Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith

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"About Our Continent in the Days of OKEUS, from whom . . .

Postmodern Pocahontas (or Pockahuntiss)

Vollmann's Career = Revenge of the Nerd

Like Trying to Find the Northwest Passage

William is blind to his own failings.

Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith
William Vollmann
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0142001503

Book Description

In Argall, the newest novel in his Seven Dreams series, William T. Vollmann alternates between extravagant Elizabethan language and gritty realism in an attempt to dig beneath the legend surrounding Pocahontas, John Smith, and the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia-as well as the betrayals, disappointments, and atrocities behind it. With the same panoramic vision, mythic sensibility, and stylistic daring that he brought to the previous novels in the Seven Dreams series-hailed upon its inception as "the most important literary project of the '90s" (The Washington Post)-Vollmann continues his hugely original fictional history of the clash of Native Americans and Europeans in the New World. In reconstructing America's past as tragedy, nightmare, and bloody spectacle, Vollmann does nothing less than reinvent the American novel.

Customer Reviews:

"About Our Continent in the Days of OKEUS, from whom . . ........2005-05-19

We Stole Puccoons; and whose Snake-Erring'd Nation the ***POWHATANS*** Lost, By the Scheming of our Counsell-Men, Princesse Poka-huntas (a country lass) to TOBACCO (but gained Discount cigarettes); Lost Kingdoms to *ARGALL* . . ."

In the Seven Dreams series one may begin with any volume, but of the four currently published volumes, Argall would be the most "American". Here we have a post-modern retelling of English colonization. As with volumes one and two, Vollmann adapts his writing style and language to the flavor and times in which he dwells. His research is deep and impeccable, and one of the most interesting things to me in reading the Seven Dreams is his unique style and method of mixing ". . . colors not only from the palate of times, but also from the palate of places" (The Rifles, 377). Did I really read of a bullet or bullets laying on the frozen ground in one foreshadowed scene from The Ice Shirt (which took place in the 10th Century)? There are a few such strange instances in Fathers & Crows. Less so in Argall, though, which mostly sticks close to the life and times of Captain John Smith (1580-1631). Smith is a similar "yeoman" type character to Poutrincourt & Champlain in Fathers & Crows, and perhaps Eirik the Red in The Ice Shirt. Vollmann utilizes these men as launching points into their time-periods, reassessing their trials and tribulations, conquests and failures. Likewise, in each of the first three volumes we find historically forgotten, but important women. They include Freydis Eiriksdottir & Gudrid Thorbjornsdottir in The Ice Shirt, Born Swimming & Tekakwitha in Fathers & Crows, and in Argall, Pocahontas. As of yet, I have not read Vollmann's so-called prostitute novels/trilogy, but am familiar enough with his research into and use of prostitutes in his various stories. Having now read the first three volumes of the Seven Dreams in order (and looking forward to #6, The Rifles), it's not surprising to find this recurrent theme of a male "glory seeking adventurer doomed to failure meets and interacts with his depraved and deprived female counterpart" (note also, interactions between Pere Brebeuf & Born Underwater in Fathers & Crows). What's fascinating about all this is that through Vollmann's modern day lenses (and those are some thick lenses!), "historie" and "histoickall facts" come across as more than the "Symbolic History" he is creating. What happens is exactly what he wants to happen, and that is to ". . . further a deeper sense of truth". The phantom-like, piratical title-character Argall, as is the town of Gravesend which John Smith hales to & from (in "several compass circles") are good examples of the blending of truths and untruths in order to create "an account of origins and metamorphoses". In reading Argall you are not reading history, exactly. It is based on history, but is closer to poetry than a novel, because poetry transcends the strictures of a traditional novel. Its genius lays not only in its concept as part of a larger North American landscape puzzle, but in its execution. While The Ice Shirt contains a captivating dis-harmony of time & place, myth, legend, history, and modern travelogue; Fathers & Crows a more refined and fine-tuned sense of direction & story-telling; Argall is a magnificent culmination of language & character. It felt very enlightening, especially to one who grew up with very idealistic and naïve notions of adventurous Pilgrims arriving on the Mayflower, trading and sharing Thanksgiving feasts with blissful, welcoming Indians. And Pocahontas seemed some romantic "Indian princess" who delighted those bold and faithful colonists. Of course, most of us become less naïve and more enlightened as we grow older and expand our horizons. As with any deep poetry or "meditation", Argall (and The Ice Shirt, & Fathers & Crows) is an enlightening experience for those able and willing to venture forth. Admittedly, as less enthusiastic reviewers have pointed out here and elsewhere, Vollmann can seem long-winded, wanting of an editor, and somewhat superficial in terms of character morality, etc. Personally, I take my time with books, and enjoy the lengthy narratives, twists and turns, use of chronologies, maps, lengthy source notes, whimsical drawings, so on and so forth. I feel like I've got my money's worth. (As one should for a $40 coverprice!). In terms of morality, I think Vollmann (as a post-modern writer) comes across as dry and lacking "wisdom" in any deep moral sense, as compared to say the Victorian-era writers such as Tolstoy and Dickens not because he can't feel or provide insight into his characters, but because: 1. it would be disingenuous given the subject & overall plan of the Seven Dreams, and 2. it frees up YOU, the reader to interact with the text using your own values and judgments without the author getting in the way. It's up to you to find your way (but there are plenty of notes to guide you in whichever direction you so choose).

