https://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol9/iss1/5/
The full title is "The Flat Earth Made Round and Tolkien’s Failure to Finish The Silmarillion".
This is a piece I've been working on for quite a while. I delivered part of it at last year's Kalamazoo (2019) but expanded it a good deal for this final version.
It looks at various elements and events that combined to hinder Tolkien from finishing THE SILMARILLION in the years 1951-1973. In particular I single out two key factors:
(1) the traumatic breakdown of his efforts to publish the book through Collins, leading to a catastrophic interruption of his work on the book
and
(2) Tolkien's conclusion that many of the most iconic elements in his mythology could no longer evoke secondary belief in modern-day readers.This most intractable of problems facing him led him into an impasse wherein he decided he must make a major change without being able to bring himself to do so".
That at any rate is the gist of the piece, which is available in its entirety on the JOURNAL OF TOLKIEN RESEARCH site. Enjoy!
--John R.
12 comments:
Ooohh! Really looking forward to reading this, John!
I think you mean “gist of the piece”... not “gest”.
And “entirety” not “entirity”.
Typos suck! Also, I loved reading your History of the Hobbit books. 🙂
Hi Doug K.
Knowing what a close study you've made of how the 1977 SILMARILLION was put together, I'll be interested to hear what you think of my effort.
--John R.
Dear Davey p
Thank you for pointing out the typos, which I have gone in and fixed. I know I'd flagged the gest/gist one for correction but must have posted the wrong draft.
Glad you enjoyed THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT. I was lucky to get to do this, and it was very much a labor of love.
--John R.
Another excellent piece on my to-read-list, I am quite sure - thanks for sharing!
I really enjoyed reading that, John! I have a lot of jumbled thoughts, which I may or may not get a chance to organize and write down, but for now I will share two.
One is that I immediately thought of Verlyn's recent MythCon Scholar Guest of Honor address in which she so eloquently described the ways that Tolkien " seems to toggle between diametrically opposite positions." I think this is another reason why he ultimately was unable to complete the Silmarillion in his lifetime.
The second thought is in response to this statement: "Investigating this topic in detail would take an entire book (and I hope to write one)."
I look forward to that day!
I too look forward to the book! This was just very well done, which I expected. :)
Thank you so much for sharing it.
It's not my area of specialty, but i found the arguments persuasive. I especially like the way you point out the contradictions in how we view Tolkien, and how this is fed by our assumptions that he is one, singular person and personality unchanging, rather then an evolving person, as we all are, who was different at different points in his life.
Since I have found myself paralyzed in my own lesser endeavors when I found that a change in concept invalidated a large mass of previous work I was predisposed to agree with you central thesis.
Thanks Marcel
--JDR
Hi Doug K.
If Verlyn's piece you refer to is the one printed in MYTHLORE #135 ("The Arch & the Keystone") then I have this but have not yet read it -- something which I shd remedy sooner rather than later. Thanks for pointing out its applicability.
--JDR
Hi Paul W.
Thanks for the comment; glad you liked the piece.
I'm a firm believer that context is important and we shd take it into account when we're fortunate enough to have it.
I have to say that your statement
"Since I have found myself paralyzed in my own lesser endeavors when I found that a change in concept invalidated a large mass of previous work I was predisposed to agree with you central thesis."
pretty much sums up my major point better than i did.
--John R.
Hi John,
Yes, that is the piece that I was referring to. As you probably know, I am a huge admirer of Verlyn's, and I think that piece is one of the most important things that she has written, and one of the most significant pieces of Tolkien scholarship that I have read in the past couple of years.
Best,
Doug
Just read this, rather belatedly - an excellent piece on an important topic!
I particularly liked the caution that 'what’s true of Tolkien in 1951 may no longer be the case in 1968'. In this case, I always rather felt that the importance of the shape of the Earth rather varied during Tolkien's later years. The 1948 dabblings seem to have been rather ephemeral, and were not taken too seriously in the main work around 1950. They certainly resurfaced in the second half of the 1950s, and it took quite a bit of Tolkien's energy in this period to solve them. But solve them he did, I would say: Quendi & Eldar seems to me a pretty successful 'etymological manifesto' for what his late Legendarium should look like, worked out coherently and to his satisfaction (at least for a few years). He even implemented a considerable portion of this, appropriately revising (and rejecting) a number of the relevant texts he worked on in this period (much of what's grouped as 'LQ2' by Christopher).
I absolutely agree that this was a huge sink of time and energy for him in the crucial post-TLotR push, and quite probably a fatal one -- I just wonder if it's chronological focus can be narrowed to the second half of the 1950s, perhaps resurfacing again in the later 60s (though perhaps with less consequence).
I do hope you'll write the full book! I'd be particularly interested to see what you have to say about the Ruin of Doriath and Voyage of Earendil, which might be fairly seen as the biggest hurdles that Tolkien faced, ones he never came close to overcoming. The presence of the Qenta Noldorinwa doesn't really set up an expectation that he'd have been able to work out these parts of the text to his satisfaction in the 1950s (certainly not in the later part of that decade). He'd previously always been derailed before writing a full version of these narratives (you have to go back to the Lost Tales for Doriath, and there was never a longer version of Earnedil at all), which gave him few resources to draw on in writing a late Quenta-style account that was both narratively compelling and consistent with the rest of the Legendarium.
If he'd managed to continue The Wanderings of Húrin, things might have been different -- but I'm not sure he could have. To me, that piece is the most emblematic (and possibly significant) of his entire late work on The Silmarillion: he was able to produce a powerful new narrative slotted into his old framework, but couldn't revise the traditional portions of the story at all. Part of this was probably just narrative structure (the earlier parts of the narrative are revised more than the later, and while the Earendil sections at least got a touch-up when he occasionally jumped to the end, the Doriath materials were the worst victims of the repeated interruptions and distractions of earlier 'phases' of work). But I think a lot of it was inherent to the tension between how the story needed to go, and his mature conceptions of what people like Húrin and (especially) Thingol were like. Christopher and Kay did their best to fix this, but their telling is not entirely satisfactory to me -- I'm not sure anyone, even Tolkien himself, could entirely salvage that crucial turning point in the narrative (at least not after a certain point).
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