When I was about seven, someone read me The Hobbit. That would be around 1975, two years after my father had left. My brother and I lived with our mother and a bunch of university dropouts with long hair and motorcycles who rented rooms in our house. I remember still a Led Zeppelin poster on the wall at the top of the first flight of stairs.
Later, I dwelled for many years on the edge of the East Anglian Fens, earning cash in the summers giving guided punt tours to tourists. This sparked an interest in the shapes and stories of history, and the telling of them. Eventually I wrote a book on Victorian Cambridge, which in turn awakened an interest in the discovery of prehistory. After 1859 the bottom fell out of history, and two generations of respectable scholars filled the void with lurid fantasies of primitive social evolution. One day, my independent research having reached the Interwar years, I picked up Tolkien’s Finn and Hengest (1982), recognized a return to sobriety armed with pregnant insight, and was hooked. So I turned my back on East Anglian ivory towers and returned to the writings of this astonishing Oxford Professor.
Thank God, that’s done! and I’ll take the road, quit of my youth and you. The Roman road to Wendover, by Tring and Lilley Hoo. As a free man may do. (Rupert Brooke, ‘The Chilterns’, 1913)
One day I will put up a page on (the first edition of) The Hobbit (1937), and explain how the magic ring is used to draw an ingenious picture of a proper name. Today, the adventure of Bilbo Baggins is only ever read from the perspective of The Lord of the Rings, but originally it was a story about marks, names, and meaning in the tradition of Thomas Hobbes, Hanna Diyab, and John Stuart Mill.
I am not even linking The Hobbit YouTube series made with my children, this because it is not very good. But the making of it involved an encounter with the pictorial dimension of Tolkien’s imagination - behind his prose is always a picture, only some of which is revealed by the words that he chooses. To follow the making of The Lord of the Rings, for example, one must not only see the spiral staircase hidden inside the Elf-tower on the margin of the story but also see properly the Hobbit-hole of the Bagginses, with its cellars deeper underground than the sitting rooms on the other side of the corridor, yet on the same horizontal level.
In any case, an account of the original story of Bilbo Baggins is going to have to wait until I have completed my current research on the making of The Lord of the Rings, a story that is the sequel to several stories, not only The Hobbit.
The Lord of the Rings is the sequel to The Silmarillion (1977), which was published posthumously in an edition that has been unravelling ever since. It gives a sequel to ‘The Adventures of Tom Bombadil’, an account in verse of the courtship of Tom Bombadil and Goldberry published in 1934. And it is a sequel also to ‘The Fall of Númenor’, Tolkien’s 1936 myth of how Sauron caused the drowning of Atlantis.
In terms of design, however, The Lord of the Rings is a sequel to an allegory told in November 1936 about the making and reception of Beowulf. In this short story, the Old English poem is pictured as a tower made of old stones that allows the builder to see the sea.
Seeing Stones, a series of posts originally published monthly on the Silmarillion Writers Guild, sets out a contextual reading of this 1936 allegory. The series draws out the relationship between the Anglo-Saxon tower of this story and Elostirion, the western Elf-tower on the margin of The Lord of the Rings. The concluding posts reveal the hidden spiral staircase within the tower and the relationship of this tower to the (hitherto overlooked) argument of Tolkien’s 1936 lecture, ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’.
Seeing Stones is the foundation of A Hobbit’s Guide to Stairs, which charts the making of The Lord of the Rings, revealing the spiral staircase and sea-view of the 1936 Anglo-Saxon tower as the hidden design of the great story of the War of the Ring and the end of the Third Age.
The Guide will begin to appear in the New Year.