LOTR: Foreword to the 2nd Edition Pt 1

I think any endeavour tentatively entitled Annotating the Ring should begin at the beginning: J.R.R. Tolkien’s easily overlook Foreword to the Second Edition of LOTR (1966). This will take a few posts but it’s a necessary first step. One might ask, “what benefit is there in reading Tolkien’s account of the book’s writing apart from sleepy academic hair splitting?” There are two answers: 1) here we have a rare moment when Tolkien was looking to properly contextualize his wildly successful myth in terms of his larger mythological and philosophical project … for those who will listen of course; and 2) it serves as a road map for current and future readers to find their way back to Tolkien’s intentions. Either way, what we find may seem surprising.

“This tale grew in the telling, until it became a history of the Great War of the Ring and included many glimpses of the yet more ancient history that preceded it. It was begun soon after The Hobbit was written and before its publication in 1937; but I did not go on with this sequel, for I wished first to complete and set in order the mythology and legends of the Elder Days, which had then been taking shape for some years. …”

The first thing we notice is that although LOTR follows the journey of hobbits (and was technically begun as a sequel to The Hobbit) it’s really not about “hobbits” at all. LOTR is actually the conclusion of The Silmarillion. As we’ll see, LOTR a story that happens to have hobbits but is quickly concerned with a larger narrative of which hobbits are essentially obscure. Its true concern is with events that are set in motion in the Second Age of Middle-earth and during the War of the Jewels in the ages before. Hobbits just “happen” to get caught up in the story. (I realize this is shorthanded and inflammatory, but it’s not untrue. I’ll say more about hobbits down the road)

In a letter from 24 July 1938 to his publisher Tolkien wrote, “The sequel to the Hobbit has remained where it stopped. It has lost my favor, and I have no idea what to do with it. For one thing the original Hobbit was never intended to have a sequel . . . my mind on the ‘story’ side is really preoccupied with the ‘pure’ fairy stories or mythologies of the Silmarillion, into which even Mr. Baggins got dragged against my original will . . .”. (Letters 38)

What lost favor for Tolkien was the idea of LOTR as a sequel to The Hobbit. What he means by “pure fairy” is The Silmarillion and is an idea that will need to be explored later. What’s clear from this letter, though, is that finishing the legendarium he began in 1914 had become his aim. Tolkien had other stories such as Farmer Giles of Ham and Mr. Bliss to pitch to the publishers as a follow up and was clearly content to leave The Hobbit as another one-off tale.

Shockingly, earlier, in 1937, Tolkien wrote in an unpublished letter, “I don’t much approve of the Hobbit myself, preferring my own mythology … I did not offer it for sale. But as the MS. was discovered (in a nunnery) by one of G. A and Unwin’s people and an offer made for it, I let it go. I knew I was in for trouble”.

The timeline of Tolkien’s monumental work in the 30’s looks something like this:

1931 - Tolkien writes Mythopoeia crystalizing for the first time his thoughts on the relationship between faith, myth, and mythmaking.

1936 - Tolkien’s student Elaine Griffiths suggests to her friend and Allen & Unwin employee Susan Dagnall that she should read Tolkien’s abandoned manuscript of The Hobbit. Tolkien considered the story a one off tale that “was still suffering from what he later called ‘the contemporary delusions about ‘fairy-stories’ and children” (Carpenter 179).

28 June, 1936 - Lewis writes that he lent Tolkien a copy of The Silver Trumpet by Owen Barfield. Tolkien takes the story as a ‘proof of concept’. Eight years earlier in 1928 Tolkien read Barfield’s Poetic Diction which both summarized everything Tolkien believed about language and radically transformed his approach. This may or may not have influenced Tolkien’s thinking in Mythopoeia (1931).

25 November, 1936 - Tolkien delivers his lecture, Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics, to the British Academy in London. The paper is a landmark in Beowulf studies and changes the way the academy (and public) regarded the text. The treatment is also Tolkien’s first volley in articulating his own philological philosophy. mythopoeia. Myth, language, and forms of life are essentially linked together.