That said, I hope you take some time to read Argall, and the Seven Dreams, as I think you'll learn more about our (the North American) continent than you thought you knew, including the exploits of various peripheral characters you may never have heard of, but who certainly existed - especially one Captaine Samuel Argall.

Postmodern Pocahontas (or Pockahuntiss).......2002-06-13

It helps if you're a little bit compulsive about reading Vollmann. Oh, he doesn't need the help, but as a reader, you do.

It's easy to compare him with Pynchon, since they both attempt a similar feat of matching subject with style in an expansive format that contains much humor peppered within the story. But Vollmann isn't a humorist at heart, he's part historian and part seer. He brings you the characters that you'd love to believe really are; he worms his insistent way into their hopes and imaginings so that he can present you with their characters.

You learn a lot of history reading the Seven Dreams series, of which "Argall" is a part. You learn more about how Vollmann regards history. But what makes the author so necessary and integral to my reading is that way of making me see how his characters regard themselves.

So throw your reading schedule out the window. Pick up "The Ice Shirt" and start in on this yet-to-be completed chronicle of how the Europeans came to the Americas and what that meant for both the Europeans and the people who were already here. Catch up soon, because you'll want to starting wishing for the next book in the series to appear... compulsively so.

Vollmann's Career = Revenge of the Nerd.......2002-04-07

William Vollmann is like the nerdiest person you knew in college or high school. He grew up to become a novelist who gained notoriety by writing in great detail about his experiences with prostitutes and having the audacity to claim that it took some sort of moral heroism for him to smoke crack with them in roach-infested transient hotels. Of course, it wouldn't do to be slumming all the time -- otherwise he'd just be another John Rechy or Bruce Benderson. So he adds Ivy League intellectual patina to these books by positioning them as meditations on the history of North America, or as reflections on how "all loving relationships are really forms of prostitution." He writes long, long books hoping that you'll be very, very impressed with him.

Folks, read this book or any other book by William Vollmann and keep in mind that this is an author with a profoundly stunted emotional growth. There's nothing cute about celebrating prostitution as the "most honest form of love" -- it's sickening writing, the babbling of a man still stuck in the fantasies of adolescence who will never understand that real love transcends economic exchange into a pure giving of oneself to another. He pats himself on the back for his "ferocity," when in fact he's never really outgrown being a journal-scribbling teenager who thinks every word he scribbles needs to be published and admired. His writing amounts to one big infantile gesture of lashing out at his Mommy and Daddy -- he admits as much in his interviews -- but at the same time hoping all these books he writes will make his parents love him. It's sad.

