![]() Most likely you saw it some time ago and have been laughing at him but I don’t suppose you would have done half so well yourselves in his place. It was just at this moment that Bilbo suddenly discovered the weak point in his plan. Certain passages are clearly imagined as narrated by an older figure addressing children for example, in the chapter “Barrels Out of Bond,” in which Bilbo comes up with the plan of how to save the dwarves, the narrator makes these comments: Tolkien later worked on another revision of The Hobbit, in which he tried to alter the narrative voice, the avuncular tone of which he, and a number of readers, had come to see as occasionally condescending and intrusive. It was this revised chapter that was published in the second edition of The Hobbit in 1951. In order to make The Hobbit fit more coherently as a “prequel” to the trilogy, Tolkien revised the chapter on Gollum (“Riddles in the Dark”), changing the part played by the ring, so that in the revised version, Gollum blames Bilbo for what he sees as the theft of his ring and curses Bilbo forever. Unwin asked for a sequel to The Hobbit but showed no interest in The Silmarillion, Tolkien began work on The Lord of the Rings. A first edition of 1,500 sold out quickly, and the book was published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin early in 1938. Unwin asked his 10-year-old son, Rayner Unwin, to read it, and after Rayner gave it a positive review, Stanley published the book in 1937, with a cover designed by Tolkien himself and decorated with Old English runes. In 1936, Tolkien’s student Elaine Griffiths showed the manuscript to Susan Dagnall of George Allen & Unwin, who brought it to the attention of Stanley Unwin. In the early 1930s, the story of the hobbit became one that he shared with his three sons during what he called their “winter reads.” By 1932, Tolkien had completed a manuscript that he shared with his Oxford friends, but most of those scholars saw the book as merely a children’s story. ![]() Auden more than 25 years later, he wrote, “I did nothing about it, for a long time, and for some years I got no further than the production of Thror’s Map” ( Letters 215). One day in the late 1920s, Tolkien was grading essays when he came across a blank page and absently wrote the sentence “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” In a letter to W. The origin of The Hobbit (1937) is well known.
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