Tolkien's tried to REWRITE the Hobbit

[00:00:00]In 1960, J.R. Tolken sat down at his desk and began one of his most ambitious projects to date. He had already published The Hobbit and he just finished publishing The Lord of the Rings and he had written the majority of the Sylmerelion. It was unpublished at that point, but it was a whole story detailing the history of Middle Earth and everything in between. He was wellk known and he was well-loved and he was considered at that time one of the greatest fantasy authors who had ever lived that the world had ever seen. But J.R. Tolkien was not satisfied. To his obsessive mind, there were some continuity errors between The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings that he needed to iron out. The Hobbit being written around the 1930s and the Lord of the Rings being written around the ' 50s.

[00:00:39]Tolkien just didn't have the groundwork for when he was writing The Hobbit. And some of those small continuity changes were really bothering him. So, in the early parts of 1960, [music] J.R. Tolken did something that a lot of authors would never dare to do. He tried to rewrite his own beloved children's book of The Hobbit and make it fit the mythology that he built in The Lord of the Rings. Having spent over a decade constructing the very serious world of The Lord of the Rings, he returned to The Hobbit, which again, if you read it, is significantly more whimsical and childlike being written for children.

[00:01:12]And so J.R. Tolken started rewriting it because he wanted to give The Hobbit the same tone as The Lord of the Rings. It's the adult version of The Hobbit. He got three chapters in and he was inventing all sorts of new geography and lunar cycles with the books. And he has a section where the dwarves actually do stop at the end of the Prancing Pony before they head on their way to Rivendell, which is lovely because I love the Prancing Pony. He was working on this for a few weeks when he sent the first three chapters to a friend for critique. And after he got this friend's reply, he abandoned the project and he let the original stand. What ended the project as John D. Ratliff in the history of The Hobbit later reveals was a twopoint problem that hit at the same time. The first was the Friends verdict relayed by Christopher Tolken that said the new material was wonderful, but it was not The Hobbit. The second was actually the math of it. Tolken attempted to reconcile the Hobbit's chronology, specifically the moon phases, and things just didn't work out.

[00:02:12]No matter how Tolkien attempted to work this out, it just would not cooperate with him. To a point where in the margins of one of his chapters that he rewrote, he actually wrote timetable of journey will not work out.

[00:02:24]And so both of these problems seem to give Tolkien a really good reminder that he probably needed that The Hobbit wasn't just this rough draft of a greater book titled The Hobbit 2.0, but it was actually a completed one written for children in a different tone of Lord of the Rings. And he just needed to accept that. and that version of The Hobbit was entitled to stay that way.

[00:02:49]Now, the rewrite did not come out of nowhere. This actually had been building for quite some time, and Tolken famously already rewrote one of his chapters in The Hobbit, which made much more sense for the story of the Lord of the Rings and the Finding of the One Ring. And then he covered it up by saying that Bilbo's version was the lie and it took some time getting the real version out of Bilbo, which is just brilliant storytelling. I made a whole video about that that you could watch. It was just brilliant. But this revision came in 1951 when Tolken revised the riddle game between Bilbo and Gallum for the book's second edition. In the text, in the original text in 1937, Gallum wagers the ring itself. and on losing the riddle game honorably leads Bilbo to the tunnel exit and gives Bilbo the ring which sounds insane knowing the Lord of the Rings and the possession that the ring had on Gollum. But by the time of the Lord of the Rings, the behavior of Gollum just did not make sense. So Tolken rewrote that scene so that Gollum having the lost the riddle game goes to fetch the ring and put it on likely to murder Bilbo and then discovers it missing and correctly guesses that Bilbo had found it. This was again the true story that Bilbo later admitted to Gandalf and it replaced the more kind of flattering version that he had told that kind of seemed to cast him in a better light. But this was only one chapter that Tolken changed. Yet this chapter seemed to give Tolkien a boost and it kind of showed him that the Hobbit could be revisited years after to potentially improve without damaging the actual story of The Hobbit. So another few years passed and Jr. Tolkien took off the pen again and he sat down and rewrote The Hobbit from the beginning told through Gandalf and the Dwarf's perspective. The second episode of this came out in 1954 with The Quest of Arabore. Now, I still haven't read this yet as I'm making my way through The Hobbit and I don't want to mess anything up with my reading of The Hobbit, but according to Tolkien Gateway, this is the story written by J.R. Tolken, posumously published by Christopher Tolken and the Unfinished Tales and also in two other places.