The fact that Vollmann has a big crowd of admirers says a lot about the sheep-like mentality and the moral vacancy of too many people who like cutting-edge literature. Read the bombastic praise Vollmann receives that is printed on the dustjackets of his books, and reviewers envious of his lifestyle just look like fools with the pumped-up praise that lavish on Vollmann. Go to a Vollmann reading and look around -- the people there are the sort who are hip, cynical, wear funky glasses and hate their parents, and whose main worry is keeping up with the latest slick novels and edgy CD's to hit the shelves. They have no ability to think for themselves and they are bored with life -- so they are profoundly impressed by this guy who writes about his experience with prostitutes. If you recognize yourself in this description, you need to get a life.

There's a certain sort of bourgeois person who believes their life can be redeemed by writing a novel in which they'll "show 'em all" -- the 'em being Mommy and Daddy, the cool kids who rejected them in high school, the jocks who called them nerds, etc. Vollmann is the "patron saint" of this sort of misfit. I read an interview in which Vollmann stated confidently that he is as important as Shakespeare or Faulkner. He doesn't seem to understand that the self-absorbed navel-gazing of a well-read prostitute's john doesn't quite cut it as great literature, no matter how many big words and descriptive phrases he tries to pack into his sentences. Vollmann's delusions are as bloated as his books, and his vision lacks even a hint of the universality or breadth or understanding that literary importance requires. Nobody but a few misfit loners and antiquarians will be reading Vollmann fifty years from now. Vollmann is a Montherlant in the making -- that is, an irrelevant curiosity that even most highly educated people will not have heard of.

Please think for yourself and don't buy this book just because you think it's kind of neat and edgy that this guy writes about his experiences with prostitutes. Don't engage in the sad spectacle of living vicariously through William Vollmann's sad, warped world. You'll just put yourself one step closer to moral oblivion.

Like Trying to Find the Northwest Passage.......2002-01-20

Ok, Vollmann is brilliant, a genius. One has to give it to him with this and his other huge tomes in which he goes full-tilt in an attempt at literary greatness, and his passages are often riveting.

The book tries to out-do ULYSSES. It does. But finally, around the 400th page, who cares?

William is blind to his own failings........2001-11-30

Vollmann's books are a shotgun wedding of Kerouac keyboard improv and finicky, ultra-thorough research that would shame the most hardcore library mole. His unique voice is the result of the collision between his modern sensibility -- which he's endlessly amused by instead of, like too many contemporary authors, uncritically in love with -- and his passion for exhausted and outmoded forms of thinking and of writing. For Vollmann, "modernity" is sometimes a sort of limbo, the temporal version of the Greenland in his book The Ice-Shirt, where everything that can happen has already happened and the former sites of great battles, couplings, and doomed utopian experiments are now bare swatches of anonymous turf -- witness the last few pages of Argall, where "William the Blind," as Vollmann calls himself, drives through Pocahontas' former haunts and finds an endless cortege of theme parks and strip bars -- and sometimes an ongoing process to be participated in. As is well known, Vollmann is something of an adventurer, doing his Geraldo Rivera guerilla-journalist bit with the Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan long before they were the flavor of the month. What fascination his books have comes from this contradiction. Are we living history, or is everything over?

Sadly, I must report, his books are not yet as fascinating on their own merits. Argall is admirable in almost every way -- Vollmann is obviously stoked with the passion to rescue marginalized figures from the rubble of history, and he even works up genuine anger about wrongs committed centuries ago, whereas most people these days conform more to William Hazlitt's dictum: "The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings." On top of this, his prose is impossibly energetic and rich, like that of a postmodern Fielding. But as industrious as he is in terms of researching and writing, that's how lazy he is in terms of his conceptions and grand designs. His graphomania works against him, in short -- he fills seven hundred pages here without stopping to think, as most people will before half the book is over, that Blood Meridian has already been written and was done quite well already. There is literally zero distance between Vollmann's title character and McCarthy's The Judge -- both are seen as omnipotent spectres representing the depredations of America's colonial thrust, and both even talk in the same Shakespearean-Melvillean patois. And though the unquestioned verbal virtuosity of Argall ( the book ) is more than enough to carry you through to the end, it ultimately turns out to have very little staying power, being essentially a linear, straightforward account of the events contained in John Smith's autobiography, leavened with a peculiar brand of political correctness also swiped from McCarthy ( he admits the Indians are savage and unknowable, but still treats them as sacred for that very reason. )

