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Tolkien’s death of Smaug: American inspiration revealed

As well as its familiar roots in Icelandic mythology, this Middle-earth story also has some surprising transatlantic sources

The dragon soars overhead, its underside armoured with gems from its hoard. The bowman has one arrow left. Then a bird flutters to his ear and whispers the monster’s sole vulnerability – a bare patch at its breast. The last arrow strikes home. Exit Smaug the Magnificent.

It’s a marvellous moment, thrillingly told in The Hobbit (though mashed out of recognition in the last of Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth films, released this week). But Tolkien did not conjure the scene from thin air. The peculiar manner of Smaug’s death comes via a surprising source.

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Baddies in books: The Gruffalo’s double-edged menace

He’s great to have around when you want to terrify anyone coming after you, but watch out when he gets hungry

In one episode of much-loved sitcom Father Ted, the young priest Dougal confesses that the spider-baby he saw on TV was actually something he’d dreamed. Ted shows him a diagram of a man’s head. Inside it is the word Dreams. Outside, is the word Reality. “Have you been studying this like I told you?” Ted asks.

For the mouse protagonist of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s bestselling picture book The Gruffalo, no such convenient distinction exists between the outer and inner worlds. To fend off a series of murderous, though beguiling, invitations to dinner from ravenous predators during his stroll through the dark forest, the trickster mouse invents a previous invitation with an imaginary friend.

“His eyes are orange, his tongue is black;
He has purple prickles all over his back.” [...]
“He has terrible tusk, and terrible claws
And terrible teeth in his terrible jaws.”

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Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?

Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them

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Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.

conedison is reading Karoo by Steve Tesich:

[It’s] about a man who has allowed lying to become his way of life. Tesich, an Oscar-winning screenwriter, died at age 53 and knew he was dying when he wrote this novel (published posthumously). This knowledge freed him from the desire to protect any member of the human race – most assuredly including himself. Almost every page is like a stinging paper-cut, speaking of how easily and constantly we lie to others and ourselves until the only way we can “know” each other is through our lies. Karoo reminded me of a line from a Joni Mitchell song, “Do you really smile when you smile?” Steve Tesich was a wise man and a fine writer, but unless you’re in the mood to be disturbed for 406 pages I can’t recommend it.

Having a cup of jasmin tea, wrapped up in my blanket. It is freezing cold and the heating is rubbish. But the book is great.

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By Martha Weaver

1 December 2014, 20:12

I finished A Time of Gifts, reaching the “to be continued” on the last page. [...] The narrative works best when he’s with people, and I found myself wondering about every person he described and what became of them (although not so much about him, funnily enough).

The writing stands on its own as commanding literature, but apart from when he’s in Vienna, there isn’t much humour to be had; it’s much more a young man’s adventure in which things generally go in his favour. Being so well-connected, he has lots of help on his journey, although given that he walked 1,200 miles in winter, that’s probably a good thing.

I was also just grateful for him because he was doing the journey I would have wanted to do and was doing it in the way I would have wanted too.

Im reading Don Quixote. Are there other novels in the world? Has anyone written a better one since?

One of only two private houses designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh is in my village. I read it first in September for the story, I’m rereading in December for the poetry.

What piqued my interest in Afghan Adventure was the inclusion of two names on the spine: John Fox as told to Roland Goodchild. The book was published in 1958, by which time Fox was still under 40. So why did he tell his tale to another to write up for him? It is early yet but looks to be an interesting time, with efforts to track down caravans of illegal arms being trafficked, amidst fears by the locals that they may be used against them when the Army moves out.

But it got me thinking of other books on the shelf where the story is penned by another. One that comes to mind is The Restless Voyage. Mind you Archibald Campbell had at least written his own account of his wanderings across the oceans from 1806 to 1812, with Stanley Porteous updating it in 1949, to regale us of shipwrecks, the loss of his feet and much more.

Very interesting topic, but only one book immediately springs to mind - the ill-omened Three Cups of Tea, the sad saga of which serves for a salutary tale. Even those with the best of intentions cannot help but fictionalise their own journeys when it comes time to tell the story. Taking on responsibility for telling the tale of another’s voyage, then, strikes me as a dangerous task. The narrative has already passed through one filter of fictionalisation, and the writer is effectively travelling blind. And then, having no access to the cutting room floor where the excisions from the raw memories lie, there’s no restraining knowledge of the actual truth, and thus no reason not to fictionalise further – which seems to be what happened with Three Cups of Tea...

Great cookbook. Love her recipes.

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By TaymazValley

3 December 2014, 18:55

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Amazon goes head to head with Wattpad in battle for fanfic writers

The retail colossus is aiming to recruit fan fiction writers with their own ambitions to sell, but Wattpad is winning users who want to share

It’s a cheerful orange giant stuffed with fan fiction and smileys which can garner a billion reads for an erotic One Direction story – scoring 25-year-old Texan Anna Todd a six-figure publishing deal in the process. But Wattpad also has a serious side as a thriving culture of original writing, with a small but steady flow of authors finding mainstream success with Big Six publishers such as Random House and Harper Collins. Half a dozen of these authors are getting together in the real world mid-December, at Wattpad’s first UK convention. The site has attracted more than 40 million users around the globe. No surprise, then, that Amazon has decided it wants a piece of the action.