[00:04:48]This work explains how and why Gandalf arranged for the retaking of the lonely mountain Arabore and Synindar and adventure recounted from the perspective of Bilbo Baggin sometime before the adventures of the Hobbit. That's all I want to read because I really don't want any spoilers on that story and I don't want to know what that story is really about. I want to kind of experience it fresh and new when I get there in a few months. But this story apparently left another mark on J.R. Tolkien giving him confidence thinking that he could rewrite certain chapters and sections of the Hobbit almost to tell the real story of The Hobbit, the one that wasn't so biased from the memory of Bilbo. So when Tolken picked up The Hobbit again in 1960, he wasn't really starting from a blank slate. He had already proved to himself with these two other things with the Riddles in the Dark and the Quest of Arabore revisions that he could do this.

[00:05:40]So why not give the whole book a rewrite? That's exactly what he tried to do. What Tolkien actually produced in 1960 is actually a more substantial version than just an abandoned draft.

[00:05:49]The new chapter 1 actually runs 14 typed pages in my copy of the uh the um what why why am I blanking at it? The history of the Hobbit. Wow, that was sad that I blanked on that. Yeah, this history of the Hobbit. It runs 14, but I have a Kindle version and it could be all sorts of different page lengths and stuff like that. But this whole story runs from the unexpected party through the entire arrival of the 13 dwarves.

[00:06:16]Chapter 1 was actually apparently called a wellplanned party. Maybe inferring that Gandalf had planned this whole whole thing from the get-go and sent the dwarves one by one much like he did with Bayorn. But chapter 2 is titled the broken bridge and it adds a completely different component onto the story. the stone bridge that is over Horwellis out, forcing the company to fordge a swollen river, which is how Tolken actually finally explained the loose thread in the original book that really bothered him and that he never tied off, which is Gandalf's unexpected vanishing partway through the journey east. But I actually think that's what makes the difference when you read The Hobbit. It's kind of fun not having an explanation as to why Gandalf leaves. It's very childlike. But when you read the Lord of the Rings and when I read it through I all I want is the reason for why Gandalf left. It's a it's a different mindset. It's I think the difference between wonder and information. And for The Hobbit, the idea of wonder just works better. But as Ratliff attempts to compile chapter 3, there is just less information there and there's less notes. A fragment of chapter 3 gets them to the edge of Rivendell before the TypeScript just kind of stops mid-sentence.

[00:07:25]And there's a few marginal notes for what Tolken still meant to add, but nothing more. And so, if you read these two stories side by side, in the beginning, you can sense some differences for sentence structure and how Tolkien buttons certain things up, but not significantly. Like the first paragraph of each, the the original version of The Hobbit states, "In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole filled with the ends of worms and oozy smells. Nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat. It was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort. And in his rewrite, this is what the first paragraph says. In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty wet hole filled with worms and uzzy smell, nor a dry hole, bare and sandy, with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat.

[00:08:11]It was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort. It's very minimal editing, but it does kind of shift the tone just a little bit more economical, maybe like Gandalf would actually be. And Tolken just kept doing this throughout the entirety of the book. He was taking out the whimsy and giving it a more serious feel, but it also kind of feels like it's taking the magic out of the book.

[00:08:29]To be completely honest, in the original version, we have the phrase conficate and be bother. And then in the in the new version, Tolkien writes it confounds and bothers. Bewildered and bewathered, which is one of my favorite phrases in the original becomes bothered and bewildered. And I don't love that as much. One of my favorite parts of The Hobbit are the parts where the narrator kind of steps out of the story to tell you what's going on in the shape of Bilbo. And that's taken away almost entirely in his new version. [music] And in Ratliff's words, he says, "The formerly intrusive narrator ceases to be a character in the story, which now lacks a storyteller." And so the character work cuts deeper a bit, though. Gandalf seems to have a bit more authority. He can't really be mistaken for a little old man in a pointed hat.

[00:09:14]He's much more serious version of himself here. But he's also a lot less grandfatherly and warm in this one.

[00:09:20]Thoren is also thornier, or I should say Thorinier.

[00:09:25]That was bad. Sorry. But when Gandalf gives him the map that he had in his possession, Thorne is actually really angry. And this is what the book says.

[00:09:31]His new version, not the original. Well, your father gave me this map 91 years ago, and I have g I have guarded it ever since. 91 years, cried Thoren. For 91 years, you have kept my property. Thoren said Gandalf quietly, though your fame had reached me. I first met you only a few weeks ago. Until then, use and meaning of this map was quite unknown to me, and I did not know whom it belonged to. Added in a margin, "Your father could not remember his own name, nor yours when he gave me the parchment. If I have chosen my own time for restoring it, you have no right to be angry. I came by it only at the peril of my life, for which I think you owe me some thanks. I give it to you now, he said, handing them out to Thorne with the bow.

[00:10:14]So, these are the changes that he makes, and it honestly does kind of read like a more adult version and a retelling of The Hobbit from an adult's perspective.

