[geeks] okay.

[Don McClure]

on 5/6/02 9:56 AM, Tim H. at lists at pellucidar.net wrote:

> Well, years ago there were a couple lost tales books, but now there is a
> complete shelf of unfinished works to go with it.  Christopher Tolkien has
> been editing and publishing his fathers notes for a long time, in fact the
> Silmarillion was put together by Christopher.  It's kinda cool, in traditional
> mythologies people study different colloquial versions of the stories etc.,
> but with Tolkien you can spend an entire scholarly life studying the different
> versions of one guys myth.
> 
> The Silmarillion is by far the most cohesive book published after Tolkien's
> death, and in the intro Christopher says that his father's histories of the
> races of Arda changed considerably at times, and he chose the most consistent
> ones for the Silmarillion.  A lot of the other stuff shows up in the
> unfinished works.

I'm something of a Tolkien nut. I've read that shelf of books (12 volumes,
plus several other miscellaneous books).

Tolkein was one of the foremost experts in Anglo-Saxon literature. He
created his Arda world originally to distract himself from the horrors of
WWI, and because he was disappointed there were no A-S equivalents to the
Icelandic Sagas and other Scandinavian and Germanic literature. He worked on
it for almost sixty years.

"Silmarillion" is a reconstruction, very incomplete, in places more like a
sketch of what it could have been. Its worth the trouble to read. Just keep
your finger in the glossary in the back to keep track of all those names
(Elwe, Manwe Finwe, Olwe Eonwe, etc). Nobody comes close to Tolkien in
inventing cool names and words. It was his Life. Don't be distracted by the
Old Testament tone that the work opens with. If you read "Unfinished Tales",
you can see some of the "bleeding chunks" of some of the First Age stories
in the scale that could have made "Silmarillion" as large as LOTR, if
Tolkien had completed it.

Don McClure
Bel Air, MD