Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza

A lot ended up being written about the Grey Wizard (which is how you end up with a Blue Wizard). But the very first description of Gandalf provided by Bilbo Baggins is perhaps worth pondering:

The wandering wizard that gave Old Took a pair of magic diamond studs that fastened themselves and never came undone till ordered.

I never saw another jewel quite like that in Middle-earth.

For other small minor enchanted items, I like the troll’s purse in the Hobbit who asks Bilbo who he is when he tries to steal it. Not quite related to Gandalf, I guess: but I wonder if Gandalf himself (or other wizards) were the ones enchanting these items, or if they were simply made in such a fashion as to have these small magics?

Yeah! The troll's purse is a bit similar. I especially like the description of trolls' purses as "the mischief".

Where did they go, the studs, I wonder? I can not see a gift like that being lost or misplaced or given away (unless inherited). Maybe the Old Took was buried with them on? And was the reason for them being fastened then not undone till ordered so that the owner, would not lose them? I wonder what the command word was? I bet Gandalf had a good laugh when the Old Took first put them on.

Were they cufflinks or decorative fasteners that fit onto a buttonhole on the front of a shirt or waistcoat? I am not sure I would call them 'a jewel'. Magic buttons, maybe?

Or was it all just hobbit hearsay? Similar to this statement:

‘All the top of your hill is full of tunnels packed with chests of gold and silver, and jools, by what I’ve heard. ‘

Maybe they were just gold buttons and not magic at all..

To me, those diamond studs and the troll's purse are premium examples of why it is my firm opinion that The Hobbit fails to take itself very seriously, as a story, but even more as sub-creation. This is worst in the beginning of the book, but doesn't end entirely until we reach Lake Town.

Verlyn Flieger has an essay about this in her book, Green Suns and Faërie – Essays on J.R.R. Tolkien, “Tolkien on Tolkien” in which she, with wonderful clarity, summarises (p. 54),

Flieger wrote:My argument is as follows: Tolkien's writing of The Hobbit was a learning process; indeed the last half of the book is substantially better than the first half. He used the mistakes he perceived himself to have made in that book to develop and articulate in “On Fairy-stories” a theory of fantasy and sub-creation, which he put into practice in The Lord of the Rings.

I might add that while the second half is, indeed “substantially better than the first half”, The Hobbit doesn't really become good until after Lake Town.

Flieger further gives the view (with which I, again, agree wholeheartedly) that “Tolkien was no Nesbit. The authorial aside was not his natural mode, and his efforts in that direction seem both arch and awkward.” Hooray for clear and honest scholars such as Flieger!

The wandering wizard that gave Old Took a pair of magic diamond studs that fastened themselves and never came undone till ordered.

Dear @Troelsfo and Verlyn Flieger, you are upside down in your reading of The Hobbit. You are not alone. Even John Rateliff, editor of the 1930-1932 draft manuscript of the story, hails the accidental 1951 remake of the riddle-game as a masterpiece. Well, yes it is; but it is a door into darkness as concerns the original story, first published in 1937 and - happily - reprinted as facsimile (if that is how to use the word?), the great unsung event in recent Tolkien publishing. What you say is all very right and proper but it does not concern the original story of Bilbo Baggins (a hobbit dosed with sentimentality in the sequel to hide his remake). Nobody takes The Hobbit seriously. But something happens in Tolkien's writing in the first part of the story (evident already in the first draft chapter of summer 1930) that is the birth of the 'mature' Middle-earth that colours The Silmarillion but emerged into the light of day only after Moria. The One Ring is but a variant of the magic ring. Granted, Tolkien is not quite in Middle-earth. So where is he?

Where was Tolkien?

I think at least partially in a childrens bed time story, copies I have have in story asides of the author to someone asking what a hobbit is and a few other things and even the tangent about the diamond studs seems to be more filler until he can get more meat of the story made up in his head (similar to someone transcribing an oral story but not knowing to not bother with the filler)

I know that we had bits of The Silmarillion and other stories before the Hobbit, but honestly I'm not entirely sure that it was placed in Middle-earth as we know it in Lord of the Rings at all until the demand for a sequel was made and then it seemed to be shoe horned to fit rather than a simple path from one to the other as an author emerging in his own rights but as someone writing a bit of childrens fluff for fun.

