The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ design and the use of music to explain and advance the plot, notably by American folk singer Glenn Yarborough as ‘The Balladeer’ (in The Hobbit) and ‘The Minstrel’ (in The Return of the King). Older fans have taken issue with the acting (largely with American accents) and, especially in The Return of the King, with dialogue out of keeping with Tolkien’s original (‘Denethor’s gone looney’). The Rankin-Bass films have been made available on commercial media in North America.

      An adaptation of The Hobbit in ten parts by Roger Singleton-Turner, with music by Alan Roper, was performed in 1979 on the BBC television series Jackanory by Bernard Cribbins, Maurice Denham, David Wood, and Jan Francis. The first three actors appeared in character as Bilbo, Gandalf, and (doubling) Thorin and Gollum, while the fourth served as narrator.

      ADAPTATIONS NOT IN ENGLISH

      Adaptations of Tolkien’s work in languages other than English have included stage productions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in Finland; The Lord of the Rings read on German radio by a full cast; theatrical dramatizations of Leaf by Niggle and Farmer Giles of Ham in the Netherlands and Sweden respectively; a Russian live-action television film based on The Hobbit, Skazochnoye Puteshestviya Mistera Bilbo Begginsa Khobbita (‘The Fabulous Journey of Mr. Bilbo Baggins the Hobbit’); and a Russian animated film of *Mr. Bliss based on Tolkien’s drawings.

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Poem. The first of two published versions appeared in the Oxford Magazine for 15 February 1934, pp. 464–5. Tolkien later revised the poem slightly for the collection *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962), pp. 11–16. The Oxford Magazine version was reprinted in Reader’s Companion, pp. 124–7 (the first edition mistakenly omitted the fifth verse), and in the expanded edition of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (2014), pp. 123–30.

      SYNOPSIS

      In both versions of the poem Tom Bombadil is ‘a merry fellow’ with a long beard, a bright blue jacket, yellow boots, and an old hat with a feather. On sunny days he wanders carefree in the meadows or sits ‘by the waterside for hours upon hours’. When he is happy he sings ‘like a starling’, ‘Hey! come, derry-dol, merry-dol, my darling!’ The poem relates his encounters with Goldberry, ‘the Riverwoman’s daughter’ who playfully pulls him into the water; Willow-man (Old Man Willow), a malevolent tree that traps him in a crack in its bole; the Badgerfolk, who mean to hold him forever in their tunnels; and Barrow-wight who threatens to take him ‘under the earth’ and make him ‘pale and cold’. Tom dismisses them all: he is ‘a clever fellow’ whom ‘none ever caught’. But in the final stanzas he himself catches Goldberry, and they have ‘a merry wedding’.

      HISTORY

      Tolkien based at least the flamboyant clothing of the character on a Dutch doll (a toy made of jointed wooden pegs) which belonged to one or more of his children (according to Biography it was owned by his second son, *Michael) and was given the name ‘Tom Bombadil’. In the 1920s Tolkien told stories about Tom to his children, but either he did not write them down or only one very brief, perhaps abandoned tale survives in Tolkien’s papers. Only three paragraphs before the manuscript fails, the story is set in Britain ‘in the days of King Bonhedig’ (Welsh bonheddig ‘noble’) long before the time of *Arthur, ‘Tombombadil’ is ‘one [of] the oldest inhabitants of the kingdom’, ‘four foot high in his boots’, with a long beard, ‘keen and bright’ eyes, and a ‘deep and melodious’ voice. As in the later poems, ‘he wore a tall hat with a blue feather’, a blue jacket, and yellow boots. The prose fragment was published in the 2014 edition of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book, pp. 277–8.

      Tolkien seems to have composed, or at least begun, the Oxford Magazine poem around 1931, according to the date on a fine manuscript of part the work written by Tolkien in Tengwar (*Writing systems). See reproductions in *Pictures, no. 48, and in Parma Eldalamberon 20 (2012), pp. 126–7.

      In a letter of 16 December 1937 to his publisher *Stanley Unwin, having been asked for a sequel to *The Hobbit, Tolkien suggested instead a story in which Tom Bombadil was the hero. ‘Or is he, as I suspect,’ Tolkien asked, ‘fully enshrined in the enclosed verses [The Adventures of Tom Bombadil in the Oxford Magazine]? Still I could enlarge the portrait’ (Letters, p. 26). As he had for The Hobbit, Unwin gave the poem to his young son *Rayner, who concluded that although it would make a good story, a better one would be that of Bullroarer Took, the hero of the Battle of the Green Fields mentioned in The Hobbit, chapter 1. ‘This story could be a continuation of The Hobbit, for Bilbo could tell it to Gandalf and Balin in his hobbit hole when they visited him [as told at the end of that book]’ (Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins).

      So Stanley Unwin reported, quoting Rayner’s review, in a letter of 20 December (Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins). By then, however, Tolkien had written to C.A. Furth at George Allen & Unwin (*Publishers) that he had begun after all a new story about Hobbits; but he did not forget The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Tom and Goldberry, Old Man Willow and the Barrow-wight, and incidents and features of the poem reappear or are echoed in *The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien ‘wanted an “adventure” on the way’, as he wrote to in a letter to Peter Hastings in September 1954 (Letters, p. 192) – that is, an adventure for the four hobbits in The Lord of the Rings as they travelled east from Hobbiton – and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, though independently conceived, was at hand for inspiration.

      Tom was now described in greater detail, and defined in part by his response to Sauron’s Ring: alone among the characters in The Lord of the Rings he is unaffected by the One Ring, and does not desire it. But his precise nature is not wholly explained. When Frodo asks Goldberry ‘who is Tom Bombadil’ she replies, at most, that Tom ‘is the Master of wood, water, and hill’ (bk. I, ch. 7). At the end of The Lord of the Rings he remains an enigma – intentionally so (see Letters, p. 174). Some readers, however, have refused to accept this state, and have written widely about Tom’s origin and meaning, in particular his place in the cosmology of The Lord of the Rings and *‘The Silmarillion’.

      In a letter to Stanley Unwin of 16 December 1937 Tolkien described Tom as ‘the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside’ (Letters, p. 26). Later he wrote to Peter Hastings:

      I don’t think Tom needs philosophizing about, and is not improved by it. But many have found him an odd or indeed discordant ingredient [in The Lord of the Rings]. … I kept him in, and as he was, because he represents certain things otherwise left out. I do not mean him to be an *allegory – or I should not have given him so particular, individual, and ridiculous a name – but ‘allegory’ is the only mode of exhibiting certain functions: he is then an ‘allegory’, or an exemplar, a particular embodying of pure (real) natural science: the spirit that desires knowledge of other things, their history and nature, because they are ‘other’ and wholly independent of the enquiring mind, a spirit coeval with the rational mind, and entirely unconcerned with ‘doing’ anything with the knowledge: Zoology and Botany not Cattle-breeding or Agriculture. … Also T[om] B[ombadil] exhibits another point in his attitude to the Ring, and its failure to affect him. [September 1954, Letters, p. 192]

      In 1961–2 Tolkien slightly revised The Adventures of Tom Bombadil for publication in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962). Tom was now said to live in the valley of the Withywindle, in the world of The Lord of the Rings. In his preface to the 1962 volume, writing as the ‘editor’ of the Hobbits’ ‘Red Book of Westmarch’, Tolkien described the revised Adventures of Tom Bombadil as ‘made up of various hobbit-versions of legends concerning Bombadil’. Also in СКАЧАТЬ