XPost: rec.arts.books.tolkien
From: g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies
In message <503399ac$0$56771$edfadb0f@dtext02.news.tele.dk>
Raven wrote:
> "Stan Brown" skrev i meddelelsen
> news:MPG.2a9ca583d6348c8798da2a@news.individual.net...
>> The Elves in /The Hobbit/ have never seemed to me to be consistent
>> with the Elves in the rest of the legendarium. Elves in LotR and
>> Silm, especially the Noldor, are beautiful and terrible; Elves in
>> /The Hobbit/ are mostly flighty and silly. (Elrond, please note, was
>> not an Elf but an "elf-friend" in /The Hobbit/. The Elvenking
>> [Thranduil] was not silly, but his people were.)
> Not in the Battle of Five Armies. But most of The Hobbit is a children's
> book. Even story-internally, where TH along with the LotR are the accounts
> of Bilbo, Frodo and (the last bits) Sam, compiled in the Red Book of
> Westmarch with annotations from other scribes and handed down over the ages
> to us in modern times, it may be argued that in There and Back Again, Bilbo
> used a deliberately silly tone in describing his own adventure. Perhaps he
> wrote, unconsciously or not, to a Shire audience, and only the later parts
> (after the Thinking Fox, perhaps?) were with a wider readership in mind.
> In the early part he then paid attention to the more laughey-chatty side
> of the Eldar whom he met. Thus they come through to the reader as silly,
> save where events were so un-silly that he must describe the Elves in other
> terms. But when he wrote of Frodo's adventure, and when Frodo wrote about
> them himself, a more heroic tone was chosen - most of the time.
Exactly my take on it. Bilbo wrote his story as a lark and a way of
keeping his adventure fresh in his mind. By the time Frodo came along
the story had necessarily become quite serious.
--
Tina... homecoming is spelled c *O* m
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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