1937

1 July, 1937 - Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics is published.

21 September 1937 - The Hobbit is published. Because of its success, Stanley Unwin subsequently urges Tolkien to write a sequel, which he begins.

15 Nov-19 Dec 1937 - Not wishing to be bound to The Hobbit, Tolkien set’s aside its “sequel” and resumes work on the Quenta Silmarillion.

1938

4 March, 1938 - In a letter to Stanley Unwin, Tolkien says that an “unpremeditated” turn has occurred in the sequel to The Hobbit. This marks the appearance of Black Riders during the writing of The Lord of the Rings.

1-15 September, 1938 - Tolkien continues writing and reaches Rivendell.

1939

8 March, 1939 - Tolkien gives his lecture On Fairy-Stories at the University of St. Andrews. Tolkien completes his examination of myth and language and the function of “fairy” in the modern age, which began with Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. Together with Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction make up the heart of Tolkien’s philological philosophy.

Autumn 1939- Tolkien works on early versions of ‘The Council of Elrond’, ‘The Ring Goes South’, and a first draft of ‘The Mines of Moria’.

“There”, Tolkien writes in the foreword to the second edition, “I halted for a long while. It was almost a year later when I went on and so came to Lothlórien and the Great River late in 1941.”

Returning to the foreword, then, Tolkien continues his thoughts on The Silmarillion-LOTR:

“… I desired to do this for my own satisfaction, and I had little hope that other people would be interested in this work, especially since it was primarily linguistic ininspiration and was begun in order to provide the necessary background of ‘history’ for Elvish tongues.”

We’re immediately forced to re-posture ourselves when rereading Tolkien’s work. As will soon be apparent, we’ll begin to read and see through his eyes and with his intent for several reasons. The most important reason being that we really re-encounter the nature of language and its relationship to history, things, and being human.

That Tolkien was a philologist is a given in his biography. This just means he studied the development of Old English and the meaning of words (and their worlds) as they moved through history. Tolkien’s kinship with the poetics of Owen Barfield [see Letters #15] and his very particular belief in the way language worked was well documented in Verlyn Flieger’s Splintered Light. What is not so well known are the rich philosophical implications of Tolkien’s primarily linguistic work and how this philosophy intersects with his belief’s about mythology or fairy-stories. While Barfield’s Poetic Diction and the philosophy of language will be highlighted in future posts, we should note that Tolkien’s famous On Fairy-Stories was actually written during this crucial year for LOTR, 1938 - 1939.

“When those whose advice and opinion I sought corrected little hope to no hope [to the publishing of The Silmarillion], I went back to the sequel, encouraged by requests from readers for more information concerning hobbits and their adventures. But the story was drawn irresistibly towards the older world, and because an account, as it were, of its end and passing away before its beginning and middle had been told. The process had begun in the writing of The Hobbit, in which there were already some references to the older mater: Elrond, Gondolin, the High-elves, and the orcs, as well as glimpses that had arisen unbidden of things higher or deeper or darker than its surface: Durin, Moria, Gandalf, the Necromancer, the Ring. The discovery of the significance of these glimpses and of their relation to the ancient histories revealed the Third Age and its culmination in the War of the Ring.”

Here we have it. Two paragraphs into his new foreword and we’re prepared to appreciate the first part of LOTR with new eyes. The burden of Part 1 or what becomes The Fellowship of the Ring is to simultaneously distance itself from The Hobbit and also to draw closer to the primarily linguistic legendarium. LOTR actually informs Tolkien’s writing of The Silmarillion which he’ll return to in 1951. The double-move begins with “The Long Expected Party” and culminates with “Lothlórien”. By the time we enter the heart of Silvan elves in Middle-earth we are fully returned to the mythological project Tolkien began in 1917. This move, incidentally, is also the process of ‘enchantment’.