Lost in Translation (the German one, specifically)

From one perspective, the idea of having one’s work translated into a foreign language is a kind of small but pleasurable honor, or at least it should be. It’s always nice to see one’s own work getting wider distribution, and in a language other than one's own. But with most scholarship (scholarship usually in the form of articles), this is all one gets.  With commercial work one usually benefits financially in a modest way from the sale of translation rights. Yet for me, most translations have been a source of problems and aggravations, and this has been a recurrent situation now for over two decades.

My Annotated Hobbit was first published in 1988, with a revised edition in 2002,   The first translation was into Spanish in 1990, an edition I learned about two years afterwards. I hadn’t been informed about it, nor was I paid for it. I complained to my publisher, Houghton Mifflin, and was given what became a usual run-around, but eventually I was paid my percentage for the translation rights.  In the subsequent twenty-odd years, the process has repeated itself numerous times.  Basically, the only way I’ve ever gotten paid for translations, is to complain about them many months after the translations have appeared, and even then I’m given various excuses that it was a mistake and various promises that it won’t happen again.  Hah. This seems the modus operandi for this publisher (and its UK associate, HarperCollins).  With my books from other publishers, not only have I been involved when the translation rights were first negotiated, but I have also been paid for them in a timely fashion and was even sent copies of the published translations. All the copies I have of translations of my Annotated Hobbit have been acquired on my own, including the Spanish (1990), Italian (1991, 1997, 2000, 2004), Japanese (1997) and Hungarian (2006) editions.

In the last year I have heard of four new translations of The Annotated Hobbit, all published in 2012 (and probably contracted the year before), and none of them have shown up on my royalty statements.  These include the German, Polish, French and a new Japanese translation.  A friend kindly gave me a copy of the new Japanese translation.  I haven’t seen either the French or Polish editions, but I recently received a copy of the German translation which I ordered for myself from an online bookseller.

The first reaction—short-lived—was that Hobbit Press/Klett-Cotta had done a nice presentation for Das Große Hobbit Buch [i.e., The Big Hobbit Book].  But the more closely I’ve looked at it, the more problems I’ve seen, and some of them are (to me) very serious. First, there is a tipped in erratum page, for the last four paragraphs of chapter eleven of The Hobbit were mistakenly dropped from the book as printed. 

Most translations of The Annotated Hobbit have some differences from the original—e.g., some notes on the various English texts of The Hobbit might be cut, and since they have little relevance to the language into which the whole has been translated, one can understand.  Also, the illustrations are often moved around, re-sized, and sometimes omitted.  Such cuts may be regrettable, but there is at least an argument as to why they have been made. 

With the Das Große Hobbit Buch, the first thing I noticed was an added afterword on “The Hobbit in Germany” by the translator, Lisa Kuppler.  It’s an interesting addition, and certainly relevant for the German audience.  And the book-covers of various German editions of The Hobbit have been added to the color plates in the middle of the book.  Again, a nice addition.

But when I turned to the translation of my “Foreword” I began to notice problems.  My foreword is dated (correctly) March 2002 in German, yet in the list of abbreviations I see a number of books that weren’t published until after 2002, like John D. Rateliff’s admirable History of The Hobbit (2007).  It is given an abbreviation “History” to correspond to citations in my text.  Of course, in 2002, there were no citations to it in my text, and my in-text reference “History” referred to the “History of Middle-earth” series.  In the German translation, this has been altered to the ugly acronym which I avoid, “HoME”.  There are other changes in the foreword, but with increasing aggravation I turn the pages to find further annoyances. 

There are new footnotes sprinkled throughout the book, and new paragraphs of information added frequently to existing annotations.* And the extremely irritating fact is that these additions all appear to be by me.  They are not.  Even worse, I look at the copyright page, and see several lines of permissions for the Tolkien texts, and lines of copyright notice for the German translation, but no acknowledgement of my copyright in the annotations or any permission acknowledged for their use. Which makes me wonder whether Klett-Cotta even licensed the rights for them. 

In compiling The Annotated Hobbit, I worked closely with the Tolkien estate, and I took especial care to make the annotations accurate and uniform in approach. This German translation eviscerates that care, and puts in material that was neither seen nor considered by me. (And it’s not like I’m difficult to contact—I am in touch with a number of German Tolkien-scholars who know how to reach me, not to mention having this public blog.)  Das Große Hobbit Buch is self-evidently based on my work, yet it has been re-edited on a line-by-line basis, with additions and subtractions that are not mine, and of which I had no knowledge of previously. This seems a process far and away from what is appropriate for an act of translation, and I feel it necessary here to disavow Das Große Hobbit Buch as not representing my work. It really appalls me that a publisher and translator would take such unwonted liberties.  

