Christopher Tolkien systematizes his father's papers. ( )

Read "The Lost Road" section for a a course at The Mythgard Institute. It was good, but I'm always a little put off by Christopher Tolkien's commentary and notes. Christopher gets a little hard to follow when he starts talking about variations in different manuscripts. Definitely will take some additional reading.

I look forward to reading other sections, in particular the Etymologies, but will likely need to put them off until I have more Time. ( )

At one point, Lewis observed to Tolkien that since there weren't enough stories being writtten of the sort that they wanted to read, they'd have to write them themselves. Lewis committed to writing a book about space travel, Tolkien about time travel; Lewis' commitment developed into his Space Trilogy (/Out of the Silent Planet/, /Perelandra/, /That Hideous Strength/), while Tolkien's project -- to be titled /The Lost Road/ -- never managed to come together. This is the debris of that project: interesting reading, but you can see why it never quite worked...

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1785921.html

Getting to the end of the books about how the Silmarillion was (and wasn't) written now, this volume includes several interesting insights into how Tolkien's works reached us. At the core is the rather slim pickings of The Lost Road, the time travel novel which Tolkien began at around the same time C.S. Lewis began his Ransome trilogy. Tolkien abandoned it, and it wasn't really going in the right direction; what we have here is too episodic to be coherent, and in particular, the framing narrative has a set of slightly odd father-son dynamics going on - Tolkien's own parents were absent, largely through being dead, and the same is true of most of his more successful characters (Bilbo's parents are never heard of, he in turn abandons Frodo in the first chapter of LotR, Húrin is a distant captive while his son and daughter fall in love with each other) though there are exceptions (mostly father-figures who are over-controlling - Théoden, Denethor, Thingol).

The importance of father-son dynamics extends also to the making of this book, and I was particularly interested in a passage on page 302 where Christopher Tolkien expresses his regrets that the Silmarillion as originally published was not better; he reflects on the role played by Guy Gavriel Kay in assembling the texts but in the end takes full responsibility for it himself. I was not surprised to read that the story he feels was worst served is the tale of Beren and Lúthien.

There's also a lot of meaty material on the languages - an essay called the Lhammas and a set of Elvish etymologies, which brought home to me that for Tolkien his invented structure was much more than just Quenya and Sindarin, it also included half a dozen other languages spoken by different branches of the Elves, barely mentioned in the stories. I have dabbled enough in philology to sense the uniqueness of this achievement - very few sf or fantasy writers come anywhere near Tolkien's level of detail in his invented names and words, and some (eg Robert Jordan) are so bad at it that it's painful.

Apart from that, we have the Fall of Númenor, and yet another rehash of the main text of the Silmarillion. I am looking forward to the next volume which is about the early versions of LotR. ( )

There is little in this volume to interest any but the most dedicated of Tolkien enthusiasts.

Part I, The Lost Road, presents draft fragments of an ambitious mythological fantasy, intended to span the centuries backwards from the Oxford of the 20th century, through unfolding layers of Germanic history and legend, to the fall of Atlantis, following pairs of father and son figures through the generations. (Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill must surely have been an inspiration.) After two pairs of short chapters it peters out. The Atlantis story at its heart was eventually to emerge as the tale of Numenor in The Silmarillion. The attempt to frame this tale within a modern character's dreams (of an implausibly linguistic nature) resurfaced in The Notion Club Papers. The germs of some interesting ideas are here embedded in a narrative of stunning turgidity. Tolkien's tendency towards archaizing chronicle is here exacerbated by having much of the action recounted in stilted dialogue between the characters, who are transparently projections of aspects of Tolkien's own personality and obsessions. It might seem amazing that the author of this awkward, pale, post-pre-Raphaelite thee-and-thou prose managed to transform himself into a formidable writer of modern English, though it is hardly fair to judge a writer on the basis of some initial and ultimately abortive sketches. The section most worthy of note is a 150-line piece of alliterative verse called "King Sheave", marginal to the main text but evocative. Another, "The Nameless Land" or "The Song of Aelfwine", is complex in verse-structure, modelled on the medieval poem Pearl, but the content is low-grade "elfin" stuff.

Part II consists of draft sections of the Silmarillion which add little to the published text. Part III, The Etymologies, will excite only those who would read a dictionary of Sumerian for fun. MB 21-vi-2007 ( )