Thread 2! We're starting in THE TREASON OF ISENGARD, Volume 7 of the History of Middle-earth.

(I lost my copy of 8 and haven't actually read ever gotten to read Vol. 9, but copies of both are on their way.)

So, having reached Balin's tomb, and with a rough idea of where the book's going to go, Tolkien... goes back and revises his first chapters again. At length.

A lot of this is polishing, changing character names, amplifying concepts. The Black Riders steadily become more sinister, for example; the Ring more important.

He's still wobbling about various elements, too. Odo/Fatty Bolger (now renamed Hamilcar for a while) is still running around with Gandalf in some drafts, although you can see Tolkien moving towards the idea that Gandalf's been taking prisoner.

Trotter's going to be a Man - no, he's Bilbo's cousin, Peregrin Bolger. No, he's a Man. At a guess, Tolkien was still vacillating between trying to write something closer to the Hobbit, with its cast of largely interchangeable dwarves, and something more complex and epic.

I know from my writing, if I'm unsure about something fundamental, it's very hard to make progress. Sometimes, you've got to go back and fix problems; sometimes, it's better to plough ahead and discover the rest of the story so you've got a different perspective on earlier stuff.

I don't think there's a single easy answer. Maybe "whatever you do, keep working on it!" - but then again, sometimes a break is exactly what you need.

I guess "don't give up" works as a universal aphorism, but that's not exactly a perfectly engineered writing tool.

Advice is a toolbox.

It really is instructive, though, to look at the whole sweep of Aragorn's plot. Aragorn, Arwen, Gondor, Isildur... all of that wasn't there from the beginning.

Sometimes, when reading a book, you're amazed by the intricacy of the plot or the cleverness of a twist.

You think the author must be a genius to have planned that all along.

But you can go back and add stuff in, and set up those intricacies and twists, and make yourself look like a genius, even when you started with Trotter the Hobbit and the Land of Ond.

First drafts can be miles away from final drafts.

(That said, it's amazing how good Tolkien's prose is on his first attempt. Rereading these books, my opinion of him as a stylist improves, even as it becomes clear that he had no idea what he was doing in other parts.)

The book now spends 30 pages discussing Bilbo's poem at Rivendell. It's interesting (again, for certain values of interesting), but if Tolkien was writing today, I guarantee he'd have a bunch of hard conversations with his editor.

One thing that's notable about the poem (Errantry) is that Tolkien started writing it as humour in the early 1930s, and slowly adapted it into his mythology, and then into Lord of the Rings. Only one line from the original ("his scabbard of chalcedony") survives.

I want to note three things about the revision of the Council of Elrond.

First, it's at this point that Tolkien really works out the backstory of the Ring - how it was made, what it does, how Sauron lost it, the fate of Isildur, and how Isildur's death led to Gollum getting the Ring - and how all that connects to Aragorn.

And the tension between Aragorn and Boromir (and later, more indirectly but intensely, Aragorn and Denethor) pops right out of that backstory.

Virtually nothing about the character's personality has changed by turning Trotter the Hobbit into Strider the Ranger, but context matters too.