Draft:Prologue to The Lord of the Rings: Difference between revisions

Introductory text to J. R. R. Tolkien’s novel The Lord of the Rings

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The Prologue to The Lord of the Rings is a text that appears in the aforementioned novel by British writer J. R. R. Tolkien in which he explains and summarizes different aspects of his legendarium that relate to the work. It serves as a bridge between The Lord of the Rings and its predecessor, The Hobbit, and is dedicated mostly to the hobbits, a fictional race related to Men and characterized by their short stature.^[1][2]

J. R. R. Tolkien wrote the first version of the prologue between 1938 and 1939, very shortly after beginning to compose the story of The Lord of the Rings, although this version was still very poor. Due to the great importance he gave it, it took him more than ten years to complete the text and this did not occur until shortly before the publication of the first of the volumes into which the novel was divided, The Fellowship of the Ring, in 1954.^[3] As a result of the development of the complete novel, the prologue underwent major changes, with several versions existing, some of which were published by the author’s third son and principal editor, Christopher Tolkien, in the books The Return of the Shadow (1992) and The Peoples of Middle-earth (1996), from the collection The History of Middle-earth.

Critics granted the prologue a certain usefulness and advised readers not to forget it or overlook it.^[4] In the film trilogy directed by New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson based on The Lord of the Rings, part of the prologue appears in the extended version of the first film, The Fellowship of the Ring, where the hobbit Bilbo Baggins describes his race while writing the introduction to his book There and Back Again. In both this adaptation and that of director Ralph Bakshi, the prologue focuses on the history of the Rings of Power and especially that of the One Ring.

This section of the prologue is the only text by J. R. R. Tolkien in which the history of the hobbit race prior to the events narrated in The Lord of the Rings can be found. Their origin dates back to the Elder Days, but nothing was known of them until the Third Age, except that the three branches of the race (Hotfoots, Stools, and Fallohides) coexisted in the vales of the Anduin river and there came into contact with the Éothéod, the ancestors of the Rohirrim, and from them adopted some customs and their language. After the first millennium of the Third Age, the hobbits moved to the lands of Eriador and the three branches separated to reunite years later in the Shire, founded by the Fallohide brothers Marcho and Blanco. There the hobbits lived in peace until the War of the Ring, which occurred at the end of the Third Age.

Tolkien also offers a description of the hobbits and the main differences between the three branches, as well as their culture and some customs.

This section describes one of the hobbits’ main pastimes, pipe smoking, from the fictional point of view of the legendarium. Tolkien places the origins of this custom in the Shire in the year 2670 of the Third Age, when the hobbit Tobold Hornblower first cultivated pipe-weed in Longbottom, a village in the Southfarthing. However, the hobbits of the village of Bree were the first to smoke pipes and those who spread the habit to other races, such as the Dwarves and Men. The pipe-weed that Tobold Hornblower cultivated came from Bree but was not originally from there either, but from the lands located in the lower course of the Anduin river, where it was planted by the Númenóreans.

The basis of this section was a lengthy speech of Merry about pipe-weed in a draft of the chapter The Road to Isengard, eventually removed and reworked.^[8]

Here the main geographical divisions of the Shire are described, the land where the hobbits had lived since the middle of the Third Age. Apart from the four main divisions, also called farthings, there were some smaller ones that were not official, such as family lands. It also describes the system of government (based on the Mayor of Michel Delving and the Thain) and the scarce public services of the Shire: the police (or Shirriffs, as the hobbits called them) and the mail.

The entire War of the Ring section entered the Prologue only with the second edition of The Lord of the Rings.^[9]

To link both novels, Tolkien offers here a summary of The Hobbit with special emphasis on the part where Bilbo Baggins discovers the One Ring and his encounter with the creature Gollum. In order to give a reason for the changes he made in the chapter “Riddles in the Dark” of The Hobbit, Tolkien also tells in this section how Bilbo invented a false story about his encounter with Gollum (the story that appears in the first edition of The Hobbit) to tell his friends and how only to the wizard Gandalf did he tell the truth (the story that appears in the second edition and here) after the latter’s insistence.

