The Hobbit and LotR Continuity Questions

[axordil]

The ironic part being that without the hobbits, the Sil would never have seen the light of day, and LOTR wouldn't exist. Effectively, Middle-Earth wouldn't exist. Let us be grateful for the serendipitous scribblings of bored professors.

[Primula Baggins]

Well, I am grateful for the hobbits because they're what I love most about LotR. Tolkien started with The Hobbit and wasn't writing that with the Silmarillion in mind, but he did go on to fit them into LotR not just as an afterthought but as central elements of the story (and of how readers experience the story).

I do know that Tolkien cared a great deal about the consistency of his legendarium, and of course that he tried later on to retrofit The Hobbit to make it flow better with LotR. However, the whole world he created was so huge and complex that some of the changes he kept introducing, to make it all more self-consistent or to reflect his deepening thoughts on its form and history, just seemed to create more inconsistencies.

I've sometimes wondered, maybe a little mischievously, what Middle-earth would be like if Tolkien had possessed a word processor armed with search and replace instead of stacks and stacks of conflicting manuscripts that could only be searched or corrected by hand. Would he have been able to bring it into perfect self-consistency? And if he had, would it seem as alive and real as it does now?

[CosmicBob]

I've sometimes wondered, maybe a little mischievously, what Middle-earth would be like if Tolkien had possessed a word processor armed with search and replace instead of stacks and stacks of conflicting manuscripts that could only be searched or corrected by hand. Would he have been able to bring it into perfect self-consistency? And if he had, would it seem as alive and real as it does now?

I have wondered that too. Especially after reading HoME and hearing about how he had to re-use paper and erase and write over stuff. But then the drafting wouldn't have been there, or at least not be so extensive. But I think he probably would have produced more.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Really interesting thoughts! Well said, both of you.

[Galin]

(...) I've sometimes wondered, maybe a little mischievously, what Middle-earth would be like if Tolkien had possessed a word processor armed with search and replace instead of stacks and stacks of conflicting manuscripts that could only be searched or corrected by hand. Would he have been able to bring it into perfect self-consistency? And if he had, would it seem as alive and real as it does now?

Well, I would say that perfection was never the goal (athough you probably didn't mean perfectly perfect in any case), and that Tolkien purposely introduced some measure of inconsistency and grey area (or gray area)...

... but I think Tolkien's measure of purposed inconsistency (or perhaps in some cases 'allowed' inconsistency) should not be confused with other things. To my mind there has been a slight 'movement' of sorts, for readers and perhaps even some scholars, to essentially create inconsistency where none really exists, or at least to describe the legendarium in such a way as to open this door, which might undermine the art of Subcreation in my opinion.

Some conflation is not always on purpose, but comes about by simplification of the external details: for example, in one thread (not here) I saw someone post about the three possible histories of the Elessar-stone -- but even if this rough draft text was ever to see the inside of a publishing house, only two variant histories were to be internal.

The 'third' really came from a wholly different text, with no real indication (that I ever noticed anyway) that Tolkien had considered it yet another variant history within his world.

[Primula Baggins]

I can easily believe that Tolkien introduced or allowed some ambiguity in order to make his world seem deeper and more dimensional. When my middle son was first learning to create computer art, he told me once that one of the most important lessons is to make the atmosphere less than perfectly clear, so distant parts of the scene are hazed or even obscured. The sense of not being able to see or know everything pulls the observer in. The sense that "anything might be out there" makes the world larger, more mysterious, more fascinating. Tolkien does this better than anyone who's ever tried to imitate him.

The difficulty for the films is that things must be shown and that the audience considers everything it's seen with its own eyes to be true. Contradiction is upsetting and confusing. PJ is walking an even narrower line than Tolkien had to. (Some of the difficulty he earned for himself, of course, by changes he chose to make in the LotR films.)