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outofangband · 1 year ago

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Comparing the Captures of Maedhros and of Húrin thoughout versions

Note: I did not include all volumes of HoME in this however with the exception of Volume Eleven which contains The Wanderings of Húrin there are few meaningful differences. I will make a later post for more HoME content

Second note: I also have a post comparing the fates of Morwen, Aerin post Nírnaeth and Dor-lómin generally which I also will work on to revise and republish

It is notable to me that Húrin and Maedhros are among the only named figures Morgoth successfully orders the capture of by name. I wanted to explore the similarites and differences between varying versions.

Here are the two that are probably considered most canonical, from The Silmarillion and The Children of Húrin respectively

Maedhros was ambushed and all his company were slain but he himself was taken alive by the command of Morgoth and brought to Angband (The Return of the Noldor, The Silmarillion)

...but they took him at last alive by the command of Morgoth who thought thus to do him more evil than by death (The Battle of Unnumbered Tears, The Children of Húrin)

Morgoth’s intentions for Húrin are far more clear than for Maedhros. He knows ( “by his art and his spies”) that Húrin had the friendship of the King (Turgon in this case). It’s not entirely clear yet if Morgoth has heard rumors that Húrin had been to Gondolin but he certainly knows of the brothers reunion on the battlefield with Turgon and makes some quick connections. The conversation between Húrin and Morgoth spans almost the entirety of chapter three and has some of the most dialogue for Morgoth in the entire Legendarium

@tolkien-feels once made a joke about the conversations between Túrin and Sador in chapter one being like forced to go through the Athrabeth with a child and I think The Words of Húrin and Morgoth function almost in a similar way; some of the deeper philosophical questions of the universe involving mortality and fate and the reach of the gods are raised in these horrifying circumstances.

(I won’t go into it too much here because there is so much to say about this, but I’ll link a couple of my posts on it just for my own reference and organization here and here

Morgoth certainly tried to use the capture of Maedhros to his own advantage when he sends word to his brothers claiming he’d release him if they retreated but this attempt is rather perfunctory and I don’t think he truly thought it would go anywhere. At best, the Fëanorians might be spurred or goaded into further recklessness trying to recover Maedhros. At worst, nothing would happen for some time.

A fascinating difference between the notes of Tolkien that later became this part of the published Silmarillion is that in the original notes, two more words are added to the quote above. Maidros was ambushed, and all his company was slain, but he himself was taken alive by the command of Morgoth, and brought to Angband and tortured. (HOME V, p. 274)

In the version in the Book of Lost Tales, Maedhros is captured at the gates of Angband during a siege. He is tortured for information on jewel making, no word given on the success of this interrogation, and then released alive though maimed in an eerily vague afterthought. I have more on this in my BoLT tag, I find it fascinating for the ways it mirrors Húrin’s release in later canon

In the Lays of Beleriand Maedhros is mentioned only briefly though interestingly, most of his mentions include note of his torment, the most prominent appearing in The Lay of the Children of Húrin

in league secret with those five others, in the forests of the East fell unflinching foes of Morgoth Maidros whom Morgoth maimed and tortured is lord and leader, his left wieldeth his sweeping sword

Both the use of the name Maidros as well as the specifications of ‘maimed and tortured’ appear to take after the Book of Lost Tales version however the Lays goes further and confirms that the maiming left so vague in BoLT did indeed include the loss of Maedhros’s right hand. And of course it’s notable that Morgoth did this, not Fingon during rescue.

Húrin‘s capture and imprisonment remain fairly consistent throughout the more known versions of the story, that is, in the Silm, in the Narn, and in the unfinished tales. Even in BoLT and the Lays the general outline is similar. In the Silm and the Narn, the story is consistent though of course much is cut out in the Silm version. Unfinished Tales has no significant changes to this section of the text.

In BoLT which is not considered canon, Úrin as he’s called there is captured during battle and both threatened with torture and offered great riches to betray Turondo (Turgon). When he refuses, Melko sets him in a ‘lofty place of the mountains’ and curses him to watch the doom of Morwen and his children. (”at least none shall pity him for this, that he had a craven for a father”). Húrin has not been to Gondolin in this version. This version is notable in this regard for a few things: One, Morgoth spends far less time with Húrin and no mention of physical torture apart from threats of it is noted prior to his imprisonment in the mountains and the curse. Two, the actual dialogue between them is rather different and briefer. Morgoth tries to take advantage of the poorer views by the elves towards humans by offering employment to Húrin but without success.

The version in the Lay of the Children of Húrin is more similar to the Narn and Silm. There is more extended contact between Morgoth and Húrin (though the contents of their talk is still different). It’s also perhaps the most vivid in descriptions of torture and imprisonment and the only version where actual methods of torment are mentioned or implied (namely whips and brands).

I definitely want to go into this version more later! As always please feel free to ask more! I will also go into more versions throughout HoME of both these storylines if there’s interest!

Final notes:

No version of Húrin in Angband will be as disturbing to me as Húrin’s imprisonment by his own kin in Brethil in The Wanderings of Húrin

#the silmarillion #the children of húrin #maedhros #Húrin #in the iron hell #musing and meta #BoLT #HoME #the lays of beleriand

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absynthe--minded · 4 years ago

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If you don’t mind because I love to hear it, what editorial choices did Christopher Tolkien make that really frustrate you?

My top one would be Turin’s character assaination.

I do not mind being asked!! this is an incomplete list but I hope it gets the point across

Túrin’s character assassination is astonishing, you’re right, for me it’s specifically everything in Nargothrond as well as the minimizing of Saeros (and sometimes Daeron) harassing him for racist and xenophobic reasons. This is really well-known so I’m not going to spend a lot of time on it unless people want me to? it’s probably best encapsulated in another post lol.

WHERE ARE THE WOMEN, CHRISTOPHER, WHERE ARE THEY. Haleth’s all-woman bodyguards get cut out! Míriel being the inventor of sewing gets cut out! Indis and Nerdanel having a friendship gets cut out! Andreth gets cut out, with not even a mention of the Athrabeth! Morwen and Niënor lose all their character traits! Finduilas is a ghost of her former self! Idril’s character gets cut down to nothing!

Findis and Lalwen not existing. I’m actually going to give them their own bullet point because Lalwen goes to Beleriand with her brother Fingolfin. That’s an entire extra Finwëan princess to talk about!

cutting the Wanderings of Húrin from the Silmarillion was a Bad Choice because it robs Húrin of his status as like. almost a warning of divine punishment. With the Wanderings, and specifically his travels to Gondolin and Menegroth, you can make the argument that Doriath falling and Gondolin falling were in large part because they failed to look after innocents and refugees, and that’s a really neat angle

Gil-galad Son Of Fingon. Gil-galad’s parentage changed so many damn times. I am all for Gil-galad the adopted son of Findekáno and also kind of Maitimo? but Gil-galad the biological son of Fingon has caused so many fandom problems. Leaving his parentage ambiguous would have been the right choice, and Christopher himself agrees with me here.

Beren and Lúthien being directly involved with killing the dwarves who killed Thingol. Christopher also admits in HoME that having Guy Gavriel Kay help with ghostwriting that Silm chapter was a mistake, and that he probably could have succeeded in creating a coherent narrative from his father’s later work (specifically the draft where Celegorm and Curufin kill the dwarves, assuming they have the Silmaril, but Melian actually took it and went to Lúthien)

I’m still doing research on this so I can’t actually speak authoritatively on it yet but what inspired my original frustrated post was the fact that as far as I can tell, the bits in the Silm chapter “Of Maeglin” about Maeglin’s desire to marry Idril being seen as incestuous and twisted and disgusting? Entirely absent from the drafts. All I’ve found in HoME and TFOG so far indicates that J.R.R. Tolkien never wrote anything close to that - Maeglin wanted to marry her, sure, but in the Book of Lost Tales, their marriage is frowned upon because Turgon thought that his nephew was clout-chasing rather than genuinely in love with his daughter. And the other HoME volumes usually have some variation on “Maeglin wanted to marry her, and Turgon loved and trusted him, but she married Tuor instead”, if they mention him at all. All the stuff about how he loved without hope, and how she saw him as terrifyingly warped? I’m willing to say that there’s a very good chance he invented that. Maeglin’s characterization in JRRT’s writing is very different from how he is in the Silm.

Amrod surviving at Losgar. I feel like this is a pretty agreed-upon fandom thing? We all sort of just accept that he died. But it still annoys me that Chris decided not to follow that path.

Argon not existing at all. Argon’s death mirrors Amrod’s death - both Fëanor and Fingolfin have to lose a son before they can begin life in exile, and one dies in fire and the other dies in freezing cold. It also sets up an interesting relationship since Argon died defending his family and his people and Amrod died because of someone else’s selfish and misguided attempt to defend his family.

the removal of a lot of the more queercoded/queer-subtext moments. Túrin and Beleg kiss in front of the Gaurwaith in the Lay of the Children of Húrin, and in that version and the Book of Lost Tales version of the story, Túrin kisses Beleg after he dies. The green Elessar that Galadriel gives to Aragorn is mentioned to be a betrothal gift in Laws and Customs among the Eldar, and there’s one version of the story where that same green stone was given to Fingon by Maedhros.

downplaying the presence of Taliska in the narrative and stripping out a lot of Edainic cultural worldbuilding. Taliska, one of the Edainic languages (or an Edainic language with several distinct dialects) hasn’t had any publicly released information about grammar and construction. We never find out in the published Silm that the Atani - the mortal Men - call themselves the Seekers, the way the elves call themselves the Quendi. We don’t learn that nothlir is the Taliska word for “folk” or “people”, so nothlir Haletha means “folk of Haleth”. All the lengthy discussion of Edainic philosophy from the Athrabeth is gone, and Chris’s decimation of the Narn i Chin Húrin means we don’t know anything in the Silm chapter about life in Dor-lómin under Húrin and Morwen’s leadership.

I hope that answers your question? sorry, this turned out to be long.

#replies #anon replies #absynthe's meta #tolkien

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arofili · 3 years ago

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Three Houses of the Edain Edit Series: Appendix B

Continued from Appendix A. This section will contain information on the House of Hador.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Appendix A: House of Bëor Appendix B: House of Hador (you are here!) Appendix C: House of Haleth, Drúedain

~~~

HOUSE OF HADOR

Note: With regard to name translations, I took inspiration from this article; specifically, I used some of the suggestions for name meanings of the early Hadorians and assigned them to elements in my Taliska glossary (see Appendix A).

~~~

Marach ft. Marach, Legen (OC), Malach Aradan, Imlach It is canon that while they were the third House to enter Beleriand, Marach’s people were originally in the lead; also canon is the attitude of the Green-elves toward them and Marach’s decision to remain in Estolad even though his son led many of his people further west. Since Imlach’s son Amlach is still in Estolad during the time of dissent, it is highly probable (though not explicitly stated afaik) that Imlach remained with his father. Everything else is headcanon. Also, Marach is trans because I said so <3

Imlach ft. Imlach, Amar (OC), Amlach The basic structure of this story is canon: Malach remained in Estolad; Amlach was a dissenter who was impersonated and became an elf-friend in his anger at the deception, entering into Maedhros’ service. I added a lot of details to flesh out the story, especially Amlach’s confusing night in the forest. I think Sauron (or one of his servants) stranded him in the woods and stole his likeness, though I doubt Amlach ever really figured out exactly what happened.

Malach Aradan ft. Malach Aradan, Zimrahin Meldis, Adanel, Magor Malach did enter Fingolfin’s service, and the basic details of his familial relationship are canon. Much of the rest of this is headcanon, however.

Magor ft. Magor, Amathal (OC), Hathol, Thevril (OC), Hador Lórindol We don’t know much about Magor or Hathol; the only canonical detail here is that Magor did move his people away from Hithlum and served no elf lord (though we don’t have details on why). Everything else is headcanon.

Hador Lórindol ft. Hador Lórindol, Gildis, Glóredhel, Galdor of Dor-lómin, Gundor This is mostly canon, though it has been embellished, and everything about Gildis other than her name is headcanon. Gundor’s life is also mostly headcanon, though the manner of his death is canon; I’ll go into his story soon.

Gundor ft. Gundor, Angreneth (OC), Indor, Padrion (OC), Aerin, Peleg We don’t know anything about Gundor other than the manner of his death; we also don’t know how Aerin is related to Húrin, so I decided to expand on both of those unknowns with the same story. Aerin’s father is said to be Indor, who is elsewhere said to be the father of Peleg (who was himself the father of Tuor in an early draft), so I made him the son of Gundor. Since Peleg obviously can’t be Tuor’s father anymore, I killed him off at the Nírnaeth...just like Huor, oops. I think Brodda took Aerin to wife before Morwen disappeared, but I couldn’t figure out how to word that concisely, so I left it kind of vague/misleading in the caption. Oh well.

Galdor of Dor-lómin ft. Galdor of Dor-lómin, Hareth, Húrin Thalion, Huor This is mostly canon, though it has been embellished to give Hareth a bit of personality. Ylmir is the Sindarin name for Ulmo, used by Tuor in his song “The Horns of Ylmir.”

Húrin Thalion ft. Húrin Thalion, Morwen Eledhwen, Túrin Turambar, Beleg Cúthalion, Urwen Lalaith, Niënor Níniel Boy howdy this is a long one! It’s almost entirely canon, though I’ve added some embellishments here and there. Beleg is included because he and Túrin were definitely married (at least by elven standards); I’ll go more into that, and the details of Túrin’s time with the Gaurwaith, in a future edit, but for now I settled just using the gayest possible language. Same deal for his time in Nargothrond.

Huor ft. Huor, Rían, Tuor Eladar We don’t know that Galdor took an arrow specifically to the eye, but I thought it would be poetic if both he and Huor died in the same manner so I added that detail to the canon that Galdor was killed by an arrow. The rest of this is pretty much all canon, with some embellishments. Tuor’s story will continue in another edit.

