A less than good end and a botched beginning

If I remember correctly, John Rateliff in his The History of The Hobbit also draws that conclusion (that Tolkien had not yet finished the book and thus Lewis was only able to comment what he so far had been able to read). But anyone with access to Rateliff's volumes may check this up.

Well, Voronwe you have made a few points in regards to the beginning and the end of the story. As to what Tolkien might have later wrote as you said Who Knows?

Voronwë makes a good point that we don't know what Lewis meant by 'the end'. Halfir's question can't be answered without knowing this, and it simply can't be known, only speculated, with the evidence at hand. John Rateliff concludes with absolute confidence from Lewis's letter that 'what Lewis read was a complete story', reasoning that he surely would have 'commented on being handed a tale that broke off at the most dramatic moment' while singling 'out that portion of the tale for criticism' (The History of The Hobbit, vol. 1, p. xvi). But this is by no means sure. Lewis wasn't writing a review for publication, only four sentences in a casual letter with casual language. It would be perfectly reasonable to conclude, as an alternate interpretation, that by 'I think it is until the end' Lewis meant the end as far as the story went in the copy at hand. Compare our Reader's Guide, p. 391: the letter 'seems to describe a completed work -- at least, [Lewis] makes no overt mention that it was yet to be finished. . . . His comment . . . may refer to a conclusion [such as Carpenter suggests], at the death of Smaug, with many aspects of the story still unresolved; but the letter is too imprecise to know definitely what Lewis meant.'

John argues (p. xvi) that 'the presence of the Cave-Bear, Elves, and a magician at the battle with the goblins' in the 1932 Father Christmas letter, which recall certain elements of the Battle of Five Armies, establishes 'that the final chapters [of The Hobbit] were in progress at the time this letter was written'. We don't find this conclusive, however: Tolkien could just as well have used these features first in the Father Christmas letter and adapted them for The Hobbit when completing it at a later date. John also suggests that Christopher Tolkien's letter to Father Christmas in December 1937, referring to The Hobbit then recently published, in which Christopher writes that its 'ending chapters were rather roughly done, and not typed out at all', should be taken to mean that the final chapters existed only in manuscript until typed by Tolkien for submission to Allen & Unwin in 1936. But this too can be no more than speculation, and against it could be put the questions: If the final chapters were complete by January 1933, did Tolkien then give Lewis a hybrid typescript/manuscript to read? Was this also the case when the 'home manuscript' of The Hobbit circulated to other friends? Would Tolkien, who took pains to make a neat, correct typescript of the chapters through the death of Smaug, evidently also with maps and illustrations, impose upon his friends the final chapters in handwriting which, as may be seen at Marquette, was not his most calligraphic?

If so, then John may be correct. If not, then the work that Lewis read in 1933 was either unfinished (relative to the published Hobbit) or it contained some form of summary conclusion now lost. Our view is that, overall, the available evidence -- for this point as for others -- is too contradictory to allow for much more than its presentation, without rendering an absolute verdict. As we wrote in the Reader's Guide: 'The history of the writing of The Hobbit cannot be recounted with complete certainty' (p. 385).

Wayne and Christina

In the light of those comments, however, it would be interesting to see what position John Rateliff takes!

Well, I guess someone should point him to this thread then.

To be clear about this, if we're trying to make a case about anything, it's that the available evidence for when Tolkien began or finished The Hobbit, or how long it took him to write it, is so contradictory that the scholar should either lay it out dispassionately but come to no definite conclusion, or else attempt a conclusion but make it clear that it is only one of some possible number that could be drawn. The former is what we did in our Hobbit essay in the Companion and Guide, in which many points are made often with qualification and the word 'seems' appears frequently. John Rateliff has chosen instead to draw conclusions, and does so with an adamance that must lead less critical readers to mistake them for established fact rather than consider them theories based inevitably on the writer's assumptions and interpretations, according to his individual knowledge and experience.