*To give just one example (not untypical of what I see throughout the translation), I note that with regard to my annotation 5 to Chapter 7 (p. 165 of the 2002 US edition), which concerns Beorn and an analogue Bothvarr Bjarki in The Saga of Hrolf Kraki, the German translation has some additional sentences (not written by me) about Tolkien’s unpublished story “Sellic Spell” as a retelling of the lost fairy tale of Beowulf (which isn’t an accurate description of what “Sellic Spell” is), also telling us that the manuscript of “Sellic Spell” is now preserved in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. I did write of “Sellic Spell” elsewhere in The Annotated Hobbit (annotation 9 to Chapter 15, p. 324-5 of the 2002 edition), but the translator has removed those references, and taken some of my words from there to make a point I did not want to make in an earlier position, as well as pretending to know more than is relevant. The manuscript of “Sellic Spell” is indeed in the Bodleian (a fact I would not think that needs mentioning), but as it is in the restricted papers, it is not generally accessible to the public. I have read “Sellic Spell” and presumably the translator hasn’t. So why is the translator allowed to put words in my mouth about it that I would not say? 

In Memoriam: Recent Passings of Tolkien Scholars

One of the sad editorial tasks I was involved with at Tolkien Studies was the writing of brief memorials for recently departed colleagues and fellow Tolkien-scholars.  Here follows the memorials I would have suggested for the time period since I left Tolkien Studies to the present, in reverse chronological order (i.e., the most recent passing first).  

Anne C. Petty (1945-2013) passed away from cancer on July 21st, 2013.  Born Anne Cotton, she married William Petty in 1964.  They had one daughter. 

Petty was educated at Florida State University (B.A. 1966; M.A. 1970; Ph.D. 1972).  She published One Ring to Bind Them: Tolkien’s Mythology (University of Alabama Press) in 1984.  It was reprinted (with a new introduction and a revised bibliography) in 2002.  Tolkien in the Land of Heroes: Discovering the Human Spirit followed in 2003. She also published Dragons of Fantasy: Scaly Villains & Heroes of Modern Fantasy Literature (2004; 2nd edition 2008), which includes a section on Tolkien’s dragons. 

Petty’s essay on “Identifying England’s Lönnrot” appeared in the first volume of Tolkien Studies (2004) and she contributed three entries (“Allegory”; “Finland: Literary Sources”; and “Folklore”) to the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Assessment (2007), edited by Michael D.C. Drout, as well as essays on “Shakespearean Catharsis in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fiction” in Tolkien and Shakespeare (2007), edited by Janet Brennan Croft, and “Reflections of Christendom in the Iconography of Middle-earth” in Light Beyond All Shadow (2011), edited by Paul E. Kerry and Sandra Miesel.  She also reviewed The Silmarillion: Thirty Years On (2007), edited by Allan Turner, for Tolkien Studies volume 6 (2009).  An interesting interview with Petty about her work appeared in the Green Books section at TheOneRing.net in 2004, see here.   

Petty’s novels include two volumes of a projected quartet about Australian aboriginal dreamtime, Thin Line Between (2005) and Shaman’s Blood (2011), as well as another work of dark fantasy, The Cornerstone (2013), and a literary suspense novel set in Petty’s home state of Florida, Hell and High Water (2011), co-written with P.V. Le Forge. 

In 2006, Petty formed Kitsune Books, with the stated intention of making available well-written books that are "slightly off the beaten path". She published a novel by Verlyn Flieger, The Inn at Corbies' Caww, and an anthology on The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman, edited by Anthony S. Burdge, Jessica Burke, and Kristine Larsen, among some two dozen-plus publications.  Petty closed down Kitsune Books in December 2012, after the onset of illness. 

Dinah Hazell (1942-2012), author of The Plants of Middle-earth: Botany and Sub-creation (Kent State University Press, 2006), passed away in Menlo Park, California, on December 14th, 2012. She was survived by her husband, George Tuma, Emeritus Professor of English at San Francisco State University, with whom she had designed and co-edited the online journal Medieval Forum and co-taught a popular class on The Lord of the Rings as epic literature.  Her husband passed away one month to the day after Hazell. 