Tuor Eladar ft. Tuor Eladar, Idril Celebrindal, Eärendil Ardamírë The meat of this story is canon, but I’ve added in some of my headcanons as well. I definitely embellished Annael’s departure from Mithrim to show my perspective on his decision to leave Tuor behind (I really do think he thought Tuor was dead or as good as it, and that as a leader he had the responsibility to keep the rest of his people safe). I’m a little foggy on why Tuor was already so obsessed with Gondolin when he met Gelmir and Arminas, because why would the Sindar of Mithrim be so excited about a Noldorin city? I guess maybe they had friends from way back when who went with Turgon? Or maybe they just wished they could be “safe” like the Gondolindrim were, idk. I was kind of vague there. Ylmir is the Sindarin name for Ulmo; Yssion is a Sindarin name for Ossë (the other one is Gaerys, which I think sounds cooler but isn’t as close to a literal Sindarization as Yssion). The bit about Voronwë teaching Tuor Quenya on the road is headcanon, but I think it makes a lot of sense. Telpevontál is my Quenya translation of Celebrindal. I skimmed and skipped a lot of Tuor’s time in Gondolin, since I went over that in another edit. “The Horns of Ylmir” is a real song that Tolkien wrote (Adele McAllister has a cover of it); I added the bit about it triggering Idril’s foresight, though the song is absolutely foreshadowing no matter how you look at it. Eärendil did canonically get married the same year that Tuor and Idril left for Valinor; we don’t have much info on that otherwise, so I made it as bittersweet as possible. The bit about the Elessar is a lot of convoluted headcanon in my attempt to make sense of its 3 bajillion different origin stories. The name Ardamírë is prophetic because, you know, the whole Silmaril thing, but I liked the idea that Idril made the connection with the Elessar before the Silmaril came into the picture. All we know about Idril and Tuor’s fates in canon is that people ~believe~ they made it to Aman and that Tuor was counted as an elf, but that last bit never sat right with me since elsewhere it’s very clearly stated that the Gift of Men is not something that can be refused or taken away. The alternate legend is my own headcanon for what happened to them (I also think they had more peredhil kiddos); in my mind, the Valar let Tuor live the rest of his days in Valinor (all 500 years of them, I just think it’s poetic and connected to his grandson Elros’ fate) before he died peacefully and willingly, able to get closure with Idril before he went.

Storytellers ft. Eltas, Dírhaval Eltas is a character from the Book of Lost Tales, who tells Eriol the “Tale of Turambar.” Supposedly, he once lived in Hísilómë (Hithlum) and came to Tol Eressëa and the Cottage of Lost Play by the Straight Road. That story does not add up at all when you look at it through the lens of Tolkien’s later Legendarium, so I took the name and his origins in Hithlum and crafted an entirely different story for him. Dírhaval is canonically the poet who wrote the Narn i Chîn Húrin; he only wrote that one poem because he was killed at the Third Kinslaying before he could finish any of the other Great Tales like Narn i Leithian (The Lay of Leithian; from his Tolkien Gateway article I think that’s what he was working on after CoH? but I’m not totally sure. But Tolkien never finished the Leithian either, so I think it’s poetic to have Dírhaval do the same). Andvír was one of his sources in canon, I added in the others (Eltas, Nellas, Celebrimbor, Glírhuin), though it was conceivable (and canon, in Nellas’ case) that they knew Túrin enough to report his story (though we don’t know anything in canon about Nellas’ fate). These name translations are my own; I thought “sitting man” worked as a meaning for Dírhaval since I imagine that storytellers like him were known as folk who sat around a lot writing or telling tales.

Servants of Morwen ft. Morwen Eledhwen, Gethron, Grithnir, Ragnir the Blind, Sador Labadal Morwen sending her servants to talk to the elves is headcanon, and so is Gethron knowing some Sindarin, though I think that makes sense considering he did canonically travel across Beleriand and was the one who spoke to Thingol when they arrived in Doriath. We don’t know anything in canon about Ragnir except that he was blind. Sador’s story is canon, though I have added some embellishments here and there. Aside from Sador and Morwen, these name translations are all my own and extremely dubious, but I did my best.

Companions of Húrin ft. Húrin Thalion, Asgon, Ragnir the Outlaw, Dringoth (OC), Dimaethor (OC), Negenor (OC), Tondir (OC), Haedirn (OC), Orthelron (OC) This edit tells the beginning part of “The Wanderings of Húrin,” an unfinished manuscript that was cut from the final published Silmarillion. Húrin’s role in this tale is canon up through his departure from Brethil (that was where Tolkien left off); the way that he left his companions a final time is my headcanon. Asgon and Ragnir are the only names of his companions we know from canon; Asgon’s role as a former outlaw who had known Túrin when he returned to Dor-lómin and started a rebellion is canon, and Ragnir’s pessimism (asking to go home) and his relative youth is also from canon. Everything else about these outlaws is my headcanon, including my reasons for why they weren’t present at the Nírnaeth where literally all the able-bodied men of the House of Hador had perished (except for Húrin). Húrin did go to Nargothrond after Brethil, but I made up everything past that point. We know that there were some Edain at the Havens of Sirion (and presumably there were Men present in the War of Wrath that Elros mingled with before becoming their King), so I thought this could be a way for the remnant of the Haladin (and some of the House of Hador) to get there. I’ll go over the rest of “The Wanderings of Húrin” in future edits, when we get to the relevant Haladin characters.

Gaurwaith ft. Neithan, Beleg Cúthalion, Forweg, Andróg, Andvír, Algund, Ulrad, Orleg, Blodren This is largely a canon-compliant overview of Túrin’s life among the outlaws. The stories of Forweg and Andróg (and Beleg and Túrin/Neithan) are canon (though I did take that extra step and marry off Túrin and Beleg). Orleg’s story is canon, though it’s one that I had overlooked on my various readthroughs of Túrin’s Silm chapter & CoH. Algund and Ulrad’s stories are presented in a slightly tweaked/condensed form; Andvír’s origins as the son of Andróg (??? when did he have a son and why is it never mentioned in the main story???) are canon but (as expressed in parentheses) rather baffling, so I didn’t really emphasize him. Blodren is a character who isn’t in the later drafts of this story; he was an Easterling who was tortured by Morgoth because he “withstood Uldor the Accursed,” and eventually turned into a spy for Morgoth. (As with all Easterling names, his etymology is entirely made up.) He “served Túrin faithfully for two years” before fulfilling the role later taken up by Mîm and betraying the Gaurwaith to the orcs. He was killed by a “chance arrow in the dark” during the battle. I altered his story so that he wasn’t personally tortured by Morgoth and thus did not turn; since he was an Easterling and the rest of the Gaurwaith were Edain, I decided they probably treated him poorly, and threw in a bit of a friendship with Mîm as a nod to how Mîm took over his role. Also, I think Easterlings having pre-existing relationships with dwarves is a cool concept—especially since Bór’s people and Azaghâl’s people both served under Maedhros at the Nírnaeth, and could possibly have had the chance to interact!

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CONTINUED IN APPENDIX C

#three houses of the edain #peoples of arda #house of hador #house of marach #estolad #ered wethrin #dor lomin #my meta #tefain nin #thote appendices

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kendrixtermina · 5 years ago

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Further reactions to "The book of lost tales":

I appreciate that Idril canonically wears armor and does swordfighting.

I feel like I can actually imagine adult!Idril much better now like in armor and with open hair, distraught but ready to fight while babby Earendil does not yet realize the danger...

My first thought is that Earendil was probably cute in that baby chainmail. My second thought is OUCH, Idril and Tuor always made sure their growing baby had fitting chainmail cause they felt the apocalypse might get them at any moment. Imagine that, imagine them having the baby armor fitted every year or so :(

Its fun how much of the basic structure already exists but most of what you'd consider the main characters doesn't exist or is scattered across various minor roles The only Prince anywhere in sight is Turgon - Except for Team Doriath, theyre all accounted for. I suppose Maeglin is kinda there in name only with vaguely the same role & motivation, but looks personality and background all did a 180 since. Luthien is still pretty much "princesd classic" at this point, not quite the fearless go-getter from the final version - markedly this version tells Beren that she doesnt want to wander in the wilderness with him whereas the final one says she doesnt care and its Beren still wants to get the shiny so as not to ask this of her and also for his honor.

I mean in the finished version Id consider the 3rd and 4th gen royals to be the main characters (well, alobgside Team Doriath and the varioud human heroes) and theyre hardly here. Imagine the silm with no Finrod!

Feanor had no affiliation with the royal family whatsoever, and is also generally less super. He's just the guy who won the jewelsmithing competition, not the inventor of the whole discipline. Still seems to have been envisionad as a respected member of the community who gets called to the palace for crisis meetings and is listened to when he stsrts giving speeches. From the first he already has the backstory of going off the deep end (or at least growing disillusioned with Valinor) after a family member is killed by Melkor and theyre still the first to die, but its just some other rando unrelated to the royals

The situation regarding the humans is different - instead of Melkor leaking their existence, its Manwe who explains that the other continents were supposed to be for them eventually. So Feanor goes off on a tirade about weak puny mortals comes off as a more of a jerk unlike in the final version where Melkor barely knew about the humans and described them to the Noldor as a threat. On the other hand in this one, also very much unlike in the finished product, Melkor dupes even Manwe into being unfair to the elves as a whole. In this the final version is a definite improvement, both Feanor and the Valar come off as a lot more sympathetic and though still deceived he's partially right in some things at least, so you have more of a genuine tragedy rather than a simple feud

There is something to the idea of Commoner!Feanor tho. I guess some of this survived in his nomadic explorer lifestyle and how both his wife and mother (who arent mentioned here) eventually were the ones to get that background of being not especially pretty ladies who are not from the nobility but got renown, respect and acclaim for their unique talent and contribution to society, with each having invented things and Nerdanel also being renowed for her wisdom. Hes sort of an odysseus-like Figure in that sense. I suppose later developements necesitated that Maedhros & co. have an army not just a band of thieves, which means they needed to be nobles/lords. That said this being a society where artisans are very respected and half the lords have scholarly/artistic pursuits going, the gap was probably not as big to begin with as it might have been in say, medieval England. Esoecially since Nerdanel's father had been given special honor by one of the local deities and that the social order might have been a very recent thing in Miriel's time. One might speculate that the first generation of Lords started out as warriors during the great journey, or perhaps just Finwe's friend group.

Also found that bit intetesting where the Valar have to deal with the remaining political tensions and effects of Melkor's lies on the remaining population in Valinor... - i guess with the change of framing device it was less likely for news of something like this to reach Beleriand. That, or the existence of Finarfin and his repentance made this go smoother this over in later cannon

Turgon's go-down-with-the-ship moment reaaly got to me. Im half tempted to write a fic where his wife, siblings and dad glomp him on arrival in Mandos. I dont care that none of them exists yet in this continuity i want Turgon to get hugs

I love all the additional Detail that got compressed out in the shift from fairytale-ish to pseudohistoric style especially all the various Valinor magic insofofar as it is compatible with the final version - particularly love the idea of the connection between the lamps and the trees that is now integrated into my headcanon forever

Its actually explained what the doors of night are

If I had not already read unfinished tales or volumes X to XII where this is also apparent, this is where I would say: Ah so the Valar were supposed to be flawed characters. Manwe has an actual arc; by the time he sends Gandalf he finally "got" it. I think in the published silm the little arcs of Ulmo and Manwe are mostly just lost in compression/ less apparent when only some of the relevant scenes got in but not all

It occurred to me way too late that the "BG" chars are the most consistent because theyre at the start and most stories are written from beginning to end. Finwe doesnt get a dedicated paragraph of explicit description until HoME X but my takeaway was that he's described pretty much like I always imagined him anyways/ same vibe I always got from him... charismatic, thoughtful, enthusiastic, sanguine temperament, brave in a pinch but at times lets his judgement be clouded by personal sentiment (though that last bit is more apparent/salient as a character flaw once he became the father of a certain Problem Child) ...i guess this would be a result of jrrt having had a consistent idea of him in his head for a long time.

This means Finwe's still alive at the time of the exodus which is just fun to see/interesting to know... Interestingly he sort of gets what later would be Finarfin's part of ineffectually telling everxone to please chill and think it over first while Feanor simply shouts louder (which is consistent with his actions before the sword incident in later canon where he initially spoke out against the suspiciozs regarding the Valar) - but its not exactly the same, he's more active than Finarfin later in that when "chillax" availed nothing he said that then at least they should talk with the other Kings and Manwe to leave with their blessing and get help leaving (This seems like it would have been the clusterfuck preventing million dollar suggestion in the universe where Feanor is related to him and values him) but when even that falls on death ears he decides that he "would not be parted from his people" and went to run the preparations. I find it interesting that the motivation is sentiment/attachment (even phrased as "he would not be parted from [his people]" same words/ expression as is later used for the formenos situation), not explicitly obligation as it later is for Fingolfin (who had promised to follow Feanor and didnt want to leave his subjects at the mercy of Feanor's recklessness )

Speaking of problem children. It seems the sons of Feanor were the Kaworu Nagisa of the Silmarillion in that originally all they do is show up at some point and kill Dior as an episodic villain-of-the-week. And then, it seems their role got bigger in each continuity/rewrite... probably has something to do with the Silmarils ending up in the title later making it in the sense their story that ends and begins with them. They have zero characterization beyond "fierce and wild" at this point, though in what teetsy bits there is we already have the idea that Maedhros is the leader and Curufin is the smart one/shemer/sweet-talker, though not the bit where Maedhros (or Maglor, or anyone really) is "the nice one". Which I guess explains why "Maglor" sounds like such a stereotypical villain name.