[00:10:22]Weirdly, after reading the first little bit for what Ratliff compiled, I actually have to say I kind of think the pros is almost better constructed sentence by sentence than the original.

[00:10:31]It really does have this feel to Lord of the Rings to it. It's not really whimsical at all, which is the entire purpose of The Hobbit. But what it's missing, I think, is a bit clear in that it does kind of feel like a lack of a narrator bent. That's what makes The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit so readable. This one just doesn't have that. It kind of feels like Gandalf was forcing his hand writing this. And while Tolkien does kind of nail some of the voice of Gandalf, it's just different and probably needs a bit more ironing out as he went on. Honestly, you really should just pick up a copy of the history of of uh The Hobbit just for this section alone. When I finish my read through The Hobbit, I'm going to read this whole book and I'm kind of excited for it. For now, I just tackled this one chapter, though, and it's really good. But Ralph has this belief that it's the two things that made Tolken put an end to this book, as I kind of talked about before. The first was the verdict of his friend. According to Christopher Tolken, once his father had worked through the opening chapters, he sent the material to a friend for outside opinion. Again, the identity of the friend isn't really recorded anywhere in the surviving papers that we have, but some people do suggest that this is Katherine Farer. Ratliff didn't even suggest that, but I did read it on some Reddit threads and apparently it has a small bit of accuracy to it because they corresponded a lot. But the response relayed secondhanded via Christopher Tolken. So, it's kind of like a secondhand source, but it says this. This is wonderful, but not The Hobbit. Again, this is Christopher Tolken's own recollection of what happened offered without a documentary source. [music] And Ratliff kind of presents it exactly what it is, as a testimony, not really an artifact. But its effect on Tolkien was still really definitive. He stopped writing completely. But I don't really think it was just this one detractor that was the reason why he stopped writing in entirety. The second problem was more so the math. And I think it was a combination of these two things that made him stop. This was something really hard to bypass from the beginning.

[00:12:20]Tolkien attempted to hem up the Hobbit's looseish journey into something that kind of felt more map like Lord of the Rings. [music] And in his own he he has a section called distances and itinerary and in these notes and he calculates the road from Bagend to Rivendell being 412 mi and he works out a dayby-day schedule to cover it. But every fix that he made kind of made another one break. speeding up the company's place to match the geography of the Lord of the Rings threw off the moon phase at the troll encounter which was supposed to show a waning moon but at the new faster pace would have been a full or nearly or or nearly a full moon slowing them down to fix the new moon also threw off Duran's day and apparently there's also an issue with Dne's army coming in for the battle that that uh they kind of covered there with the amount of ground that they did cover but I don't really want to read that section that much because I haven't gotten there in the books and I want that to be spoilery Great. But Tolkien is working through this in his own hand and he's actually kind of drawing up moon charts and you know all these things to cross-check references against each other. And then in one page of pencled notes he actually writes the question that it kind of was the whole reason why he quit in the first place where he just says the timetable of the journey will not work out. And I think Ratliff understands this and he has a really good understanding to it that he says these two failures were not really that separate. There's a tonal problem and a technical one that kind of came from the same route that The Hobbit was really written for children and the Lord of the Rings was written for adults and you can't really attempt to change the tone without some serious issues that are attached to it. Yeah, Tolken likely would have changed the entirety of The Hobbit had he built out all the Sylmerelion in the Lord of the Rings before he wrote The Hobbit, but he didn't. And the Hobbit was written in a narrative voice and tone where the forests are endless and the captivity is a you know long weary time because the story just runs on this dramatic logic rather than this calendar. And so the Lord of the Rings is the exact opposite.

[00:14:15]It's a world where Tolken is a is writing exact numbers and figures for things where you have miles and days and weather and moon cycles and everything's kind of perfect. Although I will say I still have a slight issue with the moon phasing while they're in Loth Laurian. I need some help on that one when I finish my second read because I think it's all over the place and that really confused me. But in trying to rewrite the first book so that it kind of obeyed the second book's rules. It made the whole thing just way more about tone than anything else. It also made the story kind of submit to this adult system that it was never really writing because it was The Hobbit. The Hobbit was the Hobbit for a reason. It was a children's story. And so the Hobbit kind of passed out of Tolkien's memory. And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend and legend became myth. And for 2 and a half thousand years, story passed out of all knowledge until when Chance came, [music] it ens snared a new bear. I'm kidding. I just had to throw that in there because it's a great section. But it was only 5 years later. But this is an important part of the story. 5 years later in 1965, J.R. Tolken was pulled back into the Hobbit one more time. And I think this is essentially why he dropped the version in its entirety. and he pulled it he was pulled back into the story under different terms. The appearance of there there was an unauthorized ace ver ace version of the Lord of the Rings that came out in the summer of 1965 and it forced his publishers to act quickly because of copyright issues. They needed a new revised edition before they could do anything else and it was probably all a money thing. But Tolki went looking for revised notes so that he could make a new version. And some of these notes were the exact same thing that I was talking about before that Ratliff kind of compiles in his history of the Hobbit. Again, you should go read that.

