xhonzi said:
CP3S said:
I knew you did, because I am pretty sure we've talked about them before. I just followed Ender's lead without thinking, then right after making my post, I read yours saying you have, realized of course you have, and edited my post. Must have missed my edit.
*AHEM* I made my post at 4:00 XDT. You made your edit at 4:02 XDT.*
Maybe I didn't hit refresh on the page before clicking "edit", didn't see your post until after I made my edit.
2. I learned about the revised chapter many years ago, perhaps on this very forum. What I didn't realize until the other day was that it was part of a larger rewrite effort that went unpublished. I see Tolkienites mention often the revised chapter, but I've not read about the total rewrite before.
We have discussed them a lot, often drawing comparisons between Tolkien's tinkering with The Hobbit and George's tinkering with the OT.
3. I'm not a Tolkienite. I consider myself a casual LotR fan... probably know more about it than the average bear, but not compared to actual Tolkienites. But it doesn't mean I haven't read teh books, seen the movies, bought some action figures, etc...
There are Lord of the Rings action figures? It seems obvious there would be with how popular the films were, guess I just hadn't thought of it before.
Fixed.
Oh yeah, and the appendices are fun too.
And then, and only then, I will be a Jedi Knight? Okay, I guess I'll go home and read the forward. Then I can be a cool kid again.
The forward will educate you on some of The Hobbit changes, but it actually confuses a lot of people. When Tolkien wrote it, the changes had yet to be made to The Hobbit. For the target audience, those who had read the 1937 version before beginning LOTR, it was basically a big retcon they were reading, explaining that the previous book they had read contained omissions and inaccuracies on account of some dishonesty on the part of Bilbo, and then it goes on to explain what really happened.
If you've read the modern printing of The Hobbit, then reading that part of the forward is really unnecessary. When I first read LOTR, I remember being a little puzzled, I had read The Hobbit before, and it was basically telling me the exact same story I had read in that book, only while making the claim that what I had read in it before wasn't what really happened. Years later when I found out there had been changes made to The Hobbit, a light bulb came on and it all made since. Ah, if only the internehts had been then what they are today, I could have powered up the ol' NES, loading up its web browser, and got on wikipedia and learned all I could have wished to know.