"The Ruin of Doriath" was purportedly the patchworkiest bit of the finished product, but I never noticed and it actually left quite an impression of me upon first reading, the visual of Melian sitting there with Thingol's corpse in her arms contemplating everything thinking back to how they met... she had the knowledge to warn him not to doom himself but couldnt get him to understand it because he doesnt see the world as she does.... After reading this though I wish there was a 'dynamic' rendition that combined all the best bits like, youd have to adapt it to the later canon's rendition of the dwarves, have Nargothrond exist etc. But i mean that just makes Finrod another dead/doomed relative of Thingol's whom bling cannot truly replace, like Luthien and Turin. In the Silmarillion you could easily read it as just an "honoured guest treatment" but here and in unfinished tales I get the impression that Thingol actually did see Turin as a son.

Already you see the idea of trying to make the stories all interconnected but there is less than there will be (the human heroes aren't related yet and there is basically no Nargothrond, which is later a common thread for many of the stories - a prototype shows up in the 'Tale of Turambar' tho complete with half baked prototypes of Orodreth and Finduillas

O boi im not even through yet

#silmarillion #the book of lost tales #history of middle earth #baby reads HoMe

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tolkien-fandom-history · 6 years ago

Text

Interview with Angela P. Nicholas--author of "Aragorn: J.R.R. Tolkien's Undervalued Hero"

We were very excited to have the opportunity to interview author Angela P. Nicholas. Her book "Aragorn: J.R.R. Tolkien's Undervalued Hero" is an extremely detailed, in depth examination of Tolkien's Aragorn--his life, his relationships, his achievements, his skills, and his personality. It is a very worthwhile addition to any Tolkien library. She has some fascinating insights into Aragorn, book vs movie representations of the character, thoughts on the upcoming Amazon series and fan fiction as part of the Tolkien fandom. Hope you enjoy reading it!

1. How did you first become interested in Tolkien?

Answer:

Although The Lord of the Rings was very much in fashion during my student days in the late sixties and early seventies I wasn't interested in it at that stage – probably because I didn't tend to follow fashions! It was not until a few years later, in 1973, that a friend persuaded me to read it. He stressed that it would be a good idea to read The Hobbit first and promised me that I was "in for a treat". I was hooked immediately and when I got together with my future husband soon afterwards I wasted no time in introducing him to Tolkien's works as well! I re-read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings several times during the seventies and bought The Silmarillion as soon as it was published in 1977. Further readings have followed since, especially while working on Aragorn, extending to Unfinished Tales, the twelve volumes of The History of Middle-earth and Tolkien's Letters as well.*

2. Aside from reading the books, have you had any other immersion in the Tolkien fandom? Online, through societies, other venues?

Answer:

My Tolkien-related activities include membership of the Tolkien Society since 2005, leading to attendance at Oxonmoot (most years) plus a number of AGMs, the occasional seminar and the event in Loughborough in 2012. I've contributed several articles to Amon Hen and also gave a talk about Aragorn at Oxonmoot a few years ago. In addition I attend meetings of my local smial (Southfarthing) which is actually a Tolkien Reading Group.

3. There are so many richly written, deeply compelling characters in Tolkien. How did you decide to focus on Aragorn?

Answer:

There wasn't really any decision to make, as right from the start I found Aragorn the most complex and appealing character in the book. Every time I re-read The Lord of the Rings - including delving into the Appendices - I found new depths to his character and significance.

4. What prompted you to write this book? How did the impetus to write about him, in such rich detail, come about?

Answer:

The actual impetus came from Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films. Although I enjoyed his portrayal of Aragorn in some ways, it was clear that there were significant differences between the film and book versions of the character. For my own satisfaction I decided to re-discover Tolkien's Aragorn by studying all the Middle-earth writings and making detailed notes on anything of interest. I did not, at that stage, see myself actually writing a book.

5. Did you initially plan such an exhaustive and detailed study of this character, when you first decided to write the book?

Answer:

No, I didn't envisage anything so detailed. It just got out of hand: the more notes I made the more ideas I had and the thing just grew exponentially!

6. The title makes use of the word ‘undervalued’—how do you define that in terms of Aragorn and how did you come to associate that word with him?

Answer:

While studying Aragorn it became clear to me that his role in the story is a lot more significant than is immediately apparent. This is partly because the book is “hobbito-centric”, to use Tolkien's own word [see end of Letter 181 in The Letters of J R R Tolkien edited by Humphrey Carpenter], so is largely written from the hobbit viewpoint. For this reason Aragorn's ancestry and earlier life are only described in the Appendices, which not everyone reads. Thus his deeds - and their significance - are often overlooked, causing him and his role to be undervalued. Chapter 1.5 of my book in particular aims to address this problem by concentrating on the story of The Lord of the Rings from Aragorn's point of view. He does many crucial things behind the scenes, for example: the lengthy search for Gollum; standing in for Gandalf as shown by the secret vigil he conducts over Frodo during the months before the latter's departure from the Shire; and - the most significant achievement - confronting Sauron in the Palantír of Orthanc thus implying that he himself has the Ring and so diverting Sauron's attention away from Frodo.

7. If you were to consider writing a similar book about another character from Tolkien’s legendarium who would you choose to focus on?

Answer:

I find Finrod Felagund, Galadriel and Elrond interesting, especially in the light of their impact on Aragorn and his ancestry. Among the hobbits, Merry Brandybuck is rather appealing. However I have to say that I am not planning to do another book on this scale!

8. What were your thoughts on the portrayal of Aragorn in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies?

Answer:

Given “book” Aragorn's lengthy struggle to regain the kingships of Arnor and Gondor and to be deemed worthy of marrying his beloved Arwen, it was extremely disappointing to be presented with the image of “Aragorn the reluctant king” who breaks off his engagement so Arwen can sail west.

In general I felt there was too much emphasis on Aragorn as a fighter, along with almost total neglect of his formidable healing skills, impressive foresight and knowledge of history and lore.

Another great disappointment was the omission of the challenge to Sauron in the Orthanc Stone. Yes, this incident was included in the extended version of The Return of the King, but it appeared in the wrong place and also gave the impression that Aragorn lost the confrontation. (The credit for seeing the enemy's plans in the Stone was actually given to Pippin!)

In addition I found the beheading of the Mouth of Sauron particularly disturbing.

9. Did you find Viggo Mortensen believable and appealing as Aragorn?

Answer:

In spite of my answer to the previous question I liked Viggo Mortensen's performance. He did actually look something like my image of Aragorn and he seemed to capture the sadness, remoteness, physical courage and protectiveness I associate with the character. Basically I thought that Mortensen did very well with the part he was given to play - but the part was not that of Tolkien's Aragorn!

10. Amazon has bought the rights to the appendices of the Lord of the Rings and is planning a 5 part series. Rumor has it that the first season will focus on young Aragorn. What do you hope to see in this adaptation and are there any particular incidents/scenes/events that you think merit particular attention or inclusion?

Answer: The following seem to me to be important:

- Putting Aragorn's early life in the context of “Estel”, the Hope of the Dúnedain, who has been prophesied to be the one who will atone for Isildur's failure to destroy the Ring, and who will restore the kingship of Men.

- Some emphasis on his family members: Ivorwen, Dírhael, Gilraen, the death of Arathorn, subsequent fostering by Elrond, and training by Elladan and Elrohir. Some indication of the close relationship with his foster-father would be good: Elrond loved Aragorn as much as his own children but this was not made apparent in the Peter Jackson films.

- The scene when Elrond tells the 20-year-old Aragorn his true identity.

- First meeting with Arwen

- Friendship with Gandalf from age 25 onward

- Betrothal to Arwen, and Galadriel's involvement: he was 49 by this time, so that may not be considered part of his early life (though 49 would be young for one of the Dúnedain!)

- Perhaps some reference to the events of The Hobbit in 2941-2 when we know that 10/11-year-old Aragorn was living in Rivendell.

11. What do you find most inspiring about Tolkien’s world?

Answer:

The depiction of such a complete and seemingly realistic world, and the fact that one can pick up extra hidden depths in both story and characters on each re-reading. There is always something else to discover or a new interpretation of a familiar passage.

12. Are you involved in any more projects involving Tolkien?

Answer:

Not at the moment. I have one or two ideas for possible short articles.

13. What advice would you give to those first encountering Tolkien’s work and wanting to learn more about Middle-earth and its inhabitants?

Answer:

Speaking from my own experience I would say: Read The Hobbit first then The Lord of the Rings several times, including the Appendices, before delving into other works: The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth and Tolkien's Letters, plus critical works, etc. - and of course online sources which were not available when I first became interested in Tolkien.

14. In the preface to your book you mention discovering the online Tolkien fanfiction community—what are your thoughts on Tolkien fanfiction? What time frame was this and did you join the fanfiction community at that time?

Answer:

I started writing fanfiction during 2003 and continued doing it until about 2007 which was when I made the decision to write a serious work about Aragorn. One piece of fanfiction appeared in Amon Hen, and the rest on a couple of websites which I think no longer exist.

My main thought about fanfiction is that it was this which started me off writing. It was very much an experiment as my last attempts at creative writing dated back to my school English lessons in the 1960s! Without trying the fanfiction first I don't think I would ever have got round to writing articles for Amon Hen, let alone my book.

15. Did encountering fanfiction or even writing it have an effect on your thoughts on Aragorn and the salient points of his character that truly defined him?

Answer:

Yes - because the chief aim of the fanfiction (mine and, I suspect, that of other fanfiction writers) was to fill in the gaps in Aragorn's story. I scoured the text for possible motives and feelings of the people I was writing about. My fanfiction was always based on the “book” version of the story and characters (never on the film version). I did sometimes use invented characters but only to add detail and interest to the story. For exampIe this approach was used when writing about Aragorn's Rangers and when describing his interactions with the inhabitants of Bree. Some stories were actually based on invented characters, in order to try and see Aragorn through the eyes of others. This probably helped me when writing the “Relationship” chapters [see next question.]

16. One aspect of your book that to me is truly unique is Part 2, where you study and interpret his interactions and relationships with the other races and individuals he encounters in Middle-earth. What made you decide to pursue this format?

Answer:

It just seemed the most logical approach. I couldn't study Aragorn's relationships properly without also studying the other half of each different relationship. There was so much to be revealed about both parties in these studies, many of which were based around families and generations (such as in Rohan, and Gondor, and in the Rivendell and Lothlórien communities).

17. Aragorn as a character brings together elements and bloodlines from the First Age into the Fourth Age—you outline these genealogies and relationships quite thoroughly in your book. How do you think this knowledge of his genealogy affected him in his transition from youth to Ranger to King? Is there a character from the earlier Ages that you think had a more significant impact on him or that he resembles the most in character?

Answer: Aragorn would presumably have learnt about these people as a child during his history lessons, but would not have connected them specifically with himself until he was made aware of his true identity at the age of 20.

Elendil, Isildur and Anárion stand out as the obvious significant ancestors whom Aragorn would have striven to emulate - plus, in the case of Isildur, also to atone for his failure to destroy the Ring.

Other ancestors who may well have inspired admiration and/or gratitude in Aragorn include:

- Elendur the self-sacrificing eldest son of Isildur. A passage in Unfinished Tales refers to Elrond seeing a huge similarity between Elendur and Aragorn, both physically and in character. [See footnote 26 at the end of The Disaster of the Gladden Fields.]

- Amandil, the father of Elendil, who advised his son to gather his family and possessions in secret and plan an escape from Númenor in the event of a disaster, before himself courageously setting out for the Undying Lands to plead for mercy for the Númenóreans. He was never heard of again, but the Númenórean race was saved due to Elendil's successful escape to Middle-earth after following his father's instructions.

- Tar-Elendil the 4th King of Númenor and his daughter Silmarien. The royal line of Númenor and its heirlooms only survived via this female line.

- Tar-Palantir the penultimate King of Númenor who resisted the influence of Sauron and tried to turn the Númenóreans back to friendship with the Eldar.

Another notable ancestor for a different reason was Arvedui, the last King of the North Kingdom, who tried to claim the throne of Gondor as well but was rejected and ended up losing both kingdoms before fleeing to the frozen north where he died in a shipwreck. Aragorn must have regarded his own mission to reunite the two kingdoms just over 1,000 years later with some apprehension.

Ar-Pharazôn would clearly have served as a dire warning!

I wonder if Aragorn felt any unease about his namesake, Aragorn I, being killed by wolves!

A comment in Appendix AI(i) of The Lord of the Rings states that the Númenóreans came to resent the choice of Elros to be mortal, thus triggering their yearning for immortality and their subsequent downfall. Did Aragorn ever resent his ancestor's choice? Personally I think he would have had the knowledge and wisdom to understand Ilúvatar's purpose in reuniting the immortal line of Elrond with the mortal line of Elros (through the marriage of Arwen and Aragorn) in order to strengthen the royal line prior to the departure of the Elves and the beginning of the Age of Men.

18. What are your thoughts on the original premise that Aragorn was Trotter, a hobbit?

Answer:

Eeek! The grinning and the wooden shoes! I don't think that the book could possibly have had the same impact, depth and sense of history if the main characters had all been hobbits. I seem to remember that the name “Trotter” still survived for a while after he became a man. “Strider” sounds much better. I'm so glad Tolkien didn't pursue the original idea.

19. Do you have any advice for budding Tolkien acolytes and scholars who are first delving into the legendarium?

Answer:

Read and re-read, record thoughts, ideas, passages worth quoting. Read what JRRT wrote and what others have written. This worked for me, over a very long period - more by accident than design.

*this answer is the same as Angela's answer in the Luna Press interview with her as it has not changed! Take a look at that article for more information on Angela and her book. https://www.lunapresspublishing.com/single-post/2017/09/04/Aragorn---A-Companion-Book

Interviewed by @maedhrosrussandol

July 14th 2018

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radioactive-earthshine · 7 years ago

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I just started following you and your post about welcoming all fans of Tolkien really made me happy bc I just joined in the fandom after an artist I like drew some Angbang. That was the beginning of the end lol. I have been reading wiki articles but I know that is not near enough and is it exhausting for me but from what I know there are loads of books too and I don't know where to start. Where should someone start? Is there a reading order? Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

Angbang has yet again pulled the unsuspecting victim straight into the void. I don’t think Tolkien would have imagined that the love of his two main villains would bring in readers, but anyway, however you got here: welcome! We don’t have cookies, but we do have feels and literal decades of writing to sift through. Your stay will be as long as you choose, and that may be a long, long while. I have been in the fandom for nearly 20 years and I still have not read everything or explored everything yet.

