J. R. R. Tolkien

[miobrien]

It's been a very long time since I read the Lord of the Rings, and I'm itching to read through the books again. (I'd also like to watch the extended versions of the three films.)

• The Hobbit or There and Back Again (1937)
• The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)
• The Two Towers (1954)
• The Return of the King (1955)

But besides these books there are several others. Has anyone read any of them?

• The Silmarillion (1977)
• The Book of Lost Tales 1 (1983)
• The Book of Lost Tales 2 (1984)
• The Lays of Beleriand (1985)
• The Shaping of Middle-earth (1986)
• The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987)
• The Return of the Shadow (1988)
• The Treason of Isengard (1989)
• The War of the Ring (1990)
• Sauron Defeated (1992)
• Morgoth's Ring (1993)
• The War of the Jewels (1994)
• The Peoples of Middle-earth (1996)
• Unfinished Tales: The Lost Lore of Middle-earth (1980)
• The Children of Hurin (2007)
• The Legend of Sigurd & Gudrun (2009)

[Liam]

Most of the titles in your second list weren't really "written" by Tolkien: they do contain occasional snippets by him, but mostly it's commentary, commentary, commentary by his son Christopher. As I'm not a Middle Earth fanatic (despite loving Tolkien's work in general) I tried perusing them at my leisure and found them rather boring.

The Silmarillion is great, but was left unfinished before Tolkien could give it any definitive shape. Still, he died when most of the myths in the corpus were already complete. The Children of Húrin was largely unfinished, and was completed by Christopher decades later. The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun is Tolkien's attempt to retell the ancient Norse myth in modern alliterative English verse. It's a curiosity, to be sure, but why bother with it when you can read the real deal?

[hdw]

I'd like to back up Liam's last point. Tolkien was inspired by the medieval literature he had read - in several languages - and in which he was so expert, and if you enjoy his reworking of these tales and legends, you would probably enjoy the originals too. If you don't know the original languages, no problem, as there are good translations of Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied, the Norse myths, the Welsh Mabinogion, etc. As someone who has studied some of these languages and literatures, part of my enjoyment of Tolkien comes from spotting the allusions, and seeing where he got his ideas from. To give a very obvious example, his Riders of Rohan are pure Anglo-Saxons. The very name of Theoden, their king, means 'prince' in Anglo-Saxon, aka Old English. and when the Riders greet Theoden with "Wæs þu Þeoden hāl!" they are saying "Hail, prince!" in flawless Anglo-Saxon.

As one of nature's pedants, I get a kick out of recognising that kind of thing.

Harry

[waalkwriter]

Are you not leaving out the influence of the Kalevala on Tolkien? I find, from just cursory readings of sections of the Kalevala, that it shares a lot of similarities with the early sections of the Simarillion. And Tolkien modeled the Elvish languages off Finnish did he not?

[hdw]

I wrote the above quickly, without mature reflection, and if I had taken more time over it I would probably have remembered the Kalevala too. I knew that Tolkien was interested in it.

Just looked up my copy of Humphrey Carpenter J.R.R. Tolkien. A Biography. The index has 13 references in all to Finnish language and Kalevala. On page 66 Carpenter writes:

"At about this time [1912] he discovered Finnish. He had hoped to acquire some knowledge of the language ever since he had read the Kalevala in an English translation, and now in Exeter College library he found a Finnish grammar. With its aid he began an assault on the original language of the poems. He said afterwards: ' It was like discovering a wine-cellar filled with bottles of amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me.'

He never learned Finnish well enough to do more than work through part of the original Kalevala, but the effect on his language-inventing was fundamental and remarkable. He abandoned neo-Gothic and began to create a private language that was heavily influenced by Finnish. This was the language that would eventually emerge in his stories as 'Quenya' or High-elven."

Harry

[Liam]

A beautiful new interview with Christopher in Le Monde. Seems like the family HATED the movies.

[Eric]

Yes, that was in Le Monde. A question that occasionally springs to mind is: did Tolkien know Afrikaans? He evidently spent his childhood and youth in Bloemfontein, and was 24 when he left for France, then England, if I've got my facts right. Bloemfontein is one of the more Afrikaans parts of South Africa, even today. Would it make any difference to Tolkien's international literary reputation if, like Coetzee, he had Afrikaner forebears?

[Liam]

A new work or just something he translated/edited at some point in his life? Is it fragmentary or full? What was the original date of composition? Ah, questions, questions. In any case, here's The Fall of Arthur.

[Liam]

^To clarify the above post, this seems to be an original work, an unfinished poem in the Old English alliterative meter:

"The Fall of Arthur, the only venture by J.R.R. Tolkien into the legends of Arthur King of Britain, may well be regarded as his finest and most skillful achievement in the use of the Old English alliterative metre, in which he brought to his transforming perceptions of the old narratives a pervasive sense of the grave and fateful nature of all that is told: of Arthur's expedition overseas into distant heathen lands, of Guinevere's flight from Camelot, of the great sea-battle on Arthur's return to Britain, in the portrait of the traitor Mordred, in the tormented doubts of Lancelot in his French castle.

Unhappily, The Fall of Arthur was one of several long narrative poems that he abandoned in that period. In this case he evidently began it in the earlier nineteen-thirties, and it was sufficiently advanced for him to send it to a very perceptive friend who read it with great enthusiasm at the end of 1934 and urgently pressed him 'You simply must finish it!'

But in vain: he abandoned it, at some date unknown, though there is some evidence that it may have been in 1937, the year of the publication of The Hobbit and the first stirrings of The Lord of the Rings. Years later, in a letter of 1955, he said that 'he hoped to finish a long poem on The Fall of Arthur'; but that day never came.

Associated with the text of the poem, however, are many manuscript pages: a great quantity of drafting and experimentation in verse, in which the strange evolution of the poem's structure is revealed, together with narrative synopses and very significant if tantalising notes.

In these latter can be discerned clear if mysterious associations of the Arthurian conclusion with The Silmarillion, and the bitter ending of the love of Lancelot and Guinevere, which was never written."