LotR re-read: Thomas, "Some of Tolkien's Narrators"

[kate_nepveu]

Critical essay: Paul Edmund Thomas, "Some of Tolkien's Narrators," in Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter.

The thesis of Thomas's essay is simple: the opening of The Hobbit is told by a very intrusive narrator [*], but as the book gets more serious toward the end, the narrator recedes; and by the start of The Lord of the Rings, the narrator has become impartial and self-effacing, presenting many more viewpoints than at the start of The Hobbit.

Thomas develops this by discussing The Hobbit's narrative voice at length, showing how it fits with the nature of the opening as a children's story. He discusses the initial drafts of LotR, which were unsuccessful attempts to return to the intrusive voice of the start of The Hobbit. He then back-tracks to say that this shouldn't actually be a surprise because of the change of voice at the end of The Hobbit as things got more serious, and the evolving seriousness of LotR itself.

This essay makes a good point, but since I'd pretty much forgotten the voice of The Hobbit, it didn't answer a question I had. Also, I think it probably could've been made just looking at the published texts, without resorting to the drafts. I will be on the lookout for any times when the narrator actually intrudes now, though.

[*] Thomas recounts a system from Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction that characterizes narrators on a scale between unintrusive and intrusive, based on three factors: their revelation of information, their interpretation of the stories they tell, and their self-consciousness of their roles as tale-tellers. This is probably familiar to a lot of people already, but I found it useful in a "hey, labels for stuff I instinctively recognized!" way.

This essay is part of a collection examining The History of Middle-earth, that is, the twelve volumes of Tolkien's drafts and variants edited by Christopher Tolkien. I skimmed a few of the opening essays, about the volumes overall; I have to say that Christina Scull's "The Development of Tolkien's Legendarium" deserves a particular sporking for closing with the following:

Not all [changed threads] will be as serious as the ones I have chosen: those who were present at the banquet at the 1987 Mythopoeic Society Conference in Milwaukee will remember Christopher Tolkien's amusing treatment of a thread from The Lord of the Rings: the transformation of Odo and what happened to him.

Closing with that: the end, all done. Sporktastic, baby.

Thanks to calimac for recommending this essay.

[ more LotR re-read posts ]

Comments

[calimac.livejournal.com]

The tale of Odo is hiding in the latter pages of The Return of the Shadow and the start of The Treason of Isengard, two of the posthumous volumes. Suffice to summarize, imagine that Gandalf rides ahead with Fatty Bolger as a decoy to throw the Nazgul's scent off Frodo. It works only too well: the Nazgul capture Fatty, and ... (at this point the text breaks off).

If you do decide to venture into the posthumous volumes, I hope the essay in this book, "The Literary Value of The History of Middle-earth," will be of help as an introductory guide. That's what I wrote it for.

[kate_nepveu]

I was briefly tempted today to get some of the posthumous volumes out of the library, and then I realized I would never get through my chosen project, re-visiting the text that's so familiar, if I started haring off after *precursors*--critical discussions are a distraction but justifiable for the purpose. Also, the variants described in the essay above were, to my eye, quite properly left behind as drafts.

But I hadn't realized that was you, and I'll give it a read and see if it convinces me to put the volumes on my list for later. Probably much later, but all the same.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Yes, later. As a great Tolkien scholar once wrote, "If we pick these things out of the scrap heap it is only to show how wise the author was to throw them there." But in fact there's much more to the posthumous books than the LOTR scrap heap. Some of his best work is also in there, including things relating to The Silmarillion that are far superior to the book of that title. (One of my tasks is to explain why they're better.)

But, again: later. LOTR first.