One thing I would like to impart on you though is this; reading Tolkien is hard. Yes some people will counter this with a sniff and a scoff and insist that it is not, but most will find his work daunting and overwhelming. If not in how it is written then in the sheer volume of information and variations of his legendarium. What helped me profoundly was reading it not as a fun casual fantasy but as a historical subject. When you put your mind in a state of what to expect out of it really helps your understanding of the text I feel.

As for reading order I personally think you should tackle it as so;

The Hobbit (keep in mind this is written before much of his own lore was settled and is meant to be a children’s book).

The Lord of the Rings (one tale, three volumes with the Appendices which are a great resource and gear you up for some HISTORY).

The Silmarillion.

Reading these five books first I feel is a great basic start and they are more or less consistent and are most “in sync” with each other. Don’t shy away from taking notes, however, particularly with The Silmarillion because from that point on it is delving into his legendarium, and the difficulty increases with each one.

The next round of books you might want to read are as follows;

Unfinished Tales

Children of Hurin

Letters (you can choose to read these here or after everything else, I know many people who saved the letters for last thought that it would have made better sense to read them during their first readings at some point.)

The rest of your journey should be the collective Histories of Middle Earth, all twelve volumes, and these are not for the faint of heart. Be prepared to take notes, be prepared to have a lot of contradiction and don’t come into them thinking that everything you will then read is gospel. If you are anything like me you will create a mosaic of what you like and sort of mush them together to make your own appealing version of events.

I. The Book of Lost Tales, part 1

II. The Book of Lost Tales, part 2

III. The Lays of Beleriand

IV. The Shaping of Middle-earth

V. The Lost Road and Other Writings

These first five go over a lot of the events of The Silmarillion (the first and second ages) and contain some of the earliest writings of Tolkien.

VI. The Return of the Shadow

VII. The Treason of Isengard

VIII. The War of the Ring

IX. Sauron Defeated

These four, as you may be able to tell from the titles, focus mostly on the events of The Lord of the Rings and the later second age through the third age.

X. Morgoth’s Ring

XI. The War of the Jewels

We’re back to The Silmarillion. These two books are cited a lot in Tolkien analysis partly due to the interesting information he provided in them (LACE is in volume X) and they are comparatively newer writings, so some fans like to consider these as more close to what the professor was going for in his legendarium.

XII. The Peoples of Middle-earth

The final volume is a lot of miscellaneous writings that spans all ages, it’s like the kitchen junk drawer for the professor’s writing.

Of course we also have new books as well to add to the list that are profoundly useful such as;

Beren and Luthien (2017)

This is a nifty book that focuses entirely on Luthien’s epic adventure and the drafts Tolkien wrote of it. It is a great resource.

The Fall of Gondolin (set to be published this year 2018)

Will also be like Beren and Luthien in that it centralizes on writings concerning this one event making it easier to study. Whew. Thank you Christopher Tolkien!

There also are a plethora of writings other people have done to supplement Tolkien’s writings intended to be good resources. Some are. Some are questionable. And others I just don’t even understand how they even got published.

My personal favorite supplementary resources are;

The Atlas of Middle-earth (revised edition) by; Karen Wynn Fonstad

This is a guide to the geography of Arda through the ages and so much more. A great resource to the change in landscape and military movements and general data about the landscape and the people who live there.

The Languages of Tolkien’s Middle-earth by; Ruth S. Noel

Short and sweet but it provides a quick and easy way to look at a glance the rules of each language. Dictionary is really pathetic but you can find better ones online, this book however has the language guides such as sentence structure and pronunciation. I like it because it is in one small book so looking things up is convenient.

Flora of Middle-earth. Plants of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium by; Walter S. Judd & Graham A. Judd

Tolkien was a great admirer of plants and these two compiled an entire book of each and every plant species mentioned in his writings, fictional and non. An interesting perspective. Has a fantastic section on the two trees of Valinor that for that part alone is worth buying. A love song for Yavanna.

The Science of Middle Earth (revised 2nd edition) by; Henry Gee

This book. This is my absolute favorite book anyone has written about Tolkien, period. This author goes into the possible science for HOW Tolkien’s world could function; as it is clear that Middle-earth is not a playground for magic but something much more fascinating. A great perspective.

This of course is my personal opinion for how to tackle reading, if you wanted an order. I did NOT read the books in order at all, and I admit I have not read some of these myself to completion.

If you are going to read anything I would definitely read the first five then from there on if it is just too daunting/overwhelming I would supplement yourself with select books focusing on what interests you the most. Also, engage in conversations with other fans, that alone helped me most of all when it came to understanding the writings. If you are lucky your university or college might even have a course on it. If anyone else has an input it would be appreciated, as always.

Welcome to the fandom, happy reading.

#tolkien #my writing #resources #welcome!!#Anonymous

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dawnfelagund · 7 years ago

Link

[I posted this essay to my blog The Heretic Loremaster over the weekend. Click the link above if you’d rather read it there. Reactions are welcome in both places.]

Who wrote The Silmarillion? It's a question with a more complicated answer than it seems on the surface. Yes, of course, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote the book that I picked up from a Barnes & Noble fourteen years ago, that is now on my desk with its cover coming off and its corners rounded from being read so many times. But who, in the vast imagined world within its pages, is telling the story? The narrator of The Silmarillion is so distant as to be barely discernible at all; it is possible to believe he doesn't exist at all. Indeed, in at least my first two readings, I did not think much of him. I assumed a distant, omniscient presence recounting what happened in plain, incontestable terms. Just the facts, ma'am.

The fact is, though, that J.R.R. Tolkien--the Silmarillion author whose name is on the cover--always imagined and constructed his stories not just as stories but as historiography: documents written by someone within the universe in which the history occurs. This complicates things: gone is the distance, the omniscience, and perhaps most importantly, the impression that the stories happened exactly as they are told.

This wouldn't be a problem--in fact, would be quite simple, as most fiction has point of view that is biased or unreliable--but for the fact that this isn't simple: This is Tolkien. So naturally, he had this idea that he wanted to write his stories as historiography, with a loremaster or chronicler who was himself a part of that history, but he couldn't make up his mind who this person was. In fact, he changed his mind several times, reversals that are documented in The History of Middle-earth for fans and scholars to angst and argue over.

I'm going to make the case that the "Quenta Silmarillion" is part of the Elvish tradition. This is contrary to the belief of Christopher Tolkien and other Tolkien scholars, who assign it to the "Mannish"--namely Númenórean--tradition. (@ingwiel has an excellent discussion of the evidence for this approach.) I understand why they did this, but I think that if you look deeply at the texts and the evidence those texts provide, there is not much to support that the tradition originated with the Númenóreans. (I am willing to concede that Elvish texts may have passed through Númenórean hands on their way back to Elrond and, eventually, Bilbo, but I persist in believing they are nonetheless predominantly Elvish texts representing an Elvish point of view.)

The Idea of the "Mannish" Tradition

The Elvish loremaster Pengolodh was first introduced as the primary author of the "Quenta Silmarillion" prior to 1930, when he was assigned author of the Annals of Beleriand (HoMe IV). Pengolodh was a tenacious character: Texts written as late as 1960 were still being assigned to him. So what happened?

The idea of the "Mannish" loremaster was a late idea and introduced as part of the series of writings collected by Christopher Tolkien under the title Myths Transformed (HoMe X). In a text that Christopher dates to 1958, Tolkien writes:

It is now clear to me that in any case the Mythology must actually be a 'Mannish' affair. ... The High Eldar living and being tutored by the demiurgic beings must have known, or at least their writers and loremasters must have known, the 'truth' (according to their measure of understanding). What we have in the Silmarillion etc. are traditions (especially personalized, and centred upon actors, such as Fëanor) handed on by Men in Númenor and later in Middle-earth (Arnor and Gondor); but already far back--from the first association of the Dúnedain and Elf-friends with the Eldar in Beleriand--blended and confused with their own Mannish myths and cosmic ideas. (Myths Transformed, "Text I," emphasis in the original)

To summarize: in 1958, Tolkien began to deeply question whether a civilization as advanced as that of the Eldar--a civilization that also had access to the teachings of the Ainur, who knew firsthand the structure of the universe--would produce myths that included such components as a flat Earth and the "astronomically absurd business of the making of the Sun and Moon" ("Text I"). This led to some radical cosmological rearrangements in Myths Transformed--and the relatively overlooked decision to reimagine the Silmarillion histories from a Mortal rather than an Elvish perspective. In an undated text also presented in Myths Transformed, Tolkien again takes up this question and explains the method of textual transmission in greater detail:

It has to be remembered that the 'mythology' is represented as being two stages removed from a true record: it is based first upon Elvish records and lore about the Valar and their own dealings with them; and these have reached us (fragmentarily) only through relics of Númenórean (human) traditions, derived from the Eldar, in the earlier parts, though for later times supplemented by anthropocentric histories and tales. These, it is true, came down through the 'Faithful' and their descendants in Middle-earth, but could not altogether escape the darkening of the picture due to the hostility of the rebellious Númenóreans to the Valar. ("Text VII")

"A leading consideration in the preparation of the text was the achievement of coherence and consistency," Christopher Tolkien wrote in a note on The Valaquenta in The Later Quenta Silmarillion II (HoMe X), "and a fundamental problem was uncertainty as to the mode by which in my father's later thought the 'Lore of the Eldar' had been transmitted."

Christopher Tolkien tentatively dates The Later Quenta Silmarillion II (LQ2) to 1958. Along with the last set of annals, The Annals of Aman and The Grey Annals, this represents the final version of the Silmarillion that his father produced. (See "Note on Dating" at the end of LQ2 in HoMe X.) Interesting about these texts--especially LQ2--is the fact that Tolkien removes all attributions Pengolodh. Mentions of Pengolodh are sprinkled throughout the Later Quenta Silmarillion I, which was written around 1951-52. When Tolkien "remoulded" LQ1 into LQ2, he removed Pengolodh. Also written around 1958? That first Myths Transformed text in which Tolkien asserts that his cosmology requires a Mortal and specifically bars an Eldarin loremaster.

And the Evidence of the Elvish, Part 1: The Creative Process

All this probably seems very simple. Tolkien was clear on his intentions. The Elvish tradition doesn't work, in his opinion. Therefore, it must be Mortal. He even took out the Elvish loremaster from the oldest Silmarillion draft. Simple, right?

Never. Working with any of the Silmarillion material--including the published Silmarillion--is necessarily speculative. This is a posthumous text, unfinished and existing in many forms. I think Christopher Tolkien did an admirable job of making a published book out of the tangle of his father's writings, but making that book required making decisions, as alluded to above, about how to decide what to include.

On this particular question, there are two approaches to making a decision on mode of transmission: There is Tolkien's stated intention, and there are the texts themselves and what they show of the realization of that intention. Christopher Tolkien, and many scholars, clearly prefer the first approach. Tolkien was clear on what he wanted, so that's the way to read the texts.

I prefer the second.

Perhaps this is because I approach the welter of Silmarillion texts as a creative writer as well as a Tolkien scholar. My experiences as an author of fiction myself lead me to question whether the creative process lends itself to the kind of neat analysis that says, "The author stated his intention. Here we have our answer." My experience tells me it is rarely that simple.

Below is what I imagine the creative process looks like for worldbuilding and constructing stories in that world, done in clipart and scribbles. For me, most of my work goes on in my mind: while driving to work, falling asleep at night, reading other authors' work, washing dishes, daydreaming. Some of the thinking is intentional, other occurs because it's where my mind wanders where I'm bored. Sometimes, thinking is sparked by an outside stimulus: an interview on the radio, a song, an image, a clip from a movie or TV. All of it goes into this tangle of thought constantly swirling in my mind, making and remaking my imagined world. Every now and then, an idea leaves my mind and takes concrete form as I write it down.

But only in limited instances do these ideas become finalized, incontrovertible--"canon," if you will. Sometimes an idea won't work and withers, unfinished. Other times, an idea is written down, only to dive back into the welter of thought in my mind for further reworking and reshaping--sometimes radically so.

Every author's creative process is different, of course, but hold up The Tale of the Sun and the Moon from the Book of Lost Tales next to the story Tolkien writes in Myths Transformed and the two are radically different, showing what any Silmarillion fan can tell you: Just because Tolkien wrote it down doesn't mean he meant it. Likewise, he went years at times without working on the legendarium, yet his letters and the progress we observe in the drafts show that he was always thinking about it. In short, his creative process, in this regard, seems a lot like mine.

Around 1958, we can say with some certainty that an idea crystallized from Tolkien's thoughts about his legendarium that the mode of transmission had to be centered on Mortals, not Elves. The idea seems to have loomed large in his awareness--along with ancillary ideas about cosmology--to the extent that it appears to reflect in decisions he made in revising LQ2.

But does that mean it is definitive? That it is "canon"? Not necessarily. In fact, I'd argue that we have proof that this particular manifestation of an idea was one that was far from finalized but dove back into the swirl of thinking on worldbuilding to be reconsidered and reworked--and ultimately unrealized.

And the Evidence of the Elvish, Part 2: Point of View

Point of view is no small thing in a story. In fact, in all but a few cases, it is so essential that to change the point of view risks breaking the story in a way that changing other elements rarely does. It's like painting. If you paint from the point of view of a peasant looking at a castle from the field where she labors, you cannot suddenly decide that the point of view is that of the princess looking out from the room in the castle where she spends most of her days, at least without redoing the painting entirely.

Likewise, one cannot take a story written from one point of view, then suddenly decide to change to a different point of view with any guarantee that the story will still work, much less make sense, without rewriting the story. In fact, in many cases, it will not.