Maggie Burns (1954-2012), the former Margaret Whetnall, passed away in her sleep on August 31st 2012. Born and raised in Birmingham, England, she was educated at St. Hilda’s Ladies College, Oxford (A.B., 1977).  She married Peter Burns in 1982; they had two sons.

Professionally she worked in the Local Studies and History department at the Central Library in Birmingham, and she made a specialty of studying the local connections of Tolkien’s family.  A number of essays—results of her extensive research—appeared in Mallorn and Amon Hen, two the publications of The Tolkien Society, as well as on the Birmingham Library’s website. She planned a book on the Tolkien and Suffield family connections with Birmingham.  It was virtually finished at the time of her unexpected death.  One hopes it can be published as a memorial. 

Michael N. Stanton (1938-2011) got his PhD. at the University of Rochester, writing his dissertation on the English poet Robert Southey.  He began teaching at the University of Vermont in 1971, becoming Emeritus Professor of English upon his retirement in 2001.

His earliest publication on Tolkien was an article “Teaching Tolkien” in a 1973 issue of a journal called Exercise Exchange. He also wrote an essay on Tolkien’s use of proverbial language in Proverbium for 1996, and contributed eleven entries (e.g., those on “Bilbo Baggins”, Gandalf”, Hobbits”, Humor”, etc.) to the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Assessment (2007), edited by Michael D.C. Drout.  Stanton’s major Tolkien-related publication was his book Hobbits, Elves, and Wizards: Exploring the Wonders and Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” (St. Martin’s Press, 2001).  For the 2002 trade paperback edition, Stanton added a short chapter on “Hobbits in Hollywood: The Fellowship Film”. In a 2002 interview with the SFRA Review, Stanton noted that “given the title of my book (which was supplied by St. Martin’s editors) I would like to have said more about wizards.”

After the success of Peter Jackson’s films of The Lord of the Rings, Stanton lead some tours of film-related sites in New Zealand, and contributed a short essay “Tolkien in New Zealand: Man, Myth, and Movie” to Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages (2005), edited by Jane Chance and Alfred K. Sievers. Stanton died on December 15th, 2011, shortly after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

The Mystery of Lintips

Here is another piece, drafted long ago, for which I never sought publication because of its short length. 

The Mystery of Lintips

In 1964, J.R.R. Tolkien was invited to contribute to a children’s anthology, the first of a proposed annual series, being edited by Caroline Hillier. Tolkien sent the editor three possible poems in early December 1964, two of which were accepted.  The three poems included one written for an American girl named Rosalind Ramage who had written Tolkien a fan letter in October 1964;  a new poem written in early December 1964 entitled “Once Upon a Time”; and a revised version of Tolkien’s poem “The Dragon’s Visit”, originally published in The Oxford Magazine in 1937.  The poem for Rosalind Ramage was not accepted for reasons of space (it remains unpublished), and Hillier was torn about accepting the other two, also because of space limitations, but in the end she took both.  The revised version of “The Dragon’s Visit” and “Once Upon a Time” appeared in Winter’s Tales for Children: I, published in October 1965.  Both poems were reprinted in The Young Magicians (1969), edited by Lin Carter.

Winter’s Tales for Children: 1 was the first of a series that lasted for four volumes from 1965 through 1968.  Caroline Hillier edited only the first two volumes; the third volume was edited by Kevin Crossley-Holland, and the fourth, by Ted Hughes. Besides the Tolkien poems in the first volume, there are contributions by Ted Hughes (one poem), Rosemary Sutcliff (one story); Philippa Pearce (a story); Kevin Crossley-Holland (one story and three Old English riddles translated into modern English); and Elizabeth Jennings (two poems), who was coincidentally a friend of the Tolkien family for many years.  The volume is illustrated by Hugh Marshall.

Tolkien’s poem “Once Upon a Time” is especially interesting because it is a poem about Tom Bombadil written two years after the collection The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from The Red Book was published, and, more importantly, because there is a mystery to the poem itself with regard to some creatures described in it called lintips.

