobbit, when Tolkien set out to rewrite The Hobbit in the style of The Lord of the Rings. While he only gets as far as the trolls, the change in style in that piece goes some of the distance towards imagining what that book would have looked like if Gandalf had told it--and as we're told in "The Quest for Erebor," it would have looked rather different indeed.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who wishes Tolkien had actually written Gandalf's version of The Hobbit--not to supersede the original text, like the replacement Gollum chapter, but to complement it.

[Galadriel55]

Gandalf is a much, much sneakier fellow than I thought until I read this chapter... Well, no, I still had my suspicions, and the appendices are somewhat enlightening, but here we see Gandalf the Schemer, not warrior or healer or magician or messenger or etc. with a bit of planning mixed into it.

[Guinevere]

I enjoyed reading this chapter very much, but have nothing to add which Formendacil and Galadriel55 haven't already said.

My favourite line in this chapter is the last sentence of version B:" A small oversight, but it proved fatal. Small oversights often do."