[00:15:54]It's great so far. But apparently Tolken couldn't find his notes. And so, working from memory rather than actual, you know, his 1960s type script, he actually produced the 1966 third edition, the text that is still printed today. And one single change is the most telling for what Tolken does. He actually sees in the original, it's the waning moon that was happening during the troll encounter, and he changes it in 1966 to a wandering moon. And so Tolkien's workaround for the lunar phase in his own charts couldn't be made to fit. So he kind of just gives up and seeds the point. And so this is the moment where Tolken is almost letting the adult version of The Hobbit go. The third edition is a light touch-up, not really a second attempt at what he did in 1960 and what he tried to do by rewriting The Hobbit in an adult version. And that's the real ending of the story. Tolken had been offered two different ways to honor the Hobbit's recollection in his larger mythology. he could rewrite it in compliance with the Lord of the Rings or just leave it alone and let the discrepancies stand. And he chose the second version and I think he chose it on purpose even though there's a lot of technical problems and even though it still doesn't work out with the miles and the moon cycles and everything's kind of messed up. I think that he saw the inconsistencies as almost being quaint and charming and maybe something that came at a lesser cost than what he would have done had he revised the entirety of The Hobbit into the new Hobbit into like an adult Lord of the Rings or an adult Hobbit, sorry. Now, as a side note, I would do almost anything to get my hands on an entire copy of The Hobbit written as Tolken does in these three chapters because they're fun chapters and the new information is something that I just want. so badly for what Tolken has written. But the OG the OG Hobbit is still the OG Hobbit and the real Hobbit for me. And I do share Ratliff's judgment about this too.

[00:17:39]Ratliff's closing judgment is pretty important to take in. He says it is like Joyce's portrait of an artist as a young man in relation to his Ulisses or Carol's The Hunting of the Snark in relation to Alice [clears throat] in Wonderland. A case of a masterpiece overshadowed by another masterpiece on a grander scale from the same author. Had Tolki never completed the Lord of the Rings. He still would be remembered as one of the great fantasy authors. The achievement of the sequel has eclipsed the accomplishments of writing The Hobbit itself, but we should not deny the distinct appeal and charm of the original book. In the end, I think it was more than just the intractable nature of the problems forcing him to recast the book that caused Tolkien to abandon the 1960s Hobbit. Rather, he just decided to trust his friend's judgment that what he was doing was wonderful, but not The Hobbit. That is, he came to recognize The Hobbit was more than the Lord of the Rings, writ small, more than a charming prelude, indeed a work deserving to stand on its own merits. And I think this is the most important part about what Tolken was trying to do and is a weird criticism that I see for all sorts of authors today. It's an issue of inconsistency and consistency. I think what Tolken discovered here is that consistency was not really the end and be all, the end all, the beall and the end all.

[00:18:56][laughter] and it wasn't the highest value. And I think he would rather sit with the inconsistency of the story and keep the tone rather than abandon the entirety of the tone of the story and just make it consistent for consistencyy's sake because people were probably writing him letters and bothering him about that. And so this abandoned copy sat forgotten in his papers for over two decades until Christopher Tolken just kind of happened across it and found it. And finally Ratliff gave it a shape in 2007. And this text serves as an evidence that some projects are better left untouched.

[00:19:31]Unless, of course, we get our hands on a copy of that. And I would love that more than anything else. Imagine if there's like a full written copy of The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, but written in the perspective and the tone of Lord of the Rings. Oh, that would be incredible.

[00:19:44]That would be so glorious. But anyway, let me know what your thoughts and feelings are about this. Or do you think that this would be canon? Do you think it would be secondary canon? Do you want a copy of The Hobbit told through the perspective of Lord of the Rings and the adult version of The Hobbit? I would love to hear your thoughts and opinions and feelings on that. So, let me know in the comments below. You can also like the video, too. You can get some uh a shirt. There's a lot of shirt merch that I have. Check out the shop in the link in the description. Um there's all sorts of new shirts that I designed and there's like some fun little ones that I just created recently. So, check those out if you want to support the channel.

[00:20:18]There's some cool ones just like the quick duck. You can become a member of the channel, too, if you want to support the channel. And as always, remember to look toward Numor that was and beyond to Elvin home that is and to that which is beyond Elvin home and will ever be. I'll see you in the next one.