Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza

Strider did not listen under the hedge before Bree, until - it seems - the very last months of composition; for nine years Aragorn was called Trotter (and in 1938 he was a hobbit).

My apologies if this reads cryptically. It is an observation from reading three and-a-half* volumes of 'The History of Middle-earth' series, which give the early drafts of the The Lord of the Rings: from the beginning of the new hobbit story in December 1937 to completion in summer 1948. *(the second half of volume IX turns to another story.) Of this whole, extraordinarily curious pile of manuscript pages, much and more could be said. But I find it hard to get my head around "Aragorn" = "Trotter".

i should change my name - simon is worse than Trotter in this place.

Could be worse...Frodo was originally Bingo Bolger-Baggins....that’s about as strange as Trotter the Hobbit,

I did read some of those volumes once, and personally found the concept of Trotter interesting yet confounding. He was named after the sound that either his shoes or his feet made. He either wore wooden shoes (strange enough for a hobbit), or his feet were wooden because he'd been tortured by Sauron. Am I remembering this correctly?

I do want to read those at some point. It would be fascinating to see how the story evolved to be the one that we know so well today. It would be a strange, yet interesting adventure.

Yes, @Dwim I do believe you're right. At least about the shoes...some sort of wooden clogs, if my memory serves. Not as sure about the whole torture thing, but wouldn't surprise me either.

@Dimcairien Luiniel, they are interesting to see the development of the legendarium. There's also a 2 volume History of the Hobbit as well, that's got some good parts too.

It’s funny to me because Trotter to me sounds almost like the opposite of Strider - Trotter to me implies the noise, yes, but not less so than “Clopper”, for example, which would also not have the connotations of pigs’ feet - more importantly to me, Trotter gives the impression of a short stride and short legs (as you might expect from a hobbit). Contrast that with Strider - who is also named “longshanks” in Bree IIRC, and “Wingfoot” by Éomer. Someone swift to travel and used to it.

Edit to close bracket

Sil that is interesting. I think of a horse's trot, which is a step up above walking pace. Definitely not very fast, and more like a casual speed to stretch the muscles.

I've only read Book of Lost Tales I and part of II. I've always been interested in the development process but have to get my mind out of the "you're reading a story" mode, which is kind of jarring with the HOME series. I do recommend Flame Fried Ent's suggestion of reading the History of the Hobbit.

Not really relevant but I remember buying Return of the Shadow (HoME VI?) at Powell's bookstore when I was 10 years old, thinking it was some kind of awesome secret prequel to Lord of the Rings. It was a very confusing couple of days before I gave up if I remember correctly.. but I do remember the Trotter thing, and I think that the Black Rider the hobbits hid from in the Shire was originally going to just be Gandalf? Anyway my 10 year old brain couldn't handle the meta-ness and I gave it up after that.

I've started a reread of Return of the Shadow recently, and as usual find myself torn between excitement at witnessing the evolution of story to its final form and some uneasiness at reading material Tolkien never thought would be seen by the general public. But all things considered I think it is worthwhile reading for those interested.

I also think it very cool that our friend the sentient fox was in the story from the very earliest draft, and almost verbatim as he appears in the published FotR.

Personally, I've become addicted to reading the early drafts of The Lord of the Rings, which I very challenging but also rewarding, not least because I now read the published story differently. I've been studying these drafts for a few years and it took some while before I even understood how to read them. Looking back, I think a first challenge is to grasp that, in the early years of composition at least, we do not have before us an early draft of the story we now know as The Lord of the Rings but another story, a sequel to The Hobbit that, after a few years, became something else.

Once this is understood then Return of the Shadow prompts a re-reading of (the first edition!) of The Hobbit, suggesting that the original story of Bilbo Baggins is not quite the children's story everyone now thinks it is (and for a Tolkien fanatic it takes a great mental effort to free oneself of the riddle game as we know it and read Bilbo's original story as it was initially imagined - because the riddle game is the center of the story, and a different riddle game = a different story and even a different Bilbo Baggins).

Then identifying the slow steps by which this sequel to The Hobbit became something else reveals something of the fascinating process by which Tolkien came to understand the nature of the One Ring. Here one has to turn to 'On Fairy-stories', which began as a lecture in March 1939, in the wake of composition of the terrible encounter on Weathertop that, it seems to me, forced JRRT to grapple with the 'magic' of the Ring, thereby spelling out the relationship between the magic of the Necromancer and the enchantment of Galadriel (which is at the heart of this essay and, of course, finds parallel expression in the Mirror scene in Lothlórien, which was composed between delivery of the lecture and writing up the essay in 1943).

So, apart from anything else, these early drafts illuminate other writings and bring to light the curious connections between them. All this then impacts upon how one reads The Lord of the Rings. I now see the story surrounding Tom Bombadil as belonging to the original sequel, embodying certain ideas that Tolkien subsequently rejected. But then we see another side of Tolkien's genius: rather than scrap the Bombadil sections, or heavily revise them, he simply left them as they were. I find it hard to put this in words, but where 'modernist' contemporary writers were hung up on unity and secure foundations of their art Tolkien swims in a more medieval current. (When I think about this I keep coming back to a list of medieval movies I once read, where Monty Python's Holy Grail is held up as authentic because it consists of a series of stories with little connection between them.)

I find it very easy to get my head around Strider's original name, though Trotter only really works as a nickname for a Hobbit, not for someone described by Sam as long-shanks.

I bring up these Home volumes here (a thread in the new plaza) because I think a chief failing of the administration of the old plaza was a failure to read them.

simon wrote: ↑Thu Aug 20, 2020 7:00 pmbecause I think a chief failing of the administration of the old plaza was a failure to read them.

That's a curious idea. Not quite sure how it would work.

@Elenhir that's just me venting about the shortcomings of 'Peeling the Onion,' which I've been engaging with intensely as part of the 'halfir archive' project. i think the chief flaw in the thread is a mining of these Home volumes as opposed to a careful reading of them.

I'll quietly skip most of what @Chrysophylax Dives says, as it would be too darned boring to read me quoting a whole lot of text just to go nodding, and at intervals injecting something like “I agree” or “I think I know what you mean”

Chrysophylax Dives wrote: ↑Sat Jun 20, 2020 8:28 am Once this is understood then Return of the Shadow prompts a re-reading of (the first edition!) of The Hobbit, suggesting that the original story of Bilbo Baggins is not quite the children's story everyone now thinks it is

This confused me a bit, Simon.

Do you intend to suggest that the first edition of The Hobbit is not quite a children's story, or that it is not quite the same children's story that we know from the second edition (but a children's story nonetheless)?

One of my own complaints about The Hobbit is that I do not feel that it takes itself seriously as a story. This is, to me, quite irrespective of being told for children or not, or of the episodic form of many medieval tales (the concept of a hero going on a journey where he – inevitably he's a ‘he’ – will encounter a number of unrelated small adventures, finally save the day in a bigger way, and that's it).

This feeling (on my side) of the story not taking itself seriously is at the same time both stronger in the first edition of The Hobbit, but is also more acceptable simply because that story is also more frivolous in the whole. In the second edition, especially with the recasting of the riddle game, the story seems to grasp for a seriousness that it cannot achieve. I also think this is part of what Tolkien was hoping to address with his 1960 rewrite, but all that that rewrite achieves is something that is even more trying to sit between two chairs – he would have needed to do a far more fundamental rewrite of the story to make it take itself seriously.