A 'darker' Hobbit

[davem]

Among all the fuss surrounding CoH we seem to have forgotten the other major Tolkien related publishing event of this year.

I found this on a search about the 'Mr Baggins: A History of the Hobbit' (the equivalent, I suppose of HoM-e for TH):

Originally Posted by John Rateliff

"The 1960 Hobbit has never been published but will be included in my forthcoming edition of The Hobbit manuscript. As I said in the footnote, it’s relatively brief but of great interest. In the meantime, if you’re not familiar with Tolkien’s other slightly earlier recasting of the material, "The Quest of Erebor", which appeared in Unfinished Tales, I suggest you look it up; other versions have since appeared in HME Vol. XII and in the revised edition of The Annotated Hobbit. The 1960 Hobbit would have been the Third Edition of the original book, had he carried through on the revisions, and would have changed the tone about as much as the 1947 rewrite of the Gollum chapter changes that section."

Mr Baggins is due to be published in two volumes in May & June.

I'm assuming that this '3rd edition' will basically show Tolkien's attempt to re-write TH along the lines of what we have in The Quest of Erebor. Of course, its difficult to discuss the details of a book that hasn't been published yet, but it just got me wondering whether we'd consider such a 're-write' as 'better' than the version we have. If Rateliff is correct that this version, if completed, would have been the '3rd Edition' then this 'darker' version would have replaced the one we have - in the same way that the 2nd edition would have replaced the 1st.

Would we have missed the 'lighter' version of the story - the 'children's book'? Personally, I'm looking forward to reading 'Mr Baggins' as much as CoH.

Any thoughts?

(Oh, & btw, there's a new edition of Mr Bliss out in October)