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Mood: Cool ]
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Currently: Eating Breakfast ]
Perhaps choosing to start this project the evening of the last day of school was not a good idea. Especially given that I had to pack up my office and move out of my school by 6:00 pm last night. My back, already mad at having to sit on the floor for the Primary Assembly, was further grumpy at having to lift and bend.
So you can understand that as I nestled into the bed with my copy of the Fellowship of the Ring, that I just wanted to drift into oblivion. But silly me had made a commitment on the web. If I didn’t read, someone on the Interwebs was going to whine and tsk. So to avoid a public shaming, I read.
Now before I get too deep into this entry. (Too late?) I want to go over which version of the book I am reading. It is the 50th Anniversary Edition with a white cover, exactly like the one below.
As I worked through the note on the text, note on the 50th anniversary and the author’s introduction to the second edition, I noticed something. For a book that I have abandoned on more than one occasion because it spends too much time on the history of a mountain range, this part of the book spends far too much time on the history of the spelling errors that crept into various editions. Apparently, well meaning editors and typesetters changed words like elvish to elfish because they didn’t understand that Tolkein was inventing new languages.
Which is kind of fascinating, but did we need to spend 26 pages on it? I felt like I was in an Oliver Stone movie. YOU IN THE BACK!! DID YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?!?!?!? Tolkein’s note for the second edition would have been enough.
So I am ready to start the main part of the story. That will be today’s effort. But before I do that, I need to grab my post it notes so I can mark words and phrases that catch my attention. Like "emendations", which I had no idea what it meant. And I was too tired to get up and look it up. (BTW: It means the act or practice of emending (Don’t you hate when dictionaries do that? Did your English teacher not tell you to not use a variation of the word you am looking up in the definition? Read a little further on the page and you will see an alteration designed to correct or improve.)
Until tomorrow, people.