The shaping of Middle-earth Book

On to volume 4 of the History of Middle-earth series and we are now starting to come to something that appears, in both form and content, much closer to what we ended up receiving as the published Silmarillion. In the first two volumes we were given Tolkien's earliest drafts of the tales that would (albeit in an often much transformed manner) ultimately become the main stories of the First Age of Middle-earth all joined together by a narrative framing conceit that tied it in explicitly to our own world's history (an element that never actually left the tales, but became much less apparent as time wore on). Then we saw Tolkien shift into the composition of several major narrative epic poems that tackled some of the tales that were to prove to be favourites of his (which were, if not complete, at least fairly well fleshed out), along with many poetic fragments of other tales that, as is sadly a common case with Tolkien, never got very far in their composition. Now in this volume we see Tolkien shifting gears and once again composing prose in several different texts, though in a completely new format.

The first of these texts is what Christopher Tolkien calls 'The Sketch of the Mythology' which is truly a bare bones precis of the history of the First Age designed as an accompaniment to the long 'Lay of the Children of Hurin' poem from the previous volume. Tolkien apparently hoped to have the poem considered for publication and sent along the sketch in order to fill in necessary details of the context of the poem and give minimal explanation of the many events and persons to which it alludes for a prospective editorial reader. Readers of the published Silmarillion will already see something they can recognize here, albeit with much less literary flair: a high level overview of the many adventures, peoples, and events that occurred in what was to become the First Age of Middle-earth.

The next section, called 'The Quenta', seems to have evolved almost directly from the Sketch, though it represents a much fuller and more literary detailing of the same events. Instead of simply giving bare bones facts Tolkien allows his poetic side much more freedom and fleshes out details to the point where the text moves from mere summary to something akin to story. As the Tolkien Professor notes in his podcast on this volume some key elements that emerge in the later Silmarillion seem to have their origin here in the Quenta: Beren & Luthien get their somewhat happy ending with Luthien fully embracing the life of mortality (and ultimate eternal union with Beren beyond the circles of the world); Gondolin shifts from being a beacon of hope and place of final refuge for elves fleeing the wrath of Morgoth to an inward looking isolationist community sowing the seeds of its own destruction; and Earendil finally seems to live up to the messianic foreshadowings that have surrounded his birth from the beginning and becomes a successful messenger to the Valar on behalf of the beleaguered peoples of Middle-earth. It is in the Quenta that we probably see the closest analogue in Tolkien's early writings to what the published Silmarillion became.

Next come a series of maps and accompanying text called the 'Ambarkanta' that attempt to delineate not only geographical elements of Middle-earth, but many of the cosmological elements of it as well. I will admit to be largely confused by many parts of this, especially the various types of 'seas' that seem to surround and encompass Arda (Tolkien's created world as whole) and their various roles in the cosmology based on their elemental composition. Tolkien obviously loved both geographical and cosmological details and could seemingly lose himself endlessly in their implications and development, something that was a double-edged sword: it allowed him to return to texts and ideas and refine them to a point where the reality of his sub-creation became truly impressive (something that has been noted elsewhere as nearly the equivalent of one man creating a body of work analogous to the mythological beliefs of an entire people); but it also diverted his attention from actually writing down his stories as he could get caught into endless details and the need to constantly refine and work out fully any and all implications of a given idea or concept. Finally are the two sets of annals: the 'Annals of Valinor' and the 'Annals of Beleriand', which each give another precis of the major events that occurred in Valinor and the later Elven kingdoms of Beleriand respectively in a year-by-year summary format.

One other aspect of this volume that is intriguing is the inclusion of several Anglo-Saxon translations of some of these texts, a nod to the fact that the overarching idea of the early Elvish histories as the source of a truly 'English mythology' transmitted to us by a lone Anglo-Saxon mariner was still an important part of Tolkien's overall view of his work. These are not stories that are meant to have taken place in 'another world', but are the earliest and forgotten histories of our own. It also shows us that far from being a diversion from his professional life as a philologist and scholar of Anglo-Saxon, Tolkien's writings on Middle-earth were intimately connected with his professional studies and it seems likely that both aspects of his life deeply informed each other. It is indisputably true that his love of language was the ultimate well-spring of his many tales and, in some sense at least, his contention that they existed 'merely' to give his invented languages a reason to exist and people to speak them is not without merit.

Not my favourite in the series so far, but a truly necessary text (for the Tolkien enthusiast) when considering the ultimate development of the Silmarillion proper in both form and content.