Changing from an Elvish to a Númenórean point of view is not so simple as declaring, "Let it be!" and there it is. In the case of the "Quenta Silmarillion," the Eldarin (specifically Gondolindrim) perspective is deeply embedded. @grundyscribbling‘s post here is a good run-down of how the narrator's affiliation with Gondolin is revealed, even if never stated, in the stories included as part of the "Quenta." My article Attainable Vistas looks at some of the numerical data I've compiled that suggests a Gondolindrim perspective. At last year's Tolkien at UVM Conference, I presented more of that data, as well as new evidence that even the narrator's language in the "Quenta," reveals the point of view of a loremaster from Gondolin. Tolkien didn't put Pengolodh's biography down on paper until the 1959-60 text Quendi and Eldar, but the texts suggest that Pengolodh's identity was swirling in his mind many decades before that, and he wrote the "Quenta" with that point of view always in mind. Changing the point of view of such a story requires significant rewriting of the text. Do we have evidence that any of that rewriting--short of striking Pengolodh's name from LQ2--occurred?

No, we do not.

In fact, we sometimes see the opposite.

And the Evidence of the Elvish, Part 3: The Texts

The Later Quenta Silmarillion II becomes a relevant text to examine here because 1) it was written at the time when we know Tolkien was thinking about the mode of transmission and 2) his striking of Pengolodh's name from this version suggests he was beginning to act on his stated intention to revise the "Quenta" to reflect a Númenórean point of view. It is also an interesting text to study because it is a revision of LQ1, written about seven years earlier when the mode of transmission was, as far as I can tell, unreservedly Elvish.

Does the LQ2 contain other revisions toward a Númenórean mode? No, it is does not. In fact, it includes additions that, from a Mortal perspective, are suspect.

Laws and Customs among the Eldar. One of two major additions to LQ2 was Laws and Customs among the Eldar (L&C). L&C is explicitly attributed to Ælfwine, the Mortal man who was part of the mode of the transmission involving Pengolodh. Ælfwine is Anglo-Saxon, not Númenórean, but L&C is clearly written from the point of view of a Mortal commenting on Elves.

L&C opens with the sentence, "The Eldar grew in bodily form slower than Men, but in mind more swiftly." This comparison immediately establishes a Mortal point of view different from that of the "Quenta" as a whole, where Mortals are usually but supporting actors in a drama enacted by Elves. The first two paragraphs continue this comparison and assume the distinct point of view of a Mortal. Later, in the section "Of Naming," the narrator notes that the variety of names used by a single Elf "in the reading of their histories may to us seem bewildering," again establishing a Mortal point of view (emphasis mine).

L&C is an example of what a text written from a Mortal point of view would look like. "Men are really only interested in Men and in Men's ideas and visions," Tolkien wrote in Myths Transformed, and L&C acknowledges this by bringing Elvish customs into the context of Mortal experience ("Text I"). This text shows that Tolkien did manipulate the point of view based on his narrator. (This won't be shocking to any writer of fiction, and as an Anglo-Saxonist, Tolkien would have been aware of the impact of point of view on a historical text from that perspective as well.)

Christopher Tolkien dates L&C to the late 1950s (LQ2, "Note on Dating"). The argument could be made that Tolkien hadn't yet begun the process of revising to incorporate a Númenórean narrator. However, of all of the texts in LQ2, L&C is the easiest to revise to change the point of view. It is already from a Mortal point of view! Simply change the attribution to Ælfwine to a suitably Númenórean name and you have a major chapter of LQ2 aligned with the Númenórean mode of transmission. It is a surface change on the order of removing attributions to Pengolodh, and the fact that Tolkien didn't undertake it makes me question how seriously he truly undertook to revise the point of view.

The Statute of Finwë and Míriel. The Statute of Finwë and Míriel is the second major addition to LQ2. It is likewise dated to the late 1950s (LQ2, "Note on Dating"). If Tolkien wanted to write a text representing a Númenórean point of view, he couldn't have done a worse job of it with the Statute of Finwë and Míriel. Here we have a text deeply concerned with eschatology: Elven eschatology.

The Númenóreans were also concerned with eschatology. You could even say the Númenóreans were obsessed with eschatology, and immortality in particular. Here's a people, after all, annihilated because of their king's obsession with an Oasis song proclaiming, "You and I are gonna live forever!" A Númenórean text that represents Elven eschatology with no commentary grounding it in a Mortal perspective (like Tolkien does with L&C) is almost impossible to fathom. A text that centers on immortality and the decision to forgo immortality would certainly excite commentary from a Númenórean loremaster. Revisions to represent a Númenórean point of view would have to address this chapter--but they don't. Again, this suggests that JRRT's ideas about the mode of transmission weren't as definitive as his writings in Myths Transformed suggest.

And all the rest ...? Outside of L&C, the remainder of LQ2 includes nothing that suggests a Mortal point of view, even though L&C shows that Tolkien was capable, with the addition of a few words, of beginning to establish this. A convincing Númenórean text would have needed deep revisions, but surface changes--like the deletion of Pengolodh--set the course in the right direction.

Throughout the "Quenta," Tolkien often uses formulas like "it is said," "it is told," and "it is sung" to indicate that the narrator is receiving information secondhand versus as an eyewitness account. As I discussed at the Tolkien at UVM Conference in 2017, these formulas are used primarily with the Ainur and Mortals. The image below shows the data from one of my slides from this presentation. Adding these formulas is a rather easy way to signal that the information the narrator is reporting is at a distance from him--and LQ2 uses them when reporting on the actions of Ainur to which even an Eldarin narrator could not have borne witness--yet Tolkien did not make these revisions. Instead, this part of the Silmarillion (originally attributed to Rúmil, who would have been present for this history) is written in the style of an eyewitness account, even though a Númenórean loremaster would certainly find these chapters of history the most distant and unattainable. Yet nothing in the style in which these chapters are written suggest this.

There is one passage in particular in the chapter "Of the Silmarils and the Unrest of the Noldor" that, like the Statute of Finwë and Míriel, seems a ripe opportunity to make revisions to signal a Mortal narrator if Tolkien desired to do so:

In those days, moreover, though the Valar knew indeed of the coming of Men that were to be, the Elves as yet knew naught of it ... but now a whisper went among the Elves that Manwë held them captive so that Men might come and supplant them in the dominions of Middle-earth. For the Valar saw that this weaker and short-lived race would be easily swayed by them. Alas! little have the Valar ever prevailed to sway the wills of Men; but many of the Noldor believed, or half-believed, these evil words. (emphasis mine)

It is hard to imagine a Mortal loremaster self-identifying as "weaker and short-lived" or offering up such an assessment without commentary. Yet this passage was brought over from LQ1--when the narrator was Elvish--without revision.

Another small passage again betrays the Elvish perspective: "But now the deeds of Fëanor could not be passed over, and the Valar were wroth; and dismayed also, perceiving that more was at work than the wilfulness of youth" ("Of the Silmarils," emphasis mine). According to the timelines in the Annals of Aman, Fëanor was about three hundred years old at this point. For a Mortal narrator--even a long-lived Númenórean one--to describe him as a "youth" is difficult to fathom.

Now one might claim that perhaps Tolkien just didn't get the chance to add material. It is one thing to remove Pengolodh but quite another to add content, even in a very brief form. However, he does add other content from Myths Transformed to LQ2: In the chapter "Of the Darkening of Valinor," he adds a reference to the "dome of Varda" that alludes to his revised cosmology. He also adds volumes of other details to flesh out the narrative of LQ1. Yet he leaves the question of transmission untouched. Ironically, Christopher Tolkien refused to consider the revised Myths Transformed cosmology in making the published Silmarllion but stripped Pengolodh from the story on the strength of the purported revision to a Mortal tradition found also in Myths Transformed.

I find the opposite. Tolkien may have stated a desire to change the mode of transmission, but he didn't actually do much to effect this, even when he had the chance to make surface changes to the text that would have set him on the path to deeper revisions. Therefore, I conclude that the "Quenta Silmarillion" should be read as a text written by an Eldarin loremaster and from an Eldarin point of view, with all that entails.

#silmarillion #tolkien #historiography in middle-earth #pengolodh #narrator of the silmarillion #history of middle-earth #myths transformed #statute of finwe and miriel #laws and customs among the eldar #quenta silmarillion #later quenta silmarillion

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ivanaskye · 7 years ago

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hey I’ll continue posting my lotr liveblogs soon but I ALSO just started reading children of hurin and I’m dying

So I open this book and the first thing I see. “It is undeniable that there are a very great many readers of The Lord of the Rings for whom the legends of the Elder Days (as previously published in varying forms in The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and The History of Middle-earth) are altogether unknown,” oh, oh honey, ahahahahahaha.

Hey stop mentioning other things I need to read (eg bolt). Stop, stop, I ALREADY HAVE A PROBLEM-

THERES A BIGGER FALL OF GONDOLIN,?

And yet I STILL cannot care one bit about beren and luthien. Sorry.

Ah yes, a forward AND an introduction. Classic

Time UNIMAGINABLY REMOTE... ohhh boy do I have bad news for u........ pls.... I’m the girl who’s used to thinking about 4.5billion years of /irl/ earth.... the first age is nothing...

Oh right Thingol’s gonna be in this book hhhhhhh ugh

WOO onto the book proper!

Ok gloredhel sounds SO SINDARIN... omg does house of hador speak sindarin.... ;-; FEELINGS.

Wait. WIAT. Waaaaaaait. TURIN AND TUOR ARE COUSINS. I. Um. How did I not knOW-

Also hurin short

Morgen was sOMEWHAT STERN OF MOOD AND PROUD. Mhmm. JUST SOMEWHAT.

Aaaaa Men ;-;. As w Rohan in rotk, I love these Men sooooo much more when I don’t feel pressured to identify as actually OF their kind

“There Turgon the King received them well, when he learned of their kin; for Hador was an Elf-friend, and Ulmo, moreover, had counselled Turgon to deal kindly with the sons of that House, from whom help should come to him at need.” Ulmo u are trying but Tuor still gets denied. Also how’d I lowkey forget these two saw Gondolin.

Maeglin stahp.

TURIN INHERITED MORWEN’S GOTH GENE

“when he returned his quick speech, full of strange words and jests and half-meanings, bewildered Túrin and made him uneasy.” This just in Turin is autistic and hurin is allistic I don’t make the rules,

“‘Fair as an Elf-child is Lalaith,’ said Húrin to Morwen; ‘but briefer, alas! And so fairer, maybe, or dearer.’” Kill m e,

....

The entire passage with Turin finding out Lalaith is dead is just. MORWEN. Morwen have u ever chilled even Once.

“‘Because Urwen is dead, and laughter is stilled in this house,’ she answered. ‘But you live, son of Morwen; and so does the Enemy who has done this to us.’”

MORWEN CALLS HIM SON OF MORWEN. Does she have drama in her veins instead f blood

“Húrin mourned openly, and he took up his harp and would make a song of lamentation; but he could not, and he broke his harp, and going out he lifted up his hand towards the North, crying: ‘Marrer of Middle-earth, would that I might see you face to face, and mar you as my lord Fingolfin did!’”

In which we find that Morwen did not take ALL the Extra in this book, there is plenty left to share. Also wait he served Fingolfin but right before he died???

Ok just everything abt the Men - who being mortal have more to lose - fighting for the elves gives me feelings

You can just FEEL the intense Second Kindred-ness on every page

THEN TURIN ASKED TO HIM, WHAT IS FATE.

I just. This family could actually compete with the Kholins on Extra-ness and THAT IS SAYING SOMETHING.

One chapter in and there’s already Mortality Discourse and I’m screaming aloud omfg

“From wounds /and griefs/ that would slay Men they may be healed;” This is. Relevant. The holding of joy closer than sorrow, to temper it....

Just. Hit home that this is like... the freakin... third, fourth generation of Edain? They so young.....

“My father is not afraid, and I will not be; or at least, as my mother, I will be afraid and not show it.’” CHECK OUT THIS BURN ON MORWEN FOLKS

AND HE WISHES HE WAS ONE OF THE ELDAR AND /FOR THAT REASON/ WANTS TO MEET THEM. Out of. Wishing. And jealousy. DRAGS HANDS DOWN OVER FACE. Reading this book is not a quiet affair.

“‘They are a fair folk and wonderful, and they have a power over the hearts of Men. And yet I think sometimes that it might have been better if we had never met them, but had walked in lowlier ways. For already they are ancient in knowledge; and they are proud and enduring. In their light we are dimmed, or we burn with too quick a flame, and the weight of our doom lies the heavier on us.’”

LIES DOWN, D I E S.

“in the year that cannot be forgotten.” Oh look the narrator is super extra too

MORWEN IS SUCH A. Such a force to be reckoned with tbh.

Wait is that THAT sword. Already???

Oh it’s not but there is foreshadowing.

An elf: is mentioned

Me: MY CHILD

Aaaa it’s so cool to see Fingon and everyone told in full prose ;-;

YEAAAA TURGON!

Wait this is quenya. Hasn’t Thingol already outlawed quenya or

I can barely read the word Angband without thinking. Angbang.

Aaaaa that classic. Bring out prisoners and mess w them mood.

BY THE TREACHERY OF MEN THE FIELD WAS LOST. /This/ is what that lyric is referencing? I think.

Ow Fingon sure dies graphically.

A NEW STAR SHALL ARISE this is definitely where these lyrics come from.

#elfblogging #children of hurin #more like EXTRAS OF HURIN.#SOOOOMEONE listens to a lot of blind guardian.

