Tolkien's summary of his work: what got left out, and why?

[fictualities]

Many of you write fic, and not so long ago posts were popping up all over my flist about that dreaded last-minute fic-posting chore: writing the summary. There you are, vaguely dazed from being immersed in your characters, and you're supposed to say what your story is ABOUT. Yikes

Comments

[fictualities]

I love the Silmarillion but could never get into anything written from the pov of the hobbits precisely because I've never been able to identify with them

I think that from moment one Tolkien's readership has been bifurcated in exactly this way! In his letters he spends a certain amount of time apologizing to mildly appalled readers for the ordinariness and for what he called the "suburban" qualities of hobbits. Ever since the books came out there have been readers who could get on board with the grand epic stuff but who gagged at the tweeness of the hobbits. And vice versa -- there are readers who love the hobbit perspective but who need persuading about the grand epic. (Personally I'm a bit more of a hobbit person by nature than a grand epic person -- and maybe that's just my damage as someone from a bi-religious family who is naturally suspicious of claims to transcendence -- but over the years Tolkien has cajoled me into loving both, and now I find the Silm utterly enthralling.)

To me this dualism in the books is a sign of strength -- it adds to the richness and complexity of the work to have two very different temperaments in dialogue with each other. But I have to admit that for non-hobbit people the first chapter in particular must be overwhelmingly hard to swallow. Tolkien said in the summary that in both style and substance, the first chapter is a deliberate continuation of The Hobbit, and that one of his major artistic concerns in book one was to slowly change the tone and reveal a much more complicated world than the one that appears at first. So, you know, from your perspective the big hurdle would be at the very beginning, but the story would pick up after that.

[anna_wing]

Well, in my innermost soul I am Bilbo Baggins, who was a Hobbit, and loved Elves, and got them and yet remained a Hobbit and happily so. Bilbo is the perfect synthesis of the two positions and had an ideal life.