Seiler@MIT-XX@sri-unix.UUCP (08/03/83)
From: Larry Seiler <Seiler@MIT-XX>
I am amazed at the thesis that an editor pushing an author to get a
story finished could possibly make the story better. Tolkein, in fact,
was not pressured by any editor into getting LotR done on time. He started
writing it before The Hobbit was published (in 1937), then went back to
working on the legends and philolgy of Middle-Earth, not finishing LotR
until 1949 (WW2 had something to do with the long delay). The book was
written more or less straight from beginning to end, and then it had to be
"rewritten backwards" to make the whole consistent. Apparently it was not
actually published until 1955.
In part, the characters determined the story as it was written (if you
understand what I am trying to say), but parts of the story were "foreseen
from the outset" and the main theme resulted from "the inevitable choice of
the Ring as the link between it and The Hobbit" (I am quoting from the intro
to Fellowshp of the Ring). It is true that, when the hobbits reached Bree,
Tolkein had no more idea than they why Gandalf was late, or who Strider was.
I never understood how that could be until recently, but in the last few
years I have been helping my wife create fantasy (strictly for our own and
our friends' amusement) and we have found the same thing to be happening.
Characters do the strangest things, often absolutely against what we want
them to do, but always act consistent with their own natures, as we find
out in the end. And random events (sometimes determined by several people
acting independently) have a strange way of combining to show us consistent
things about our world and the characters who inhabit it that we would never
have thought of on our own. It is as if we are not creating a story, but
rather reporting the history of some other reality. Tolkein felt this way
about The Lord of the Rings and succeeds in making me feel that way, and
that is one of the reasons I liked it.
Tolkein talks a lot about "sub-creation" (as he calls it) at the end
of his essay "On Fairly Stories," reprinted in The Tolkein Reader (originally
part of the book Tree and Leaf). I don't know how one would reach a state
of "the characters taking control of the story" (as Charles Martin so aptly
phrased it), but I recommend this essay to anyone who is interested in
doing it.
By the way, in the introduction to The Hobbit (second edition), Tolkein
says that he altered a part of the story to match The Lord of the Rings!
Tolkein says that in this edition "the true story of the ending of the Riddle
Game... is now given in place of the version Bilbo first gave to his friends,
and actually set down in his diary." To me, this alteration only increases
my sense of the reality of Tolkein's story. You see, on rereading The Hobbit,
I realized that it describes the same world as Lord of the Rings, except from
a slightly different (and more naive) point of view. For example, compare
the descriptions of Elrond and Rivendell in the two books. The fact that
honest Bilbo didn't tell the truth about how he got the ring fits right in,
and also tells us something about the Ring itself.
Enjoy,
Larry
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