After a good many years of reading one chapter at a time, here and there between other books, and really taking the time to saver them, earlier this year I have finished all twelve volumes of the History of Middle Earth series. This is a collection of most of J.R.R. Tolkien’s previously unpublished manuscripts which relate to Middle Earth, each with detailed notes from his son, literary executor, and fellow Anglo-Saxon professor; Christopher Tolkien. The books were, for me at least, almost always enjoyable to read. Not only do they contain more, or alternate versions of, stories about Hobbits, Elves, “Atlantis” and even tweed-wearing professors, they are full of the younger Tolkien’s personal reflections. He remembers when and where the family moved to align the dates of scraps of material written on the backs of envelopes. He recounts his trials puzzling out his father’s handwriting in decades-old notebooks. He even admits to mistakes he made in assembling
The Silmarillion for publication in the 1970s. This is all value added. I get the sense, though he never admits it in the text, this was an important project for Christopher Tolkien precisely because, in a way, he got to go back and live with his father again in such a personal way.
I’d like to say everything was amazing, but it wasn’t. How could it be? A bunch of the material is incomplete or rejected or deemed to not fit into what had already gone before. Even so, there’s a lot I liked. Here are the bottom five of my top ten materials from all twelve volumes.
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VIII: The War of the Ring, Part Three: Minas Tirith, XII: The Last Debate
Volumes VI, VII, VIII and part of IX contain the draft versions of
The Lord of the Rings. I do like reading the early versions of the tale where Bilbo’s cousin Bingo meets Trotter, a very well-travelled hobbit, in Bree. Mostly, the draft texts are a curiosity, but some contain interesting details which ended up getting cut. At one stage of writing, there was a scene after the Battle of Pelennore Fields where Gimli, Legolas, Merry and Pippin catch each other up on what happened on their different roads. The story about the Paths of Dead was later moved to its final place in the chapter The Passing of the Grey Company and was shaved down in the process. In the draft version of the chapter, Gimli tells, very briefly, about how they found the body of Baldor son of Brego, one of the early kings of Rohan along the way. He died beside a door he couldn’t open. There isn’t much more said, but Gimli calls it a sight he cannot forget. I feel the same way. For some reason, there’s a deep tragedy in the idea of this person lost in the dark and unable to open a door. Where does the door even lead? Who else was with him? Why did he want to enter the Paths in the first place? So many questions spiral out from these few lines and no answers are given. We are left to fill in the details. It’s classic spooky storytelling. Let the reader think of something, it’ll be worse than whatever the writer could says. There are a lot of moments like this in Tolkien generally, but even more so in the unfinished and draft versions. I think it is where Tolkien is at his best, giving us just enough to feel like there is a bigger world here. It’s the illusion of other vistas behind the vistas.
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X: Morgoth’s Ring, Part Four, Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth
Most of the material in volumes IX, X and XI is from after
LotR was written when Tolkien returned to the stories of the First Age. There is an early period before
LotR was actually published when he still hoped to have the First Age tales published with
The Lord of Rings. There is also a later period after publication when he was still trying to bring all the tales of the First Age into a publishable form and also to make the world consistent with what was now canon in the published text. For example, he tried to re-write the creation myth to account for modern astronomy which, he felt, demanded a round earth from the beginning of the story, rather then a flat world later made round. He also wrote an essay trying to describe, for himself at least, how the Elves actually died and if Glorfindel of Rivendell really could be Glorfindel of Gondolin.
From this same later period comes
Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, which translates to The Debate of Finrod and Andreth. This work is set up as a discussion between the Noldo King Finrod Felagund and Andreth, a Wise-woman of the human House of Bëor. She was the great aunt of Beren One-hand. They discuss the different ways they, as the two kinds of Children of Illuvatar, live and die.
Athrabeth is, first of all, a very different view of what happened in the First Age – the other tales are mostly heroic tales of battles, magic and daring do. It’s refreshing, in a holistic, medieval way, to think the same guy who died frighting a werewolf in a pit for dude bro honor also had this reasoned discussion with another mature scholar. The Noldor are always supposed to be the “wise” elves as well as the heroic ones, so it’s nice to have a dialogue of that sharing of wisdom.
