I made a guest post at dawn_felagund's website, The Heretic Loremaster

It concerns one of the theories in The History of The Hobbit: that the Elvenking in The Hobbit was originally meant to be Thingol, not Thranduil!

I've been wanting to make another HoTH post for a few days, so I might as well do it now ( Read more... )

Most of us LotR fanfic writers have from time to time bemoaned the fact that JRRT never really gave us much in the way of physical description of the characters.

Well, not in canon, anyhow. One of the revelations in The History of The Hobbit, Part One is that at one point he *did* write down some detailed descriptions ( Read more... )

Well, most of us are familiar with Bilbo's Gollum encounter as it now appears in The Hobbit. And I think, most of us know that what we have now is a revision of what originally appeared. When JRRT came to write LotR, he "ret-conned" TH, altering the Riddle Game and giving it a more sinister tone than it first had, and changing the character of ( Read more... )

Well, most of us are familiar with the fact that Frodo was subject to prescient dreams, and that even Pippin and Merry had them at Bombadil's house, while Pippin had flashes of foresight on at least three canonical occasions, and Frodo was downright prophetic at the end of LotR ( Read more... )

I know the common idea is that when JRRT first started writing The Hobbit, that it did not really have much to do with his world of the Silmarillion, but that gradually crept into it. However, it seems pretty clear that he knew all along that The Hobbit was set in Arda, as this bit from his first draft shows ( Read more... )

I was sent home early from work today, so I thought I'd finish reading my first volume of The History of The Hobbit.

It's really been fascinating-- it a lot of ways it was easier to read than HoMe-- there were still a lot of footnotes and so forth, but I think there was far less "messing about" with The Hobbit. It seems that before the ( Read more... )