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Middle-Earth Revised, Again - Page 3

© Michael Martinez

And if these works are the authoritative resources, life should be fairly simple, if incomplete. But thanks to Donald Wolheim (then with Ace Books in the United States), in 1965 Tolkien had to recreate Middle-earth so that he could properly secure a copyright for it. Wolheim shrewdly guessed that the American university market was ripe for a mass market edition of The Lord of the Rings. So he took advantage of a loop-hole in copyright law to publish unauthorized editions of the book. After the brouhaha had died down, we were left with the Third Edition of The Hobbit and the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings. In order to qualify for new copyright status, the books had to be substantively altered. Now, a copyright applies only to the expression of an idea, not to the idea of itself. But in literature the expression of an idea can be radically bumped from its normal course as a result of only a minor change in text. So it was with Tolkien's work, and he did not confine himself to merely minor changes. The plot and characterizations remained the same. Tolkien tightened up the writing in a few places but he mostly altered the backdrop for the story, perhaps so as to preserve as much of the beloved tale as possible, but also (I think) to take advantage of the situation and correct a few flaws in the picture he had painted. The Hobbit proved to be more of a challenge than The Lord of the Rings. About the latter, Tolkien wrote to Rayner Unwin in May 1965:

I am not relishing the task of 're-editing' The Lord of the Rings. I think it will prove very difficult if not impossible to make any substantial changes in the general text. Volume I has now been gone through and the number of necessary or desirable corrections is very small. I am bound to say that my admiration for the tightness of the author's construction is somewhat increased. The poor fellow (who now seems to me only a remote friend) must have put a lot of work into it. I am hoping that alteration of the introductions, considerable modifications of the appendices and the inclusion of an index may prove sufficient for the purpose....

Indeed, they did. But he found The Hobbit to be "very poor" (according to Humphrey Carpenter's biography). There are glimpses of Tolkien's dissatisfaction with The Hobbit in some of his letters. He felt he was too condescending to children in the early part of the book, and he would have preferred to rewrite it completely, had there been time to do so.

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