The History of Middle-earth

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The History of Middle-earth
Sauron Defeated Cover 1992.jpg
The front cover of Volume 9
Editor Christopher Tolkien
Author J. R. R. Tolkien
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Genre High fantasy
Publisher George Allen & Unwin (UK)
Publication date
1983 to 1996
Media typePrint (hardback and paperback)
Pages12 volumes
Preceded by Unfinished Tales  
Followed by The Children of Húrin  

The History of Middle-earth is a 12-volume series of books published between 1983 and 1996 that collect and analyse much of Tolkien's legendarium, compiled and edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien. The series shows the development over time of Tolkien's conception of Middle-earth as a fictional place with its own peoples, languages, and history, from his earliest notions of "a mythology for England" through to the development of the stories that make up The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings . It is not a "history of Middle-earth" in the sense of being a chronicle of events in Middle-earth written from an in-universe perspective; it is instead an out-of-universe history of Tolkien's creative process. In 2000, the twelve volumes were republished in three limited edition omnibus volumes. Non-deluxe editions of the three volumes were published in 2002. [1]

Contents

Scholars including Gergely Nagy and Vincent Ferré have commented that Tolkien had always wanted to create a mythology, but believed that such a thing should have passed through many hands and be framed by annotations and edits of different kinds. When Christopher Tolkien, a philologist like his father, edited the History, he created an editorial frame, inadvertently reinforcing the mythopoeic effect that his father wanted.

Structure and contents

The History of Middle-earth was published in 12 volumes by George Allen & Unwin in the UK between 1983 and 1996 as follows:

The History of Middle-earth
Volumes, groupedContents
  1. The Book of Lost Tales, Part I (1983)
  2. The Book of Lost Tales, Part II (1984)
  3. The Lays of Beleriand (1985)
  4. The Shaping of Middle-earth (1986)
  5. The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987)
These five books track the early history of the legendarium (material that Christopher Tolkien compiled and edited to form the one-volume The Silmarillion ) and related texts. Often there are multiple versions of a tale; [2] Christopher's notes indicate the likely date of each version.
    The History of The Lord of the Rings
  1. [1] The Return of the Shadow (1988)
  2. [2] The Treason of Isengard (1989)
  3. [3] The War of the Ring (1990)
  4. [4] Sauron Defeated (1992)
These four books discuss the development of The Lord of the Rings ; book nine also discusses the Númenor story in the form of The Notion Club Papers .
    The Later Silmarillion
  1. [1] Morgoth's Ring (1993)
  2. [2] The War of the Jewels (1994)
These two books focus on legendarium material that Tolkien worked on after The Lord of the Rings was published, including the Annals of Beleriand and the Annals of Aman .
  1. The Peoples of Middle-earth (1996)
The last book discusses the development of the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings and examines assorted writings from the last years of Tolkien's life.

A combined index was published six years after the series was completed as The History of Middle-earth: Index (2002).

A shorter version of volume 9, omitting material not related to The Lord of the Rings, was published as The End of the Third Age; this is usually sold as a boxed set along with volumes 6, 7 and 8 as The History of the Lord of the Rings.

Christopher Tolkien, who edited the books, made the decision not to include any material related to The Hobbit in The History of Middle-earth. His reasons for this were that it had not been intended to form part of the mythology, was a children's story, and had originally not been set in Middle-earth; it was revised during the writing of The Lord of the Rings . The History of The Hobbit was published separately, in two volumes, in 2007 and was edited by John D. Rateliff.

Reception

Charles Noad, reviewing The War of the Jewels in Mallorn , comments that the 12-volume History had done something that a putative single-volume edition of The Silmarillion (such as Tolkien had hoped to publish) with embedded commentary could not have achieved: it had changed people's perspective on Tolkien's Middle-earth writings, from being centred on The Lord of the Rings to what it had always been in Tolkien's mind: Silmarillion-centred. [3]

Reviewing The Peoples of Middle-earth , Noad adds that "The whole series of The History of Middle-earth is a tremendous achievement and makes a worthy and enduring testament to one man's creative endeavours and to another's explicatory devotion. It reveals far more about Tolkien's invented world than any of his readers in pre-Silmarillion days could ever have imagined or hoped for." He concludes that thorough study of the twelve volumes would be essential for understanding "Tolkien's imaginative art". [4]

Liz Milner, for A Green Man Review, writes that the series provides "an unprecedented opportunity to examine a great writer's creative development over a period of 60 years". [5] She adds that Christopher Tolkien's editing demonstrated "the endurance and cleaning power of Hercules", given that his father's papers were all in disorder. [5]

