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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9043076" data-attributes="member: 42582">But JRRT made this up. I mean, in early drafts he was the Hobbit Trotter.Here is Shippey on some of these aspects of the composition of LotR (The Road to Middle Earth, pp 94-5):It is for one thing remarkable that Frodo has to be dug out of no less than five 'Homely Houses' before his quest is properly launched . . . Each of these locations has of course its images and encounters to present, and some of them (like the meeting with Strider) turn out to be vital. Nevertheless there is a sense that the zest of the story goes not into the dangers but the recoveries . . . Meanwhile, the Black Riders, for all their snuffling and deadly cries, are not the menace they later become, for though they may only be waiting for a better chance, as Aragorn insists, they could have save themselves trouble several times in the Shire, in Bree and on Weathertop by pressing their attacks home. It seems likely that, as at the start of The Hobbit, Tolkien found the transit from familiar Shire to archaic Wilderland an inhibiting one. He said himself that when he first reached the Prancing Pony he had no more idea that the hobbits who Strider was, while in the first draft his place was filled by a kind of hero-hobbit call 'Trotter' . . . Tolkien broke through in The Hobbit with the trolls and then the ring. In The Lord of the Rings his invention came, to begin with, from a sort of self-plagiarism. . . . The hobbit's first three real encounters are with the Willowman and Tom Bombadil in the Old Forest, and with the Barrow-wight on the Downs outside. All three could almost be omitted without disturbing the rest of the plot. . . . The Barrow-wight does a little more in providing the sword that Merry uses . . . Still, that is a by-product. All three of these characters go a long way back in Tolkien's mind, as far back as hobbits, probably, further than the Shire or the Ring; they are all in the poem 'The Adventures of Tom Bombadil', printed in the Oxford Magazine in 1934 (just as the song Frodo sings in the Prancing Pony is a revision from 1923). Tolkien was raiding his own larder, and one in the end can see why.What then follows is Shippey's explanation of how JRRT draws upon familiar Oxford countryside and place names to create a "suggest[ion]" of "a world which is more than imagined, whose supernatural qualities are close to entirely natural ones, one which has moreover been 'worn down', like ours, by time and by the process of lands and languages and people all growing up together over millenia"(p 99).This is not being driven by "internal causes". It is a very deliberate technique of authorship.</blockquote>

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