"Tamf Moo" skrev i meddelandet
> On 11/02/10 04:47, Kristian Damm Jensen wrote:
>
>>> Sure, come on board, Tamf. It's a dressed board.
>>
>> Yes, but to whom is it addressed?
>
> the board of trustees?
The Wild Boar of Trustees, also known as the Boar of Everhold.
> I see two Gandalfs and church bell. And two half lions chasing
> a bull rat each over the lake. (Rorschach tests seen by "Illogic")
Sounds like the cover illustration of the first legal paperback edition of
LotR in the U.S., the one which featured a hill, two emus and a curious tree
bearing bulbous fruits "meant to suggest a Christmas tree".
I looked up the exact description of the cover in Carpenter's biography of
Tolkien and was forcibly struck by Tolkien's tardiness and simple
unreliability when it came to delivery dates and work he had promised to
do. Here is part of the account of the revision of TH and LTRR Tolkien
undertook to do to make an American edition meant to compete with the pirate
edition technically "new":
"Normally the very mention of the word 'revision' set Tolkien to work. But
on this occasion he did nothing about it for the time being. He was quite
used to missing deadlines and failing to meet urgent demands for
manuscripts, and now he continued to polish his new story *Smith of Wotton
Major* (which he had just written), and to work also on his translation of
*Gawain*, and on some notes for the Elvish poem *Namárië* which the composer
Donald Swann wanted to set to music as part of a Tolkien song-cycle. By the
time he had finished all these tasks it was June, and what Tolkien and
others regarded as an American 'pirate' edition of *The Lord of the Rings*
had been issued."
A bit further on: "So Tolkien began, though he turned not to *The Lord of
the Rings* for which revision was urgent, but to *The Hobbit* for which it
was not. He spent many hours searching for some revision notes that he had
already made, but he could not find them. Instead he found a typescript of
'The New Shadow', a sequel to *The Lord of ther Rings* which he had begun a
long time ago but had abandoned after a few pages. It was about the return
of evil to Middle-earth. He sat up to four a.m. reading it and thinking
about it. When the next day ha did get down to*The Hobbit* he found a good
deal of it 'very poor' and had to restrain himself from rewriting the entire
book. The business of making revisions took some time. and when he turned at
last to *The Lord of the Rings* the summer was well advanced He decided on a
number of changes that would correct remaining inaccuracies, and checked
through the index which had now been prepared for him, but it was not until
August that he managed to send the revised text to America."
It is perhaps just as well that the publishers' comments about this have not
been recorded for posterity. And after all the delays, Tolkien managed to
miss some things in LotR - for example that king Elessar's age amounts to
190 years in one place and to 210 in another.
Öjevind
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