Analysis

A life's work

Sample from "The Music of the Ainur" in Book of Lost Tales 1 (History volume 1, 1983)
Christopher Tolkien's commentary J. R. R. Tolkien's text
In another notebook identical to that in which The Cottage of Lost Play was written out by my mother, there is a text in ink in my father's hand ... entitled: Link between Cottage of Lost Play and (Tale 2) Music of Ainur. This follows on directly from Vairë's last words to Eriol, and in turn links on directly to The Music of the Ainur ... The Link exists in only one version, for the text in ink was written over a draft in pencil that was wholly erased.   'But', said Eriol, 'still are there many things that remain dark to me. Indeed I would fain know who be these Valar; are they the Gods?'
   'So be they', said Lindo, 'though concerning them Men tell many strange and garbled tales that are far from the truth...'; but Vairë said: 'Nay then, Lindo, be not drawn into more tale-telling tonight, for the hour of rest is at hand, and for all his eagerness our guest is way-worn. Send now for the candles of sleep, ...

In 1967, Tolkien named his son Christopher as his literary executor, and more specifically as his co-author of The Silmarillion . After his father's death in 1973, Christopher took a large quantity of legendarium manuscripts to his Oxfordshire home, where he converted a barn into a workspace. He and the young Guy Gavriel Kay started work on the documents, discovering by 1975 how complex the task was likely to be. In September 1975 he resigned from New College to work exclusively on editing his father's writings. He moved to the south of France and continued this task for 45 years. [6] In all, he edited and published 24 volumes of his father's writings, including the 12 of the History. [7] In those volumes, Verlyn Flieger writes,

Christopher arranged and edited in chronological sequence all the stories of his father's mythology. Now published as the twelve-volume series, The History of Middle-earth, this work presents Tolkien's mythology in its entirety, tracing the path of a remarkable vision, a musical score, if you will, from its earliest conception to its author's last meditations on his creation. [8]

Editorial framing

The scholar Gergely Nagy observes that Tolkien "thought of his works as texts within the fictional world" (his emphasis), and that the overlapping of different and sometimes contradictory accounts was central to his desired effect. Further, Tolkien was a philologist; Nagy comments that Tolkien may have been intentionally imitating the philological style of authors such as Elias Lönnrot, compiler of the Finnish epic, the Kalevala , whom Tolkien saw as an exemplar of a professional and creative philology. This was, Nagy believes, what Tolkien thought essential if he was to present a mythology for England, since such a thing had to have been written by many hands. Further, writes Nagy, by publishing his father's writings, Christopher Tolkien, also a philologist, "inserted himself in the functional place of Bilbo" as editor and collator, in his view "reinforcing the mythopoeic effect" that his father had wanted to achieve, making the published book do what Bilbo's book was meant to do, and so unintentionally realising his father's intention. Tolkien's Middle-earth writings had become, in reality and no longer only in fiction, a complex work by different hands edited, annotated, and commented upon over a long period. [9]

Elizabeth Whittingham writes that Tolkien valued the impression of depth that the mention of much older events had created in The Lord of the Rings, and that he realised he could not do the same for the Silmarillion stories as they were in that older time. Instead, a man from a later age, such as Eriol of The Book of Lost Tales , could visit Middle-earth and listen to the tales of the Elves, providing a frame story. He records the stories, she writes, and "Eriol's perspective becomes the reader's, ... separat[ing] readers from these tales of past loss and faded glory." [10]

Flieger comments that Christopher's remark in the introduction to The Book of Lost Tales 1, that he had made an error in not providing any sort of frame story for his 1977 The Silmarillion, is at least partly correct. In her view, the one-volume Silmarillion "gives a misleading impression of coherence and finality, as if it were a definitive, canonical text", while in fact the legendarium from which it is adapted "is a jumble of overlapping and often competing stories, annals, and lexicons." [11] All the same, she writes, that book was essential, as without it the History would never have been published, and the twelve-volume work "provides exactly the framework its editor [Christopher] felt was lacking in the earlier and in some ways premature book." [11]

Vincent Ferré writes that Christopher Tolkien's editing of the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth, using his skill as a philologist, created an editorial frame for his father's legendarium, and for the books derived from it. Ferré comments that this presented his father's writings as historical, a real set of legends from the past, in just the same way that his editing of The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays presented his father's essays as scholarly work. [12]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christopher Tolkien</span> British book editor, son of J. R. R. Tolkien

Christopher John Reuel Tolkien was an English and naturalised French academic editor. The son of the author and academic J. R. R. Tolkien, he edited 24 volumes of his father's posthumously published work, including The Silmarillion and the 12-volume series The History of Middle-Earth, a task that took 45 years. He also drew the original maps for his father's The Lord of the Rings.

