The Annotated Gulliver’s Travels

 

Happy New Year, and a Happy Birthday to J. R. R. Tolkien, who if he were alive would have been 130 years old today, equal to the third oldest Hobbit in history. That would be Gerontius (the Old) Took, Bilbo’s grandfather. Bilbo would of course surpass him by one year shortly before going over sea. Of course, the oldest was Gollum/Smeagol (‘of Hobbit kind’) at 589, but then, he had extended help.

Today I also received the first book of the year, The Annotated Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, with notes by Isaac Asimov. This was ordered on December 30^th as one of a batch I sent off for with money I got for Christmas. It arrived surprisingly early.

Now, I cannot exactly claim the Travels as one of my very favorite books, although it is of course a classic of enormous cultural influence and importance which I have greatly enjoyed when the mood strikes me. Therefore, it was with some dismay that I realized that I had sold my old paperback and was without any ‘real world’ copy. But there was a very felicitous remedy for my dilemma.

          I love an annotated edition, and I had read this one years ago, either in high school or college. I had never particularly cared for Isaac Asimov, either authorially or personally, but I could not fault his research or his marshalling of facts, and I enjoyed the selections from contemporary art and the illustrations selected from editions of over two hundred years (including some pictures by Fritz Eichenberg, one of my favorite artists). With Christmas money in hand, I finally popped on this deal.

    It is going, of course, onto the shelf with my other annotated books, as soon as I have thoroughly gone through it again. It is, of course, a famous work of satire, a travelogue of wonders, an adventure tale, proto-science fiction (which is why I suppose Asimov was chosen to annotate it), and yet it has somehow been relegated to the children’s shelf for the last century or so. This may be attributed to the “conceit of big and little men” as Samuel Johnson sniffingly dismissed Swift’s creation, with its suggestion of elves and giants. But it is more and other than that.