Challenge: Tolkien reading
There is now one official entry, from Jennifer Greig! The contest runs until next Wednesday so there’s lots of time to enter. Remember, there are prizes. See the original FRBR Challenge post for the details and Greig’s nice FRBRization of an atlas of Middle-Earth.
Here’s another example from me:
- Work: The Return of the King, by J.R.R. Tolkien.
- Expression: Tolkien’s abridgement (unknown date), read by Tolkien himself.
- Manifestation: Included in The J.R.R. Tolkien Audio Collection, a four-cassette collection from Caedmon (ISBN 155994675X), c1992.
- Item: The copy owned by the Maryvale branch of the Toronto Public Library, call number FICTION TOL.
- Relations: The abridgement is a new expression the original work, not a new work in itself. The abridgement is in fact a new expression based on another expression, Tolkien’s original text (or perhaps his revised text, though I don’t suppose it would matter). The expression was read aloud by Tolkien and manifested in the recording stored on cassette. It may also be manifested in print, but I don’t know.
Things get a bit more complicated because this recording is one of several on The J.R.R. Tolkien Audio Collection, which also includes readings of adbridgements of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and some poems and songs and other things, some read by Tolkien’s son Christopher. Is this work part of that larger work, or is it just this manifestation that’s part of something larger? Hmm.
Further musings: In a FRBR-aware catalogue, I imagine that when looking at any work I would see a link to a list of all audiobook versions, or indeed perhaps all audio versions, including dramatizations. This reading would be on a list along with any unabridged recordings and perhaps the relevant parts of the BBC’s radio dramatization. Looking at the other recordings in this Caedmon collection would lead me up to their works and to the trilogy as a whole.