Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published Silmarillion Book

I've long been curious about precisely which texts in the The History of Middle-Earth series Christopher Tolkien and Guy Gavriel Kay mined to construct the published version of The Silmarillion. Arda Reconstructed answers that question in painstaking detail. It's interesting to see how Christopher Tolkien and Kay wove together The Silmarillion from often disparate strands.

I love the published version of The Silmarillion. Kane takes the position that most deviations from JRR Tolkien's texts should not have been made, which I find to be too critical of what must have been lots of difficult decisions for Christopher Tolkien. Furthermore, we should allow Christopher Tolkien and Kay some creative license as editors and judge the work more on its merits as a piece of writing than judge it by its fidelity to Tolkien's drafts.

However, I do appreciate when Kane mentions text that Christopher Tolkien said was mistakenly omitted from The Silmarillion and I agree with some of Kane's criticism; for example, the second chapter of the "Quenta Silmarillion" has always seemed out of place in the narrative and now I know why. Most strikingly, it's unfortunate that Christopher Tolkien reduced the roles of women in the mythology, especially when the works that Tolkien published in his lifetime have a dearth of women.

If you read this book, I would recommend reading a chapter of The Silmarillion and then reading the relevant chapter from this book, which is organized into chapters that match those in The Silmarillion.

Arda Reconstructed is a very deeply researched book and I appreciate all the time and work that Kane must've put into comparing the published version of The Silmarillion with the texts in The History of Middle-Earth series. I've tried to read through the volumes of The History of Middle-Earth without any guide and it's daunting. What I find most valuable about Arda Reconstructed is that it gives me the ability to read a chapter from The Silmarillion, read Kane's meticulous analysis, and then find the corresponding source materials in The History of Middle-Earth and decide for myself which version of the myth I prefer.