[Child of the 7th Age]

Squatter,

Thanks for putting the first foreward up.

My own response to the "two" forewards is similar to your own. (I have an old set of the first American edition with the funky covers.)

The two forewards leave such different impressions! In the later one, Tolkien is distanced from his audience. He is looking back on the publication of the book from a space of ten years. He talks about "meaning" and those who do not care for the book, the history of the actual publication and the issue of applicability versus allegory, almost as if he's trying to answer all those questions that had been sent to him in letters over so many years. I always wonder how much of this was in his head when he actually finished the book and how much floated in during that ten-year interval. It's as if the professor is giving a general audience a polite but somewhat formal lecture.

When I read the first foreward, I'm left with a different feeling. You actually have a sense that Tolkien really did not expect his book to generate a wide audience. Instead, he seems to be talking to people he personally knows -- family, friends, members of the Inklings, and to those "admirers of Bilbo" who'd already crossed his path before. He also addresses Bilbo as the original composer of the early chapters, maintaining the fiction that the book is truly history and derived from earlier sources. Whenever I read this forward, I feel as if a secret door had opened and I've somehow managed to slip inside a private club where Tolkien is complimenting the Inklings on their Hobbit ancestry!

Tolkien was so private about many aspects of his life. He was ambivalent about any possible biography, noting that such studies could yield only a "vain and false approach" in terms of his own work. He understandably did not like the attention showered on him by the crazy American college students of my day who came pounding on his door. So any personal glimpse we get of him, especially from his own pen, is indeed a treat. And that is how I read this early foreward. It carries a tiny hint of what the man himself was like: his natural grace and ease of expression when dealing with friends.