updating the unupdatable

It was some ago that I heard that Lin Carter's book on Tolkien had been updated and republished in Britain. For goodness' sake, I thought, why? Carter's brief treatise, published in 1969, had been one of the first books on Tolkien. It's clumsy, superficial, 35 years out of date, and rendered obsolete by a monumental lack of since-released information on Tolkien's biography and the content of his legendarium. About the only thing it'd be useful for today is an extraordinarily breezy four-chapter history of Western epic fantasy through the ages from Gilgamesh to E.R. Eddison.

But it's my job to keep track of Tolkien scholarship, and this book is part of the 2003 crop I have to write about this fall, so I decided I'd better take a look at it. Rather than hope I run across a copy in England next month, I ordered it with a batch of stuff I wanted from amazon.uk. Last night I went through, comparing the new version and the first edition sentence-by-sentence (I said it was brief) to see what had been changed by the reviser, Adam Roberts (whose presence is only revealed in the text in a tiny copyright-page statement).

( This is really pathetic, so follow only if you care )