Vollmann makes me think of what DeSade's doctor says to him in the movie Quills: "You produce more pages than you consume -- the mark of a true amateur." Let's face it, no one who writes as much as Vollmann has a well-honed sense of self-criticism. Part of me thinks that he would be better off laying aside the latest 900-page opus, reupholstering his crude if touching Weltanschauung, and then returning a decade later with a compressed and fully mature work of genius... But then he wouldn't be William Vollmann, he'd be Russell Hoban. For that reason, I doubt he'll ever write anything that attains a status above "James Clavell for eggheads," but nevertheless, there's a place in the cosmos for his brand of blunt, belated justice. Just don't call him The Judge.

Amazon.com

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."

The hobbit-hole in question belongs to one Bilbo Baggins, an upstanding member of a "little people, about half our height, and smaller than the bearded dwarves." He is, like most of his kind, well off, well fed, and best pleased when sitting by his own fire with a pipe, a glass of good beer, and a meal to look forward to. Certainly this particular hobbit is the last person one would expect to see set off on a hazardous journey; indeed, when Gandalf the Grey stops by one morning, "looking for someone to share in an adventure," Baggins fervently wishes the wizard elsewhere. No such luck, however; soon 13 fortune-seeking dwarves have arrived on the hobbit's doorstep in search of a burglar, and before he can even grab his hat or an umbrella, Bilbo Baggins is swept out his door and into a dangerous adventure.

The dwarves' goal is to return to their ancestral home in the Lonely Mountains and reclaim a stolen fortune from the dragon Smaug. Along the way, they and their reluctant companion meet giant spiders, hostile elves, ravening wolves--and, most perilous of all, a subterranean creature named Gollum from whom Bilbo wins a magical ring in a riddling contest. It is from this life-or-death game in the dark that J.R.R. Tolkien's masterwork, The Lord of the Rings, would eventually spring. Though The Hobbit is lighter in tone than the trilogy that follows, it has, like Bilbo Baggins himself, unexpected iron at its core. Don't be fooled by its fairy-tale demeanor; this is very much a story for adults, though older children will enjoy it, too. By the time Bilbo returns to his comfortable hobbit-hole, he is a different person altogether, well primed for the bigger adventures to come--and so is the reader. --Alix Wilber

Book Description

Written for J.R.R. Tolkien's own children, The Hobbit met with instant critical acclaim when first published more than sixty years ago. Now recognized as a timeless classic with sales of more than 40 million copies worldwide, this introduction to Bilbo Baggins, Gandalf the Wizard, and the spectacular world of Middle-earth tells of the adventures of a reluctant hero, a powerful and dangerous ring, and the cruel dragon Smaug the Magnificent.

Customer Reviews:

Barrel Rider.......2007-10-11

"The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkien is commonly referred as a classic. While this is an often over-used term, it definitely applies in this case. Of the four books Tolkien is known for primarily, "The Fellowship of the Ring", "The Two Towers", "The Return of the King" and "The Hobbit", this is the most satisfying. I t introduces and sets up key characters for "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy consisting of the three books previously named.

In Tolkien's Middle-Earth, the principle races are men, elves and dwarves. There also goblins (orcs), giants dragons, wizards and assorted odd characters and fantastic beasts. Then there are hobbits who have as little to do with the rest of Middle-Earth as possible.

They like it that way.

Hobbits are interested in green growing things, eating and smoking pipe weed. When they aren't being industrious, they enjoy their comforts. They are very short in stature and move through the woods efficiently and silently. This isn't so they can sneak up on someone so much as it is to stay out of adventures.

Of these conservative, predictable folk, there is one Bilbo Baggins. The Bagginses are prosperous and respectable as hobbits go. Which means Bilbo is perfectly happy leading his boring comfortable life. The only mild eccentricity noted in Bilbo's line is he's related to the Tooks through his mother. Tooks had been known to get into little adventures from time to time and as such were of questionable respectability.