J. R. R. Tolkien dedicated the prologue of The Lord of the Rings to the hobbits because, as the first words of the novel say, he considered them its main protagonists. Between 1938 and 1939, when he was writing the fourth chapter of The Lord of the Rings, “A Short Cut to Mushrooms”, he noted next to the description of hobbit architecture: “Put in introduction”. From this he began a new writing which he titled Introduction: Concerning Hobbits and which he did not divide into different chapters like the definitive prologue, but rather combined all the information in a single text.^[11] In this, numerous aspects that would be preserved already appeared, although all the history of the hobbits, pipe-weed, and the ordering of the Shire were still missing, and there were other details that would be discarded, such as the ability of hobbits to hear at a mile‘s distance or the different powers of the One Ring apart from granting invisibility. Around the same time, he made another version of the introduction, identical to the previous one but expanded in what refers to the story of Bilbo and Gollum.

Years later he introduced the founding of the Shire, as well as the passages dedicated to the ordering of the Shire and to pipe-weed, the latter arising from an explanation that Meriadoc “Merry” Brandybuck gives to King Théoden of Rohan and brought to the prologue in the same way as hobbit architecture. After composing two other versions with only minor changes, J. R. R. Tolkien drafted a new one with more information, expanding especially the history of the hobbits, in which the Battle of the Greenfields appeared for the first time due to the composition of the chapter “The Scouring of the Shire”, and the three branches of the race, derived from the first version of Appendix F of the novel. However, in this new version he removed the sections on pipe-weed and on the story of Bilbo and Gollum.

Late 1949, early 1950, after another new version with minor corrections, J. R. R. Tolkien composed the definitive prologue, with the story of Bilbo and Gollum updated to agree with the new version of the chapter “Riddles in the Dark” from The Hobbit, which had been modified to reflect the new concept of the ring and its corrupting capacity.^[14]

The “Prologue” would include a description of hobbit gift-giving customs and the ribadyan (birthday celebrant) but it was dropped, being too lengthy.^[15]

The different versions of the prologue were published many years later by Christopher Tolkien, in the books The Return of the Shadow (1992) and The Peoples of Middle-earth (1996), from the collection The History of Middle-earth.

In the animated adaptation of The Lord of the Rings directed by Ralph Bakshi (1978), the prologue is different from that of the novel and in it the history of the Rings of Power is narrated, the War of the Last Alliance, the loss of the One Ring by Isildur and its subsequent finding by Gollum. The only thing both have in common is the story of Gollum and Bilbo.

In the film trilogy directed by Peter Jackson, only part of the prologue appears in the extended edition of the first film, The Fellowship of the Ring, where the hobbit Bilbo Baggins describes his race while writing the introduction to his book There and Back Again. However, while this is what the novel’s prologue does, in the film these scenes are considered part of the plot and the prologue is similar to Bakshi’s adaptation, also focusing on the Dark Years and the history of the One Ring.

In the first drafts of the screenplay, the prologue was too extensive and was overloaded with information, so the screenwriters decided to remove it despite the scenes already being filmed. During post-production, the editing team developed the new prologue in which Bilbo described the hobbits, while the history of the Ring was going to be told by Gandalf at Bag End. However, shortly before traveling to London to work on the soundtrack, Peter Jackson screened the film for New Line Cinema, the company in charge of distributing it, which suggested that the prologue be reintroduced.

The editing team reduced the prologue to seven minutes and after trying from Isildur’s perspective and from a universal one, they decided to edit it from the point of view of the Ring, since this was the true protagonist. The narrator was initially Frodo Baggins, who would carry the Ring throughout the trilogy, but he ended up being discarded because the character was unaware of its history. The screenwriters then tried Gandalf and even Ian McKellen, the wizard’s interpreter, requested it; however, they also discarded him since his role was quite large in The Fellowship of the Ring. Finally it was Galadriel, played by Cate Blanchett, who provided her voice as narrator.

The theme that plays when Bilbo is describing the hobbits in the extended version is titled “Concerning Hobbits” (matching one of the sections of the prologue). It was composed by composer Howard Shore, who created the soundtrack for the trilogy, and it primarily uses violin and tin whistle.