that Farmer Giles was written after The Hobbit, not after LotR? Kocher is wrong about the timing, but could he be right about the basic motivation: relaxing and having some fun after completing an epic? Because in the last third, The Hobbit approaches epic proportions. Certainly Farmer Giles has a lot more in connection with The Hobbit than it does LotR. How does the essay read with just that change made: Hobbit for LotR, 1937 for 1949?

I too noticed the Murray reference, which answers both the late Professor Kocher and our own NZ Strider, who posed the same question as Kocher just a few weeks ago.

I can't make out Unwin's thinking from Tolkien's letters. He seems to have been following his editor's (Mr. Furth) advice earlier in rejecting it as not satisfying the Hobbit readership market; after the war, he must have made a decision to flatter Tolkien with Farmer Giles as a solo volume. But why? It was never a best seller, nor was it really a Hobbit follow-up; LotR was finished but not revised or typed for publication, and as Tolkien observes in his letters, Allen & Unwin didn't exactly go out of their way to promote it. It was like a vanity, or perhaps a "courtesy", volume. I wonder if Unwin has a memoir or a biography to give his side of his relationship with Tolkien?

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