Interesting Links for 24-12-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Britain's winter of discontent is the inevitable result of austerity

(tags:austerity UK NHS infrastructure Doom )

2. In the long term, if we want to keep the global temperature down, then our electricity generation has to be entirely generated from renewables

(tags:renewables globalwarming )

3. Stardust is inspired by The Voyage of The Dawn Treader

(tags:narnia neilgaiman )

4. Fans Can Now Sue Movie Studios For Deceptive Trailers

(tags:trailers law fraud viaMyBrotherHugh )

5. Both versions of "Riddles in the Dark" (the Gollum chapter of The Hobbit, changed when Lord of The Rings came out)

(tags:lotr TheHobbit Tolkien )

6. Finally, a believable explanation of why Elon Musk bought Twitter!

(tags:ElonMusk Twitter comic funny )

7. Elon Musk orders removal of Twitter suicide prevention feature

(tags:Twitter suicide OhForFucksSake ElonMusk )

8. Brexit means no British manufacturer able to build ministerial cars

(tags:UK cars manufacturing Europe Doom )

9. The 10 best films of 2022

(tags:movies reviews )

Comments

[calimac]

5) I haven't seen the texts presented in parallel like this before, which is nice to have. Unfortunately it's not entirely accurate. As far as I checked, which is only a few pages in, it has the first edition correct but doesn't notice all of the changes made in the revision. For instance, Gollum's backstory in regard to playing riddles was changed to fit what Gandalf tells Frodo about his origin in LR. First edition reads, "before the goblins came, and he was cut off from his friends far under under the mountains." (Yes, it says "under" twice.) Revised edition says, "before he lost all his friends and was driven away, alone, and crept down, down, into the dark under the mountains."

What's more, there were further revisions in the 1960s which affected mostly the first couple chapters of the book but also this chapter. These were mostly small wording changes, affecting the background of the story but not changing the plot. One interesting change here, again not accounted for in this chart, affected "Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum." Tolkien added "a small slimy creature" to the end of the sentence, probably because early illustrators of the book had depicted Gollum as gigantic.

You want a full accounting of all of this? Get a book called The Annotated Hobbit by Douglas A. Anderson.