Fork

I am still 6 feet, one and one half inch­es tall, I am 167 pounds, my heart­beat is 71 bpm and my blood pres­sure is 133/81. I also vot­ed today and am dis­ap­point­ed that I did not receive a stick­er.

I’ve read dif­fer­ent ver­sions of Lord of the Rings innu­mer­able times. But I recent­ly got my hands on the most recent reis­su­ing of the author­i­ta­tive British ver­sion of the book. It con­tains a Note on the Sec­ond Edi­tion that explains the intri­ca­cies of pub­lish­ing that the book has gone through. Appar­ent­ly, the US ver­sion has been based on the orig­i­nal Houghton Mif­flin pho­to-off­set from the six­ties. Well, Pro­fes­sor Tolkien did quite a bit of revi­sion, rewrote the for­ward and cleaned up plen­ty of incon­sis­ten­cies. I’ve only read the for­ward, the pro­logue and the first chap­ter but the dif­fer­ences [at least to me] are remark­able.

Most­ly in the for­ward. Tolkien want­ed to rewrite it because his orig­i­nal for­ward con­fused the ‘machin­ery of the tale’ with the ‘author’s intent’ too much for his taste. The new for­ward gave me a cou­ple of new insights into the kind of life that Tolkien had in regard to the celebri­ty and crit­i­cism of his books. I’m real­ly dig­ging it. The new ver­sion is a pho­to-off­set of the Allen and Unwin ver­sion and con­tains British spelling con­ven­tions and seems brand new to me all over again.

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