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- Newsgroups: alt.fan.tolkien
- Path: sparky!uunet!think.com!spool.mu.edu!agate!stanford.edu!nntp.Stanford.EDU!jchokey
- From: jchokey@leland.Stanford.EDU (James Alexander Chokey)
- Subject: Re: Questions
- Message-ID: <1993Jan28.081627.20627@leland.Stanford.EDU>
- Sender: news@leland.Stanford.EDU (Mr News)
- Organization: DSG, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA
- References: <1993Jan27.061106.10870@leland.Stanford.EDU> <1993Jan28.004624@IASTATE.EDU>
- Date: Thu, 28 Jan 93 08:16:27 GMT
- Lines: 23
-
- In article <1993Jan28.004624@IASTATE.EDU> cffitzge@IASTATE.EDU (Charles F Fitzgerald) writes:
- >
- >Some (most notably Jim Chokey) would say that they do not relate at
- >all, or at least not much. Tolkien wrote _The Hobbit_ and much of
- >what would become _The Silmarillion_ before beginning the Lord of
- >the Rings. It is not clear that _The Hobbit_ was in any way connected
- >to _The Silmarillion_ at the time of its (_The Hobbit_'s) writing.
- >The Lord of the Rings was begun as a sequel to _The Hobbit_, and as
- >such, it may be argued that it had no connection to _The Silmarillion_
- >at its onset.
-
- I agree with everything written in the above paragraph except
- the characterization of my position in the first sentence. I have never
- said that Tolkien's various Middle-earth works are not related at all, or
- even that the relations between the works are relatively insignificant. What
- I have said is very similar to what you said above-- that Tolkien did not
- _initially_ conceive of The Hobbit and the first parts of LOTR as being
- connected to the various Silmarillion stories. The three stories only
- really became interconnected during the writing of LOTR. I have never tried
- to _deny_ that the stories are related; rather I have sought to _historicize_
- their relationship by pointing out that they were not _initially_ related.
-
- -- Jim C. <jchokey@leland.stanford.edu>
-