Of course this gives I think a whole new meaning to the line that Gandalf has in the Fellowship where he literally seems to shed his mischief inducing wizard role from the Hobbit entirely telling Bilbo he'll see 'Gandalf the Grey uncloaked' like Tolkien is throwing away the whole notion from the Hobbit as a mischief maker rather than a serious character.

Troelsfo wrote: ↑Wed Jul 07, 2021 6:14 pm Verlyn Flieger has an essay about this in her book, Green Suns and Faërie – Essays on J.R.R. Tolkien, “Tolkien on Tolkien” in which she, with wonderful clarity, summarises (p. 54),

Flieger wrote:My argument is as follows: Tolkien's writing of The Hobbit was a learning process; indeed the last half of the book is substantially better than the first half. He used the mistakes he perceived himself to have made in that book to develop and articulate in “On Fairy-stories” a theory of fantasy and sub-creation, which he put into practice in The Lord of the Rings.

Troelsfo, this conversation has now cost me 30 Euros - the price of Flieger's Green Suns and Faërie. But having paid my monies I have the essay that you quote from and yesterday read it for the first time. Three initial reflections.

1. Flieger is surely correct to read 'On Fairy-stories' (OFS) as critically engaging with The Hobbit (TH), arising as Tolkien clarified his thinking as he worked on its sequel (LOTR). And I don't doubt that she is correct to read in OFS the grounds of a change of style (narrative voice) and content (inner consistency of a world) from TH to LOTR. This includes the trolls and the purse and perhaps even the magic diamond studs of the OP.

2. Flieger is surely wrong to suggest that Tolkien learned his mature theory and practice of fairy stories while writing TH. This thesis is indicated in your quotation with the suggestion of composition of TH as 'a learning process' and in the later criticism of elements of TH as 'a surprising lapse in sub-creation, a detour in Tolkien's progress from Pigwiggenry to true Faërie' (pp. 61-2). The assumption here is that Tolkien's story-telling biography is a single process from false to true writing theory and practice, with the implication that in composing TH Tolkien was already feeling his way to writing a fairy story as he later came to theorize such a story. But not only is there no ground for this assumption, it runs counter to what we know of Tolkien's biography.

Flieger fudges a bit here with her chronology on pp. 55-6, which begins with the publication of TH in September 1937, steps to the commencement of the sequel in Dec. 1937, and then on through to March 1939 and the St Andrews lecture. The dates are of course correct, and all that is needed to make the clearly correct claim that, as Tolkien worked on the sequel, he began to reflect on the nature of a fairy story, criticizing aspects of what he had done in TH, developing the ideas of OFS, and hence clarifying his intentions for LOTR.

But to make the additional claim that Tolkien was already engaged in such reflections while composing TH we need the dates of this composition, which John Rateliff shows are 1930-1933, with the original spontaneous sentence with which it all began appearing in the late 1920s. There is a significant period between composition of TH and the St Andrews lecture (during which years Tolkien composed both the 'Adventures of Tom Bombadil' and the unfinished 'Lost Road' with its concluding chapter on 'The Fall of Númenor'). There is no evidence that I am aware of in any of Tolkien's writings 1933-1939 of a developing meditation on fairy stories and sub-creation that bridges TH and OFS. Indeed, Flieger's quotations from Return of the Shadow provide evidence to the contrary: if Tolkien had been developing his ideas over all these years, how to make sense of the 'bad' narratorial interjections penned for the sequel in late 1937 and 1938 that she lists on page 58?

The unwarranted assumption of continuity of intention and idea between TH and its sequel is widespread but baneful in effect (it is ultimately what allowed the abomination that was Peter Jackson's second movie trilogy, with its disdain and contempt for the story of Bilbo Baggins). Assuming that TH was always intended to be what it was later enrolled as, people cannot even see that they are overlooking the question of what TH actually is and was intended to be.

