It seems so different from every other book Ive read(only hobbit-RotK).
Like did he add fluff in the forest because of publishing standards at the time?
In stark contrast, Narnia (also read to me by dad at about the same time) seemed so small as to be a shoe-box diorama.
In my childhood imagination, Narnia was about the size of the Shire (perhaps with Bree thrown in for a sense of 'far off').
The most telling evidence for this is how drastically the story and characters change from the beginning to Bree when looking at first draft compared to published text. It took a lot of wildly divergent drafts to get to Bree, with the texts rapidly evolving. My favorite example of this is that the Strider character was originally named Trotter, and he was a hobbit that wore wooden shoes. This type of slowly building story, where layer upon layer of idea built on top of each other is not really present for most of Two Towers and Return of the King.
It was almost like Tolkien was a train that gained momentum as it went forward.
The lecture playlists (so far) can be found at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUxTFUltO4uXhEfqgI6GtIg/pla... .
Notable things about Tolkien's writing process:
- LotR was originally just meant to be a shorter sequel to The Hobbit. It's always fun to see his early notes about how few chapters he expects the book to take.
- When The Hobbit was first released, it was emphatically not part of the full legendarium that Tolkien was working on, re: the Silmarillion. He borrowed heavily from his private stories about the Elves, but it wasn't until he was writing LotR that he actually realized that everything was all connected into the same continuity.
- Tolkien was extremely conservative in his writing, in a waste-not attitude. He hated to just cut out things he had written, and instead would do a lot of recycling and reworking so that bits of dialogue and description he had done in earlier drafts would be preserved but with their context completely altered.
- Tolkien sometimes claimed that his worldbuilding started with a map, and then he placed a story inside of it, but looking through his early notes shows that's not quite true. He tended to think in terms of a series of adventures he wanted his characters to have, and would wiggle around locations on his still-nebulous maps to make the distances work (he was very particular about getting the distances and travel times all right!).
I like the passage that they find trolls from Hobbit still turned to stone the most...