Malveth The Eternal
Lorien
I wrote this when the book(s) first came out, but never posted for some reason. Hopefully, someone appreciates this:
As I write this review, I have my ‘History of the Hobbit’ boxed set in front of me. The contents of the box took almost a year to read through. They include a new edition of ‘The Hobbit’, and both volumes of John D. Rateliff’s ‘History of the Hobbit’, a continuation of the seminal work begun by Christopher Tolkien in 1984, ‘The History of Middle Earth’, which ran to twelve volumes, and was itself an addendum to two other publications, ‘The Silmarillion’ and ‘Unfinished Tales’. J.R.R. Tolkien has gone from being underappreciated and academically ignored, to being a cottage industry of merchandising and scholarship. I’ve lost count of how many ‘encyclopedias’ are currently available focused solely on the fictional Middle Earth – at least three.
This is either a good or bad thing, depending on how you look at it. Personally, I’m not sure of what’s left in the Tolkien archives: unpublished letters perhaps, academic errata, short story ‘King of the Green Dozen’, a prose Beowulf translation…the man was not prolific, and most of his creative life was focused on a single project, the languages and legends of Middle Earth. While I personally enjoyed parts of ‘The Children of Hurin’, I don’t think it was fair to market it as a ‘newly uncovered novel’, when it was obviously Volume XII of ‘The History of Middle Earth’, scholarly notes and all. I fear sometimes that the potency of Tolkien’s ‘spell’ will be undone by all this archeological activity – didn’t Gandalf have something to say about ‘he that breaks a thing to find out what it is’?
All of that aside, what I have before me is an attractive cardboard box containing three hardcover books. As these sorts of packaging gimmicks go, this one is sturdy and nice looking, with Tolkien’s art instead of a ‘professional’ illustrator – early versions covers for the The Hobbit on either side, and a slice of the final illustration for the ‘spine’.
The two Rateliff volumes are very nicely put together: the binding is tight but allows for the book to be left open at almost any page, the paper is thick and high quality, the printing is uniformly excellent, the fonts easy to read (even at long stretches), and the illustrations colored wherever called for. The covers utilize the same early Tolkien art as the box, and are printed on nice acid-free paper.
The Hobbit itself fairs less successfully: the cover is poorly reproduced, as is all the black and white art within – shockingly, carelessly so. The addition of colored illustrations do not take the sting out of the horrid reproductions of the interior pictures. A real shame. And the first chapter of ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ is crammed in small print into the back, a lamentable practice of the ‘licensed fiction’ mills. A sad lapse in taste.
This is certainly the most important and major new work of Tolkien scholarship since ‘The Peoples of Middle Earth’, and that includes the Concordance and ‘Children of Hurin’. What HotH has going for it is that it’s fresh, it covers new territory. In many ways, apart from the editorial process that created ‘The Silmarillion’, this is the last major frontier of Middle Earth scholarship, before we go sailing off the edge of the map into the deepest and most obscure waters of linguistics and philosophy. Everything about the text, Tolkien’s and Rateliff’s, feels palpably groundbreaking and exciting. Yes, The Hobbit was an entirely, thrillingly new concept in juvenile literature. That’s what makes it special. It is contained in a fiercely conservative genre, and yet it breaks all the established rules, while establishing its own new ones, now often imitated and slavishly adhered to. ‘The Hobbit’ was a first.
For those who have studied the development of the ‘Silmarillion’ material and The Lord of the Rings, we again find Tolkien flying blindly, pursuing an arcane concept: the marriage of his imaginary languages, vast unpublished epic mythology, and love of Norse sagas and the Finnish Kalevala. What began as an odd sentence – ‘in a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit’ – and then an oral tale told in episodes to his children, had become a manuscript for submission to a major publisher.
The greatest revelation of Rateliff’s scholarship is this: The Hobbit is not a stand-alone fairy tale shoehorned into the ‘Silmarillion’ universe by a few shared characters. Tolkien saw Bilbo as belonging to his greater work from the start, but edited those references out for fear of confusing the reader. I’m sure the rejection of the original ‘Silmarillion’ was no doubt a factor also. References to Beren and Luthien, Morgoth, and other elements of the greater mythology were purged by Tolkien early on. But the evidence is clear – even without ‘The Lord of the Rings’, ‘The Hobbit’ belongs to the Legenderium.
So – where does this leave THOtH? It is an exciting, if complicated, read – even the notes have notes (and sometimes the notes to the notes have notes…). At times Rateliff is reaching too far, trying to pull all of Tolkien’s imaginings of that period into a neatly tied bow. It just isn’t probable that it was so, nor is it possible (or even profitable) to attempt to prove such a thing. Rateliff sees Gollum in the Goblin petroglyphs from The Father Christmas Letters – in fact, he sees The Hobbit everywhere. Undertaking such a huge project, and immersing oneself in it, is probably the best explanation for this monomania on Rateliff’s part. But when all is said and done, these lapses do nothing to hurt the weight and importance of these two volumes. You will never see The Hobbit in the same light again – or The Lord of the Rings for that matter.
Plenty of reproductions of notes and pictures, fine binding, high quality paper and attractive printing all make this set worth the cover price for the serious Tolkien enthusiast. But the heart of the matter is Rateliff’s deeply detailed scholarship – work to make the Master himself proud, I wouldn’t doubt. A coup all around – Bravo!
