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Clues by Imogen and Grid by Patch
Theme: The Hobbit
The winner of the September puzzle is Robin Stephenson of London.
I quailed when considering Imogen's September puzzle, for of all the Guardian daily setters, he is the one I often find the most difficult. He was once Editor of crosswords for the Times, and I am sure that on the days when I could not get a foothold in that puzzle, it was usually one of his. However, I actually found this to be one of the year's easiest so far: it helped that I am very familiar with the works of JRR Tolkien.
Patch's grid is a superbly controlled production: while there is a window, a musical direction and an instrument, there are no bars; while there is a dragon and various kinds of non-human, there are no snakes (whatever Day 4 might suggest). I must say I don't mind snakes when solving, but they do often suggest (if non-thematic) that something has got slightly out of hand. I don't know what happened to the yellow cells: they were rather transparent, making filling in the grid slightly difficult, with my tentative pencil anyway; but that was a minor inconvenience.
The LONELY MOUNTAIN (Erebor) was nicely distributed through the levels, as was THE HOBBIT. Those thematic items which appeared as entries were not cruelly disguised: I liked the way the elements sword, receptacle and drinks were incorporated into BILBO BAGGINS, while there and back again was one of the many titles that reluctant hero himself proposed for his book. BOMBUR was of course only 'so small' in one dimension: we should perhaps give the 3D facts here with the update from The Lord of the Rings that he had later become so fat that several colleagues were needed to carry him to the table to eat. THORIN's clue neatly brings in something of Tolkien's own story: his way into the writing of fiction was through his scholarship in various mediaeval languages (though The Hobbit was composed for his children, while he continued that lifelong digestion of ideas linguistic, cultural and religious which would ultimately produce what he saw as his real work, The Silmarillion).
Imogen is good at misdirection: here he was in a very helpful mood in general, but there were some nice examples of clues whose subject seems far from that which is really defined. IMSHI as shove off was nice, and probably generated by his decision to work Loch Ness into the following clue; OUTSING does that sneaky thing, defining a verb by using what in the clue plays the role of a noun: our grandparents in Cryptics would not have let us get away with that, but I am very glad that the cause of mystification today is served by a greater variety of devices. Finally UNDUE is another tricky customer, repeating the change in part of speech but also requiring the subtraction of three initial letters from the half-way stage undulate: I must admit I reverse-solved that one, and even that took most of the month.
Other clues I particularly enjoyed were those for PSALM – still without work giving the S which remains when till is taken off – which is one of the trickier ones; the smashing SINGED, which gives a giggle over the grammatical error at the same time as we appreciate the neatness of the barbershop double meaning – perhaps the best clue here for the purist; and the juxtaposition of ELVES and DWARVES (a proximity that's been risky ever since the Nauglamir incident) with the very felicitous link referring to the imprisonment of the questing group by Thranduil's forces. Incidentally, what a great episode that is, with its echoes of Robin's escape from Nottingham, The Borrowers Afloat (published two decades later, but never mind) and even the doomed Babington Plot.
Frank Paul's visual clue gives us another feature of Tolkien's books: for they are page-turners which do indeed forbid the Zs of sleep. Does the recumbent figure conceal a torch under the covers, as many will have done when first reading The Hobbit and other works? Graham Fox has again risked life and limb to bring us our splendid background photograph. BEORN may have a small role in the story, but he is one of its most mysterious figures; and at any rate it wasn't GOLLUM.
All together a fine and very approachable tribute to one of the master's early works, and to him (see his published Letters) likely to have been much more acceptable than some of the excesses of Hollywood.
AGC
Grid Solution
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