IX: Sources

Does Tolkien contradict himself?  Very well: he contradicts himself. 

He contains multitudes. He never finalised his meta-narrative; at any rate he never brought the texts embodying that meta-narrative to a publishable state. He could see the whole history of Middle-earth in his head. Some parts he saw more clearly than others. Whenever he wrote one thing down, another thing went out of focus. Wikipedia refers to a non-scholarly source which distinguishes three distinct Middle-earths (Middles-earth?). But probably there are hundreds. We have 6,000 pages of textual variations and footnotes. We have one pretty good editorial stab at presenting those variations as a single text.

In the last years of his life, Christopher Tolkien seemed to be working towards a compromise between the Silmarillion and the History of Middle-earth: three books which presented Tolkien's writings about Turin, Gondolin, and Beren and Luthien in a non-scholarly format, accessible to the general reader, but still reflecting the unfinalised state of the manuscripts. Since his death, the estate has allowed Brian Sibley to present everything Tolkien wrote about the Second Age as a chronological narrative.  

I wonder whether, at some point in the future, some scholar might be let loose on the History of Middle Earth and be allowed to produce an alternate Silmarillion -- a beginning-to-end collage of Tolkien's Unfinalized Tales that makes different choices from the ones that Christopher made? Maybe a readers' edition of the Book of Lost Tales or a Round Earth version of the Silmarillion?

Why not? That text of Hamlet you have your shelf is one editor's set of choices about how the various Folios and Quartos ought to be treated. Even your Penguin Classic Frankenstein is a compromise between the 1818 and 1831 editions: and we now know that some of the boring bits in the first version were written by Percy rather than Mary.  

I wish that were the conversation we were having. I wish that when we watched Rings of Power, we split into the faction that thought that was a good idea to incorporate elements from the Lost Road and the faction who thought they should have stuck rigorously to the published Akallabeth. I wish we were debating which version of the courtship of Galadriel and Celeborn they should run with. I wish we were being shocked to find that they'd dumped the Silmarillion altogether and were treating the abortive re-write as canon. 

I doubt if one in a hundred people watching Saturday evening fantasy TV in the 1980s knew about the textual history of the Robin Hood ballads.  And even fewer cared. But Richard Carpenter did; and he cleverly made the discrepancy between the earlier ballads (where Robin is a yeoman) and the later ones (where he's a nobleman) part of the story.  That kind of thing can be done if it's the kind of thing you want to do.

The Silmarillion is not sacred. 

But some people speak as if -- some people may honestly believe -- Christopher Tolkien created the Silmarillion out of the whole cloth. I hear every day apologists for the Rings of Power asserting on social media that Silmarillion is not really by Tolkien; that it is new work that Christopher made up based on his father's notes; that those of who object to the TV show's dumping of the lore are clinging to a "head-canon" that we ourselves made up. 

Now, writers' kids sometimes do invent new books; and they sometimes even put their dad's names on them.  And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. We all know about Brian Herbert writing new Dune novels based on synopses discovered among his late father's papers, and going on to create many further volumes out of his own imagination. Many people have told me that they are not very good; but there is nothing sinful about their existing. There are twenty-five more or less official sequels to the Wizard of Oz written by persons other than Frank Baum. A licensed continuation of Tolkien by Other Hands might be very interesting. I am frankly astonished that no one has attempted, officially or unofficially, to write The New Shadow based on Tolkien's thirteen page opening chapter. 

But that is not where we in fact are. 

Where we are is that some gate-leaver-openers are using the admittedly unfinalized state of Tolkien's mythos as a nuclear option to deploy against those of us who honestly don't think the Rings of Power is very good. Tolkien didn't publish the Silmarillion so the Silmarillion is not by Tolkien so no version of Middle-earth is any better than any other so there is no lore for Rings of Power to be faithful to and everyone else should jolly well shut being so horrid about it.  And that is fannish trolling and gate-leaving of the silliest kind. 

However....

Rings of Power

Season 1 Reviews

Season 2 Reviews

Season 1 Reviews (Book)

Season 2 Reviews (Book) (Available Soon)

Complete Reviews Season 1 - 7 (Available Jan 2035)