As I write this review, I have my ‘History of the Hobbit’ boxed set in front of me. The contents of the box took almost a year to read through. They include a new edition of ‘The Hobbit’, and both volumes of John D. Rateliff’s ‘History of the Hobbit’, a continuation of the seminal work begun by Christopher Tolkien in 1984, ‘The History of Middle Earth’, which ran to twelve volumes, and was itself an addendum to two other publications, ‘The Silmarillion’ and ‘Unfinished Tales’. J.R.R. Tolkien has gone from being underappreciated and academically ignored, to being a cottage industry of merchandising and scholarship. I’ve lost count of how many ‘encyclopedias’ are currently available focused solely on the fictional Middle Earth – at least three.
This is either a good or bad thing, depending on how you look at it. Personally, I’m not sure of what’s left in the Tolkien archives: unpublished letters perhaps, academic errata, short story ‘King of the Green Dozen’, a prose Beowulf translation…the man was not prolific, and most of his creative life was focused on a single project, the languages and legends of Middle Earth. While I personally enjoyed parts of ‘The Children of Hurin’, I don’t think it was fair to market it as a ‘newly uncovered novel’, when it was obviously Volume XII of ‘The History of Middle Earth’, scholarly notes and all. I fear sometimes that the potency of Tolkien’s ‘spell’ will be undone by all this archeological activity – didn’t Gandalf have something to say about ‘he that breaks a thing to find out what it is’?
All of that aside, what I have before me is an attractive cardboard box containing three hardcover books. As these sorts of packaging gimmicks go, this one is sturdy and nice looking, with Tolkien’s art instead of a ‘professional’ illustrator – early versions covers for the The Hobbit on either side, and a slice of the final illustration for the ‘spine’.
The two Rateliff volumes are very nicely put together: the binding is tight but allows for the book to be left open at almost any page, the paper is thick and high quality, the printing is uniformly excellent, the fonts easy to read (even at long stretches), and the illustrations colored wherever called for. The covers utilize the same early Tolkien art as the box, and are printed on nice acid-free paper.
The Hobbit itself fairs less successfully: the cover is poorly reproduced, as is all the black and white art within – shockingly, carelessly so. The addition of colored illustrations do not take the sting out of the horrid reproductions of the interior pictures. A real shame. And the first chapter of ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ is crammed in small print into the back, a lamentable practice of the ‘licensed fiction’ mills. A sad lapse in taste.
This is certainly the most important and major new work of Tolkien scholarship since ‘The Peoples of Middle Earth’, and that includes the Concordance and ‘Children of Hurin’. What HotH has going for it is that it’s fresh, it covers new territory. In many ways, apart from the editorial process that created ‘The Silmarillion’, this is the last major frontier of Middle Earth scholarship, before we go sailing off the edge of the map into the deepest and most obscure waters of linguistics and philosophy. Everything about the text, Tolkien’s and Rateliff’s, feels palpably groundbreaking and exciting. Yes, The Hobbit was an entirely, thrillingly new concept in juvenile literature. That’s what makes it special. It is contained in a fiercely conservative genre, and yet it breaks all the established rules, while establishing its own new ones, now often imitated and slavishly adhered to. ‘The Hobbit’ was a first.
For those who have studied the development of the ‘Silmarillion’ material and The Lord of the Rings, we again find Tolkien flying blindly, pursuing an arcane concept: the marriage of his imaginary languages, vast unpublished epic mythology, and love of Norse sagas and the Finnish Kalevala. What began as an odd sentence – ‘in a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit’ – and then an oral tale told in episodes to his children, had become a manuscript for submission to a major publisher.
The greatest revelation of Rateliff’s scholarship is this: The Hobbit is not a stand-alone fairy tale shoehorned into the ‘Silmarillion’ universe by a few shared characters. Tolkien saw Bilbo as belonging to his greater work from the start, but edited those references out for fear of confusing the reader. I’m sure the rejection of the original ‘Silmarillion’ was no doubt a factor also. References to Beren and Luthien, Morgoth, and other elements of the greater mythology were purged by Tolkien early on. But the evidence is clear – even without ‘The Lord of the Rings’, ‘The Hobbit’ belongs to the Legenderium.
So – where does this leave THOtH? It is an exciting, if complicated, read – even the notes have notes (and sometimes the notes to the notes have notes…). At times Rateliff is reaching too far, trying to pull all of Tolkien’s imaginings of that period into a neatly tied bow. It just isn’t probable that it was so, nor is it possible (or even profitable) to attempt to prove such a thing. Rateliff sees Gollum in the Goblin petroglyphs from The Father Christmas Letters – in fact, he sees The Hobbit everywhere. Undertaking such a huge project, and immersing oneself in it, is probably the best explanation for this monomania on Rateliff’s part. But when all is said and done, these lapses do nothing to hurt the weight and importance of these two volumes. You will never see The Hobbit in the same light again – or The Lord of the Rings for that matter.
Plenty of reproductions of notes and pictures, fine binding, high quality paper and attractive printing all make this set worth the cover price for the serious Tolkien enthusiast. But the heart of the matter is Rateliff’s deeply detailed scholarship – work to make the Master himself proud, I wouldn’t doubt. A coup all around – Bravo!
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