Red Book of Westmarch

The Red Book of Westmarch (sometimes the Thain's Book Tolkien's full name for the novel is indeed The Hobbit or There and Back Again.

In The Lord of the Rings, this record is said to be written in his red leather-bound diary. Bilbo says to Gandalf that his intended ending would be him living "happily ever after to the end of his days". This is in fact a rephrased line from the final chapter of The Hobbit, originally conveyed through third-person narrative voice. Frodo writes down the bulk of the final work, using Bilbo's diary and "many pages of loose notes". At the close of Tolkien's main narrative, the work is almost complete, and Frodo leaves the task to his gardener Samwise Gamgee.

In the last chapter of The Return of the King, Tolkien provides a "title page" for the Red Book of Westmarch inscribed with a succession of rejected titles. The final title is Frodo's:

Red Book

The volumes then pass into the keeping of Samwise Gamgee, Frodo's servant and later mayor of the Shire. In time, the volumes are left in the care of Sam's eldest daughter, Elanor Fairbairn, and her descendants (the Fairbairns of the Towers or Wardens of Westmarch). A fifth volume containing Hobbit genealogical tables and commentaries is composed and added at unknown dates, presumably over a long period of time, by unknown hands in Westmarch. This collection of writings is collectively called the Red Book of Westmarch.

A similar work in some respects was the fictional Yearbook of Tuckborough, the annals of the Took family of hobbits of Tuckborough. It was described as the oldest known book in the Shire, and was most likely kept at the Great Smials of Tuckborough. The story runs that it was begun around the year and chronicled events dating from the foundation of the Shire in T.A. 1601 onwards. For comparison, the narrative in The Lord of the Rings commences in the year T.A. 3001.

The Yearbook recorded births, deaths, marriages, land-sales, and other events in Took history. Much of this information was later included in the Red Book of Westmarch. Tolkien wrote that it was also known as the Great Writ of Tuckborough and the Yellowskin, suggesting that it was bound in yellow leather or some other yellow material. Tolkien mentions several other supposedly historical documents related to the Red Book, but it is unclear whether these were integrated into editions. These works include the Tale of Years (part of which was used as the timeline for The Lord of the Rings) and Herblore of the Shire, supposedly written by Frodo's contemporary Meriadoc Brandybuck, used for information about pipe-weed.

Some events and details concerning Gollum and the magic ring in the first edition of The Hobbit were rewritten for The Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit was later revised for consistency. Tolkien explains the discrepancies as Bilbo's lies (influenced by the ring, now the sinister One Ring).

Analysis

The Tolkien scholar Mark T. Hooker writes that the Red Book of Westmarch owes its name to a collection of Welsh history and poetry including the Mabinogion, the 15th century Red Book of Hergest.

{| style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; border: none;" class="wikitable"

|+ A scholarly allusion In the Tolkien scholar Richard C. West's view, Tolkien's Red Book is a pastiche of scholarship. It functions, he writes, as what scholars would call a spurious source, but the authority it imparts is by an appeal not to the old and familiar, but to the modern mystique of scholarly research. The "found manuscript conceit",

Gergely Nagy notes that Tolkien wanted to present the complex set of writings of his legendarium as a seemingly-genuine collection of tales and myths within the frame of his fictional Middle-earth; he modified The Lord of the Rings to ascribe the documents to Bilbo, supposedly written in the years he spent in Rivendell, and preserved in the fictitious Red Book of Westmarch.

File:Red.Book.of.Hergest.facsimile.png|The Red Book of Hergest inspired Tolkien to invent the Red Book of Westmarch. In Jackson's film version, the book that Bilbo hands over to Frodo is subtitled A Hobbit's Tale rather than A Hobbit's Holiday. The Red Book in full (rather than just its title page) appears at the end of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.  In 1974, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published a one-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings, bound in red imitation leather.

References

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Secondary

Sources

External links

Reproduction of the Red Book of Westmarch movie prop
The Chroniclers of Middle-earth describing the fictional origins and history of the Red Book
BBC Radio 4 dramatisation: Bilbo retrieves his Red Book
Stages and Logic of the fictitious tradition of Tolkien’s Legendarium (Red Book of Westmarch)