The Hobbit: Riddles in the Dark – The Lost Version (2001)
It&#x27;s rather a surreal artifact of Tolkien&#x27;s writing process. He began his book as a direct sequel to The Hobbit, and chose Gollum&#x27;s ring as the macguffin to drive the plot. As the story evolved, the ring became The Ring, at which point some of the original story didn&#x27;t actually work any more.<p>He could simply have chosen a different macguffin, but Tolkien had a weird way of fixating on things that he&#x27;d already written. It&#x27;s almost scientific: you explore the space of stories, and whatever hangs together consistently must be &quot;true&quot;.<p>He solved that not by deprecating the original book, but by rewriting it, and then including a preface in <i>The Lord of the Rings</i> about how the original book was Bilbo&#x27;s self-promoting propaganda.<p>This is emblematic of his work. He kept re-writing and re-writing to find something that felt &quot;true&quot;. Which is partly why he never really settled on anything. He kept assigning characters different names, and then assigning some names to other characters until they fit. In the early <i>Hobbit</i>, Thorin was called &quot;Gandalf&quot;, which makes it a hell of a thing to read. (And the wizard was named &quot;Bladorthin&quot;. Which is almost as bad as &quot;Bingo Bolger-Baggins&quot;, the original name of Frodo. Or &quot;Trotter&quot;, the original Strider, a Hobbit with wooden feet...)<p>Given that <i>The Hobbit</i> was not actually intended to be connected directly to his Middle-earth works except retroactively, and that <i>The Silmarillion</i> was not published until after his death (with significant editing, because he kept re-writing it until it was no longer compatible with <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>), in a sense there is only one truly &quot;canonical&quot; Middle-earth book: <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>.<p>Tolkien was not only an extraordinary genius, but we have an incredible collection of his draft works to see how his genius worked. I can&#x27;t think of any other author whose process is simultaneously so remarkable and so well-documented.