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The Hobbit: Riddles in the Dark – The Lost Version (2001)
- hprotagonist 4y agooh thank god there are diffs.
- mike-the-mikado 4y agoInterestingly, in Tolkien's letter to his publisher (142, in "The Letters of J.R.R. Tollkien", selected and edited by Humphrey Carpenter), "I did not mean the suggested revision [which he had sent them earlier] to be printed off; but it seems of have come out pretty well in the wash".
- bombcar 4y agoYeah, originally he had written the LoTR expecting not being able to “fix” the previous. He even mentions it in the text (said by bilbo at the council of Elrond)
- swayvil 4y agoIt's a beautiful example of the story (the "true account") bending to the gravity of desire. (The ring is a desire singularity with 1000 gravities.) That's a big deal. I mean, the story is basically everything to us. Our whole reality. That the story is just a squishy thing that gets smashed around by desire is a very big important point. A shocking revelation. In the context of LOTR, all the narrators are now untrustworthy. Maybe things weren't so black and white. I think that's the point that's getting underlined and belabored here. Beware desire and its effects upon reality. Also, LOTR is a history. History isn't what happened. It's a story about what happened. And it's a story written by the winners. I think JRR Tolkien saw a lot of this in the war.
- Zircom 4y agoGlen Cook has an absolutely fantastic series called The Black Company where the entire series is framed as being the recorded annals of a mercenary company, with who is writing them switching occasionally between books to different characters, which let's you see the narrating character who usually writes them from a different, and sometimes less flattering, perspective. In any case, unreliable narration is obviously a big of the series, and the concept that just because something is written down doesn't mean it happened that way is pretty central, and I think it's outright brought up by the narrator at least a few times, and reading between the lines/making inferences that don't line up exactly with what is recorded is pretty much necessary to understanding the plot of the series sometimes. Cook also served for 10 years, not sure if he ever saw active combat but the series is constantly praised by veterans for it's accurate portrayal of what life in the military actually feels like.
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- Arrath 4y agoI don't see the Black Company brought up often, but it sure is a good read. I rank it akin to Malazan, though markedly different.
- thro1 4y ago.. and Roger Zelazany (Lord Of Light, Creatures of Light and Darkness, Isle Of The Dead).. - have such distance feel of time, myths and world creation that I won't look for other worlds and tales, thanks them.
- helf 4y agoThere is an alt history version of The Lord of the Rings written by a Russian author named Kirill Eskov called “The Last Ringbearer” and it is fantastic. In it, Mordor and the Orcs are a science advanced nation and the southern countries are the aggressors. It’s a great “history is written by the victor” take on the mythos. I highly recommend checking it out.
- xoxxala 4y agoThanks. I sort of recommend Khraniteli, the Soviet Lord of the Rings Soviet TV movie from 1991. Delightfully bizarre in small doses but a little hard to sit through the whole thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xluxT4fj2U8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xluxT4fj2U8
- mnw21cam 4y agoWhile we're talking alternative LoTRs, it's worth having a look at The DM Of The Rings https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=612 https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=612 which manages to use all stills from the LoTRs films and tell a completely different story, in the same vein as Darths and Droids https://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0001.html https://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0001.html .
- swayvil 4y agoI just downloaded it. Thanks :)
- helf 4y agoCurious to know what you think. :D
- oneoff786 4y agoWell I hate it. Is history written by the victor? Maybe. But the lord of the rings is not intended to be read that way. I find it tiresome to have someone come out and say this nice fantasy story, that is not a hard deep dive on morality or political reality, is actually something entirely wrong; and to then have it implicitly suggested that if I don’t buy it that I don’t get “the point”. Our post modern society has truth written by whichever side validates your beliefs at this point. I’m not convinced that “written by the Victor” is even an accurate take.
- wolverine876 4y ago> In the context of LOTR, all the narrators are now untrustworthy. I think that's a common misunderstanding of the 'untrustworthy narrator' concept. All narrators are untrustworthy, the question is not a binary one: 100% or not. The question is how trustworthy, and where and when can we trust this narrator? Like real people, nobody is perfect - everyone tells >0 lies and >0 truth - but putting them all in the same basket is meaningless and aburd. Some are far more trustworthy than others. Tolkien was very clear that knowledge had great power (Gandalf, for example) and that deception and untrustworthiness were works of the enemy, of evil. Bilbo's lie was driven by the Ring, the ultimate corrupting evil. The protagonists, including the hobbits, Gandalf, Aragorn, Gimli, Legalos, etc., were exceptionally trustworthy and took it very seriously; look at Sam's faithfulness to Frodo, for example. Boromir was depected as flawed, and ultimately broke trust and was corrupted by the Ring.