Aside from being a cool thing to add to the canon, I find
Athrabeth fascinating because it puts ideas Tolkien had written about elvish life cycles in other places into the mouth of an elf. Finrod tells Andreth about
hröar and
fëa, which roughly mean Body and Spirit. These terms, and the concepts Finrod talks about, don’t really show up elsewhere. Similarly, Andreth tells him lore which shows up nowhere else. In ancient times humans met and fell under the power of a horrible being she has come to understand was Morgoth (Sauron’s boss and the original Dark Lord, for those who don’t know). This is, to me, more of Tolkien putting his Catholic faith into his fiction.
What I found so interesting about it, however, is Andreth presents this information as a great shame and something she can barely discuss. Since it shows up no where else, is it really such an important idea for Tolkien that his fantasy humans also had a -capital F- Fall? I get the feeling from reading the
Athrabeth, as well as what Tolkien wrote to friends in his letters, that is was an important part of his thinking, at least in later years. His was retelling Christian theology and so a Fall, a period of tension between good and evil, a final battle, and the ultimate removal of humans from the created world are all there; just but recast in fantasy terms. It’s not always so clear when Samwise is reciting Bilbo’s silly song about trolls, but it’s very clear in some other these other works what Tolkien was doing.
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V: The Lost Road and Other Writings, Part One: The Fall of Númenor and The Lost Road, III: The Lost Road
Tolkien was haunted by a tale he could never rightly tell. He tired several times and in different ways to tell the story of the fall of Númenor. Aragorn is descended from the Númenorians and some of his family history is told in
The Lord of the Rings. There is the annalistic list Tolkien prepared of the rulers of Númenor for inclusion in the Appendices to
LotR. Then, there is
The Lost Road. Legend says Tolkien and his writing buddy, C. S. Lewis, challenged each other to write a tale of travel. Lewis was to write of “travel in space” and he produced the novel
Out of the Silent Planet, and went on to expand it into a trilogy. Tolkien was to write of “travel in time” and he began to write
The Lost Road, which progressed no further than a first draft of sketches and some connected poetry. Like so many of his other abandoned stories, the parts of
The Lost Road which exist hint at a powerful finished work about family legacy and human tragedy writ over thousands of years.
In brief,
The Lost Road begins in the modern era with a son and father beside the ocean. The son feels a strange pull to go to sea, almost like it is a memory of the past. The father admits he felt it too as a young man. This scene repeats again and again, each time going deeper into history. According to the story, fathers and sons have always stood on the beaches of England, looked out over the Atlantic, and thought they really belonged “out there somewhere.” This leads all the way back in time to Tolkien’s Second Age of the Sun when humans really did live on a huge island, Númenor, in the middle of The Great Sea. Then the tale begins to tell of the beginning of the end of Númenor’s age of bliss and the political machinations and betrayals which led to its destruction by the gods.
I like most of the ideas
The Lost Road plays around with. I actually like the sentimentality of using generations of father-son conversations to bring the reader into the story. Tolkien was someone who loved his children very much. Many of his stories emerged from ones he told his children and his letters to his son while his son was in uniform during the Second World War positively gush with affection and worry. There is not so much familial love on display in his major published works, but it was clearly part of who he was. I like seeing him write these intimate scenes for this story. I enjoy that the idea of “racial memory” or “generational longing” is how a fantasy writer and linguist would tell a story of “time travel.” He certainly wouldn’t write about a time
machine, as any Tolkien fan should know. I have experienced false nostalgia from reading particularly moving descriptions of the past, but the longing to be someplace you have never been is not something I have felt spontaneously. It seems Tolkien himself did feel that way and he tried to work through those feelings, in part, with this story. He explored this in more depth in another abandoned story I will discuss later in this countdown.
Should I mention how the whole Númenor is remembered as Atlantis aspect of the story and the Númenorians being a “blessed” and “better sort” of people is problematic? Maybe I should.
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XI: The War of the Jewels, Part Three: The Wanderings of Húrin and Other Writings Not Forming Part of the
Quenta Silmarillion, I: The Wanderings of Húrin
This is a prime example of an unnecessary text. I’m sure that’s why material from it was not incorporated into
The Silmarillion. It’s a remarkably complete text, though, so that suggests it was important to Tolkien. Or it could be he just got a wild hare to write it and dashed it off all at once.
