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The general feeling I get when reading through some of the content released after Tolkien's death (History of the Lord of the Rings books specifically) is that

The general feeling I get when reading through some of the content released after Tolkien's death (History of the Lord of the Rings books specifically) is that the reason the first half of the Fellowship is at a slower pace than the rest is because Tolkien did not know where the story was going or where it would end. The most telling evidence for this is how drastically the story and characters change from the beginning to Bree when looking at first draft compared to published text. It took a lot of wildly divergent drafts to get to Bree, with the texts rapidly evolving. My favorite example of this is that the Strider character was originally named Trotter, and he was a hobbit that wore wooden shoes. This type of slowly building story, where layer upon layer of idea built on top of each other is not really present for most of Two Towers and Return of the King. It was almost like Tolkien was a train that gained momentum as it went forward.

DanAndersen 8y ago
For anyone interested in the development of LotR over time, I really recommend listening to the Signum University online lectures going through the History of Middle-Earth series. Dr Corey Olson is going through each of the volumes in turn and offering great analysis of how the story began to emerge, just as you describe. The lecture playlists (so far) can be found at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUxTFUltO4uXhEfqgI6GtIg/playlists https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUxTFUltO4uXhEfqgI6GtIg/pla... . Notable things about Tolkien's writing process: - LotR was originally just meant to be a shorter sequel to The Hobbit. It's always fun to see his early notes about how few chapters he expects the book to take. - When The Hobbit was first released, it was emphatically not part of the full legendarium that Tolkien was working on, re: the Silmarillion. He borrowed heavily from his private stories about the Elves, but it wasn't until he was writing LotR that he actually realized that everything was all connected into the same continuity. - Tolkien was extremely conservative in his writing, in a waste-not attitude. He hated to just cut out things he had written, and instead would do a lot of recycling and reworking so that bits of dialogue and description he had done in earlier drafts would be preserved but with their context completely altered. - Tolkien sometimes claimed that his worldbuilding started with a map, and then he placed a story inside of it, but looking through his early notes shows that's not quite true. He tended to think in terms of a series of adventures he wanted his characters to have, and would wiggle around locations on his still-nebulous maps to make the distances work (he was very particular about getting the distances and travel times all right!).

DanAndersen 8y ago

For anyone interested in the development of LotR over time, I really recommend listening to the Signum University online lectures going through the History of Middle-Earth series. Dr Corey Olson is going through each of the volumes in turn and offering great analysis of how the story began to emerge, just as you describe. The lecture playlists (so far) can be found at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUxTFUltO4uXhEfqgI6GtIg/playlists https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUxTFUltO4uXhEfqgI6GtIg/pla... . Notable things about Tolkien's writing process: - LotR was originally just meant to be a shorter sequel to The Hobbit. It's always fun to see his early notes about how few chapters he expects the book to take. - When The Hobbit was first released, it was emphatically not part of the full legendarium that Tolkien was working on, re: the Silmarillion. He borrowed heavily from his private stories about the Elves, but it wasn't until he was writing LotR that he actually realized that everything was all connected into the same continuity. - Tolkien was extremely conservative in his writing, in a waste-not attitude. He hated to just cut out things he had written, and instead would do a lot of recycling and reworking so that bits of dialogue and description he had done in earlier drafts would be preserved but with their context completely altered. - Tolkien sometimes claimed that his worldbuilding started with a map, and then he placed a story inside of it, but looking through his early notes shows that's not quite true. He tended to think in terms of a series of adventures he wanted his characters to have, and would wiggle around locations on his still-nebulous maps to make the distances work (he was very particular about getting the distances and travel times all right!).