The History of the Hobbit. Part One: Mr. Baggins; Part Two: Return to Bag-End (Book Review)

THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT. PART ONE: MR. BAGGINS; PART TWO: RETURN TO BAG-END. John D. Rateliff. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. ISBN 978-0618968473, 978-0618969197. Hardcover. 905pp. $70.00. [Also available in a boxed set with the 70th Anniversary Edition of The Hobbit, ISBN 978-0618964406. $95.00] READERS HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR The History of The Hobbit for a very long time indeed, roughly the same length of time the first admirers of The Hobbit had to wait for its sequel. At the outset of Christopher Tolkien's textual history of The Lord of the Rings, he made the explicit statement that "[n]o account is given in this book of the history of the writing of The Hobbit up to its original publication in 1937" (Shadow 6). But such a history was needed, and the nascent project was probably already underway at the hands of Taum Santoski at Marquette University at the time Christopher Tolkien penned his introduction. Not long after Santoski's untimely death in 1991, John Rateliff assumed direction of the project, having already been involved in a less formal capacity for several years. Shortly thereafter, Wayne Hammond informed eager readers that "the history of the writing of The Hobbit is sketched by Humphrey Carpenter in J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, and will be fully told by John D. Rateliff in a forthcoming book" (Descriptive Bibliography 7). But until the summer of 2007, those readers had to be content with Carpenter's and Hammond's abbreviated accounts, though they had been clamoring for the promised book for fifteen years.