So Tolkien began, though he turned not to The Lord of the Rings for which revision was urgent, but to The Hobbit for which it was not. He spent many hours searching for some revision notes that he had already made, but he could not find them. Instead he found a typescript of ‘The New Shadow’ a sequel to The Lord of the Rings which he had begun a long time ago but had abandoned after a few pages. It was about the return of evil to Middle-earth. He sat up till four a.m. reading it and thinking about it. When the next day he did get down to The Hobbit he found a good deal of it ‘very poor’ and
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