mariness

John D. Rateliff's The History of the Hobbit is a book for Tolkien completists – and only Tolkien completists. Casual readers or those who just saw the movies can safely skip it. But those who like me were obsessed enough to snatch up the previous compilations of Tolkien's drafts and unfinished works must have this book. (Actually, books; it's in two volumes.) Each draft chapter is carefully annotated with footnotes and essays and footnotes on the footnotes and essays, with chatter about Tolkien's sources and writing methods and the various ways The Hobbit could have gone, but didn't, not to mention a fascinating discussion about the continuing evolution of various characters – particularly Gollum. Annnnnddd references to pretty much everything even vaguely related to The Hobbit and discussions of word origins and some chapters that Tolkien completely rewrote to make The Hobbit more consistent with its sequel and lists of dwarf names. Plus, bonus Dungeons and Dragons commentary. I mean, awesome.

But for all that, the book does have one glaring omission, although I freely admit that I might have missed it had I not just spent a significant part of this year plowing through the works of George MacDonald and Edith Nesbit. And that is – Edith Nesbit.

Rateliff cites Nesbit exactly twice – as a creator of whimsical dragons (true) – and as a writer in the tradition of classic British children's literature (more as one of its establishers, but this is nitpicking.) And that's that.

No mention of the narrative asides, so similar in tone and purpose, that litter both Nesbit's novels and The Hobbit (and are not found in other books that Rateliff cites as influences.) And, above all, no mention of a certain ring of invisibility.

Rateliff spends eight pages (plus footnotes) chatting about other rings of invisibility, citing Plato, Aladdin, Chretien de Troyes, Hartmann von Aue, The Mabinogion, Ariosto (a comparison Tolkien disliked), Fr. Francois Fenelon, Andrew Lang, an obscure Estonian folktale collected by Frederich Kreutzwald which Rateliff admits barely resembles Bilbo's ring whatsoever, concluding that a) literature offered few rings of invisibility prior to Tolkien and b) Tolkien was probably most influenced by Plato and Chretien de Troyes. I'm not going to argue the Plato part – Tolkien certainly knew The Republic very well, or the de Troyes part, but all of this ignores a children's book that featured a ring that turned you invisible – and just how inconvenient this could be if you were hungry or hurt -- The Enchanted Castle.

True, I can't be certain that Tolkien knew any of Nesbit's novels. And also, I'd be the first to admit that Nesbit had no influence on The Lord of the Rings. But The Hobbit is a very different sort of work, and in a book of analysis that takes time to mention (and I think misinterpret, but, that's arguable) Anne McCaffery's dragon books; Vita Sackville-West (who might have helped inspire the name of the Sackville-Bagginses – she and Tolkien were both enthusiastic gardeners if they had little else in common, and Tolkien may have read her gardening articles), not to mention the Estonian folktales, this omission seems, how do I put this? Odd.

But this omission aside, if you are a Tolkien enthusiast, invest. It's your sort of book; deeply fascinating and insightful – with a fair warning that you may find yourself wanting to chase down Estonian folktales afterwards. But I can't exactly term that a bad thing.

After reading the last bit, I went back and skimmed through the rest of the liveblogging on the debate on Texas educational standards. Here's the next bit that jumped out at me:

We just got a look at four amendments board member Barbara Cargill will propose. Students would be expected to “explain three pro-free market factors contributing to European technological progress during the rise and decline of the medieval system” (what three factors?);

Look, I know I seem to complain about this a lot, but it's because the concept doesn't seem to be getting through: when we use the word "medieval," we are talking about an approximately 1000 year period of history (depending upon when you define the beginning and the end, traditionally the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 456 to either the fall of Constantinople (1453) or the printing press (1450) or the death of Richard III/beginning of the Tudor dynasty (1485) or the fall of Grenada (1492) or any of a number of other dates; I can assure you that you can easily find historians who will disagree with me, and many historians prefer to date the end of the medieval period somewhat earlier, at the Black Death (1348-1350), because of the tremendous economic and social upheavals that followed that pandemic.

In one thousand years and several countries and several cultures and various people traipsing around everywhere (the medievals traveled far more than we tend to give them credit for; several people hopped on the crusade bandwagon for a reason), not to mention varying levels of technology, we, not surprisingly, find significant diversity in economic systems. Yes, at various places (England, France) and various times (a fairly limited period) feudalism was the In Thing, a system that would later appear in other cultures, not to "leave" until Alexander II freed the serfs in 1861, a move, I might add, that was not done for the sake of the serfs. But feudalism was by no means universal in medieval Europe at any time, and even places that used the system showed significant local variations.

Tolkien does an excellent job of showing how this worked in The Lord of the Rings, showing how different, somewhat but not completely isolated cultures, used completely different economic systems, an image he took from his extensive studies of Scandinavian economic systems interacting with British economic systems still interacting with old Roman and current Byzantine systems. It's a more enjoyable way of understanding the system without going through a lot of medieval economic textbooks.