The internet shopping site has just launched its own social reading and writing platform, Kindle WriteOn, a move characterised by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian as “trying to eat [Wattpad’s] lunch”. WriteOn is currently in invite-only beta mode, but all you need for access is the online equivalent of a Masonic handshake – a code passed to you from someone on the inside.  

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#Readwomen2014: the next chapter

The last 12 months have introduced me to much great writing, and turned a new leaf for many readers. But where do we go from here?

In January 2014 I wrote a piece for The Guardian headlined, “Will #Readwomen2014 change our sexist reading habits?”. I didn’t choose the headline (the editors do that) and, when I saw it on the page, the scope of this ambition seemed suddenly terrifying.

I didn’t mean for it to happen like this. I’d made a few New Year’s cards for friends, with drawings of writers whose work I’d read recently, and I asked people on Twitter to contribute to a list of women authors on the back of the cards. I started with 250 names, and within days had well over 1,000, plus requests for the cards, and press coverage worldwide. But #Readwomen2014 didn’t happen because I drew some cards. It happened because, this January, gender in writing was suddenly something that everyone wanted to talk about.

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What does the Guardian bookshop's 2014 bestsellers list tell us about our readers?

We’re revolutionary cat lovers into sex and rock’n’roll, it seems, but we also keep a close eye on the most urgent current affairs

Each year, at around this time, we embark upon the strangely fascinating task of compiling the list of bestselling books through the Guardian bookshop over the previous 12 months. What we end up with is always a top 10 that varies wildly from every other UK book retailer, and a unique insight into the tastes and enthusiasms of Guardian readers. For the first time, we’re sharing these insights with you. Whether you use it to select your next bedtime read, or whether it just confirms everything you always thought about the Guardian, we hope you find it as interesting as we do.

1. We’re ready for revolution.

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Poem of the week: Christmas (I) by George Herbert

Worldly hospitality becomes an image of divine benevolence in a 17th-century sonnet that will resonate with exhausted December shoppers

This week, the first of George Herbert’s pair of Christmas poems, published in his posthumous collection, The Temple, provides a pause for reflection in the season of frantic shopping and “frost-nipt sunnes”. Christmas (I) tells the Nativity story from an innovative angle, and realigns one of Herbert’s favourite tropes for denoting the relationship of God and the soul, that of kindly host and needy guest.

In their physicality of design, reference and voice, Herbert’s poems have a mysterious power of yielding themselves to contemporary experience and interpretation. Shoppers and partygoers alike might sympathise with the exhausted rider (“quite astray”) evoked at the beginning of Christmas (I). The unexpected opening modifier, “After all pleasures,” contains an important ambiguity. The preposition “after” suggests both a following in time, and an actual pursuit. Herbert’s speaker, seemingly, is exhausted both by the pleasures experienced and by the process of chasing them, as if unsatisfied pursuit and unsatisfied consumption were as crazily embroiled in the 17th century as the 21st.

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Poster poems: bees

Many poets have hymned the giant impact of these miniature creatures – now it’s time for you to get busy

It’s a startling fact that one third of everything we eat depends on the presence of the humble bee for its existence. Without bees, a whole range of food crops, from almonds to watermelons, would simply stop producing. If the trend of the last decade or so that has seen bee populations decline – as a consequence of disease, pesticide use and other environmental factors – were to continue, food supplies would collapse and prices would soar, resulting in a crisis as great as any we have ever experienced.

These gloomy thoughts were triggered as I read Alex Finlay’s recent book-length bee poem Global Oracle. The poem encompasses many of the important roles that bees have played in human culture, from their association with the oracle at Delphi to their place in rural weather lore. As I read the book, I was also struck by how often bees have appeared in poetry down the centuries.

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Truman Capote and the old failings of New Journalism

Freshly uncovered police reports of the In Cold Blood murder case show the ‘non-fiction novelist’ was rather too imaginative with the facts

In his introduction to a 1973 anthology of literary reportage, The New Journalism, Tom Wolfe lampoons the appalled reaction of the old guard to the blend of literary technique and newspaper reportage which made his name as a feature writer:

These people must be piping it, winging it, making up the dialogue … Christ, maybe they’re making up whole scenes, the unscrupulous geeks ...

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Ayelet Waldman storms on Twitter over 'Notable' New York Times neglect

Author unleashes stream of apoplectic tweets after her novel Love and Treasure is not included on the newspaper’s list of 2014’s literary highlights

There’s something about the web that brings out the worst in authors, whether it’s Alain de Botton’s in response to a bad review (“I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make”) or, more recently, the teddy-bear detective affair (check the comments).

But the latest internet author meltdown comes courtesy of Ayelet Waldman, esteemed American novelist, author of the recent novel Love and Treasure, and the writer who brought down an avalanche of criticism when she admitted she loved her husband more than her children. The New York Times said that, in Love and Treasure, she “sustains her multiple plot lines with breathless confidence and descriptive panache, fashioning complex personalities caught up in an inexorable series of events”; the Wall Street Journal that the novel was “thoughtful, expansive”.

I am really not dealing well with having failed to make the @nytimes notable book list. Love & Treasure is a fucking great novel IISSM.

@susannah_scott nah. I was honest. Am not ashamed.

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