https://www.theonering.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/The-Ho...

I'm guessing that Tolkien would have deeply hated it all with a burning passion.

(And even the books, floods and comets, children's books about impending natural disasters, not of the magical kind that you know aren't real anyway, but of the kind that have actually destroyed life on earth before and might happen again, that's real nightmare fuel for active children's imaginations.)

This despite the fact that some names and elements were re-used. He often cycled the same names around until he found where they fit. Which also makes reading early drafts of the Hobbit fun when Thorin was named Gandalf.

But apparently there were dozens of different versions that actually ended up in print that had different amounts of the changes caused by some printers mixing old plates and new. So it's entirely possible that small slimy appeared in some versions around 1951 but not others and that's what that page is working off of.

> Now it is a curious fact that this is not the story as Bilbo first told it to his companions. To them his account was that Gollum had promised to give him a present, if he won the game; but when Gollum went to fetch it from his island he found the treasure was gone: a magic ring, which had been given to him long ago on his birthday. Bilbo guessed that this was the very ring that he had found, and as he had won the game, it was already his by right. But being in a tight place, he said nothing about it, and made Gollum show him the way out, as a reward instead of a present. This account Bilbo set down in his memoirs, and he seems never to have altered it himself, not even after the Council of Elrond. Evidently it still appeared in the original Red Book, as it did in several of the copies and abstracts. But many copies contain the true account (as an alternative), derived no doubt from notes by Frodo or Samwise, both of whom learned the truth, though they seem to have been unwilling to delete anything actually written by the old hobbit himself.

Perhaps even Bilbo himself. :) One can imagine him telling a heavily fictionalized version of his adventures to some impressionable young hobbits.

Actually - in the creative process did he kick off the Hobbit then expand into the world building as an after thought and turn the one ring into this wild expansive creative endeavor? I always assumed it had been pre-built in his mind then spilled out in ink (As a sequence of events).

> There are of course other very minor changes. For instance, Gandalf tells Bilbo to bring out the chicken and tomatoes in the unrevised edition vs. the chicken and pickles in the revised edition. But I'll skip over these inconsequential changes.

Bit of medievalism there (tomatoes being a Colombian Exchange thing).

The version you linked is a 2016 reprint, so I’m actually not sure which one is correct.

The version I linked to still has Gollum offering to give Bilbo the ring so it certainly predates the modern version I have. And that is the change Tolkien explicitly states he made.

The version I linked has this "If it asks us, and we doesn't answer, we gives it a present, gollum!" Which I'm positive is only in the 1937 version. From what I can tell there were also minor corrections made before the 1951 changes, so I suppose it's possible that adding small slimy creature was one of those.

There are also reported to be dozens of different versions after 1951 caused by printers mixing and matching old and revised plates. I'm unsure exactly how that 1937 facsimile was recreated, or how the version I linked was created. One or both could have been taken from this mismatched versions.

I think the only way to be sure would be to buy a reprint from before 1951 or to find a scan of one online.

Apologies.