Central to this connection is Gandalf the Grey, a wizard. For some reason he has developed a curiosity and a fondness for these little people. Maybe it`s because in his adventure-filled life, it's nice to have a little peace and quiet. Gandalf is also renowned for his fireworks of which everyone enjoys.

One day the family friend shows up on Bilbo's doorstep. Shortly after this, Bilbo finds himself hosting not just Gandalf but also twelve dwarves lead by Thorin Oakenshield. Not long after this, Bilbo finds himself `assigned' to this motley crew as a "Burglar". They are on a quest to recover Thorin's lost fortune.

This is when the book really begins. This is a journey tale. That means Bilbo goes through transformation in the process of this quest. Relationships are developed and tested in a way none can predict. This being a fantasy they see and do fantastic things.

Eventually Bilbo returns home no longer respectable. Along the way he has picked up a ring...........

Tolkien at his best!.......2007-10-09

As the prelude to the Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit or There and Back Again, is a magnificent tale of magic, fantasy, and adventure. I found that I could not set this book down. With each page, I was that much more drawn into the realm of Middle Earth, and I made myself put the book down for a little bit in order to enjoy it.

The characterization in this book is phenomenal. Both the protagonists and antagonists throughout the novel help creat the landscape of the book, as well as set the foundation for Middle Earth. Bilbo Baggins, the hobbit, displays the ideal character in that he is forced into a world of adventure of magic. As an innocent creature unaware of the outside world, Bilbo matures throughout the book, and is a classic example of a character who, by the end of the book, has developed into a great intellectual character. Bilbo continues to display this intellect throughout the Lord of the Rings.

I have experienced many a conflict with other readers who did not enjoy the Hobbit, and I'm not saying that this book is in everyone's favor, but any reader of fantasy, magic, and adventure will love this book. I recommend the Hobbit to every person no matter what age. As a timeless tale of Tolkien, I give this book five stars (although, it probably deserves more).

The Hobbit.......2007-10-06

This book was boasting with the great imagination of J.R.R Tolkein. About 60 years before the lord of the seires Bilbo Gandlaf and a gang of Dwarfs travel through the misty moantians to get to a treasure stolen from the Dwarfs. As the gang travels through the land they meet tons of epic characters (elfs dwarfs goblins trolls). Tolkein could have written more voilence like its sequel Lord of the Rings. Overall it was a epic classic.

--.......2007-10-03

I generally do not read books if there is a possibility of a movie being made on the same. However, this is a really very interesting book. You can not keep it down once you start reading.

Tolkien Set the Stage.......2007-10-02

Though I grew up reading fantasy, playing Lone Wolf books and sometimes joining an AD&D game, I had never read any of Tolkien's works until recently. The Hobbit sat on my bookshelf for seven years because I couldn't get past the first chapter. Now I breezed through it, soaking in the rich world of Tolkien's imagination and discovering where most modern fantasy has its roots. Though I've seen the first two Lord of the Rings movies, I'm now going to get and read those books and anything else JRR Tolkien wrote in the way of fantasy.

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THE HOBBIT - or There and Back Again
J. R. R. Tolkien
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J. R. R. Tolkien
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The annotated Hobbit: The hobbit, or, There and back again

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One of the best books about Tolkien ever
Most of the annotations are wasted.
Very good supplement to a landmark book.
A Beautiful Version of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit
A Mixed Bag

The annotated Hobbit: The hobbit, or, There and back again
J. R. R Tolkien
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Book Description

