I was wrong and Kocher was right: the story specifically mentions a "hard
winter" in the mountains where the giants and dragons lived, although it was
still early in winter, before Christmas.
I thought about the idea of Giles being composed as relaxation after
The Hobbit. I wish we could trace the history of each project more
exactly: the annotated Giles supposes the first manuscript of
Giles to date from the late 20s, because it seems less mature than the
earliest version of The Hobbit which dates to about 1930. Even the
first typescript version of Giles can only be placed somewhere between
1932 (when may be when it was translated into French by a student of Tolkien)
and 1937 (when that translation is mentioned in a letter).
Has anyone printed 11-year-old Rayner Unwin's short review of Giles
here?
