Simon J. Cook's Blog, page 7

Odin & Ing (the Lord)

Tolkien declared his story of the Ring no allegory, and it has never been my intention to offer a political reading of his tale. From the first, however, I have insisted that (as Tolkien says) the stories of Middle-earth are not set in some other world, but in our own world in a distant and […]

Premonitions of WWII

*   Composition of ‘The Breaking of the Fellowship’ can be dated by some marginalia on the manuscripts in which Tolkien outlined the death of Boromir. On the back of this sheet our author has absently written: ‘Chinese bombers,’ ‘North Sea convoy,’ ‘Muar River,’ ‘Japanese attack in Malaya,’ and other such. Christopher Tolkien notes the Japanese […]

First Mirror

He caught her, held her fast! Water-rats were scuttering reeds hissed, herons cried, and her heart was fluttering… You shall come under Hill! Never mind your mother in her deep weedy pool: there you’ll find no lover! The Adventure of Tom Bombadil (1934) From its beginnings in very late 1937 through to the end of […]

Revolution of the index

Anyone coming to these posts for the first time will find little sense in the following post, but someone who has followed previous posts will understand that three key ideas are in the process of coming together: namelessness, the index, and a Copernican revolution in a theory of naming. Namelessness Our starting point is the observation that […]

A Copernican Revolution in story-vision

The post Genesis of the One Ring identified two seminal decisions made in the first week or weeks of composition of The Lord of the Rings: (1) to place the magic ring at the center of the new story; which idea was soon followed by the idea that: (2) the magic ring was made by the Necromancer. […]

The Necromancer 1936: a northern serpent

In 1936 Tolkien had pulled off a stunning ‘final story of the elves,’ a northern myth of a second mortal fall based on Plato’s myth of Atlantis derived from meditation on the story of Scyld Scefing in Beowulf. ‘The Fall of Númenor’ is a statement of Tolkien’s fundamental ideas of no less importance than his essay On Fairy-stories. Just take stock […]

The Necromancer: sex & the magic ring

In the last days of 1937, or the first of 1938, Tolkien decided the magic ring won from Gollum had been made by the Necromancer. The name was loaded with significance. In the first instance, the Necromancer stepped out of a passing reference in The Hobbit. On the edge of Mirkwood, Bilbo asks if another path […]

Genesis of the One Ring

Summary of last post: A long-expected party mirrors The Hobbit and was conceived as the prelude to a story about a descendant of Bilbo Baggins who inherits his magic ring. Half-way through a second draft of A long-expected party Tolkien breaks off, sets out some notes that establish that the magic ring was made by the Necromancer. […]

Bilbo’s Property

The Hobbit was published September 1937 and in the week leading to the following Christmas Tolkien bowed to polite yet firm requests from his publisher and began a sequel. He sat down and wrote five manuscript pages to which a title was added ‘A long-expected party.’ I have said before that The Lord of the Rings may […]

The Hobbit (1937)

My philological index of The Lord of the Rings identifies a hidden index within a conventional index of names of Middle-earth. This ghost index is the index of the original story of The Hobbit. Key elements of the ghost index are given here. This post explains a small part of the ghost index. Bilbo Baggins. property, acquired: magic ring property, inherited: Bag-End; generic […]