Reddit reviews The History of the Hobbit: The Hobbit / Mr. Baggins / Return to Bag-end

> if Tolkien got around to rewrite the Hobbit to fix various inconsistency issues (like the term goblins vs orcs) he probably would have mentioned Legolas.

And in fact, in 1960 Tolkien began to do exactly that. He was working on a fourth revision of the Hobbit, this one a pretty big rewrite that was intended to tie it far more closely to LOTR in details and tone. The company even stops at Bree and the Prancing Pony in this revised version.

He only got three chapters into it before abandoning it to go back to work on his Silmarillion material. (He did this sort of thing a lot in his career.)

You can read those unpublished chapters and notes on what he intended to do in this book.

Sure. Stop me when this gets boring!

The History of Middle-earth.

The History of the Hobbit.

The Road to Middle-earth, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century and Roots and Branches, all by Tom Shippey

You should read Tolkien's Letters, too.

Other books to consider:

The LOTR reader's Companion

J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances

Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien's Middle-earth

The Keys of Middle-Earth: Discovering Medieval Literature through the Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien

Understanding The Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism

J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide

If you're feeling rich, you could try to find a copy of Songs For The Philologists, a collection of poems, mostly in Old English, written by Tolkien and E.V. Gordon (I only have a .pdf copy).

I'd also read Tolkien's Beowulf criticism.

and just for fun, read Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien, which is nothing to do with philology but which was cowritten by my major professor :)

Let's see, what else? Anything by Douglas A. Anderson, Verlyn Flieger or Michael Drout (especially Drout's Beowulf and the Critics and How Tradition Works: A Meme-Based Cultural Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century.

That's pretty much all that leaps immediately to mind, just glancing over my bookshelves, but if you search for "Tolkien scholarship and criticism" you will find much, much more. Hope this helps!

I got this version as a gift last year. It's brilliant.

i got the three volume set: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0618964401
ISBN-10: 0618964401
ISBN-13: 978-0618964406

apparently they published them one at a time, so each has its own as well.

If you are interested in collecting, you must, must, must get The History of the Hobbit box set.

It's incredibly inclusive, and contains the 70th anniversary edition of The Hobbit (Perhaps worth the price of the set all by itself!), all the original drafts that Tolkien made of the story, essays on the tale's construction, notes on the text, and commentary.

Read The History of the Hobbit if you are looking for background information.