Appendices That Might Have Been

So, one of the interesting side-effects of studying an author's works is that the better you know them the more inevitable they look. It's like listening to a classic recording of a favorite song or watching a well-known film: rejected drafts, alternate takes, deleted scenes all show how a work could have been different than it wound up being, yet the path chosen becomes very much the 'right' path in our minds.  This is why glimpses into roads not taken are so important.

I was looking at a good example of this during my recent time at Marquette--a document I'd never looked at before, one of the last pieces of LotR manuscript to reach Marquette (Mss-4, Box 2, folder 16, pages 1-2: Early Contents Material). This is essentially a collection of Tables of Contents for LotR put together at various times.* I mentioned in my last post how Tolkien totaled up the page count of each of LotR's six Books to get an idea of just how long the completed book was. His purpose for doing so seems to have been to get a sense of how much room there was for ancillary material. He had already allotted within his 927 page, 89,000 word total a foreword (12 pages) and the Epilogue (5 pages); now on that same sheet he jotted down titles of things he wanted to include in the Appendix:

Of the languages of the Third Age and of Translation

The Calendar

Chronology of the Tale

The Script and the Runes

Genealogical Tables

Maps
   1. General Map of the Westlands
   2. The Shire
   3. Gondor and Mordor

List of Names with notes on their pronunciation and derivation

Of the Rings of Power

The Fall of Numenor

Of Aragorn and Arwen Undomiel

Chronology of the Third Age: The Tale of Years

The Heirs of Isildur

The House of Eorl

Of Durin's Race

Angerthas Moria

Pennas Golodrina

Lammas Veleriandzen

Dangweth Pengolodh

Lay of Luthien

Pennas iNgeleid

Most of these pieces made it into the six Appendices in some form and fashion; others had to wait for the 1977 Silmarillion, like the Fall of Numenor (in the form of The Akallabeth) and 'Of the Rings of Power', and a few never quite made it in, like the List of Names,which seems to be ancestral to the promised (but never completed) Index to the first edition.

Of the mooted but omitted works, I take the Pennas Golodrina to mean something like 'The History of the Noldor'), the Lammas Veleriandzen or 'Languages of Beleriand' I assume is either one of the Lhammas texts printed in HME.V.167ff or a projected later development thereof. The Dangweth Pengolodh ultimately made it into the History of Middle-earth, but not by much: this explanation of how the language of immortals can change appears towards the end of the series, THE PEOPLES OF MIDDLE-EARTH (HME.XII.395-402).

The most interesting of all these suggested additions by far, for me, is the idea that Tolkien thought of including the entire LAY OF LUTHIEN within the covers of THE LORD OF THE RINGS. I can see the logic of that -- it forms a good matched pair with 'Of Aragorn and Arwen Undomiel' -- but, like the Lammas (the history of the languages spoken on a continent destroyed more than three millennia before), it might be thought of as too much of a good thing, not directly connected with the story of The Ring.


One thing I wish I'd had time to work out is the probable date of these notes. That shd be determinable by looking at the various typescripts of the completed book and comparing the page tallies of each Book to those listed on the accompanying Table of Contents. I suspect  it's not long after he completed the typescript (which he loaned to the Lewis Brothers in October & November 1949). Certainly it seems to be when he's thinking of LotR as a standalone book, rather than accompanied by a separate SILMARILLION volume (as was his plan by February 1950); otherwise things like the LAY OF LUTHIEN, the Dangweth, the Fall of Numenor, the Lammas, and esp. the Pennas, wd naturally go in that Silm. volume instead. And I think  that once he'd abandoned the idea of publishing THE SILMARILLION alongside LotR he wd have been trying to restrict himself to essentials, rather than casting his net as widely as we see here.Unfortunately I have not yet had time to check Christopher Tolkien's account of the creation of the Appendices (HME.XII), which I suspect will shed a good deal of light on all this.

--John R., still in Dayquil/Nyquil land
current reading: Wm Morris (THE WELL AT THE WORLD'S END), Renee Vink (WAGNER & TOLKIEN). current viewing: DOCTOR WHO (the Second Doctor).

*one of the more interesting among them notes the date at which each chapter's events occur, right on the T.o.C. page