“Once Upon a Time” is comprised of three stanzas of fourteen lines, each stanza beginning with the phrase “once upon a –”; and the final line of each stanza starting with “once upon a time”. The rhyme-scheme runs aabbccddeeffgg, but the opening line of each stanza also has an internal rhyme—e.g., for stanza one, “Once upon a day on the fields of May”.  The first stanza centers on Goldberry, and she is stooping over a lily-pool and blowing away dandelion clock (i.e., the white seeds that form after flowering).  It is interesting to note the description of “earth-stars” that have opened in the green-grass, whose steady eyes watch the sun climb up and down.  The “earth-stars” are presumably geastrales, an order of various types of fungus commonly called “earth-stars” that are related to puffballs. 

In the second stanza, which begins “Once upon a night in the cockshut light”, the earth-stars are closed, and Tom—the Bombadil surname is never given in the poem—is wandering in the wet grass under the stars.  Most interestingly, in lines 9-11, the Moon rises and under his white beams silver drips from stem and stalk of the grass “down to where the lintips walk / though the grass-forests gathering dew”.  Here the lintips are introduced, and they are apparently very small, for they move about near the ground in “grass-forests” where they gather dew. 

Lintips become the central focus of the third and final stanza, which begins “Once upon a moon on the brink of June /a-dewing the lintips went too soon.” Tom notices them and kneels down, saying:  “ ‘Ha! little lads! So it was you I smelt? / What a mousy smell!’” (l. 4-5) Tom tells them to drink the sweet dew, but to mind his feet.  The lintips laugh and move away, leaving Tom to comment that they are the only things that won’t talk to him, or “say what they do or what they be” (l.10). The lintips are as much a mystery to Tom, as they are to the reader of the poem.

Basically, lintips are small creatures that move in the grass during the night and drink dew, and they have a mousy smell. They could be mice, voles, or insects of some sort.  The name lintip/lintips may be an invented word of Tolkien’s like mewlips, some creatures who also feature in a single poem. Additionally, one turns to the O.E.D. without finding any real-world analogues. With the hint in line fourteen of the first stanza, that the poem is set in “an elvish land”, one wonders if lintip might be of elvish construction. The stem lint/lin could be interpreted in elvish in a number of ways (the better of several possible stems include Q lint fluff, down, soft stuff; Q linte swift, quickly nimble)*, but the ending –ip/–tip is not of normal elvish construction, and seems to point lintip away from being an elvish word. 

It seems that whatever lintips are, they will remain as much a mystery to us as they were to Tom.  When I queried Christopher Tolkien on this point, he replied “On lintips I fear I am a total blank” (letter dated 3 September 2005).  

Thanks go to Christopher Tolkien, Alan Reynolds, Carl Hostetter, John Garth, and Eileen Moore, for comments on lintips sent to me over the years.

* I note also that in “A Secret Vice” Tolkien wrote:  “I can also remember the word lint ‘quick, clever, nimble’, and it is interesting, because I know it was adopted because the relation between the sounds lint and the idea proposed for association with them gave pleasure.”  (The Monsters and The Critics, p. 205). 

BUILDING IMAGINARY WORLDS by Mark J.P. Wolf

I wrote this short review some months ago, and put it aside for posting with other partially-written things that presently remain unfinished for reasons I needn’t go into here. In the meantime I’ve pulled out this review to post separately.   

Mark J.P. Wolf’s new book, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (Routledge), snuck out without much fanfare late last year.  It basically looks at subcreation from a very broad perspective, covering the subject not only chronologically (from the Odyssey to the present day), but also across multiple forms of media—that is, not just as literature but also as films, television shows, various types of games, etc., as well as what is now called the modern media franchise.  Thus the focus, though there are some chapters on the literature of imaginary worlds, turns more to the various ways in which a modern person can experience and share in these imaginary worlds.  The theory of creating literary imaginary worlds is not shirked, and Wolf builds upon earlier examples such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Macdonald and J. R. R. Tolkien.  Indeed, the latter provides Wolf with the basic terminology (primary world, secondary world, subcreation) that recurs throughout the book. Wolf notes that imaginary worlds “need not rely on narrative structures” but that narrative is the best way for someone to enter an imaginary world, and that the purposes for creating an imaginary world can be very varied (e.g., satire, entertainment, escape, etc.), just as the forms.  While a novel might give rise to a subsequent film or television series, the opposite can happen too (witness Star Trek and Star Wars, which began as a television series and film respectively, yet branched out to novels, graphic novels, etc., and to various considerations of the lesser aspects of world-building, like the books on the Klingon language and the blueprints to the various starships).  People enjoy studying and sharing-in invented worlds from many angles, and the most traditional way—via literary criticism—is shown to be just one way of many. There is much food for thought in this pioneering and thoroughly readable book, which will broaden the way one views the experience of  imagination in the twenty-first century. Highly recommended.  (My sole complaint is that the book is priced too high:  $39.95 retail for the trade paperback, $175 retail for a hardcover.)