Húrin was a human warrior, one of the lords of the Edain, who allied with the Elves against Morgoth. He was also the father of Túrin and Niënor whom Morgoth cursed and whose downfall has a prominent place in
The Silmarillion. The doom brought upon the brother and sister is technically Morgoth’s torment of Húrin whom he captured, chained to a seat on a fortress, and cursed with supernatural sight so he could watch the tragedy of his children’s lives unfold. Then, to rub salt in the wound, after his children were dead, Morgoth released Húrin and sent him to do what he willed. What he did, as told in
The Wanderings of Húrin is go get revenge on the Folk of Brethil. Túrin had lived and fought for this forest-dwelling people for many years, but they would not assist him in his final battle with the dragon Glaurung. He essentially attempts to shame them for not being braver, but he doesn’t really want to inspire them, he wants to incite them to revolt against their hereditary lord. This he does and the fight effectively ruins Brethil and another stable land holding the line against Morgoth is ruined. It’s a tragedy in all respects. Húrin oversteps decency out of anger, the lord of Brethil oversteps decency in response out of fear, with the Folk of Brethil caught in the middle; genuinely remorseful they let Túrin be killed and genuinely torn about whom to follow.
This is a classic Tolkienesque conflict of ancient rights and personal motives. To me, the central scene is one in which Húrin speaks to a moot gathered at Doom-rock (it reminded me of the scene at a natural stone amphitheater early in Richard Adams’
Shardik, even though that was written later). This is where Húrin gives the speech which upsets the Brethil society. It is similar to Tolkien’s other “mental contest” scenes, such as Gandalf breaking Grima’s hold on Théoden or Aragorn talking to the Mouth. It also has something of Marc Antony speaking over Caesar’s body in Shakespeare. It’s very much about the power in words and working one’s will through words almost like magic.
It’s all well-developed, mature storytelling. Tolkien had it in him. He didn’t write many scenes like this, but he could write them.
Wanderings is what’s good about Tolkien on display. Then again, it’s his weakness as a writer too, because this fully-realized story fragment doesn’t connect to much of anything. It’s way too detailed to be included in the annals of the First Age, but it’s not given a proper beginning or ending, so it can’t be called a proper short story. It’s a very striking couple chapters orphaned from an novel which was never written.
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II: The Book of Lost Tales Part 2, Part One: The Tale of Tinúviel
The first two volumes of the History of Middle Earth, unsurprisingly, contain the earliest versions of what eventually became
The Silmarillion, begun while Tolkien was convalescing from a bout of flu during the First World War. In 1917 he first wrote the story which eventually developed into a touchstone for his life: The Tale of Lúthien and Beren.
What amazes me most about all the
Lost Tales versions of the stories is how similar they are, in broad strokes, from the first to the tales as later written. At the same time, the details and the tone of the stories are so different, they are hardly the same stories at all.
The Tale of Tinúviel is emblematic. In short, Beren wishes to win Tinúviel’s hand from her stern father Tinwë and so they go off together, make friends with a great hound named Huan, fight an evil prince, take on Melko himself to claim a Silmaril only to have Beren’s hand bitten off by a giant wolf named Karkaras, which Beren and Tinwë eventually slay to recover the jewel. These fundamentals of the story did not change over 60 years of development! It’s remarkable. These stories arose almost fully formed from some deep, very personal place, it seems, and just stuck around with Tolkien forever.
But the tone is so different. Firstly, the language is full of constructions to sound “old timey” like “surely, my thane” and “then did she lave her hand.” Then Tinúviel’s magic is totally fairy tale. She sings a song of all the longest and tallest things to make her hair grow long enough so she can weave it into a rope to escape from the tree top house where she was being kept. Lastly, while telling the story is part of the point, Tolkien can’t help but make it something of a just so story along the way. The tale contains the line, “Wherefore it is that there is hatred between the Elves and all cats even now.” Yes, that evil prince I mentioned is a large black cat called Tevildo Prince of Cats and he menaces first Beren (by making him hunt rat-sized mice) and then Tinúviel. That’s where Huan, the great hound, comes in and he chases Tevildo off. If this part of the story sounds familiar too, it’s because through various mutations, Tevildo eventually becomes Sauron who, in the form of a werewolf, fights with Huan and loses.
I love this version of the story. It’s so goofy and charming, which was clearly what Tolkien was originally going for. The valor, dignity, and complex relationships between fate and heroism he later explored with the same First Age stories just isn’t here. These are “simply” new fairy stories in the vein of the ones Tolkien had read as a child.
I’ve got five more to talk about
next time!
