Year long stops?

[Gwaimir Windgem]

I got the Letters of JRRT at the library :D, and have been reading them in pure delight. In letter 25, JRR says that "the tale halted in the telling for about a year at two separate points": One of these points, I believe, is at the end, before Balin comes to visit him. When is the other? Is it after the Battle of Five Armies, when he's at Rivendell?

[hectorberlioz]

:eek: OMG!
so there were years involved in the hobbit! wow. i never paid enough attention i guess.

[Tuor of Gondolin]

This, to me, is an interesting minor detectiveish question. Here is a possible answer:

For one pause:
In the Humphrey Carpenter biography, Chapter V, "Enter Mr. Baggins", HC writes:
"This recollection that there was a hiatus between the original idea and the composition of the main body of the story is confirmed by a note that Tolkien scribbled on a surviving page of the original Chapter One: 'Only page preserved of the first scrawled copy of The Hobbit which did not reach beyond the first chapter.' "

[But this guess by me of the first pause is just a hypothesis].
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Where the other pause came is quite clear. It occured shortly after the death of Smaug.
"For the benefit of his children he had narrated an impromptu conclusion to the story, but, as Christopher Tolkien expressed it, 'the ending chapters were rather roughly done, and not typed out at all.'.....She [Susan Dagnall] sent the typescript back to Tolkien, asking him if he would finish it, and preferably soon, so that the book could be considered for publication in the following year."

[Shadowfax]

Originally posted by Gwaimir Windgem
I got the Letters of JRRT at the library :D, and have been reading them in pure delight. In letter 25, JRR says that "the tale halted in the telling for about a year at two separate points": One of these points, I believe, is at the end, before Balin comes to visit him. When is the other? Is it after the Battle of Five Armies, when he's at Rivendell? I always understood this to mean that there were pauses in the time it took for Tolkien to compose the story, not in the narrative itself. Like he wrote, stopped for a year, wrote some more... I don't know if that's what he meant, but that's how I've seen it.
Just my 2 cents.

[Bombadillo]

That's what I would think Shadowfax.

I don't have my book handy, but at the end of the Hobbit isn't it passively mentioned how long Bilbo'd been gone? Somewhere around the auction I believe. And it was only little over a year.

I'll have to check later to assure that.

[Tuor of Gondolin]

Originally posted by Shadowfax

I always understood this to mean that there were pauses in the time it took for Tolkien to compose the story, not in the narrative itself. Like he wrote, stopped for a year, wrote some more... I don't know if that's what he meant, but that's how I've seen it.

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That's how I take the meaning, and how I addressed it above. From the way Tolkien writes in "Letters" # 25 I'm about 95% sure JRRT is referring to pauses in his writing The Hobbit, not pauses of a year each occurring in the story itself. For one thing, I believe the whole tale takes just one year in story time.

[Imric]

The wonderfully useful Annotated Hobbit's introductory essay (which was written by annotator Douglas A. Anderson) tells us what is known of the composition of the book.

The Professor's legendary opening sentence ''In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit'' (which he scribbled down out of boredom as he marked student examaination papers during his summer break) appears to have been written sometime in the years 1928-1930, with the actual writing of the story proper beginning in late 1930 and reaching Chapter 12 by January, 1933.

At this point, a break in the writing occurs, with Tolkien not resuming his work until the summer of 1936 at which time publication of The Hobbit was under consideration. Tolkien's typescript was sent off to the publisher on October 5, 1936 with two sets of page proofs undertaken before publication on September 21, 1937.

Mr. Anderson also summarizes the various stages of The Hobbit as follows.



Stage A which consists of a partial (six pages) handwritten manuscript of Chapter 1 in whic the dragon is named Pryftan, Gandalf is the head dwarf and the wizard is called Bladorthin.

Stage B, with a mixture of handwritten and typed manuscript, takes the tale up to Chapter 12 (plus Chapter 14) of the pulished version, with the renaming of Smaug and the change of Gandalf from dwarf to wizard. Thorin becomes our head dwarf while Beorn is known as Medwed. A six page outline summarizes action from the Elvenking's Halls until the end of the story

Stage C is a typewritten version of Stage B in which the character of Medwed is renamed as Beorn.

Stage D is a handwritten manuscript covering Chapters 13 and 15-19.

Stage E is a typed reworking of Stage C and contains a wholly new, inserted Chapter 13 plus the new material from Stage D.

Stage F is a second typescript which was evidently intended for use as a printer's typescript, though it was apparently not employed for this purpose due to many typographical errors.




As we can see, the creation of The Hobbit was a seven year odyssey in which the writing process was a rather discontinuous process.