Joanna Russ's Version of THE HOBBIT

A few months after the death of Joanna Russ in April 2011, I was finally able to read her unpublished play based on The Hobbit (which I'd heard of through science fiction circles some twenty years earlier), and I wrote up the following comparison.  It was published in the December 2012 issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction, v. 25 no. 4 (whole no. 292), page 21.  (Update:  I've removed the jpeg since it was quickly reposted variously without permission or attribution.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but I post my work here on my blog to get traffic for the blog. Please, feel free to use extracts and cite the URL when reposting elsewhere, but it's not nice to lift things wholesale and complete. Thanks.) 

Joanna Russ’s Version of “The Hobbit”

by  Douglas A. Anderson

My title for this article may seem like a jest, an incongruent pairing of one author’s name  with the uniquely titled work by another—a combination unlikely to exist save in an alternate reality as might be imagined by Paul Di Filippo—but I’m actually entirely serious here.  Joanna Russ did write such a work— she wrote a play based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s well-known children’s book, and Russ titled her version (using Tolkien’s own subtitle to The Hobbit) “There and Back Again: A Hobbit’s Holiday”

For some years I’ve known of one copy in private hands, with (as described to me) Tolkien’s “waspish” comments handwritten in the margins, but I’ve never seen that.  With the passing of Joanna Russ in 2011, I learned that a collection of her papers are now held in the Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio.  So on a recent research trip, I finally got to read Joanna Russ’s version. 

The typescript is undated (but more about that later), and on the title page there is a note in Russ’s hand, initialed by her, noting that “Tolkien didn’t like it, wouldn’t let it be publicly performed.” The typescript is forty-nine pages, with three additional pages of front matter (a title page, a cast of characters, and a synopsis of scenes).  Russ divided the Tolkien’s storyline up into three main scenes, adding a narrator to fill in some gaps of the story that are not portrayed on the stage. The company of dwarves is reduced to five in number (Balin, Dwalin, Fili, Kili, and Thorin).  Many characters and events are omitted without any reference to them at all (e.g., the eagles, Beorn, the Elvenking, Laketown, Bard, the Arkenstone), but some missing scenes are mentioned in the narration (the encounter with the Trolls, and, later, with the spiders).

Scene one (the first twelve pages) tells of Gandalf visiting Bilbo, and the coming of the dwarves, and their enlisting Bilbo to join in their adventure.  There is no mention of the Map of the Lonely Mountain, but two of Tolkien’s poems are used in the text, “Chip the glasses and crack the plates”, and “Far over the Misty Mountains cold”.  Strangely, Russ, for no apparent reason, has altered the wording of the poems in several instances. 

Scene two (pp. 13-30) gives a bit of the journey, leading up to the taking of refuge from a storm in the cave, on the shoulder of what the narrator calls Mount Gundabad. Bilbo is wary of the supposed shelter, but the goblins spring upon the group and take away the dwarves.  Bilbo is missed in the shuffle, and wanders down the tunnel to meet Gollum.  Bilbo finds the ring, and the riddle match ensues, with the usual result.  Gollum goes to get his ring and realizes that Bilbo already has it. Bilbo escapes into the sunlight where he finds Gandalf and the dwarves.  Gandalf tells the party that he is leaving (he refers to having business in the North), and suggests that the dwarves choose Bilbo as their leader.

