Talk:Red Book of Westmarch/Archive 1

Comments
Why is part of the title of the book struck out? Is there a reason for this? –Benjamin  ( talk ) 01:54, 19 February 2006 (UTC)
 * See the last chapter of the Lord of the Rings. The article is reproducing the title page of the Red Book as described there... including various titles stricken out. --CBDunkerson 13:00, 19 February 2006 (UTC)
 * This really ought to be a part of the article. It confused me as well (and I've read them several times...) --D3matt 03:40, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
 * These concerns seem to have since been rectified. --Thisisbossi 07:49, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

history of Red Book
I've often wondered how we were supposed to imagine Tolkien got access to the Red Book. If this is not mentioned anywhere, I'd suggest adding a sentence immediately after Tolkien's claim that he translated the book from Westron, something like "Nowhere in his writings does his fictional persona say how he learned Westron or how the Red Book came into his hands." &mdash;JerryFriedman (Talk) 05:06, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Deletion

 * Another has quoted one of Tolkien's letters to suggest that his pose as translator reflected his perception of the writing process:


 * 'I always had the sense of recording what was already "there", somewhere, not of "inventing",' (Letters, p. 131), a feeling that lay behind the fictional device of the 'Red Book of Westmarch'…

The quotation is actually from p. 145, letter 131 (not p. 131) of the 1981 Letters; the error is Mr. Caldecott's (he, or his editor, repeatedly turned letter numbers into page numbers). The quoted material is half Tolkien's ("I...'inventing'") and half Caldecott's interpretation ("a feeling...Westmarch'"). But the quote from Tolkien does not refer to the Red Book at all, and so has no place in this article. RandomCritic (talk) 13:23, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Handwritten edition
Putting this out there (don't laugh at the price). It is "handwritten in English by the Hungarian artist Hári Isván", with an interview here. Similar craft being displayed here. Tastes vary, and I'm not sure how much of this is encyclopedic, but maybe someone will one day write about the phenomenon of artistic responses in this vein. Carcharoth (talk) 14:06, 11 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Clearly not intending to sell very many... as you say, if somebody bothers to write about this in a respectable newspaper, we'll be able to report on it. The Tolkien Library is actually quite a serious sort of site and is almost usable. Perhaps if a consensus were to be reached on it at WikiProject Middle-earth that would be sufficient. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:11, 11 March 2020 (UTC)