"The History of The Lord of the Rings": 2020 Discussion Group

[Hugh]

HLotR 4 p. ix/ It would be interesting to know if the Inklings were aware that Tolkien had, evidently, after seven years or so of labor, set aside LotR and had been deep into the writing of a new novel (The Notion Club Papers), and, if they were, what their thoughts were. Lewis in particular must have been dismayed. CJRT writes of an hiatus "that lasted through 1945 and extended into 1946., The Return of the King being then scarcely begun." The Notion Club Papers is, at a rough estimate, nearly as long as Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, and by around the time of Tolkien's tools-down on LotR, Lewis had written his complete cosmic trilogy.

Here's a comment on Tolkien's emotional situation around this time -- I don't endorse it; it's speculative.

The Notion Club Papers - an Inklings blog: JRR Tolkien's nervous breakdown

I expect I'm not that well-informed on these matters, but I'd assumed that Lewis and the others were well aware that Tolkien was writing The Notion Club Papers. The break in writing the LOTR may well have been helpful in that the subsequent chapters flowed fairly easily when he resumed writing.

Re the "nervous breakdown": as Bruce Charlton acknowledges, the term nervous breakdown is not the greatest. In my own terminology, I've appreciated that there were times when Tolkien suffered significant stress, to the extent that he felt unable to cope with the pressures of work/life and needed to take a break. This is clear from the Letters. (Before I began reading around him three or four years ago, I'd always assumed his life had been pretty easy with plenty of time to muse about the LOTR!). The transfer of responsibilities from Pembroke to Merton must have meant a greatly increased workload for some months. I'm not sure there would be too much to be read into his wife going to Brighton for ten days while JRRT and Christopher decamped to the Bear Hotel. If I remember correctly (not a given), Edith used to go away fairly regularly for a break/rest, and staying at the Bear would have meant no home cooking. It's well known that the marriage had "its difficulties" and this must have been hard for both of them.

 

[Extollager]

"The transfer of responsibilities from Pembroke to Merton must have meant a greatly increased workload for some months."

I believe it really did, if I remember correctly from reading the Scull-Hammond Chronology a while ago.

 

[Extollager]

Well, I hope you'll be on board, Hugh (and others) for the new thread, beginning next month, after we finish The History of The Lord of the Rings here. I expect to launch that shortly.

 

[Hugh]

Well, I hope you'll be on board, Hugh (and others) for the new thread, beginning next month, after we finish The History of The Lord of the Rings here. I expect to launch that shortly.

I'm afraid that that will be a step too far ahead for me - I'm looking forward to re-visiting the various biographies I read a few years ago which are now a blur. Probably the Letters first. But I'll keep an eye on the thread. I have appreciated this read through around the LOTR.

 

[Hugh]

Impulse buy: ordered this yesterday when I noticed a special offer on Amazon (a little over £20.00 cheaper than the price listed here). Arrived 30 minutes ago...

Should keep me busy...

The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Boxed Set: Amazon.co.uk: Hammond, Wayne G., Scull, Christina, Tolkien, J. R. R.: 9780008214548: Books

Buy The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Boxed Set Revised and expanded edition by Hammond, Wayne G., Scull, Christina, Tolkien, J. R. R. (ISBN: 9780008214548) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

www.amazon.co.uk

 

[Extollager]

Hugh, that is a great set. You have made an excellent purchase. I had the earlier edition & still had to get this one. (I gave the earlier edition to a local high school.) Indispensable for serious students of Tolkien's life and writing process.

 

[Extollager]

I've read about Tolkien's work on the Tower of Kirith [sic] Ungol in HLotR 4. I find no confirmation of a speculation in my entry on 19th- and 20th-century literary influences in the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, as follows:

-------Published posthumously, Haggard’s The Treasure of the Lake (1926) is yet another Quatermain romance. A woman called White-Mouse urges the hunter and Hans to help her to rescue Kaneke, a warrior who is imprisoned at the top of a precipice. White-Mouse plans that they will use a long, “very steep” tunnel leading to a trap-door, by means of which they may be able to reach Kaneke. The tunnel proves to be an almost perpendicular tube wide enough to admit them, and furnished with “a kind of ladder with little landing-places at intervals.” There are three of these landing-places. When they reach the third, Quatermain estimates that they are “quite two hundred feet above the spot where the actual tunnel sprang from the cleft.” White-Mouse opens the trap-door, and, just before the moment of supreme danger, Quatermain sees “a star shining in the sky [that] gave me comfort, though I did not know why it should.” In the rescue of Kaneke, White-Mouse, in her white garments, frightens the guards, who evidently take her for a ghost, and stabs one of them with her knife.