Scene three (pp. 31-49) begins at the Lonely Mountain.  Bilbo doesn’t go down the tunnel alone to meet the dragon but is accompanied by the dwarves.  At this time he tells the dwarves about his ring of invisibility.  They still admire him for his pluck (leaping over Gollum in the dark, dodging goblin-guards, fighting spiders).  The party observes Smaug from a discreet distance. Thorin requests that Bilbo pick up a memento, like a cup, from Smaug’s treasure. Bilbo does so, and returns it to the dwarves, realizing that Smaug will notice its absence and trap them in the mountain without food.  Bilbo returns to Smaug and has the usual conversation, discovering Smaug’s weak spot.  The ring accidentally slips off Bilbo’s finger and is lost. Smaug laughs at him, but Bilbo runs toward the dragon with his sword drawn.  The dwarves join in, attacking Smaug.  Kili twists his foot and falls down, remaining in view of the audience to tell what he sees of the battle. Bilbo and the dwarves kill Smaug.  The dwarves return to Kili, carrying Bilbo, who is told by Thorin that while they worried Smaug, it was Bilbo who killed him with one blow.  Bilbo just wants to go home.  The dwarves hoist him on their shoulders and sing of Smaug’s death.  Bilbo joins in with Tolkien’s verse “The dragon is withered” (again substantially altered).  A closing vignette shows Bilbo in his hobbit hole, telling Gandalf about coming home to find his possessions being auctioned.  He thinks his aunt Lobelia may have taken his silver spoons. They are interrupted by a young hobbit Bill Fernytoes who wants to hear stories of Bilbo one-handedly killing the dragon.  The young hobbit is scolded by his mother, Lobelia, who has followed him. Bilbo seizes her umbrella, and turns it upside down, causing several spoons to fall out. Bilbo recites a poem he has written, “The Road goes ever on” (again with strange alterations by Russ).  Curtain.

 There is no indication of date of composition, save for the fact that Russ references tomatoes in Bilbo’s larder, indicating that she used a pre-1966 text (“tomatoes” were changed to pickles in the 1966 revision—see annotation number 26 to chapter one in the 2002 revised edition of my Annotated Hobbit).  I have long suspected that Russ’s adaptation might have dated from her time at the Yale School of Drama (c.1958-60); she received an M.F.A. in Playwriting and Dramatic Literature from Yale in 1960. So it is nice to find corroborating evidence that this is true. There are published references in Tolkien scholarship about a dramatization of The Hobbit that originated from a female student at the Yale Drama School, though the name of the adaptor is nowhere given, and all evidence points to it being Russ.

On 23 April 1959, Charles Lewis of George Allen & Unwin (Tolkien’s London publisher) sent Tolkien a letter saying that the Yale Drama School would like to perform an adaptation of The Hobbit, with the adaptor  paying a royalty, subject to Tolkien’s approval of the adaptation. 

On 30 April 1959, Tolkien replied to Charles Lewis, noting that the adaptor had sent him a copy of the play some time ago, but said nothing about any performance and didn’t even ask for his opinion of it.  Tolkien told Lewis that the adaptation seemed to him “a mistaken attempt to turn certain episodes of The Hobbit into a sub-Disney farce for rather silly children. . . . At the same time, it is entirely derivative.”  Though he would prefer not to be associated with such stuff, Tolkien said he would waive his objections on the understanding that the performance is “part of the normal processes of Drama School (sc. in the teaching and practice of drama-writing); and that the permission for performance does not imply approval of the play for publication, sale, or performance outside of the Yale School.”

On 6 May 1959, Lewis wrote to Tolkien, saying that he had outlined Tolkien’s arguments concerning the adaptation in a letter to the adaptor, also stating that Tolkien would not object to a performance of the play by the Yale Drama School.  On 28 May 1959, Lewis wrote to Tolkien that the adaptor of The Hobbit had requested the return of her manuscript. 

Tolkien presumably sent back the copy he had annotated, which Russ later gave away, preserving with her own papers only her own un-annotated version.  Looking at the details of her adaptation, one can see why Tolkien didn’t like it.  There are a number of things in the first two scenes that would have bothered Tolkien (not least the rewriting of his poetry, or the unnecessary misapplication of the name Mount Gundabad to the wrong mountain), even though much of what is presented stays fairly close to the source material.  But the third scene diverges widely from what Tolkien wrote (a feature which especially irked him with every proposed adaptation of his work), and he would certainly not have approved of Russ’s alteration that has Bilbo heroically killing the dragon. On its own as a play Russ’s version doesn’t work very well, even with the way that she has altered the plot.  But overall, Russ’s version isn’t really any worse than other adaptations that have been done over the years. Whereas those were done without Tolkien’s input or approval, Russ did the honorable thing and asked Tolkien, and thereby was shot down. I suspect that Peter Jackson’s forthcoming films of The Hobbit, now expanded from two to three films, may make Joanna Russ’s version appear as the more faithful to the original text.  Time will tell. 

  *************