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absynthe--minded · 3 years ago

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So... Let's say that, on the wave of recent excitment for the upcoming book, somebody has decided to ignore both their official academic career AND the evergrowing pile of bought-but-not-read books on the bookshelf, and wants to finally dive into HoME... which volume(s) would you suggest starting with? Asking for a friend...

so my answer to this is Morgoth’s Ring, but it’s a bit more complicated than that.

the thing about HoME is that it’s not organized by category, it’s organized chronologically, so it starts with the very first stuff Tolkien wrote and builds out from there. If you’re interested in tracing the development of a particular character, it’s in your best interest to get the whole thing and use the index or a search function to track their progress, but if what you’re looking for is a specific story, that’s a different animal entirely. Morgoth’s Ring, in my opinion, has a lot of stuff that’s really worth reading if you want to start exploring more deeply and you’re already interested in the fandom as a whole, but there’s a lot more out there worth exploring, SO.

what I’m gonna do is go through the volumes and point out anything that’s there that I really like or think is relevant in terms of fanon. I’m excluding the middle volumes because they’re the rough drafts of The Lord of the Rings and don’t really come up a lot in conversation in the fandom, so this is gonna be the beginning and the end. I am of course giving my opinion as to highlights and must-reads, and if people feel like I’ve slighted their personal favorite thing, I hope they’ll say so in the notes! there’s so much and it’s scattered everywhere and I know I’ll forget something worth mentioning.

the way that HoME is structured is snippets of text in between long stretches of commentary by Christopher Tolkien, and the commentary is hit or miss. personally, I disagree with basically every point Chris makes, but it’s still worth reading in some situations because he will cite fragments or notes or asides that don’t get transcribed, or he’ll discuss things he did for the published Silmarillion that he judges to be errors. there are also footnotes written both by JRRT and by Chris, and those are always worth it in my opinion.

The Books of Lost Tales - technically this is one and two of twelve, but they have a very different structure than the rest of the History. here is where we’ll find the very earliest stuff Tolkien ever wrote about Arda, and here is where the beginnings of the ‘Mythology for England’ idea come into play. the basic idea for these books is that Eriol, or Ælfwine, a mariner presumably from the British Isles, goes on a solo voyage and gets horribly lost and lands on Tol Eressëa. from there, he becomes what I can only really call a weeb but for elves (elfaboo?) and starts asking a bunch of questions to the people who befriend him. they very obligingly start telling him everything, and as a result there’s a frame story for a significant part of these volumes that makes the whole thing feel very fairytale in a way that later works really don’t capture. the bones of the SIlm are here, though a lot of the political intricacies and character drama aren’t. it’s also a very incomplete telling, though all three of the Great Tales show themselves. highlights: the Tale of Tinúviel aka “the one where Beren is a Noldo and Sauron is a giant cat”, the most complete version of the Nauglamír story that we have (though I will argue that it’s noncanonical for various reasons), the only complete account of the Fall of Gondolin featuring horribly detailed Everybody Dies play-by-play

The Lays of Beleriand - this is a poetry volume so if you really don’t like poetry I understand skipping it, but if you do read it you’re in for a treat. the framing device is basically gone, but it’s worth pointing out that Ælfwine isn’t gone entirely - he pops up a few more times throughout the rest of HoME to serve as the in-universe writer of a bunch of fake sociological studies and articles. highlights: here’s where you’re going to find the full-length Lay of Leithian (incomplete, but the most detailed version of the story that we have so far) as well as the Lay of the Children of Húrin, which is also incomplete but has some really heartwrenching stuff as well as Beleg and Túrin kissing and Morgoth hitting on Húrin.

The Shaping of Middle-Earth - here’s where a lot of stuff that turns up in the Silm comes from, to the point that I can pick out direct quotes from Shaping that are in the published volume. still no framing device, we’re getting into the early Quenta properly. highlights: the Quenta, appropriately, which is useful not least as a compare/contrast between the source and the Silm, and the translations of the Fëanorians’ names into Old English. this is a great volume and I absolutely recommend it.

The Lost Road and Other Writings - this is kind of an oddball volume but there’s a lot of information here about Númenor, even if quite a lot of it is deviating from later and more definitive canon. We get a time travel story of sorts, with a distinctly more fantastical bent than your average time travel story, and information about what’s best described as a Sauron-driven industrial revolution meant to help challenge the gods. highlights: basically everything we know about Adûnaic is here

Morgoth’s Ring - skipping past The Return of the Shadow, The Treason of Isengard, The War of the Ring, and Sauron Defeated, we come to volume 10. if you are going to get only one HoME volume, get this one. Both during and after writing LotR, Tolkien returned to the Silmarillion, and began to introduce more character details in addition to worldbuilding and linguistics. With Laws and Customs Among the Eldar and The Statute of Finwë and Míriel we get information about marriage and birth and death and see the beginnings of the intricate interpersonal political drama in Valinor that so many fans have come to love and hate. the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth is here, too. highlights: there’s too many to pick from so I’m just gonna say character descriptions! here is where we get the detail that Míriel Þerindë has silver hair. Nerdanel makes her first appearance, and this is the only source for much of the information about her character.

The War of the Jewels - this volume is my personal favorite, largely because of the Grey Annals, my preferred canonical source and my pick for best draft, riddled with Maedhros character details and Russingon subtext and raw dialogue. there’s other stuff here too but I think WotJ is worth it for that alone. this is a volume highlighted by timelines and outlines rather than full narratives, but there’s a surprising amount of detail and gut-wrenching pain and agony despite the lack of conventional storytelling. highlights: here’s where we get the famous “and their love was renewed” line for Maedhros and Fingon, same with the mention of the green Elessar stone being originally given to Fingon by Maedhros. Finrod tells Celegorm and Curufin “your oath will devour you” and that’s raw as hell.

The Peoples of Middle-Earth - some of the very last things Tolkien wrote about before his death, which places this in the same category as the upcoming The Nature of Middle-Earth in terms of timing/his greater career. the majority of this book is essays and examinations rather than narrative development, though a significant part of it is dedicated to Maeglin’s early life and particularly the travel times for Eöl’s journey that gave Aredhel and her son time to escape. there’s another version of the Statute of Finwë and Míriel here I think, but the full and more complete version is in MR. highlights: The Shibboleth of Fëanor, also known as “Dialectical Shifts Are A Conspiracy Theory”, which is notable for telling the story of a frankly comedic linguistic rivalry, featuring information about elvish naming customs, and giving a version of events at Losgar where Amrod gets burned alive with the ships.

I hope that helps! have fun!!

#replies #tortoisesoul #tolkien #absynthe's meta

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aspenbloomfieldyr2fmp · 5 years ago

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Tolkien

Who Was Tolkien?

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) was a major scholar of the English language, specialising in Old and Middle English. Twice Professor of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) at the University of Oxford, he also wrote a number of stories, including most famously The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), which are set in a pre-historic era in an invented version of our world which he called by the Middle English name of Middle-earth. This was peopled by Men (and women), Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, Orcs (or Goblins) and of course Hobbits. He has regularly been condemned by the Eng. Lit. establishment, with honourable exceptions, but loved by literally millions of readers worldwide.

Childhood and Youth

The name “Tolkien” was believed by the family to be of German origin; Toll-kühn: foolishly brave, or stupidly clever—hence the pseudonym “Oxymore” which he occasionally used; however, this quite probably was a German rationalisation of an originally Baltic Tolkyn, or Tolkīn. In any case, his great-great grandfather John (Johann) Benjamin Tolkien came to Britain with his brother Daniel from Gdańsk in about 1772 and rapidly became thoroughly Anglicised. Certainly his father, Arthur Reuel Tolkien, considered himself nothing if not English. Arthur was a bank clerk, and went to South Africa in the 1890s for better prospects of promotion. There he was joined by his bride, Mabel Suffield, whose family were not only English through and through, but West Midlands since time immemorial. So John Ronald (“Ronald” to family and early friends) was born in Bloemfontein, S.A., on 3 January 1892. His memories of Africa were slight but vivid, including a scary encounter with a large hairy spider, and influenced his later writing to some extent; slight, because on 15 February 1896 his father died, and he, his mother and his younger brother Hilary returned to England—or more particularly, the West Midlands.

The West Midlands in Tolkien’s childhood were a complex mixture of the grimly industrial Birmingham conurbation, and the quintessentially rural stereotype of England, Worcestershire and surrounding areas: Severn country, the land of the composers Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Gurney, and more distantly the poet A. E. Housman (it is also just across the border from Wales). Tolkien’s life was split between these two: the then very rural hamlet of Sarehole, with its mill, just south of Birmingham; and darkly urban Birmingham itself, where he was eventually sent to King Edward’s School. By then the family had moved to King’s Heath, where the house backed onto a railway line—young Ronald’s developing linguistic imagination was engaged by the sight of coal trucks going to and from South Wales bearing destinations like” Nantyglo”,” Penrhiwceiber” and “Senghenydd”.

Then they moved to the somewhat more pleasant Birmingham suburb of Edgbaston. However, in the meantime, something of profound significance had occurred, which estranged Mabel and her children from both sides of the family: in 1900, together with her sister May, she was received into the Roman Catholic Church. From then on, both Ronald and Hilary were brought up in the faith of Pio Nono, and remained devout Catholics throughout their lives. The parish priest who visited the family regularly was the half-Spanish half-Welsh Father Francis Morgan.

Tolkien family life was generally lived on the genteel side of poverty. However, the situation worsened in 1904, when Mabel Tolkien was diagnosed as having diabetes, usually fatal in those pre-insulin days. She died on 14 November of that year leaving the two orphaned boys effectively destitute. At this point Father Francis took over, and made sure of the boys’ material as well as spiritual welfare, although in the short term they were boarded with an unsympathetic aunt-by-marriage, Beatrice Suffield, and then with a Mrs Faulkner.

By this time Ronald was already showing remarkable linguistic gifts. He had mastered the Latin and Greek which was the staple fare of an arts education at that time, and was becoming more than competent in a number of other languages, both modern and ancient, notably Gothic, and later Finnish. He was already busy making up his own languages, purely for fun. He had also made a number of close friends at King Edward’s; in his later years at school they met regularly after hours as the “T. C. B. S.” (Tea Club, Barrovian Society, named after their meeting place at the Barrow Stores) and they continued to correspond closely and exchange and criticise each other’s literary work until 1916.

However, another complication had arisen. Amongst the lodgers at Mrs Faulkner’s boarding house was a young woman called Edith Bratt. When Ronald was 16, and she 19, they struck up a friendship, which gradually deepened. Eventually Father Francis took a hand, and forbade Ronald to see or even correspond with Edith for three years, until he was 21. Ronald stoically obeyed this injunction to the letter. In the summer of 1911, he was invited to join a party on a walking holiday in Switzerland, which may have inspired his descriptions of the Misty Mountains, and of Rivendell. In the autumn of that year he went up to Exeter College, Oxford where he stayed, immersing himself in the Classics, Old English, the Germanic languages (especially Gothic), Welsh and Finnish, until 1913, when he swiftly though not without difficulty picked up the threads of his relationship with Edith. He then obtained a disappointing second class degree in Honour Moderations, the “midway” stage of a 4-year Oxford “Greats” (i.e. Classics) course, although with an “alpha plus” in philology. As a result of this he changed his school from Classics to the more congenial English Language and Literature. One of the poems he discovered in the course of his Old English studies was the Crist of Cynewulf—he was amazed especially by the cryptic couplet:

Eálá Earendel engla beorhtast

Ofer middangeard monnum sended

Which translates as:

Hail Earendel brightest of angels,

over Middle Earth sent to men.

(“Middangeard” was an ancient expression for the everyday world between Heaven above and Hell below.)

This inspired some of his very early and incohate attempts at realising a world of ancient beauty in his versifying.

In the summer of 1913 he took a job as tutor and escort to two Mexican boys in Dinard, France, a job which ended in tragedy. Though no fault of Ronald’s, it did nothing to counter his apparent predisposition against France and things French.

Meanwhile the relationship with Edith was going more smoothly. She converted to Catholicism and moved to Warwick, which with its spectacular castle and beautiful surrounding countryside made a great impression on Ronald. However, as the pair were becoming ever closer, the nations were striving ever more furiously together, and war eventually broke out in August 1914.

War, Lost Tales and Academia

Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Tolkien did not rush to join up immediately on the outbreak of war, but returned to Oxford, where he worked hard and finally achieved a first-class degree in June 1915. At this time he was also working on various poetic attempts, and on his invented languages, especially one that he came to call Qenya [sic], which was heavily influenced by Finnish—but he still felt the lack of a connecting thread to bring his vivid but disparate imaginings together. Tolkien finally enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers whilst working on ideas of Earendel [sic] the Mariner, who became a star, and his journeyings. For many months Tolkien was kept in boring suspense in England, mainly in Staffordshire. Finally it appeared that he must soon embark for France, and he and Edith married in Warwick on 22 March 1916.

Eventually he was indeed sent to active duty on the Western Front, just in time for the Somme offensive. After four months in and out of the trenches, he succumbed to “trench fever”, a form of typhus-like infection common in the insanitary conditions, and in early November was sent back to England, where he spent the next month in hospital in Birmingham. By Christmas he had recovered sufficiently to stay with Edith at Great Haywood in Staffordshire.

During these last few months, all but one of his close friends of the “T. C. B. S.” had been killed in action. Partly as an act of piety to their memory, but also stirred by reaction against his war experiences, he had already begun to put his stories into shape, “… in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire” [Letters 66]. This ordering of his imagination developed into the Book of Lost Tales (not published in his lifetime), in which most of the major stories of the Silmarillion appear in their first form: tales of the Elves and the “Gnomes”, (i. e. Deep Elves, the later Noldor), with their languages Qenya and Goldogrin. Here are found the first recorded versions of the wars against Morgoth, the siege and fall of Gondolin and Nargothrond, and the tales of Túrin and of Beren and Lúthien.

Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring, although periods of remission enabled him to do home service at various camps sufficiently well to be promoted to lieutenant. It was when he was stationed in the Hull area that he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and there in a grove thick with hemlock Edith danced for him. This was the inspiration for the tale of Beren and Lúthien, a recurrent theme in his “Legendarium”. He came to think of Edith as “Lúthien” and himself as “Beren”. Their first son, John Francis Reuel (later Father John Tolkien) had already been born on 16 November 1917.

