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V: The Lost Road and Other Writings, Part Three: The Etymologies
This is a essentially a dictionary of every root for the two main versions of Elvish Tolkien created, as they existed just before he began writing The Lord of the Rings, circa 1937. Here is single entry:
ÁLAK- rushing. *álākō rush, rushing flight, wild wind: N alag, rushing, impetuous; alagos storm of wind. Cf. Ancalagon dragon-name [NAK]. Related to LAK.
*alk-wā swan: Q alqa; T alpa; ON alf; Ilk. alch; Dan. ealc. Cf. Alqalonde Swan-road or Swan-haven, city of the Teleri [LOD].
Now, it goes on like this for 65 pages! For those who don’t know anything about the Tolkien canon this is complete gibberish, but like any technical writing, it’s full of information for those who already know. In Noldorin the word for a wind took on the implication of rash action. They named a dragon that! There’s more information about dragons at the root NAK. There are cognate words for “swan” in Qenya, Old Noldorin and Telerin (the languages of the three types of “high” elves), as well as in Ilkorian (eventually to develop into Sindarin) and Danian (spoken by the Green elves).
On one level it is completely ridiculous to make such an exhaustive word list for a set of made up languages. Even move so, because the completed word list quickly became opposite as Tolkien revised the language relationships and rejected the idea of Noldorin as a separate language. As a technical tool for studying Tolkien’s elvish languages, The Etymologies is, sadly, a useless (or at least deeply flawed) document. It represents a single moment in time. The crystallization of the creator’s thoughts into one glorious complete whole before the next moment’s thoughts made it obsolete. This is, in many ways, the story of all the History of Middle-earth documents. So many of them represent searing moments of creativity when Tolkien put everything in is head down in one place. Usually, he moved on to other ideas before he even finished and even when he did finish, he almost always immediately began revisions. His stories where never complete because his world was always changing in his mind. But then, on another level, this is what I love about it. I love to experience these rare moments when he did complete a work, even if he later changed most of it. I appreciate the vicarious joy of creation which must have driven him to just get it all down in some form.
I like to visit The Etymologies and wander through the myths, seeing the tenuous links between dragon names and city names. The implied stories in cross-cultural word play. The story of the world is there in the notes behind the words. It’s a fascinating document. I have even used it to pull together names for characters in roleplaying games. One of my characters had a suit of armor named Alagos, because of The Etymologies.
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III: The Lays of Beleriand, Part Three: The Lay of Leithian
The story of Lúthien and Beren is one of the two “big” stories in The Silmarillion, so it’s no surprise it’s a story Tolkien told several times. I already have one on this list, but The Lay of Leithian deserves the higher spot for its sheer ambition. Over six years in the late ‘20s into the ‘30s he managed to write over 4000 lines of rhyming couplets, telling about 80 percent of the story. Thusly:
But Thingol looked on Lúthien.
“Fairest of Elves! Unhappy Men,
children of little lords and kings
mortal and frail, these fading things,
shall they then look with love on thee?”
his heart within him thought. “I see
they ring,” he said, “O mighty man!
But to win the child of Melian
a father’s deeds shall not avail,
nor thy proud words at which I quail.
A treasure dear I too desire,
but rocks and steel and Morgoth’s fire
from all the power of Elfinesse
do keep the jewel I would possess.
Yet bonds like these I hear thee say
affright thee not. Now go thy way!
Bring me one shinning Silmaril
from Morgoth’s crown, then if she will,
may Lúthien set her hand in thine;
then shalt thou have this jewel of mine.”
It has all the same beats as any over version of the tale, but told in this very particular way. Like all long-form verse, it takes a little bit to get into the flow of it, but once you do, it’s fascinating for being one of the most detailed versions of the story. To me, that’s one of the great things about reading through the HoME books. Works like this poem have blown apart, for me, the authority of the published Silmarillion. That’s not “the real story” and this is some weird verse version of it. No, this is one version of a story which exists in many forms, just as the edited and pasted-together prose version in The Silmarillion is another version of that same story. Reading this, aside from its inherit qualities, contributes to an overall impression that the heroic stories of Tolkien’s First Age really are timeless tales “of old” because they have been told and retold in so many ways. Knowing full well all the versions are by Tolkien himself doesn’t really diminish that impression. At least, not for me.
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VII: The Treason of Isengard, V: Bilbo’s Song at Rivendell: Errantry and Eärendillinwë
I am unsure why this poem speaks to me so much. I think it is more the process of transformation which is revealed in this chapter. Tolkien wrote a quirky poem in the 1930s about a typical Nineteenth Century fairy riding a grasshopper and wooing a butterfly. The poem was developed and published as “Errantry” in a magazine in 1933. Later, during the writing of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien revisited the poem and over several drafts transformed the basic structure into a narrative description of the mariner Eärendil and his final journey into the West to summon the help of the Valar in the final days of the First Age. Many of these iterations are given in full in the book.
To me, this transformation illustrates perfectly part of what Tolkien imagined he was doing. Silly songs about fae dancing in the moonlight which he had grown up with were just the pale and half-forgotten memories of heroic deeds in ancient days. He recast the rhyme “Hey-Diddle-Diddle” as an old Hobbit song, which in turn referred back to the man in the moon from the elvish creation myth. In transforming his own poem “Errantry” into Bilbo’s “Eärendillinwë” – good enough to receive a hearing before the elves of Rivendell – Tolkien is again revealing to us the deeper “truth” behind the “diminished” fairy stories we still tell.
