Question: Are you a The Hobbit person or a Lord of the Rings person?

PUNKADIDDLE: Top Ten All-Time Best-Selling Books, 4: J R R Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937)

So, I read this essay back at the tail end of last year, and then totally flaked on sharing it with you. It's nominally about the two revisions of The Hobbit--the one you're used to, and the one that meshes with LotR and all the rest--it really helped me understand how I could *adore* The Hobbit while finding LotR not simply unspeakably boring, but also sort of embarrassing. The nutshell:

I don't believe in Evil (note initial cap). And, in fact, it's books like The Hobbit (among a handful of other stories, including Star Wars of all things) that helped me understand that there is neither Evil nor Evil Doers (note caps, again) in the world. There's laziness and incompetence and malice and bad luck, there's greed and viciousness and shame and want, but no Evil force out to do Evil 'cause Evil is what needs doing, no Sauron. Even the evilest (note lack of caps) dicks in all of history thought they were doing what was right for themselves and their "people" (in whatever limited way they defined that). Hitler thought Hitler was making the world a better place. Hitler's assessment of Hitler was almost certainly more positive than Louie Pasture's assessment of Louie Pasture.

The Hobbit, as Tolkien originally wrote it, isn't set in a world with real Evil; it's actually set in a fairly psychologically realistic world (for me, that is, a guy who sees no Evil), in which folks mostly luck into what happens to them, and hilarity ensues. LotR, on the other hand, is set in a world that revolves around Good and Evil and essential qualities that make some folks Destined for Greatness--and, I'm gonna level with you, that bores me. It isn't just that this isn't the world I live in, it's that this isn't the world I *want* to live in.

At any rate, here's a snippet of the essay, which is really worth your time if you have any opinion on Tolkien:

Well, one thing I can say is that Tolkien wrote two versions of the story of The Hobbit. In the first, a troop of dwarves, to use what Tolkien insisted was the proper plural form of the word, are planning to trek to a distant mountain in order to steal a great pile of treasure guarded by a lethal, fire-breathing dragon -- or more properly, to steal it back, since they claim it belongs to them. They are looking for a professional thief to help them in this dangerous business. The wizard Gandalf, for reasons that appear largely capricious, tricks the dwarves into hiring Bilbo Baggins, an ordinary, sedentary, unadventurous hobbit; and likewise tricks Bilbo into going along. This situation is played broadly for laughs, because Bilbo is so patently unfitted to the business of adventuring. 'Unfitness' also seems to characterize the dwarves, mind you: the party stumbles from disaster to disaster as they journey, escaping death by hairs' breadths half a dozen times at the hands of trolls, goblins, wolves, spiders and hostile elves. They are saved from their early misadventures by Gandalf's interventions, for though eccentric he is considerably more competent than they. Later, though, Gandalf goes off on his own business, and the party has to rescue itself. As they continue to stumble into a series of potentially fatal pickles, they somehow manage, by a combination of luck and hobbit-judgment, always to get away. Indeed, following Bilbo's development from massively incompetent to marginally incompetent is one of the pleasures of the narrative. . . .

This is The Hobbit that appeared in 1937, to both acclaim and commercial success. But there's another The Hobbit. I don't mean the upcoming film. I mean a second The Hobbit written by Tolkien, comprising revisions to this first edition, additional material written for the Lord of the Rings and the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, plus other material -- most importantly two separate prose pieces, both called 'The Quest for Erebor' that were collected in the posthumously-published Unfinished Tales (1980). JRRT's first revisions were confined to the 'Riddles in the Dark' chapter: for after writing he first Hobbit Tolkien came to the conclusion that 'the Ring' was more than just a magic ring, more even than a ring of Gyges: that it was indeed the most powerful artifact in the whole world, one with which people became so besotted they lose their souls. Gollum, he reasoned, would not freely give up such an item. So he rewrote the scene. But this is symptomatic of something larger -- a reconceptualising (Tolkien purists might say: a distillation or focussing) of the now-celebrated JRRT-legendarium: no longer a folk-story, now a grand sacramental drama of incarnation, atonement and redemption.