When the Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, Tolkien had already been putting out feelers to obtain academic employment, and by the time he was demobilised he had been appointed Assistant Lexicographer on the New English Dictionary (the “Oxford English Dictionary”), then in preparation. While doing the serious philological work involved in this, he also gave one of his Lost Tales its first public airing—he read The Fall of Gondolin to the Exeter College Essay Club, where it was well received by an audience which included Neville Coghill and Hugo Dyson, two future “Inklings”. However, Tolkien did not stay in this job for long. In the summer of 1920 he applied for the quite senior post of Reader (approximately, Associate Professor) in English Language at the University of Leeds, and to his surprise was appointed.

At Leeds as well as teaching he collaborated with E. V. Gordon on the famous edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and continued writing and refining The Book of Lost Tales and his invented “Elvish” languages. In addition, he and Gordon founded a “Viking Club” for undergraduates devoted mainly to reading Old Norse sagas and drinking beer. It was for this club that he and Gordon originally wrote their Songs for the Philologists, a mixture of traditional songs and original verses translated into Old English, Old Norse and Gothic to fit traditional English tunes. Leeds also saw the birth of two more sons: Michael Hilary Reuel in October 1920, and Christopher Reuel in 1924. Then in 1925 the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford fell vacant; Tolkien successfully applied for the post.

Professor Tolkien, The Inklings and Hobbits

In a sense, in returning to Oxford as a Professor, Tolkien had come home. Although he had few illusions about the academic life as a haven of unworldly scholarship (see for example Letters 250), he was nevertheless by temperament a don’s don, and fitted extremely well into the largely male world of teaching, research, the comradely exchange of ideas and occasional publication. In fact, his academic publication record is very sparse, something that would have been frowned upon in these days of quantitative personnel evaluation.

However, his rare scholarly publications were often extremely influential, most notably his lecture “Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics”. His seemingly almost throwaway comments have sometimes helped to transform the understanding of a particular field—for example, in his essay on “English and Welsh”, with its explanation of the origins of the term “Welsh” and its references to phonaesthetics (both these pieces are collected in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, currently in print). His academic life was otherwise largely unremarkable. In 1945 he changed his chair to the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature, which he retained until his retirement in 1959. Apart from all the above, he taught undergraduates, and played an important but unexceptional part in academic politics and administration.

His family life was equally straightforward. Edith bore their last child and only daughter, Priscilla, in 1929. Tolkien got into the habit of writing the children annual illustrated letters as if from Santa Claus, and a selection of these was published in 1976 as The Father Christmas Letters. He also told them numerous bedtime stories, of which more anon. In adulthood John entered the priesthood, Michael and Christopher both saw war service in the Royal Air Force. Afterwards Michael became a schoolmaster and Christopher a university lecturer, and Priscilla became a social worker. They lived quietly in North Oxford, and later Ronald and Edith lived in the suburb of Headington.

However, Tolkien’s social life was far from unremarkable. He soon became one of the founder members of a loose grouping of Oxford friends (by no means all at the University) with similar interests, known as “The Inklings”. The origins of the name were purely facetious—it had to do with writing, and sounded mildly Anglo-Saxon; there was no evidence that members of the group claimed to have an “inkling” of the Divine Nature, as is sometimes suggested. Other prominent members included the above—mentioned Messrs Coghill and Dyson, as well as Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, and above all C. S. Lewis, who became one of Tolkien’s closest friends, and for whose return to Christianity Tolkien was at least partly responsible. The Inklings regularly met for conversation, drink, and frequent reading from their work-in-progress.

The Storyteller

Meanwhile Tolkien continued developing his mythology and languages. As mentioned above, he told his children stories, some of which he developed into those published posthumously as Mr. Bliss, Roverandom, etc. However, according to his own account, one day when he was engaged in the soul-destroying task of marking examination papers, he discovered that one candidate had left one page of an answer-book blank. On this page, moved by who knows what anarchic daemon, he wrote “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit“.

In typical Tolkien fashion, he then decided he needed to find out what a Hobbit was, what sort of a hole it lived in, why it lived in a hole, etc. From this investigation grew a tale that he told to his younger children, and even passed round. In 1936 an incomplete typescript of it came into the hands of Susan Dagnall, an employee of the publishing firm of George Allen and Unwin (merged in 1990 with HarperCollins).

She asked Tolkien to finish it, and presented the complete story to Stanley Unwin, the then Chairman of the firm. He tried it out on his 10-year old son Rayner, who wrote an approving report, and it was published as The Hobbit in 1937. It immediately scored a success, and has not been out of children’s recommended reading lists ever since. It was so successful that Stanley Unwin asked if he had any more similar material available for publication.

By this time Tolkien had begun to make his Legendarium into what he believed to be a more presentable state, and as he later noted, hints of it had already made their way into The Hobbit. He was now calling the full account Quenta Silmarillion, or Silmarillion for short. He presented some of his “completed” tales to Unwin, who sent them to his reader. The reader’s reaction was mixed: dislike of the poetry and praise for the prose (the material was the story of Beren and Lúthien) but the overall decision at the time was that these were not commercially publishable. Unwin tactfully relayed this message to Tolkien, but asked him again if he was willing to write a sequel to The Hobbit. Tolkien was disappointed at the apparent failure of The Silmarillion, but agreed to take up the challenge of “The New Hobbit”.

This soon developed into something much more than a children’s story; for the highly complex 16-year history of what became The Lord of the Rings consult the works listed below. Suffice it to say that the now adult Rayner Unwin was deeply involved in the later stages of this opus, dealing magnificently with a dilatory and temperamental author who, at one stage, was offering the whole work to a commercial rival (which rapidly backed off when the scale and nature of the package became apparent). It is thanks to Rayner Unwin’s advocacy that we owe the fact that this book was published at all – Andave laituvalmes! His father’s firm decided to incur the probable loss of £1,000 for the succès d’estime, and publish it under the title of The Lord of the Rings in three parts during 1954 and 1955, with USA rights going to Houghton Mifflin. It soon became apparent that both author and publishers had greatly underestimated the work’s public appeal.

The “Cult”

The Lord of the Rings rapidly came to public notice. It had mixed reviews, ranging from the ecstatic (W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis) to the damning (E. Wilson, E. Muir, P. Toynbee) and just about everything in between. The BBC put on a drastically condensed radio adaptation in 12 episodes on the Third Programme. In 1956 radio was still a dominant medium in Britain, and the Third Programme was the “intellectual” channel. So far from losing money, sales so exceeded the break-even point as to make Tolkien regret that he had not taken early retirement. However, this was still based only upon hardback sales.

The really amazing moment was when The Lord of the Rings went into a pirated paperback version in 1965. Firstly, this put the book into the impulse-buying category; and secondly, the publicity generated by the copyright dispute alerted millions of American readers to the existence of something outside their previous experience, but which appeared to speak to their condition. By 1968 The Lord of the Rings had almost become the Bible of the “Alternative Society”.

This development produced mixed feelings in the author. On the one hand, he was extremely flattered, and to his amazement, became rather rich. On the other, he could only deplore those whose idea of a great trip was to ingest The Lord of the Rings and LSD simultaneously. Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick had similar experiences with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Fans were causing increasing problems; both those who came to gawp at his house and those, especially from California who telephoned at 7 p.m. (their time—3 a.m. his), to demand to know whether Frodo had succeeded or failed in the Quest, what was the preterite of Quenyan lanta-, or whether or not Balrogs had wings. So he changed addresses, his telephone number went ex-directory, and eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth, a pleasant but uninspiring South Coast resort (Hardy’s “Sandbourne”), noted for the number of its elderly well-to-do residents.

Meanwhile the cult, not just of Tolkien, but of the fantasy literature that he had revived, if not actually inspired (to his dismay), was really taking off—but that is another story, to be told in another place.

Other Writings

Despite all the fuss over The Lord of the Rings, between 1925 and his death Tolkien did write and publish a number of other articles, including a range of scholarly essays, many reprinted in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (see above); one Middle-earth related work, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil; editions and translations of Middle English works such as the Ancrene Wisse, Sir Gawain, Sir Orfeo and The Pearl, and some stories independent of the Legendarium, such as the Imram, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun—and, especially, Farmer Giles of Ham, Leaf by Niggle, and Smith of Wootton Major.

The flow of publications was only temporarily slowed by Tolkien’s death. The long-awaited Silmarillion, edited by Christopher Tolkien, appeared in 1977. In 1980 Christopher also published a selection of his father’s incomplete writings from his later years under the title of Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. In the introduction to this work Christopher Tolkien referred in passing to The Book of Lost Tales, “itself a very substantial work, of the utmost interest to one concerned with the origins of Middle-earth, but requiring to be presented in a lengthy and complex study, if at all” (Unfinished Tales, p. 6, paragraph 1).

The sales of The Silmarillion had rather taken George Allen & Unwin by surprise, and those of Unfinished Tales even more so. Obviously, there was a market even for this relatively abstruse material and they decided to risk embarking on this “lengthy and complex study”. Even more lengthy and complex than expected, the resulting 12 volumes of the History of Middle-earth, under Christopher’s editorship, proved to be a successful enterprise. (Tolkien’s publishers had changed hands, and names, several times between the start of the enterprise in 1983 and the appearance of the paperback edition of Volume 12, The Peoples of Middle-earth, in 1997.) Over time, other posthumous publications emerged including Roverandom (1998), The Children of Húrin (2007), Beowulf (2014), Beren and Lúthien (2017), and most recently The Fall of Gondolin (2018).

Finis

After his retirement in 1959 Edith and Ronald moved to Bournemouth. On 29 November 1971 Edith died, and Ronald soon returned to Oxford, to rooms provided by Merton College. Ronald died on 2 September 1973. He and Edith are buried together in a single grave in the Catholic section of Wolvercote cemetery in the northern suburbs of Oxford. (The grave is well signposted from the entrance.) The legend on the headstone reads:

Edith Mary Tolkien, Lúthien, 1889–1971

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren, 1892–1973

Source

https://www.tolkiensociety.org/author/biography/

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fic-dreamin · 7 years ago

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Yet another cash-in from the Tolkien Estate In 1945, The Welsh Review published a 506-line poem, ‘The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun’, by J.R.R. Tolkien. A&I, as I will call it for the rest of this review, tells the story of Aotrou, a childless Breton lord who visits a witch in order to cure his wife Itroun’s infertility, with tragic consequences. It was Tolkien’s attempt to write a poem in English inspired by Villemarqué's nineteenth-century anthology of Breton folk songs, Barzaz-Breiz, which Tolkien owned and which clearly had a significant impact on him. Go to Amazon

Insight into Tolkien's fascination with folk tales Before J.R.R. Tolkien was working on what would become “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings,” he wrote “The Lay of Aotrou & Itroun.” In 1929 and 1930, he worked on this ballad, a retelling of a folk tale collected and published in a dual language (Breton and French) edition in 1846 by the French writer Theodore Claude Henri Hersart de la Villemarque. Tolkien actually owned a copy of the 1846 edition, published at a time when writers all over Europe were collecting folk tales and stories (including the Brothers Grimm). Villemarque’s stories were immensely popular and are still in publication today. Go to Amazon

A Little Gem of a Classic I may be one of the few who sees everything done by Christopher Tolkien and the Tolkien Estate as praiseworthy. I like the Silmarillion (though I do hold out hope for a extended version), The Books of Lost Tales, The History of Middle Earth and all subsequent volumes.Including this one.I love these books because, I believe I know what Tolkien was trying to do, as himself mentions in his Letters he had a dream to gift his England with a mythos (paraphrase). I believe it slowly dawned on him that such a thing was beyond the ability of just one man, regardless of how talented he was. However, he strove mightily and brought forth some completed works and others in various stages of completeness. Christopher Tolkien has done amazing work and has gifted us with (among other things) a coherent Silmarillion, The Children of Hurin, the forthcoming Beren and Luthien.Needless to say, I hope he has many more completed works awaiting us. Go to Amazon

A Dark Medieval Tale. Five Stars Amazing book Early Breton poems, well translated and explained Always like to see some of Tolkien's early work make it ...

#Verlyn Flieger: 9781328834546: Amazon.com: Books

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litsen-lithenna · 5 years ago

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Although I agree with most of what was so gloriously stated (Maglor as Homer is a kink), the Silm was precisely planned to not be given through a " personal " pov.

The thing is that Tolkien believed that a direct witness as a narrator would make those tales much less attractive, and that their charms was based on the fact that in the LotR, they only appear as “glimpses” of a “larger background” (as parallel tales like those which appear, for instance, in Beowulf). And he was well aware that this dimension could make the publication of the Silmarillion even more difficult, since his readers were used to a narration given through the hobbits’ perspective.

Hence the Eriol business (already in the early 1920s!) in The Book of Lost Tales, but also, and mostly, that moment in Imladris, in the LotR, when Biblo gives Frodo books which are described as “copy of the Red Book Westmarch which was made in Gondor...” (Prologue of the Second edition of the LotR) - Those are tools that make the tales remote and yet close, because they are told to or by a character to whom we, readers, can relate.

Yet, in the end, the Silmarillion was published without such tools, which might explain why it is not so easy to read... We’re just not used to that kind of narration!

In any case, although I love the idea of those elven lords as narrators of the First Age stories, the taste of those tales would have been much different then, if not disappointing... In other words, they are attractive precisely because they’re presented as myths - and Tolkien’s doubts were based on the facts that modern readers wouldn’t be receptive to a detached narrator with a “objective” pov (which, actually, is not really the case of the Silmarillion narration) - and that may be the reason behind the existence of intradiegetic narrators such as Rúmil and Pengolodh...

“To tell [the stories that are only alluded to in The Lord of the Rings] in their own right and expect them to retain the charm they got from their larger setting would be a terrible error” -- Professor Tom Shippey, quoted by Christopher Tolkien In the Foreword of The Book of Lost Tales I

if the silm had a fixed protagonist like a lot of stories, my money's on fingon, finrod, or maedhros. fingon bc he radiates dumbass protag energy, finrod bc he's like the angelic nice guy protag, while maedhros as a protag if we're making the silm edgy

edit: *if only those 3 didn't die😔😔

#Aaaaaah #All the things I love to discuss #I could talk about that for hours #please don't let me!#tolkien's lore

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danithebookaholic-blog · 7 years ago

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January Authors

I wish I had all the time in the world - and a photographic memory - so I could read all of the books that have ever been written and be able to write a review on all of them, so I could share my love for the written word with you.