It is correct that Tolkien composed TH as a fairy story that he told his children, and correct too that around 18 months into the composition of a sequel he began to meditate on the very nature of a fairy story and found his original story wanting. But the changes in style within TH are unrelated to the account of fairy stories that we find in OFS; to begin to understand them we need to actually pay attention to what Tolkien was trying to do in TH. This question is not asked by Flieger, who assumes that the primary purpose of composition of TH was simply to write a fairy story. The reality would seem to be that Tolkien composed TH for other reasons, adopted fairy story as the mode of writing, and only several years later reflected critically on the nature of that mode.

3. Flieger's reading of TH is, unjustifiably, exclusively negative while her reading of OFS seems a tad attenuated. I'll get to TH by way of OFS. In the passage you quote we have:

[Tolkien] used the mistakes he perceived himself to have made in that book [TH] to develop and articulate in “On Fairy-stories” a theory of fantasy and sub-creation, which he put into practice in The Lord of the Rings.

I'm not exactly sure what Flieger means here by 'theory of fantasy and sub-creation' (nor yourself in quoting her). Literally, her statement is unobjectionable - perception of the mistakes of TH contributed to that element of the theory set out in OFS that Flieger emphasizes in this essay. But her essay rather gives the impression that the demand for the inner consistency of a secondary world is the whole of that theory. This is of course nonsense, and I cannot believe Flieger really holds to a reading that barely scratches the surface of OFS, which - alongside much else - draws a vital contrast between the sub-creative activities of mortals (whose sub-creative activities are confined to words), elves (who also do drama and, it turns out, make the Silmarils and other precious stones), and necromancers, who might appear to be engaging in fair sub-creative activity but are in reality practitioners of foul magic. Thus we find in OFS a theory of sub-creation and forging that can be used to understand the work of Tolkien, Fëanor, and Sauron; there is much more going on here than a simple demand for the inner consistency of reality.

This is of direct relevance for a discussion of the relationship between TH, OFS, and LOTR (the subject of Flieger's essay). As I noted earlier today in discussion with @Saranna, sub-creation is explored in two key steps in OFS: first, in 'Origins', we find an account of the making of a fairy element by the mixing of nouns and adjectives; second, in 'Fantasy', we have an account of the making of a secondary world within which the fairy element will appear credible. As examples of fairy elements, Tolkien includes 'magic rings'. If Flieger is correct to read OFS as an intermediary between TH and LOTR - and I believe that she is - then here is surely the heart, or at least a core part of the relationship: OFS generalizes the 'magic ring' of TH, thereby deriving 'fairy elements', and then posits the need to establish a secondary world in which finding a magic ring is credible. To ask how a magic ring can be a credible element of a world is, among other things, to inquire into its origins - such a magic ring was presumably made, so how must we imagine a world in which some powerful personality can make such a ring? Only thus do we approach what, imo, is the real genius of OFS: an account of Tolkien's own practice that - with suitable qualifications for the distinctions between mortals and immortals, elves and necromancers - can account also for the genesis of the Rings of Power.

My third initial observation, then, is that Flieger's exclusive emphasis upon the elements of TH that Tolkien came to reject as he penned OFS and LOTR is only part of the story of the relationship between TH, OFS, and LOTR, and the less interesting part at that.

Now that I have started on all this I find it hard to stop. In particular, I would like to probe the brief chronology of composition that Flieger provides with a more intensive reading of Return of the Shadow. Christopher Tolkien's editorial work allows us to be more precise than is Flieger as to the relationship between the drafts of the new hobbit story and the turn to the St Andrews lecture, and what is thereby revealed is, imo, of some relevance to the present discussion. But though I don't feel that this post is quite worth 30 Euros, it is already rather long (and this particular essay is only one of many in Flieger's Green Suns). So I'll draw a line for now and hope for some illuminating replies below.

Currently all out of replies, I will come back to this thread with interest when I have the energy!