Early Drafts and Carbon Copies: Composing and Editing Smith of Wootton Major

Abstract

Early Drafts and Carbon Copies:Composing and Editing Smith of Wootton Major Christopher Crane (bio) Recent scholarship has shown an increasing interest in Tolkien's writing process. Verlyn Flieger's 2005 critical edition, Smith of Wootton Major, Extended Edition (released in a pocket-sized edition in 2015), provides fresh insight into Tolkien's creative process and his thinking about faery.1 In addition to a reprint of the story itself and new introduction and commentary by Flieger, the volume contains several previously unpublished pieces by Tolkien, including an essay on the background and authorial intention of Smith; a timeline and sketch of major characters; the abandoned introduction to George MacDonald's The Golden Key which led him to begin the tale that became Smith; and, perhaps most illuminating, an early draft of the story, including facsimile pages (typed and manuscript) and Flieger's facing-page transcriptions.2 In 2006 Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, in the entry for Smith in their J.R.R. Tolkien Companion & Guide, briefly noted an inconsistency between Flieger's presentation of the early draft material and the Tolkien MSS held at the Bodleian Library (2: 944).3 In 2015 Douglas A. Anderson expanded on this observation in his review of the pocket edition of Flieger's Extended Edition. He detailed several "serious flaws" he saw with her original that remained unchanged in the new edition. Among these was the assertion that, in publishing Tolkien's earliest draft pages of Smith, Flieger "lost track" of the verso of one folio and that she presented other pages out of order. In addition, Anderson asserts that in the section she calls a Hybrid Draft, Flieger erroneously considers the typescript pages of the earliest draft and the hand-written pages that follow as continuous. The first part of the present essay examines the manuscripts at the Bodleian in light of these alleged problems with Flieger's edition. Although I agree that Anderson is correct in his observations about a missing (or omitted) folio, I believe he is incorrect in considering the hand-written pages as out of place and part of a subsequent draft. The omitted folio, which Anderson has pointed out is from a later draft, is printed here (Figure 1). In addition to clarifying the relationships among drafts, this folio offers insight into the stage of composition at which Tolkien began to conceive of the tale as centering on Smith's [End Page 143] journeys into Faery rather than simply on the misconceptions people (such as Nokes) have about it. In the second part of this essay, I clarify the relationships among the three intermediate typescript drafts of the tale and discusses Tolkien's use of carbon copies in his editing process of these as well as in some of the background material also published in Flieger's edition. 1. The Earliest Drafts The organization and labeling conventions for the Tolkien papers held in the Bodleian Library play a major role in these findings and thus require some explanation. The accessible portions of Tolkien's academic and literary works held by the Bodleian are MSS 1–25.4 The collection includes various types of documents such as handwritten leaves, typescript pages, newspaper clippings with Tolkien's doodling, mailing envelopes, and letters. Other artwork is with a separate set of MSS. The numbered folios of each MS are either affixed lightly to or filed loosely with the large leaves of guardbooks, or fascicules; these are stored in boxes of (typically) three or four guardbooks. Tolkien MSS 1–25 fill 14 boxes. These are organized and labeled generally according to the published works to which they correlate, although some MSS categories include material from multiple works. Pertinent to this study, Tolkien MSS 9–12 are made up of Smith of Wootton Major documents, ranging from early letters from the publisher who asked Tolkien to write the introduction to The Golden Key to the annotated page proofs of the story itself. Tolkien MS 6 includes pages from Leaf by Niggle (folios 1, 23–73, 95–96), a portion of material from "On Fairy-stories" (folios 2–22, 97), and a "fragmentary typescript draft" identified in the...