Nanni

If you got the opportunity to add one thing to the canon of any of your fandoms, what would that be? Maybe there’s a character who didn’t get much of a backstory/storyline and you’d like to do something with them, maybe a show was axed too soon and you had thoughts on what could happen in a subsequent season, maybe there’s a new episode you’d like to have added.

I know this is one of those "the book is too short" comments that Tolkien wrote about in the forward for the authorized paperback editions but - !

I wish we came back to Farmer Maggot and the rest of the family at the end of Return of the King, during the return to the Shire. He's such a huge and vital presence during the chase through the Shire, and we never meet him again, nor is he ever referred to after Tom Bombadil tells unspecified stories about him while Frodo and company are staying in his house. The journey and the story skips right through the Marrish during the Scouring chapter. Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin ride through it in about a paragraph after spending the night at the bridge gatehouse.

We're introduced to Tom Cotton and his household, who Sam has remembered or talked about several times during the journey through Mordor, instead: and it's an interesting portrait! I don't want to lose it! But I really do wonder: what did the Maggots do? What kind of response did Maggot have, to Frodo, and to Merry and Pippin, who he knew quite well, when they came back changed and marked by big and sometimes mystical experiences?

So I saw the movie yesterday, and realized within the first five minutes or so that I have a serious Hobbit problem.

I have this book memorized.

No, really! I didn't reread before going to the film, because I frequently find Jackson's attempts at matching Tolkien's tone unsatifying, so the last time I read The Hobbit was... ... ...Eight months ago? Nine? Something like that, anyway.

Didn't help. Still knew it backwards and forwards.

I enjoyed myself anyway! Mom and I agreed right while we were watching that even if the rest of the movie were to suck, it'd have been worth price of admission for the washing up song. That's what Bilbo Baggins hates!

( There was one change that really, really bugged me... )