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Tom Hillman's avatar

Haldane was the brother of the well-known writer and important correspondent of Tolkien, Naomi Mitchison. It was she, I believe, who read Tolkien's attempt to rewrite The Hobbit into a style more like LotR, and said "It's not The Hobbit."

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Kalimac's avatar

Spacks' essay on Tolkien, then called "Ethical Pattern in Lord of the Rings," was published in Critique v. 3 no. 1 (Spring-Fall 1956). The Isaacs/Zimbardo version is revised as well as retitled.

Source: Richard West's Tolkien Criticism: An Annotated Checklist, which is my first stop for early Tolkien critical bibliography.

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Kalimac's avatar

Sorry, that was a typo on my part: 1959, not 1956. It's not quite that early!

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