Similarly, in LOTR Tolkien tells that Frodo, poisoned by Shelob but alive, is taken to the top of the Tower of Cirith Ungol, and must be rescued by Sam. Sam climbs the “steep,” winding stairs of the three-tiered Tower, losing count of the steps after two hundred. He takes advantage of a startled Orc’s confusion, crying, “‘Yes! The Elf-warrior is loose!’” (884) Sam is miserable about the odds he faces, but is cheered when he recalls the sights of Western lands and the sight of stars (888). He attacks an Orc and cuts its hand from its arm with his blade, Bilbo’s small old sword Sting (889). To reach Frodo, Sam passes through a trap-door. The coincidence of Haggard’s and Tolkien’s conceptions – the steep ascent, ladders, and the threefold construction, the significance of two hundred, the encouragement provided by stars, the impersonation of a frightening being, the trapdoor, the rescue itself, the rescuer’s blow struck by a blade – suggests that The Treasure of the Lake was one of the Haggard volumes that Tolkien read. ------

It seems quite an array of coincidences, if you ask me, but here again a study of the drafts still leaves the matter in doubt!

 

[Extollager]

HLotR 4 27/It's striking how inappropriate Sam's song is, in the rejected version here, to his situation.

In the first stanza, "all living things are dead" isn't so much arresting as awkward.

Read the first four lines especially of the second stanza: an effect of gentle melancholy. Tolkien could have sold the rights to ASCAP!

Most of the third stanza is even less suitable to the occasion. It sounds like a girl remembering her boyfriend who went off somewhere or even a child remembering his or her mother.

I'm glad to have the poem as a reflection of Tolkien's imagination -- and it's not that I'm saying it's bad (except for the line I criticized at first), but that it would really have harmed the narrative Tolkien was writing, sounding false in context.

 

[Extollager]

More on HLotR 4 ....

13/ JRRT's underestimations of what remained to be done to finish writing the narrative of LotR.

52/ Full scenario of the Scouring of the Shire not yet present to Tolkien's mind, apparently.

53/ Question here about where and what the western green island is to which Frodo and Sam (Sam not yet imagined as marrying Rose Cotton and raising a family). This doesn't sound like Aman, the Blessed Realm. If it isn't, then one wonders to what degree Tolkien had worked out the relationship of LotR to the Silmarillion legends.

56/ I had thought, at one time, that Tolkien had a major debt (of which he might well have been unaware) to Rider Haggard's romance heart of the World, in which a crown with a green stone is connected with a returning king, etc. But as I have read CJRT's History, I've come to feel less confidence in my hypothesis.

73/ "late notes of my father's on the fragments of other languages found in The Lord of the Rings" -- it would be interesting to have list of whatever of these notes have been published, and where, and those that remain, so far, unpublished. I wonder if we won't see some of those notes next year in The Nature of Middle-earth.

78/ Still "Trotter"!

81ff/ Enjoyable variant, discarded, of the Scouring, with Frodo as a formidable fighter and "Sharkey" as a mere ruffian Man.

93/ "orc-men/halfbreeds" -- Did Tolkien seriously consider such a revolting idea? Btw I think that, in one of George MacDonald's two "Princess" books, there's a casual reference to a goblin who had a human parent in his or her ancestry.

97/ Threat of burning of the Cottons' farmhouse made me think of the Burners in Njal's Saga.

 

[Extollager]

Reading Christopher Tolkien's narrative of his father's composition of these final chapters of LotR, I was struck by how often changes were made even as late as galley proofs!

132/ The quotation from JRRT's letter to Waldman suggests that the destination of Frodo after he leaves the Grey Havens was not Aman, but "only" Tol Eressëa -- so within sight of Aman but not Aman, the Blessed Realm, the Undying Land, itself. I'd have to dig around a bit to get a better sense of the implications.

I think Tolkien was wise to allow himself to be prevailed upon to drop the Epilogue (in either of its versions). They are somewhat pleasant reading but, dare I say, maybe a bit bathetic after what preceded them. Better to end with Sam's "Well, I'm back." I wonder who the person(s) were who thus persuaded JRRT? Perhaps C. S. Lewis and Christopher Tolkien.