Red Book of Westmarch - Relationship To Real Works

Relationship To Real Works

See also: Revisions of the Hobbit

As a memoir and history, the contents of the Red Book probably correspond to Tolkien's work as follows:

  • Bilbo's journey: The Hobbit
  • Frodo's journey: The Lord of the Rings
  • Background information: the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings, as well as essays such as published in Unfinished Tales and The History of Middle-earth
  • Hobbit poetry and legends: The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (in the Red Book, scattered throughout the margins of the text of Bilbo and Frodo's journeys)
  • Bilbo's translation of Elven histories and legends: The Silmarillion

Some events and details concerning Gollum and the magic ring in the first edition of The Hobbit were rewritten for The Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit was later revised for consistency. Tolkien explains the discrepancies as Bilbo's lies (influenced by the ring, now the sinister One Ring).

Tolkien also said the original version of the Red Book contained the story of Bilbo's journey from the first edition of the Hobbit. Beginning with the Thain's Book, later copies of the Red Book contained, as an alternative, the true account (from notes from Frodo and Sam). Tolkien says neither hobbit seemed willing "to delete anything actually written by the old hobbit himself."

Read more about this topic:  Red Book Of Westmarch

Famous quotes containing the words relationship to, relationship, real and/or works:

    “Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody’s piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading.”
    —Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)

    “Sometimes in our relationship to another human being the proper balance of friendship is restored when we put a few grains of impropriety onto our own side of the scale.”
    —Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

    “But real action is in silent moments. The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the like, but in a silent thought by the way-side as we walk; in a thought which revises our entire manner of life, and says,—”Thus hast thou done, but it were better thus.””
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “I look on trade and every mechanical craft as education also. But let me discriminate what is precious herein. There is in each of these works an act of invention, an intellectual step, or short series of steps taken; that act or step is the spiritual act; all the rest is mere repetition of the same a thousand times.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)