For readers throughout the world, The Hobbit serves as an introduction to the enchanting world of Middle-earth, home of elves, wizards, dwarves, goblins, dragons, orcs and a host of other creatures depicted in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion -- tales that sprang from the mind of the most beloved author of all time, J.R.R. Tolkien.
Newly expanded and completely redesigned, Douglas A. Anderson's The Annotated Hobbit is the definitive explication of the sources, characters, places, and things of J.R.R. Tolkien's timeless classic. Integrated with Anderson's notes and placed alongside the fully restored and corrected text of the original story are more than 150 illustrations showing visual interpretations of The Hobbit specific to many of the cultures that have come to know and love Tolkien's Middle-earth. Tolkien's original line drawings, maps and color paintings are also included, making this the most lavishly informative edition of The Hobbit available.
The Annotated Hobbit shows how Tolkien worked as a writer, what his influences and interests were, and how these relate to the invented world of Middle-earth. It gives a valuable overview of Tolkien's life and the publishing history of The Hobbit, and explains how every feature of The Hobbit fits within the rest of Tolkien's invented world. Here we learn how Gollum's character was revised to accommodate the true nature of the One Ring, and we can read the full text of The Quest of Erebor, Gandalf's explanation of how he came to send Bilbo Baggins on his journey with the dwarves. Anderson also makes meaningful and often surprising connections to our own world and literary history -- from Beowulf to The Marvellous Land of Snergs, from the Brothers Grimm to C. S. Lewis.

Customer Reviews:

One of the best books about Tolkien ever.......2005-08-06

I've read many Books about J.R.R Tolkien and his creation, as well as the entire 12 books of the History of Middle Earth. The Annotated Hobbit is the best of them all. It is sheer example of a book that tells you a lot but don't confuse you with too much data.
Every person that read the Annotated Hobbit will never again treat the Hobbit as a simple children's book. The Hobbit has depth and Anderson provides us with important insights, ideas and interesting data.
The Annotated Hobbit also has the famous "missing chapter" that was included in the Hobbit's first edition. (i.e. the chapter where Gollum is showing Bilbo the way out and acts like an honest guy - Tolkien had to change that of course after he wrote the Lord of The Rings).
Read this book and you will understand a lot more about The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings and J.R.R Tolkien himself.

Most of the annotations are wasted........2005-05-21

This is my third "Annotated" book -- following The Annotated Alice and Annotated Fairy Tales -- and while The Hobbit itself is great, the majority of the annotations add no value to the story as they merely mark where a word or two was changed between editions. Unfortunately, there's so many of them that they frequently appear a couple of pages after they're noted so you have to turn forward to find out that "South" was changed to "Southwest" and then you've broken the flow of the story. The Hobbit itself is a great read-aloud story and some of the annotations are surprising and interesting... but the mundane and boring annotations really weigh the book down compared to the annotations in Alice or Fairy Tales.

Very good supplement to a landmark book........2005-04-26

`The Annotated Hobbit', annotated by bookseller Douglas A. Anderson is published by J.R.R. Tolkien's American publisher, Houghton Mifflin (important because it means the cover of this book uses the same art as the cover of the most popular hard-covered American edition of the Hobbit, published in the 1960's).

Let me be perfectly clear that this is first and foremost a review of the Annotation, not of the novel, `The Hobbit' itself. I have an almost reverential respect for the original novel, having bought my first copy of this work on a cold February day in 1965 in the Lehigh University bookstore. I began reading it on the bus on the way home from my college classes at about 1:00 PM, and simply could not put it down. I finished reading it at about 8:30 that evening. The experience is not unlike some cinematic versions of experiences like Dorothy's opening the door of her Kansas house to step out onto the grass of Oz. I am totally unsurprised by a statement in this annotation that says that the entire first page of `The Hobbit' has been reproduced in `Bartlett's Familiar Quotations'. There are few more magical or evocative openings to novels I have read in my whole life. And, while I can appreciate that there are adult readers, my Hemingway loving uncle being one of them, who simply `don't get it', I am often driven to the point of dispair when I can't interest young readers or listeners in `The Hobbit'. Like `Winnie the Pooh' and `Alice in Wonderland', I really think these are books designed much more to bring back memories of childhood in adults than to engage young readers. And oh how much I enjoy reading `The Hobbit' aloud!

