The History of LotR - Chapter-by-Chapter Companion

[davem]

Child

As the main body of your post requires some thought (& careful re-reading of HoME, I'll come back on that later. One thing I can respond to now is:

Originally Posted by Child of the 7th Age

I will need to think about your more general query on the narrator

I'm not sure it deserves it!

I suppose what I was getting at was the way Tolkien not only begins the story six times, the storyline each time being subtly different, but he creates a different narrator each time - as if the choice of story determined the narrative style. Or is it that he's struggling to find a narrative voice/approach he's comfortable with, & as he tries out different voices he comes up with different storylines? So was the story determined by the way he chose to tell it, or was the style determined by the content?

Its just a throwaway question, but it interests me - Tolkien wrote different kinds of stories, & he seems to have a range of narrative voices, & each 'voice' will tell a different kind of story. So, he begins writing the Hobbit sequel with a particular narrative 'voice' - similar to, but not exactly the same as the narrator of the Hobbit - which implies that even from the first he knew (if only subconsciously) that he would be telling a different kind of story. By the final draft he's moved closer to the 'high' style of the end of the Hobbit, but he's not quite there. Eventually, by the time he's decided that what he's really writing is the culmination of the Legendarium, the style has changed dramatically from the first draft, because that story could not be told by the first narrator. But the first narrator is entertaining, interesting, ironic - in fact, he's a very well realised character in his own right, & could have told a very entertaining story. Same with all the others.

So, its not a case of Tolkien starting out with a vaguely sketched story/narrative voice which he gradually 'improves' & deepens - any of the stories/narrators in the different drafts would have worked, but they would have gone in different directions. But is his final choice of which story to tell based on storyline or narrator?