The "Ainulindalë" is the creation account in J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium, published posthumously as the first part of The Silmarillion in 1977. The "Ainulindalë" sets out a central part of the cosmology of Tolkien's legendarium, telling how the Ainur, a class of angelic beings, perform a great music prefiguring the creation of the material universe, Eä, including Middle-Earth. The creator Eru Ilúvatar introduces the theme of the sentient races of Elves and Men, not anticipated by the Ainur, and gives physical being to the prefigured universe. Some of the Ainur decide to enter the physical world to prepare for their arrival, becoming the Valar and Maiar.

<i>The War of the Jewels</i> Eleventh of the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth

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<i>The Peoples of Middle-earth</i> Twelfth of the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth

The Peoples of Middle-earth (1996) is the 12th and final volume of The History of Middle-earth, edited by Christopher Tolkien from the unpublished manuscripts of his father J. R. R. Tolkien. Some characters only appear here, as do a few other works that did not fit anywhere else.

<i>The Lost Road and Other Writings</i> Fifth of the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth

The Lost Road and Other Writings – Language and Legend before 'The Lord of the Rings' is the fifth volume of The History of Middle-earth, a series of compilations of drafts and essays written by J. R. R. Tolkien in around 1936–1937. It was edited and published posthumously in 1987 by Christopher Tolkien.

<i>The Book of Lost Tales</i> Collection of stories by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Book of Lost Tales is a collection of early stories by the English writer J. R. R. Tolkien, published as the first two volumes of Christopher Tolkien's 12-volume series The History of Middle-earth, in which he presents and analyses the manuscripts of those stories, which were the earliest form of the complex fictional myths that would eventually comprise The Silmarillion. Each of the Tales is followed by notes and a detailed commentary by Christopher Tolkien.

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Ælfwine the mariner is a fictional character found in various early versions of J. R. R. Tolkien's Legendarium. Tolkien envisaged Ælfwine as an Anglo-Saxon who visited and befriended the Elves and acted as the source of later mythology. Thus, in the frame story, Ælfwine is the stated author of the various translations in Old English that appear in the twelve-volume The History of Middle-earth edited by Christopher Tolkien.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Round World Version of Tolkien's legendarium</span> Aspect of J.R.R. Tolkiens legendarium

The Round World Version is an alternative creation myth to the version of J.R.R. Tolkien's legendarium as it appears in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. In that version, the Earth was created flat and was changed to round as a cataclysmic event during the Second Age in order to prevent direct access by Men to Valinor, home of the immortals. In the Round World Version, the Earth is created spherical from the beginning.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the real-world history and notable fictional elements of J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy universe. It covers materials created by Tolkien; the works on his unpublished manuscripts, by his son Christopher Tolkien; and films, games and other media created by other people.

The term Middle-earth canon, also called Tolkien's canon, is used for the published writings of J. R. R. Tolkien regarding Middle-earth as a whole. The term is also used in Tolkien fandom to promote, discuss and debate the idea of a consistent fictional canon within a given subset of Tolkien's writings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tolkien's legendarium</span> J. R. R. Tolkiens mythological writings

Tolkien's legendarium is the body of J. R. R. Tolkien's mythopoeic writing, unpublished in his lifetime, that forms the background to his The Lord of the Rings, and which his son Christopher summarized in his compilation of The Silmarillion and documented in his 12-volume series The History of Middle-earth. The legendarium's origins reach back to 1914, when Tolkien began writing poems and story sketches, drawing maps, and inventing languages and names as a private project to create a mythology for England. The earliest story, "The Voyage of Earendel, the Evening Star", is from 1914; he revised and rewrote the legendarium stories for most of his adult life.

<i>Tolkiens Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth</i>

Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth is a collection of scholarly essays edited by Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter on the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth, relating to J. R. R. Tolkien's fiction and compiled and edited by his son, Christopher. It was published by Greenwood Press in 2000. That series comprises a substantial part of "Tolkien's legendarium", the body of Tolkien's mythopoeic writing that forms the background to his The Lord of the Rings and which Christopher Tolkien summarized in his compilation of The Silmarillion.

Verlyn Flieger is an author, editor, and Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the University of Maryland at College Park, where she taught courses in comparative mythology, medieval literature, and the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. She is well known as a Tolkien scholar, especially for her books Splintered Light and A Question of Time. She has won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award four times for her work on Tolkien's Middle-earth writings.

