The rabbit’s revenge
23 October 2021 | Amon Hen, № 291∶ October, 2021, 14
In a 1944 letter to his son Christopher, J.R.R. Tolkien noted that on April 26 he had “struggled with recalcitrant passage in ‘The Ring’. “At this point I require to know how much later the moon gets up each night when nearing full, and how to stew a rabbit!” (Carpenter, 74).
Christopher later explained in The War of the Ring (131) that this comment (and others of his father’s in letters and personal notes) referred to difficulties in synchronizing the motions of the disparate parties in the broken Fellowship and tying them to the phases of the moon, beginning around the time when Sam made his infamous (to this devoted lagomorph-lover) rabbit stew.…
❧