But back to this Annotation'. Like similar annotations to works of fiction such as `Alice in Wonderland' and the Arthur Conan Doyle stories of Sherlock Holmes, there are four different subjects for annotation. One is internal; where names and events are cross-referenced to other parts of the work to explain, elaborate, resolve, or point out inconsistencies. The second is external, where correspondences can be made to sources or, in the case of Conan Doyle or Carroll, events of the day that may have found their way into the fiction. The third is references to the author's unpublished notes and letters. Tolkien's works should be rich sources for all three types of annotation, as the world of `The Hobbit' and `The Lord of the Rings' is based on an enormous body of Norse, Celtic, and Teutonic mythology, fable, and epic literature. Also, standing behind `The Hobbit' is the great events of `The Lord of the Rings', `The Silmarillion', and over twelve volumes of Tolkien writings compiled and annotated by Christopher Tolkien.

So why are the annotations in this volume so sparse? The author certainly does not limit himself to only one kind of annotation. There are examples of all three references to other Tolkien works, notes and letters, and other sources. The author does give us lots of illustrations of scenes from `The Hobbit' published in translations of the work from around the world. There are also a few illustrations from books that certainly influenced Tolkien, such as `The Marvelous Land of Snergs'. The one thing that all these illustrations tell me is that, on average, they are not very good, oriented primarily towards a children's audience rather than some of the more heroic art familiar to us from modern fantasy illustrators. It seems to me a lost opportunity also to not include Tolkien's own color illustrations for `The Hobbit', as they appeared on the very first `Tolkien' calendar in, I believe 1966 or 1967.

I will give just a few illustrations of where I think the author may have disappointed his readers. By far the most interesting character in `The Hobbit' next to Bilbo and Gandalf is Smaug. And yet, the book has next to nothing to say about the fictional antecedents of that delightfully cagey old worm. One of my only fond memories of the rather insipid cartoon version of `The Hobbit' done several decades ago is the gravely voice of Smaug done by Paladin himself, Richard Boone. If you couldn't get John Huston, then Boone was certainly the next best thing. To the whole conversation between Bilbo and Smaug, there are but two notes regarding Smaug and dragons. At least we get a reference about the source of Smaug's name, a primitive Germanic verb, `smugan' meaning to squeeze through a hole. Tolkien confessed that this was `a low philological jest'. In the wider story culminating in the great events of `The Lord of the Rings' coming at the end of the Third Age, it is much more important to Gandalf to remove this great dragon from the field so Sauron could not use him as a weapon in the War of the Rings than it was to restore a small band of dwarves to their treasures. The book has practically nothing to say about this, or the fact that the character of the `necromancer' who takes up residence at the southwestern tip of Mirkwood forest is actually either the leader of the Nazgul or Sauron himself.

I keep thinking, as I turn each page of ample, empty white margins, all the things that could have been included.

In balance, this is not a bad book or even a poor purchase, especially if, like me, you simply must have a copy of every different version of Tolkien's works imaginable. It has a very nice bibliography and an Appendix of all textual changes between the 1937 and 1966 editions. For those notes it does have, it is great as a version to read to children where you can record your own notes with answers to their questions.

A Beautiful Version of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit.......2005-02-08

This beautiful version of Tolkien's The Hobbit is one of the best versions you can get of this book. The annotations and commentary of information make this a must for Tolien fans. The artwork of some artists and Tolkien himself is beautiful. I giive it a Two Thumbs up.

A Mixed Bag.......2004-09-25

I thoroughly appreciate the illustrations of how the Hobbit has been illustrated in other countries that are included in this edition. The introduction is first rate, though mysteriously it uses end notes while the rest of the book uses annotation in the margin. The notes that delve into the possible sources and influences on Tolkien's thought and work are mostly interesting and informative. The main negative I find is how many marginal notes are devoted to textual variants between the various editions. For example, in the section where the company meets the trolls, a note explains one version has "they dropped him" while another version has "he dropped him." Although the textual variant notes are usually more extensive than this, they are an uninteresting disappointment to me. The level of detail is high, but at times, almost to the point of being pedantic. Still, if you love the work of Tolkien, you will find this version enjoyable as well.

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THE HOBBIT - or There and Back Again
J. R. R. Tolkien
Manufacturer: Methuen
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000GVYMLG

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THE HOBBIT - or There and Back Again
J. R. R. Tolkien
Manufacturer: Magnum Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0458920304

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The Hobbit : Or There and Back Again

Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000HKI6HC

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