J. R. R. Tolkien. Author of the Century by Shippey Tom

Author:Shippey, Tom [Shippey, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780007381951
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER V

THE SILMARILLION:

THE WORK OF HIS HEART

Lost lore and lays

The publication and success of The Lord of the Rings in 1954-5 left Tolkien in much the same position as the publication and success of The Hobbit in 1937. The publishers wanted a sequel, and this time they were seconded, as Stanley Unwin’s son and successor Rayner confirms in a 1995 memoir, by increasingly large numbers of devoted readers. But Tolkien had no sequel ready to hand, or even in mind. What he had was what would be called nowadays (it is a word he would have hated) a ‘prequel’: the ‘Silmarillion’, existing as many manuscripts in many forms. He was never able to prepare this material for publication in a way which completely satisfied him, though he continued working on it for almost twenty years until he died; all the ‘Silmarillions’ now in existence have been published posthumously. Nevertheless it was the work of his heart, which occupied him for far longer than The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. The better-known works are in a way only offshoots, side-branches, of the immense chronicle/mythology/legendarium which is the ‘Silmarillion’, and which we have first in the form in which it was published as a connected narrative in 1977 (which I distinguish as The Silmarillion), and then in many of the twelve volumes of The History of Middle-earth published between 1983 and 1996, all thirteen works (as also the volume of Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, from 1980) edited by Tolkien’s son and literary executor Christopher.

Tolkien was working on something which might be seen as the seed of a section of The Silmarillion at least as early as 1913, when he began to write ‘The Story of Kullervo’, a ‘prose-and-verse romance’ never yet published which resembles in outline the story of Túrin, eventually chapter 21 of the 1977 Silmarillion. In late 1916, by now on convalescent leave from the trench fever contracted on the Somme, he was writing a much more extended and continuous account of elvish story, completed (or at least relinquished) by 1920, and published in 1983-4 as the two-volume Book of Lost Tales. During his years at Leeds University (1920-25) he began to versify two main sections of this material, the tales of Túrin and Beren, eventually published as The Lays of Beleriand in 1985. In 1926, when he sent one of these poems to his old teacher R.W. Reynolds, Tolkien also wrote a brief outline or ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ to act as background for Reynolds, which appeared as ‘The Earliest Silmarillion’ in The Shaping of Middle-earth (1986), though as with so much of what he wrote the published version takes in heavy rewriting up to 1930. Between 1930 and 1937, when The Hobbit came out, the ‘Sketch’ was rewritten in expanded form as the ‘Quenta’ or ‘Quenta Nol-dorinwa’, and then rewritten again as the ‘Quenta Silmarillion’ (the first published in The Shaping of Middle-earth, above, the second in The Lost Road, in 1987). It was

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