The Text of The Hobbit: Putting Tolkien’s Notes in Order
1981; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 7; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/esc.1981.0022
ISSN1913-4835
Autores Tópico(s)Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
ResumoT H E T E X T O F T H E H O B B I T : P U T T I N G T O L K I E N ’ S N O T E S I N O R D E R CONSTANCE B. HIEATT University of Western Ontario _Lhat J. R. R. Tolkien did indeed fail to keep his “notes in order,” a pos sibility he acknowledges in the “Foreword” to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings,1 should be amply clear now to anyone who takes an interest in the matter. Humphrey Carpenter’s authorized biography2 has given us a fair idea of Tolkien’s extraordinary disorderliness,3 and his pen chant for second-thoughts and extensive revisions must have already been clear to readers who had learned anything about the evolution, if such it can be called, of The Silmarillion.4 Presumably some of the many devotees of The Lord of the Rings must have compared the first and second editions of that work looking for the “errors and inconsistencies” which, in the same “Foreword,” Tolkien said he had corrected in the second edition. If they have, they will have found revisions of other varieties as well.5 There are more significant revisions, however, in the text of The Hobbit, which seem to have attracted little attention and until recently little, if any thing, was said about the matter in print — no doubt because The Hobbit has still not attracted many explicators and critics.6 Those who have pub lished comments on it have made some rather misleading remarks simply because they have not sufficiently discriminated among the various editions. And the textual history of the book is not as accessible as that of The Lord of the Rings, for various reasons.7 The first edition of The Hobbit was published in England by George Al len & Unwin Ltd. in 1937; it was quickly followed by the first American edition, published by Houghton Mifflin (Boston and New York) in 1938. The two first editions are identical in all but two respects.8 The American edition includes four coloured illustrations, now familiar to those who have seen the Tolkien Calendars, which are not in the first printing of the Eng lish edition.9 On the other hand, the Houghton Mifflin edition does not reproduce the maps on the endpapers in two colours, as was done in the English edition, which creates a puzzling state of affairs for a reader who tries to follow the parenthetical advice on p. 30, “Look at the map at the beginning of this book, and you will see there the runes in red.”10 The first En g l ish Studies in C anada, vii, 2, Summer 1981 edition( English or American) is now extremely rare. This is not only be cause children’s books, whether in public or private libraries, tend to get read to pieces, but also because there were not very many printings of the edition. The record given on the copyright page of the third edition indi cates only four impressions before the appearance of the second edition in I95I>11 There is, however, no trace of a second edition in the catalogues of the British Library or the Bodleian, libraries of deposit which are supposed to have all editions of books published in England. The Bodleian lists the edi tion of 1937 and a 1942 reprint (the third impression of the first edition), then nothing more until the third edition of 1966. The B.L. has one further entry before 1966, a 1961 Puffin Books reprint. What the 1961 Puffin is a reprint of, however, is not clear in the catalogue, which does not record any 1951 or “second” edition: nor is it listed in the British National Bibliogra phy volume for 1951-54, or any subsequent volumes.12 Thus it appears that the “second edition” was not officially announced as such at the time of its publication. An explanation of this odd omission apears to lie in the circumstances of Tolkien’s revision of the fifth chapter (“Riddles in the Dark” ) described by Carpenter: During the summer of 1947 he drafted a...
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