J. R. R. Tolkien
The Book of Lost Tales
Part I
Christopher Tolkien
FOREWORD
The Book of Lost Tales, written between sixty and seventy years ago, was the first substantial work of imaginative literature by J. R. R. Tolkien, and the first emergence in narrative of the Valar, of the Children of Ilъvatar, Elves and Men, of the Dwarves and the Orcs, and of the lands in which their history is set, Valinor beyond the western ocean, and Middle-earth, the ‘Great Lands’ between the seas of east and west. Some fifty-seven years after my father ceased to work on the Lost Tales, The Silmarillion,* profoundly transformed from its distant forerunner, was published; and six years have passed since then. This Foreword seems a suitable opportunity to remark on some aspects of both works.
The Silmarillion is commonly said to be a ‘difficult’ book, needing explanation and guidance on how to ‘approach’ it; and in this it is contrasted to The Lord of the Rings. In Chapter 7 of his book The Road to Middle-earth Professor T. A. Shippey accepts that this is so (‘The Silmarillion could never be anything but hard to read’, p. 201), and expounds his view of why it should be. A complex discussion is not treated justly when it is extracted, but in his view the reasons are essentially two (p. 185). In the first place, there is in The Silmarillion no ‘mediation’ of the kind provided by the hobbits (so, in The Hobbit, ‘Bilbo acts as the link between modern times and the archaic world of dwarves and dragons’). My father was himself well aware that the absence of hobbits would be felt as a lack, were ‘The Silmarillion’ to be published—and not only by readers with a particular liking for them. In a letter written in 1956 (The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, p. 238), soon after the publication of The Lord of the Rings, he said:
I do not think it would have the appeal of the L.R.—no hobbits! Full of mythology, and elvishness, and all that ‘heigh stile’ (as Chaucer might say), which has been so little to the taste of many reviewers.
In ‘The Silmarillion’ the draught is pure and unmixed; and the reader is worlds away from such ‘mediation’, such a deliberate collison (far more than a matter of styles) as that produced in the meeting between King Thйoden and Pippin and Merry in the ruins of Isengard:
‘Farewell, my hobbits! May we meet again in my house! There you shall sit beside me and tell me a1ll that your hearts desire: the deeds of your grandsires, as far as you can reckon them…’
The hobbits bowed low. ‘So that is the King of Rohan!’ said Pippin in an undertone. ‘A fine old fellow. Very polite.’
In the second place,
Where The Silmarillion differs from Tolkien’s earlier works is in its refusal to accept novelistic convention. Most novels (including The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings) pick a character to put in the foreground, like Frodo and Bilbo, and then tell the story as it happens to him. The novelist of course is inventing the story, and so retains omniscience: he can explain, or show, what is ‘really’ happening and contrast it with the limited perception of his character.
There is, then, and very evidently, a question of literary ‘taste’ (or literary ‘habituation’) involved; and also a question of literary ‘disappointment’—the ‘(mistaken) disappointment in those who wanted a second Lord of the Rings’ to which Professor Shippey refers. This has even produced a sense of outrage—in one case formulated to me in the words ‘It’s like the Old Testament!’: a dire condemnation against which, clearly, there can be no appeal (though this reader cannot have got very far before being overcome by the comparison). Of course, ‘The Silmarillion’ was intended to move the heart and the imagination, directly, and without peculiar effort or the possession of unusual faculties; but its mode is inherent, and it may be doubted whether any ‘approach’ to it can greatly aid those who find it unapproachable.
There is a third consideration (which Professor Shippey does not indeed advance in the same context):
One quality which [The Lord of the Rings] has in abundance is the Beowulfian ‘impression of depth’, created just as in the old epic by songs and digressions like Aragorn’s lay of Tinъviel, Sam Gamgee’s allusions to the Silmaril and the Iron Crown, Elrond’s account of Celebrimbor, and dozens more. This, however, is a quality of The Lord of the Rings, not of the inset stories. To tell these in their own right and expect them to retain the charm they got from their larger setting would be a terrible error, an error to which Tolkien would be more sensitive than any man alive. As he wrote in a revealing letter dated 20 September 1963:
I am doubtful myself about the undertaking [to write The Silmarillion]. Part of the attraction of The L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed. (Letters, p. 333)
To go there is to destroy the magic. As for the revealing of ‘new unattainable vistas’, the problem there—as Tolkien must have thought many times—was that in The Lord of the Rings Middle-earth was already old, with a vast weight of history behind it. The Silmarillion, though, in its longer form, was bound to begin at the beginning. How could ‘depth’ be created when you had nothing to reach further back to?
The letter quoted here certainly shows that my father felt this, or perhaps rather one should say, at times felt this, to be a problem. Nor was it a new thought: while he was writing The Lord of the Rings, in 1945, he said in a letter to me (Letters, p. 110):
A story must be told or there’ll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving. I th1ink you are moved by Celebrimbor because it conveys a sudden sense of endless untold stories: mountains seen far away, never to be climbed, distant trees (like Niggle’s) never to be approached—or if so only to become ‘near trees’…
This matter is perfectly illustrated for me by Gimli’s song in Moria, where great names out of the ancient world appear utterly remote:
The world was fair, the mountains tall,
In Elder Days before the fall
Of mighty kings in Nargothrond
And Gondolin, who now beyond
The Western Seas have passed away…
‘I like that!’ said Sam. ‘I should like to learn it. In Moria, in Khazad-dыm. But it makes the darkness seem heavier, thinking of all those lamps.’ By his enthusiastic ‘I like that!’ Sam not only ‘mediates’ (and engagingly ‘Gamgifies’) the ‘high’, the mighty kings of Nargothrond and Gondolin, Durin on his carven throne, but places them at once at an even remoter distance, a magical distance that it might well seem (at that moment) destructive to traverse.
Professor Shippey says that ‘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’. The ‘error’ presumably lies in the holding of such an expectation, if the stories were told, not in the telling of the stories at all; and it is apparent that Professor Shippey sees my father as wondering, in 1963, whether he should or should not put pen to paper, for he expands the words of the letter, ‘I am doubtful myself about the undertaking’, to mean ‘the undertaking to write The Silmarillion’. But when my father said this he was not—most emphatically not—referring to the work itself, which was in any case already written, and much of it many times over (the allusions in The Lord of the Rings are not illusory): what was in question for him, as he said earlier in this same letter, was its presentation, in a publication, after the appearance of The Lord of the Rings, when, as he thought, the right time to make it known was already gone.