John states in his blog post that 'the answer, plain and simple' to the question of what ending to The Hobbit Lewis disliked 'is that we just don't know'. Just so. He then proceeds, however, to argue for his conclusion that The Hobbit was complete, as published, when Lewis first read it, through a series of questions and statements which in each case presupposes that this conclusion is correct, e.g. when he asks 'Was it the shift from light-hearted adventure-story to a more serious "heroic" tone?' he assumes that the final chapters were fully in existence by the start of 1933. John also writes:

I find it hard to read 'good . . . until the end' as Lewis's attempt to say 'good, but it lacks an ending' (Lewis was, after all, famous for the clarity of his prose). Wayne & Christina, in their contribution to the thread, offer an interesting thought experiment that the 1933 text broke off at the end of the typescript, which was then followed by 'some form of summary conclusion now lost'. That might be the case, but I'm hesitant to suggest a hypothetic text as a way out of our difficulties unless we can produce some evidence such a text once existed, especially when a literal reading of the evidence avoids the need for one.

Leaving aside that this takes as an unsustainable given that all of Lewis's prose, in the entirety of a great mass of writing and including casual comment in private letters, is clear and unambiguous, we see no reason not to consider 'the end' = 'the end of what Tolkien sent him' as a reasonable alternative meaning of the phrase -- maybe correct, maybe not, but a possible alternative nonetheless. The 'hypothetic text', pejoratively a 'thought experiment'
, is indeed hypothetical, and was suggested in our earlier comment, clumsily as we now see, as a further possibility, i.e.: (1) Lewis read The Hobbit written only to the death of Smaug (Christopher Tolkien and Humphrey Carpenter's view), or (2) Lewis read The Hobbit complete to the end as published (John's view), or (3) Lewis read The Hobbit in the neat typescript to the death of Smaug, with a summary conclusion (not complete final chapters) taking the story to its published end. (On (3), compare John in his Hobbit history, p. xviii: 'Carpenter evidently interpreted this [Christopher's statement to Father Christmas that "the ending chapters were rather roughly done, and not typed out at all"] to mean that the final chapters had not been written at all but existed only in a hasty outline'.) John's 'literal reading of the evidence', again, is only an interpretation, depending on what 'literal' means -- that is, on what Lewis meant by 'the end'.

We suppose that John's statement 'the theory that The Hobbit broke off unfinished isn't supported by any contemporary evidence' is meant to suggest that the 'contemporary evidence' of Lewis's letter to Greeves supports the theory that The Hobbit was finished at that time, but this conclusion depends on an indisputable agreement that Lewis's words mean what John says they mean. And not only Lewis's 'the end' is open to interpretation. Consider the first sentence of his paragraph: 'Since term began I have had a delightful time reading a children's story which Tolkien has just written.' What does 'just written' mean? Just the other day? Just last week? Does 'written' necessarily mean 'completed'? Was the whole of the story 'just' (recently) written, or was it indeed written over a period of years? And if Lewis knew that Tolkien had written The Hobbit over a period of years (however long that may be), would it not have been more 'natural' to write 'just finished' or 'just completed'?

John wonders why Humphrey Carpenter wrote in the biographical note he contributed to Drawings by Tolkien (1976) that The Hobbit was 'completed early in the nineteen-thirties':

. . . and to them [his children] he told the story of The Hobbit, completed early in the nineteen-thirties, but not put into print until a happy chance had brought it to the notice of a London publisher some years later.

and then only 'a year later' (i.e. in his Tolkien biography published in 1977) decided that there was a gap of several years between Tolkien writing the death of Smaug and the final chapters. Once again there's an issue of precise language. Does 'early in the nineteen-thirties' mean 1932/3? Or could it mean any time before 1935? And what did Carpenter mean by 'completed'? He had only three pages in the Ashmolean/National Book League catalogue to cover the whole of Tolkien's life, and devoted only three lines to The Hobbit from inception to publication, no room to deal with the issue of dating at any length.

In any case, assuming that (as seems likely) the catalogue was published in time for the exhibition opening in December 1976, there were only six months between its appearance and that of the Biography, published in May 1977, and it could well be that Carpenter wrote his biographical note simultaneous with writing the Biography, or that -- considering the lead time usually wanted for printers in those days -- he had already completed the Biography when writing the catalogue note. (Carpenter began work on the Biography in 1974 or 1975, and had completed a draft by the start of 1976.) As for any possible argument (flipping John's supposition around) that Carpenter altered his view of the history of The Hobbit between an earlier Biography and a later catalogue note, there's this from his 1978 book The Inklings, prior to quoting Lewis's letter to Greeves: 'Tolkien had invented [The Hobbit] partly to amuse his own children, and certainly without any serious thought of publication. He had not even bothered to finish typing out a fair copy, but had left it broken off some way before the end' (p. 57).

Wayne and Christina