Tuesday 26 January 2016

tolkien - What did the Hobbits call the story we know as The Lord of the Rings?

Richard has correctly identified the in-universe title of the story. However, that has nothing to do with the reason that Lord of the Rings is referred to by that name in the "Palantíri" essay. Christopher Tolkien explains the source of this essay in the introduction to Unfinished Tales:




For the second edition of The Lord of the Rings (1966) my father made substantial emendations to a passage in The Two Towers, III 11 "The Palantír" (three-volume hardback edition p. 203), and some others in the same connection in The Return of the King, V 7 "The Pyre of Denethor" (edition cited p. 132), though these emendations were not incorporated in the text until the second impression of the revised edition (1967). This section of the book is derived from writings on the palantíri associated with this revision; I have done no more than assemble them into a continuous essay.




(emphasis added)



In other words, this is not a slip on Tolkien's part; he's writing this essay as the author, to try and clarify his thoughts on a section of his book.



The book itself, or at any rate the manuscript conceived of as being the basis of the novel, is referred to by name only once by any character. As Frodo is consoling Sam at the Grey Havens, he tells Sam:




You will be the Mayor, of course, as long as you want to be, and the most famous gardener in history; and you will read things out of the Red Book, and keep alive the memory of the age that is gone...




That's the only reference to the book, by name, by a character in the book.

No comments:

Post a Comment