Tolkien by Raymond Edwards

Author:Raymond Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Crowood

III – The Hobbit: style and sources

We last saw The Hobbit as an unfinished story, or one finished only orally, known to Tolkien’s children and to a small number of his close friends and sometime pupils, mostly connected with the hostel for Catholic women students at Cherwell Edge, run by the nuns of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus.19 Some time between 1933 and 1936, Tolkien lent an unfinished typescript of The Hobbit to one of his students, Elaine Griffiths;20 she passed it to a friend, Susan Dagnall, like her a sometime resident at Cherwell Edge, who now worked for the publisher George Allen & Unwin.21 She in turn strongly suggested the story be finished and submitted for publication; and this Tolkien did in late 1936.

We may wonder why it is that Tolkien was able to complete The Hobbit but not at this time any of his myriad other projects; I strongly suspect it is because it was confessedly a children’s story and thus not fundamentally, in Tolkien’s mind, a serious work, and one that could thus be issued even if imperfect, so evading the inner perfectionist who vetoed or sabotaged his grander schemes.

Unwin’s chairman, Stanley Unwin, paid his ten-year-old son Rayner a shilling for a report on the book; Rayner liked it, and Unwin agreed to publish. In some ways Unwin was an unlikely partner for Tolkien; he was a non-smoking, teetotal pacifist and Nonconformist of distinctly left-wing views (he had published both Bertrand Russell, and Arthur Ransome’s shameless apology for Bolshevism, Six Weeks in Russia): he and Tolkien would have disagreed on pretty much everything. Nevertheless, Unwin was a canny businessman, and recognized a classic when he saw one.

This turn of events ended any immediate chance that The Lost Road would be completed; it would, in any case, have been a tricky task, but in the months (up to December 1937) when Lewis was finishing Out of the Silent Planet, Tolkien was obliged to set aside The Lost Road to complete and revise The Hobbit, and be at pains to satisfy Unwin’s need for ancillary material – maps, blurbs, illustrations – to make it a publishable book. He obtained ‘puff pieces’ (or, more formally, testimonials) praising the book from various well-disposed friends and colleagues, including R.W. Chambers; George Gordon promised one, but there is no indication whether he made good on it (‘I may warn you that his promises are usually generous,’ Tolkien told Unwin22). In September 1937, The Hobbit was published; Tolkien was forty-five.

He also took some trouble to get Lewis’s book published; J.M. Dent, who had published The Pilgrim’s Regress, rejected Out of the Silent Planet as ‘bunk’. Tolkien persuaded Unwin to look at it, but to no avail; his reader also rejected it. Tolkien protested, and Unwin was prevailed on to take it to the Bodley Head, another publishing firm of which he was also chairman. They accepted it, and it was published on 23 September 1938.

The Hobbit had started, as we saw, at Tolkien’s desk some years earlier during his annual chore of examination marking.

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