Unfortunately, I don't have all the time in the world and I can't read a mile a minute (I'm quite a slow reader, considering how much I read), nor do I have a photographic memory. So, instead I'm going to share those that fall outside of my Pinterest Reading Challenge, Book of the Month, and Audio Book Extras in a monthly form.

The following are just a few authors that were born this month and some of my favorites written by them. This is by no means a complete list. You'll find some classic authors as well as some that are new and up-and-coming. Some are legends while others are as green as the spring grass. Some are dark and mysterious and others are bright and bubbly. And some lost and almost completely forgotten or today's bestseller. All are completely different, and yet each have very one big thing in common: Love for telling a story.

I hope you enjoy this month's Birthday Authors, and maybe find a new read while you're at it!

January 3 - J.R.R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkein (January 3, 1892 - September 2, 1973) was an English writer, poet, phiologist, and university professor who is best known as the author of the classic high-fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. (source)

My Favorite: The Hobbit

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort. (source)

January 12 - Jack London

John Griffith "Jack" London (January 12, 1876 - November 22, 1916) was an American novelist, journalist, and social activist. A pioneer in the world of commercial magazine fiction he was one of the first writers to become a worldwide celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction.

Some of his most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life". He also wrote about the South Pacific in stories such as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen", and of San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf. (source)

My Favorite: The Call of the Wild

Life is good for Buck in Santa Clara Valley, where he spends his days eating and sleeping in the golden sunshine. But one day a treacherous act of betrayal leads to his kidnap, and he is forced into a life of toil and danger. Dragged away to be a sledge dog in the harsh and freezing cold Yukon, Buck must fight for his survival. Can he rise above his enemies and become the master of his realm once again? (source)

I have only read a couple of Jack London's books, and it has been many years since I've done so. This is one author in which I need to explore more!

January 19 - Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849) was an Aperican writer, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and American literature as a whole, and he was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story. Poe is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre and is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

Some of Poe's most noted works are The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart, "Lenore", "The Raven", and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Poe's only complete novel. (source)

My Favorite: "Lenore"

"Lenore" originally began as a different poem, "A Paean", and was not published as "Lenore" until 1843.

The poem discusses proper decorum in the wake of the death of a young woman, described as "the queenliest dead that ever died so young." The poem concludes: "No dirge shall I upraise,/ But waft the angel on her flight with a paean of old days!" Lenore's fiance, Guy de Vere, finds it inappropriate to "mourn" the dead; rather, one should celebrate their ascension to a new world. Unlike most of Poe's poems relating to dying women, "Lenore" implies the possibility of meeting in paradise.

The poem may have been Poe's way of dealing with the illness of his wife, Virginia. The dead woman's name, however, may have been a reference to Poe's recently dead brother, William Henry Leonard Poe. (source)

January 25 - Virginia Wolfe

Adeline Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 - March 28, 1941) was an English writer who is considered one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Born in an affluent household in Kensington, London, she attended the King's College London and was acquainted with the early reformers of women's higher education.

Having been home-schooled for part of her childhood, mostly in English classics and Victorian literature, Woolf began writing professionally in 1900. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. She published her first novel titled The Voyage Out in 1915. Her best-known works include the novels Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando, and the book-length essay A room of One's Own, with its dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." (source)

Sadly, this is the one author on this list that I have not read any of their work.

January 27 - Lewis Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (January 27, 1832 - January 14, 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English writer, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon, and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice in Wonderland, its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, which includes the poem "Jabberwocky", and the poem The Hunting of the Shark - all examples of the genre of literary nonsense. He is noted for his facility at word play, logic and fantasy. (source)

My Favorite: Through the Looking-Glass

This 1872 sequel to Lewis Carroll's beloved Alice's Adventures in Wonderland finds the inquisitive heroine in a fantastic land where everything is reversed. Looking-glass land, a topsy-turvy world lurking just behind the mirror over Alice's mantel, is a fantastic realm of live chessmen, madcap kings and queens, strange mythological creatures, talking flowers and puddings, and rude insects. Brooks and hedges divide the lush greenery of looking-glass land into a chessboard, where Alice becomes a pawn in a bizarre game of chess involving Humpty Dumpty, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Lion and the Unicorn, the White Knight, and other nursery-rhyme figures. Promised a crown when she reaches the eighth square, Alice perseveres through a surreal landscape of amusing characters that pelt her with riddles and humorous semantic quibbles and regale her with memorable poetry, including the oft-quoted "Jabberwocky." This handsome, inexpensive edition, featuring the original John Tenniel illustrations, makes available to today's readers a classic of juvenile literature long cherished for its humor, whimsy, and incomparable fantasy. (source)

From one bookaholic to another, I hope I’ve helped you find your next fix. —Dani

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hermanwatts · 5 years ago

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Sensor Sweep: Genre Magazines, Mort Kunstler, Vampire Queen, Boris Dolgov

Publishing (Forbes): Today, the number of science fiction and fantasy magazine titles is higher than at any other point in history. That’s more than 25 pro-level magazines, according to a count from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, amid a larger pool of “70 magazines, 14 audio sites, and nine critical magazines,” according to Locus Magazine.

Publishing (Jason Sanford): For the last few months I’ve been working on #SFF2020: The State of Genre Magazines, a detailed look at science fiction and fantasy magazine publishing in this day and age.This report is available below and can also be downloaded in the following formats: Mobi file for Kindle, Epub file for E-book Readers, PDF file. For this report I interviewed the editors, publishers, and staff of the following genre magazines. Many thanks to each of these people. The individual interviews are linked below and also contained in the downloadable Kindle, Epub, and PDF versions of the report.

Science Fiction (New Yorker): In her heyday, Russ was known as a raging man-hater. This reputation was not entirely unearned, though it was sometimes overstated. Of one of her short stories, “When It Changed,” which mourns a lost female utopia, the science-fiction novelist Michael Coney wrote, “The hatred, the destructiveness that comes out in the story makes me sick for humanity. . . . I’ve just come from the West Indies, where I spent three years being hated merely because my skin was white. . . . [Now I] find that I am hated for another reason—because Joanna Russ hasn’t got a prick.”

Comic Books (ICV2): Blaze Publishing has reached an agreement with Conan Properties International that will allow it to publish U.S. editions of the Glénat bande dessinée series The Cimmerian, ICv2 has learned. The Glenat series adapts Robert E. Howard Conan stories originally published in Weird Tales into comic stories that Ablaze describes as “the true Conan… unrestrained, violent, and sexual… just as Robert E. Howard intended.”

Fantasy (DMR Books): To cut straight to the one-line review: Jamie Williamson’s The Evolution of Modern Fantasy (Palgrave McMillan, 2015) is a must-read if you’re at all interested in how the popular genre now known as “fantasy” came about. Even if it’s a little difficult to obtain and get into. Williamson is both an academic and “one of us.” A senior lecturer in English at the University of Vermont, he’s taught a number of classes that I’d love to audit (Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Science Fiction & Fantasy Literature, King Arthur).

Historical Fiction (Jess Nevins): Hereward the Wake was written by the Rev. Charles Kingsley and first appeared in as a magazine serial in 1865 before publication as a novel in 1869. It is a fictionalization of the life of the historical Hereward the Wake (circa 1035-circa 1072), a rebel against the eleventh century Norman invasion and occupation of England. Although he became a national hero to the English and the subject of many legends and songs, little is known for certain about Hereward, and it is theorized that he was actually half-Danish rather than of Saxon descent.

Art (Mens Pulp Magazines): During the summer and fall of 2019, we worked with the great illustration artist Mort Künstler, his daughter Jane Künstler, President of Kunstler Enterprises, and Mort’s archivist Linda Swanson on an art book featuring classic men’s adventure magazine cover and interior paintings Mort did during the first major phase of his long career. That book, titled MORT KÜNSTLER: THE GODFATHER OF PULP FICTION ILLUSTRATORS, is now available on Amazon in the US and worldwide. It’s also available on the Barnes & Noble website and via the Book Depository site, which offers free shipping to anywhere in the world.

Gaming (Tim Brannon): Palace of the Vampire Queen. In the beginning, there was a belief that all DMs would naturally create all their own adventures and there was no market for pre-written ones. The only printed adventure out at this time was “Temple of the Frog” in Blackmoor. Seeing a need, the Palace of the Vampire Queen was written by Pete and Judy Kerestan. Yes, the very first adventure was co-written by a woman. The first edition was self-published, followed by a second and third edition by Wee Warriors (1976 and 1977) and distributed exclusively by TSR.

Fiction (DMR Books): Last summer, I was fortunate enough to acquire the copyrights to Merritt’s material from the previous owners. Along with the rights, I received a few boxes of papers, which I’ve enjoyed going through during the past few months, and which I anticipate will provide me with many more enjoyable evenings perusing them. Among these were papers relating to Merritt and the Avon reprints. Some of this takes the form of correspondence between Merritt’s widow, Eleanor, and the literary agent she’d engaged for Merritt’s work, Brandt & Brandt. Others are contracts with Avon, as well as Avon royalty statements.

Pournelle (Tip the Wink): Here, all of Pournelle’s best short work has been collected in a single volume. There are over a dozen short stories, each with a new introduction by editor and longtime Pournelle assistant John F. Carr, as well as essays and remembrances by Pournelle collaborators and admirers.” My take: I enjoyed this a lot. It had been a while since I read any Pournelle (and then almost always with Niven). I’m now tempted to reread The Mote In God’s Eye.

Gaming (Reviews From R’lyeh): Ruins of the North is an anthology of scenarios for The One Ring: Adventures over the Edge of the Wild Roleplaying Game, the recently cancelled roleplaying game published by Cubicle Seven Entertainment which remains the most highly regarded, certainly most nuanced of the four roleplaying games to explore Tolkien’s Middle Earth. It is a companion to Rivendell, the supplement which shifted the roleplaying game’s focus from its starting point to the east of the Misty Mountains, upon Mirkwood and its surrounds with Tales from Wilderland and The Heart of the Wild to the west of the Misty Mountains.

Art (Dark Worlds Quarterly): Being an artist for Weird Tales was not a fast track to fame and fortune. It is only in retrospect that names like Hugh Rankin, A. R. Tilburne, Hannes Bok, Lee Brown Coye and Vincent Napoli take on a luster of grandeur. At the time, the gig of producing illos for Weird Tales was low-paying and largely obscure. Some, like Lee Brown Coye, were able to establish their reputations in the art world after a long apprenticeship in the Pulps. Most are the select favorites of fans. Boris Dolgov was one of these truly brilliant illustrators who time has not been as kind to as should be.

Tolkien (Karavansara): But what really struck me in the whole thing was something that emerged from the debate: some fans said the novel should have been translated by a Tolkien fan, and by someone with a familiarity with fantasy. But other have pointed out that The Lord of the Rings is not fantasy. And my first reaction was, what the heck, with all those elves and orcs, wizards and a fricking magical ring and all the rest, you could have fooled me.

Tolkien (Sacnoth’s Scriptorium): So, I’ve been thinking back over Christopher Tolkien’s extraordinary achievements and wondering which was the most exceptional. A strong case can be made for the 1977 SILMARILLION. In retrospect, now that all the component pieces of that work have seen the light in the HISTORY OF MIDDLE-EARTH series we can see just how difficult his task was, and how comprehensively he mastered it. Special mention shd be made of one of the few passages of that work which we know Christopher himself wrote, rather than extracted from some manuscript of his father: the death of Thingol down in the dark beneath Menegroth, looking at the light of the Silmaril.

Art (Illustrator Spotlight): Many of you have seen some of the pulp covers he created; most likely those for The Spider, Terror Tales, Dime Mystery or Dime Detective. I was recently reading a blog post about David Saunder’s book on DeSoto (I can’t find the link to the blog anymore), and one of the comments was about how the commenter didn’t believe that DeSoto deserved a book, having painted only garish, violent covers. My reaction was immediate; I felt like telling the commenter to go forth and multiply, in slightly different words of course.

Martial Arts (Rawle Nyanzi): Yesterday, I put up a blog post where I showed videos discussing Andrew Klavan’s comments regarding women and swordfighting (namely, that women are utterly useless at it.) As one would expect, this has been discussed all around the internet, but much of it involves virtue signalling. To cut through a lot of that fog, I will show you a video by medieval swordsmanship YouTuber Skallagrim, in which he discusses the comments with two female HEMA practitioners — one old, one young.

Fiction (Black Gate): Changa’s Safari began in 1986 as a concept inspired by Robert E. Howard’s Conan. I wanted to create a heroic character with all the power and action of the brooding Cimmerian but based on African history, culture and tradition. Although the idea came early, the actual execution didn’t begin until 2005, when I decided to take the plunge into writing and publishing. During its creation I had the great fortune to meet and become friends with Charles R. Saunders, whose similar inspiration by Howard led to the creation of the iconic Imaro. What was planned to be a short story became a five-volume collection of tales that ended a few years ago with Son of Mfumu.

Gaming (Sorcerer’s Skull): The Arimites have the gloomy environment of Robert E. Howard’s Cimmerians and elements of a number of hill or mountain folk. They’ve got a thing for knives like the Afghans of pulp tradition with their Khyber knives, though the Arimites mostly use throwing knives. They’re miners, and prone to feuding and substance abuse, traits often associated with Appalachian folk. I say play up that stuff and add a bit from the Khors of Vance’s Tshcai–see the quote at the start, and here’s another: “they consider garrulity a crime against nature.”

Sensor Sweep: Genre Magazines, Mort Kunstler, Vampire Queen, Boris Dolgov published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

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