- bentley 4y agoIn the United States, the copyright on The Hobbit will last until 2033, 95 years after publication—but only the first edition. The second edition with the revised Gollum story was published in 1951, so it will remain copyrighted until 2047. Interestingly, this is still earlier than the first editions of The Lord of the Rings (which will expire in 2050 and 2051). Tolkien died in 1973, so in life+50 countries, all of his works will expire in the same year, 2024—that is, unless the country chooses to extend by twenty years to life+70, as both Canada and New Zealand are doing next year.
- CyborgCabbage 4y agoDisgraceful, what's even the point of putting pen to page when you're only gonna get a measly 95 years of ownership.
- amanaplanacanal 4y agoExtending copyright seems antithetical to the whole purpose. If copyright is supposed to incentivize creative works, how does extending it after the fact do that? Doesn’t it have the opposite effect?
- bell-cot 4y agoAt this point, "incentivize creative works" is 99% ideological gloss. The long-running payments from copyrighted works are golden Rings of Power from the POV of the financial and legal industries - and those guys are far less neglectful and benevolent than Gollum was, to ever let go if they can possibly avoid it.
- purple_ferret 4y agoJust in time for Rings of Power Season 3
- colechristensen 4y agoLife + 50 just doesn’t make any sense. A creative work doesn’t need to provide for your grandchildren in retirement quibbling in an estate trust about how to squeeze every last drop of blood from the stone. If it was really so successful then save up some profits from when it was reasonably in your control and make a trust fund with that.
- jfengel 4y agoIt's rather a surreal artifact of Tolkien's writing process. He began his book as a direct sequel to The Hobbit, and chose Gollum's ring as the macguffin to drive the plot. As the story evolved, the ring became The Ring, at which point some of the original story didn't actually work any more. He could simply have chosen a different macguffin, but Tolkien had a weird way of fixating on things that he'd already written. It's almost scientific: you explore the space of stories, and whatever hangs together consistently must be "true". He solved that not by deprecating the original book, but by rewriting it, and then including a preface in The Lord of the Rings about how the original book was Bilbo's self-promoting propaganda. This is emblematic of his work. He kept re-writing and re-writing to find something that felt "true". Which is partly why he never really settled on anything. He kept assigning characters different names, and then assigning some names to other characters until they fit. In the early Hobbit, Thorin was called "Gandalf", which makes it a hell of a thing to read. (And the wizard was named "Bladorthin". Which is almost as bad as "Bingo Bolger-Baggins", the original name of Frodo. Or "Trotter", the original Strider, a Hobbit with wooden feet...) Given that The Hobbit was not actually intended to be connected directly to his Middle-earth works except retroactively, and that The Silmarillion was not published until after his death (with significant editing, because he kept re-writing it until it was no longer compatible with The Lord of the Rings), in a sense there is only one truly "canonical" Middle-earth book: The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was not only an extraordinary genius, but we have an incredible collection of his draft works to see how his genius worked. I can't think of any other author whose process is simultaneously so remarkable and so well-documented.
- bee_rider 4y agoIt is sort of funny. Historical myths and legends of were not controlled in the same sense that modern fiction is, so you had various sets of stories — King Arthur, Greek pantheon, etc, where the canon is really more of a suggestion. Events can be jumbled around to ignored, new characters can be introduced, the Lancelots of the whole thing stick around but some of their aspects are pulled forward or pushed back. And then of course modern stories are generally single-source and totally controlled (other than comic books and that sort of thing). And one of the major authors who sort of bridges the gap… his method seems to have been “well I’ll just run that whole historical process in my head, with the various characters and groups recording their legends and myths!”
- jonnycomputer 4y agoI read the original version first, some ancient copy checked out of the library. When I re-read it a couple of years later, the book was different than I remembered. It was only years later that I discovered why.
- dadjoker 4y agoHeh, the web dev geek in me made it so that the first thing I noticed about the page was the old school web page layout using tables.
- boredemployee 4y agoi love all the (movie) sequels of hobbit, LOR etc. but I have a hard time to put the stories together in my mind. maybe reading all the books would help me with the timeline and overall understanding?
- BerislavLopac 4y agoYes, but in all honesty just "reading the books" is probably not enough. To really understand the full "lore" you should definitely read the appendices and the chronology; also reading The Silmarillion and The Unfinished Tales is most recommended.
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- fallingfrog 4y agoHe really was such a great writer. The revised version is much better, too.