Incompetent Dwarves and Wizardly Plans

Adam Roberts, discussing the ten best-selling books of all time, uses his blog entry about The Hobbit (number four) to note the differences between the “endearing incompetence” of the characters of the first edition (1937) and the second edition, revised to accomodate The Lord of the Rings and in which “everything has to happen for a reason”:

My beef is with the notion that all our bents and faculties have a purpose. In Tolkien’s second version of The Hobbit, it is precisely the haphazardness, the intimations of glorious, human, comic incompetence, that must be sanded, smoothed and filed away. It is no longer enough for Gandalf to turn up on the doorstop of the world’s least likely adventurer merely because that is the sort of thing batty old wizards do. Now he must do so because he has a larger plan.

That larger plan — dealing with Smaug to rid Sauron of an ally in the inevitable war to come — is, of course, spelled out in the appendices to LOTR and in Unfinished Tales. Did Tolkien invent retconning? Thorin and Company do seem to blunder their way through the book, don’t they? Via Andrew Sullivan.