![]() In 1960, Tolkien embarked on an (eventually abandoned) attempt to rewrite The Hobbit to be more in the style of The Lord of the Rings. The History of The Hobbit - "The The Bladorthin Typescript" One on the Green Fields! But I assure you the mark was on the door ‘We know, we know’ said Gloin (he was very fond of golf) ‘holed out in I had a great-great-great-uncle, Bullroarer Took, and –’ ![]() Tell me what you want me to do, and I will try it, if I have to walk from here to the last desert in the East and fight the Wild Wireworms of the Chinese. In the typescript Tolkien made following this, he goes on to say that Gloin was a big golf fan, and thus knew the story of Bullroarer Took very well. The History of The Hobbit - "The Pryftan Fragment" It sailed two hundred yards and went down a rabbit hole, and in this way the battle was won by checkmate and the games of Golf & chess invented simultaneously. If you have ever seen a dragon in a pinch you would realize that this was only poetical exaggeration applied to any hobbit, even the Old Took’s great uncle Bullroarer who was so large he could sit on a Shetland pony and charged the ranks of the goblins of the Mount Gram in the battle of the Green Fields of Fellin and knocked their King Fingolfin’s head clean off with a wooden club. The earliest surviving manuscript of the passage shows that Tolkien had a different goblin name to pun with (Fin golfin instead of Golfimbul), and that he also included an invention of chess in the same battle. Later Tolkien considered removing even that. Tolkien's earlier drafts show a little more golf things that didn't make it into the book, but the passage quoted is the only appearance of golf in any of Tolkien's published works. the narrator might occasionally venture an interpretation of more than mere plot-events.Īnd there are other examples throughout Tolkien's letters where he distinguishes the narrator from events or characters in his story.Īlthough none of these have specific reference to the game of golf, in this case the narrator can be safely assumed to be merely telling a joke to amuse his audience, and nothing more. What all of this means is that one should not assume that mention of anything in the voice of the narrator reflects in any way on what may or may not actually exist in Middle-earth. But it had some unfortunate effects on the mode of expression and narrative method, which if I had not been rushed, I should have corrected. But the desire to address children, as such, had nothing to do with the story as such in itself or the urge to write it. When I published The Hobbit – hurriedly and without due consideration – I was still influenced by the convention that 'fairy-stories' are naturally directed to children (with or without the silly added waggery 'from seven to seventy'). Tolkien deals with this in his own Letter 215: The narrator is very specifically addressing a modern audience (and an audience of children, at that), and so there are other similar anachronisms throughout the Hobbit (we had a recent similar question relating to guns in Middle-earth, for example). ![]() ![]() Regarding it being out of place, it's important to remember that this mention of golf is made in the voice of the narrator, not of one of the characters in the story. This is the only mention of golf in Tolkien's writings. ![]()
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