<i>The Silmarillion</i> Collection of J. R. R. Tolkiens mythopoeic works

The Silmarillion is a book consisting of a collection of myths and stories in varying styles by the English writer J. R. R. Tolkien. It was edited, partly written, and published posthumously by his son Christopher Tolkien in 1977, assisted by Guy Gavriel Kay, who became a fantasy author. It tells of Eä, a fictional universe that includes the Blessed Realm of Valinor, the ill-fated region of Beleriand, the island of Númenor, and the continent of Middle-earth, where Tolkien's most popular works—The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings—are set. After the success of The Hobbit, Tolkien's publisher, Stanley Unwin, requested a sequel, and Tolkien offered a draft of the writings that would later become The Silmarillion. Unwin rejected this proposal, calling the draft obscure and "too Celtic", so Tolkien began working on a new story that eventually became The Lord of the Rings.

J. R. R. Tolkien used frame stories throughout his Middle-earth writings, especially his legendarium, to make the works resemble a genuine mythology written and edited by many hands over a long period of time. He described in detail how his fictional characters wrote their books and transmitted them to others, and showed how later in-universe editors annotated the material.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Great War and Middle-earth</span> Effect of the First World War on Tolkiens fantasy writings

J. R. R. Tolkien took part in the First World War, known then as the Great War, and began his fantasy Middle-earth writings at that time. The Fall of Gondolin was the first prose work that he created after returning from the front, and it contains detailed descriptions of battle and streetfighting. He continued the dark tone in much of his legendarium, as seen in The Silmarillion. The Lord of the Rings, too, has been described as a war book.

<i>Tolkiens Art: A Mythology for England</i> 1979 book by Jane Chance

Tolkien's Art: 'A Mythology for England' is a 1979 book of Tolkien scholarship by Jane Chance, writing then as Jane Chance Nitzsche. The book looks in turn at Tolkien's essays "On Fairy-Stories" and "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics"; The Hobbit; the fairy-stories "Leaf by Niggle" and "Smith of Wootton Major"; the minor works "Lay of Autrou and Itroun", "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth", "Imram", and Farmer Giles of Ham; The Lord of the Rings; and very briefly in the concluding section, The Silmarillion. In 2001, a second edition extended all the chapters but still treated The Silmarillion, that Tolkien worked on throughout his life, as a sort of coda.

J. R. R. Tolkien decided to increase the reader's feeling that the story in his 1954–55 book The Lord of the Rings was real, by framing the main text with an elaborate editorial apparatus that extends and comments upon it. This material, mainly in the book's appendices, effectively includes a fictional editorial figure much like himself who is interested in philology, and who says he is translating a manuscript which has somehow come into his hands, having somehow survived the thousands of years since the Third Age. He called the book a heroic romance, giving it a medieval feeling, and describing its time-frame as the remote past. Among the steps he took to make its setting, Middle-earth, believable were to develop its geography, history, peoples, genealogies, and unseen background in great detail, complete with editorial commentary in each case.

Tolkien has often been supposed to have spoken of wishing to create "a mythology for England". It seems he never used the actual phrase, but various commentators have found his biographer Humphrey Carpenter's phrase appropriate as a description of much of his approach in creating Middle-earth, and the legendarium that lies behind The Silmarillion.

References

  1. ↑ "The History of Middle-earth". An Illustrated Tolkien Bibliography. TolkienBooks.net. 2014. Retrieved 16 July 2014.
  2. ↑ Flieger 2005, p. 50.
  3. ↑ Noad, Charles (1994). "[Untitled Review of The War of the Jewels ]". Mallorn (31): 50–54. JSTOR   45320384.
  4. ↑ Noad, Charles E. (1996). "[Untitled Review]". Mallorn (34): 33–41. JSTOR   45321696.
  5. 1 2 Milner, Liz. "J.R.R. Tolkien's The History of Middle-Earth". A Green Man Review. Retrieved 4 June 2024.
  6. ↑ McIlwaine, Catherine. "Introduction" in Ovenden & McIlwaine 2022 , pp. 7–10, 14–22
  7. ↑ Ovenden & McIlwaine 2022 , pp. 26–27 "Timeline"
  8. ↑ Flieger 2005, p. xiv.
  9. ↑ Nagy, Gergely (2020) [2014]. "The Silmarillion: Tolkien's Theory of Myth, Text, and Culture". In Lee, Stuart D. (ed.). A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 107–118. ISBN   978-1-119-65602-9.
  10. ↑ Whittingham 2017, "Tolkien's Mythology of Creation".
  11. 1 2 Flieger 2005, p. 63.
  12. 1 2 3 Ferré 2022, pp. 53–69.

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