It’s been a long time since I’ve actually chosen to read The Lord of the Rings (about a year ago I read it accidentally - it happens), so I decided that not only is it time to revisit this Greatest of All Fantasy Books (fight me!), but I would share my thoughts with /r/Fantasy as I go on. I’m aiming for roughly one chapter a week, assuming that life doesn’t get in the way. People are of course free to read along if they want to, but that’s up to you.
As I go through the book, I will be offering comments on whatever strikes my fancy - how the book is crafted, interesting tidbits from The Letters of JRR Tolkien or The History of Middle-earth or any other ancillary text, comparisons to the Peter Jackson trilogy, et cetera.
Onward to the Prologue!
First thing: the conceit of the The Lord of the Rings is that this isn’t a novel written by Tolkien; rather, it is the Red Book of Westmarch, written first by Bilbo as his memoir of his journey to the Lonely Mountain, added to by Frodo telling the history of the War of the Ring, and with some final chapters written by Sam after Frodo sailed West. Tolkien didn’t write it, he just translated it. The Prologue is, essentially, a note from the “translator” with background information assisting in the understanding of what follows.
The first part of the Prologue, “Concerning Hobbits,” tells us all about Hobbits - the different … ethnicities, I guess I’ll say ... the history of their interactions with Dwarves and Men and Elves, the founding of the Shire, the Hobbit calendar, their languages, Hobbit-holes, and so forth. Some might find it super interesting, other people might find it deadly dull. Right from the beginning Tolkien is doing things his own way. This is not a normal prologue.
There’s a specific section on pipe-weed. It’s not marijuana, regardless of how much Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan giggle. It’s just tobacco.
Last bit of background information is on the section of the Prolouge where the translator gives a summary of the parts of The Hobbit that concern Bilbo’s finding of the Ring. This is probably the area where things get most meta. When The Hobbit was first published, Bilbo didn’t find the Ring by chance; he was given it by Gollum as a prize for winning the riddle contest. Tolkien later amended the book so that he stumbled on it in the dark and Gollum regarded Bilbo as a thief. You can read the side-by-side changes here.
Now, even within the revised text of The Hobbit, Bilbo (at first) tells Gandalf and the Dwarves that he won the Ring fairly. Gandalf will draw attention to this later - Bilbo, a very honest person, told a lie designed to establish his claim to the Ring as legitimate. Within the text, this is the Ring beginning to influence Bilbo. In the real-world, the Ring in the original edition of The Hobbit wasn’t the One Ring - it was a magical trinket that turned people invisible, nothing more. The Hobbit was a bedtime-story that Tolkien told to his kids (and started writing down because young Christopher complained when he would get details wrong) only loosely connected to Middle-earth, which Tolkien had been writing about for decades already. Elrond’s cameo and references to Gondolin were more about adding a little flavor than anything else. So when Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings, and wrote it both as a sequel to The Hobbit and as part of his well-developed fictional world of Middle-earth, The Hobbit needed a fair bit of retconning to make it work.
When taken together, the Prologue gives a good preview of what is probably the most divisive aspect of The Lord of the Rings. In the fantasy genre as a whole, most people will tell you that Infodumping Is Bad. And yet Tolkien himself, inarguably the most influential fantasy writer, infodumps all over the place without even bothering to try to dress it up. And for many of us, it works. I was sucked in right from the beginning - the more information Tolkien gave, the more I wanted.
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