It’s very “meta,” in the modern parlance. He didn’t make it explicit in anything I have read, but it seems Tolkien knew perfectly well what he was doing. This chapter contains excerpts of Tolkien’s writings to others about the link between the poems. In the introduction to a 1962 collection where “Errantry” was republished, he supposed Bilbo must have written the “silly” version earlier before he moved to Rivendell. The chapter ends with some fascinating behind-the-scenes information about the poem. The multiple drafts, the statements of the author, the commentary of the editor to put it all in sequence; together, this is the History series at its best.
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IV: The Shaping of Middle-earth, II: The Earliest ‘Silmarillion’
Tolkien’s natural working method was iterative. He would begin a text, abandoned it, start over creating a more detailed version of the same material, abandon that as well, start over again but with a different voice (perhaps changing from an annal style to a narrative from). The result of this method is many stories get told many times, in various ways, and in various levels of detail. The meeting of Beren and Lúthien, for example, is one of the most-told tales, even making it into The Lord of the Rings. By contrast, some stories were almost never retold – the siege of Gondolin comes to mind. This is why this selection from the late '20s, which Tolkien called “Sketch of the mythology with especial reference to the ‘Children of Húrin’”, is so valuable. It is a continuous narrative of everything from the moment the Valar entered the newly-made world, through the battles of the First Age. This document is not for poetry or clever names or descriptions of throne rooms, it is focused on the big events – who fought whom over what and the outcome. It’s the only time Tolkien wrote the whole thing down. It’s about 30 pages, a mere sketch indeed! But the whole story is there! We get Melkor’s betrayal, the Kinslaying, the building of Nargothrond and Gondolin, the recovery of one Silmaril, the destruction of each elvish refuge, the birth of Elrond, the mission of Eärendil, and the Last Battle. Then we get hints of what will happen in the future when the world will finally be healed from all Melkor’s damage.
It’s a breathless read. It moves. There is such a wide scope to the mythology in Tolkien’s mind, and it’s all there for the reader to see. The way in which legacies and resonances play out over the generations and the ages are clearly on display. This complete mythology would have been amazing to read. That is the bittersweet flip side of so many of the these drafts and preparatory materials. He never managed to set this whole saga down again. He told most of it in various parts, but as he left it and as it was assembled into The Silmarillion, it is difficult or impossible for most people to get a sense of the whole thing. This “sketch” is a complete, focused version and it’s from the author’s hand as well. So go read it!
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IX: Sauron Defeated, Part Two: The Norton Club Papers
My affection for The Norton Club Papers stems from the fact this unfinished work combines most of what I like about the other selections on this “best of” list. The work is, at once, a “meta” joke about Tolkien’s own life and obsessions, it is presented as one of the many “layers” of myth-retelling which Tolkien built into the back-story of how his ancient stories were transmitted down to today, it sits on the boarder between fantasy and “weird fiction”, and its unfinished nature allows me to imagine the shape of what the finished version could have been.
To describe it simply, Papers is the minutes of a literary club at Oxford college. The members are described, their jovial banter is recorded, and their compositions are read into the record. Then one of their number named Lowdham begins to share the ancient language he hears in his dreams. This leads Lowdham and Jeremy, another member of the club, to travel up and down the west coast of Ireland hoping they can “get” a little more of this language which seems to come to them from the sea. Then in waking dreams, they witness the final days of Númenor.
I love both what Papers is and what it is trying to be. Its ambition and execution as a work of fiction is impressive. I think I like it even more to take it as one of Tolkien’s most honestly personal works. He wrote what there is of it in a rush over Christmas break 1945, so it is remarkably consistent in tone and depth. I enjoy that he was able to indulge his penchant for writing dialogue of fussy English people (the over-long early versions of his forward Concerning Hobbits come to mind). This is explicitly drawn from his experience with his own literary club because the first page of the manuscript suggests the Norton Club was modeling itself on The Inklings of old. He writes about what it is like to hang out with other English professors and challenge each other to impossible games like “let’s guess what the language of Atlantis must have been.” We get to be the fly on the wall. I love that through his various characters Tolkien points out his own real influences; various characters make reference to Atlantis, Avalon, St. Brendon and even Lewis’s Numinor as a way to seat Númenor into its literary context. I love the visions Lowdham has and tries to describe to his friends. He tells them of seeing the dome of a particular building at their college at night with a cloud behind it and inexplicably knowing it looked the same at the great temple in the capitol of Númenor after Sauron had initiated human sacrifice as part of worshiping the darkness. To me, this is Tolkien writing of his own experience of having these sort of “knowing” visions which he is trying to capture and understand through his writing. I love that the Papers are dated in the late eighties, meaning Tolkien was essentially imagining people in the future looking back on him and his peers. Everything about the work is odd and oddly personal in a uniquely great way. It is so like and yet also so unlike his other writings. If only he had finished it...
That does it! My ten favorites, ranked. If you have read The Lord of the Rings and crave some more Tolkien, my first recommendation is The Unfinished Tales of Middle-earth and Númenor. If you still want some more Tolkien after that, then come dive into depths of The History of Middle-earth series. You may find this link to What’s in the History of Middle-earth? helpful in finding your own favorite selections. Thank you for reading.
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