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FOREWORD

This book was written for two reasons: curiosity and dissatisfaction.

The curiosity has been present for the last twenty-three years, and began when I first read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The same question that was raised then continued as, each year, I read and re-read the books. I felt that there was something greater, more significant, more meaningful than was immediately apparent upon the printed page. A cause of the curiosity, of course, lay in the method of Tolkien’s writing. He had an incredible depth to his tale, a great sense of time and a deep and rich historical background. The action in The Lord of the Rings, although set in a mythical past, takes place at the end of the historical cycle. Preceding the story is a vast tapestry of history, extending over many thousands of years, and to which frequent allusions are made, and, of course, the characters are inextricably a part of that tapestry. The question that flows from this is, ‘What are the details of this historical background?’

My attempts to answer this were hampered by the lack of detail and clues that appeared in the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings which gave tantalising glimpses only of fragments of the overall design. A part of the problem was that the Appendices to the first edition did not contain many of the clues that Tolkien included in the revised Appendices to the second edition, and it was only when I came to this latter publication that I perceived the first hints of the existence of The Silmarillion.

In 1977 The Silmarillion was published and for me it was a matter of great expectation. But the book raised even more questions whilst at the same time it answered many others. The answers began to filter through from other sources. Humphrey Carpenter’s Biography, with its hints of The Book of Lost Tales, Unfinished Tales itself, and Tolkien’s Letters began to provide the wind that dispersed the clouds from the face of the sun of understanding. It was rapidly becoming clear that Tolkien had not only woven a tapestry of history, but had also created a mythology. But for what purpose, how successfully, and with what result? It was after my studies for the New Zealand and International Mastermind shows that I determined, once and for all, to try to satisfy my curiosity and answer the questions that had plagued me for so long.

I have also mentioned dissatisfaction. My dissatisfaction is with much of the published literature about Tolkien’s Middle-earth. With the exception of Carpenter and Shippey, most of the writers and commentators seemed to have missed a vital point. I did not think that Tolkien’s work was merely derivative – that he had examined other mythologies and extracted tales, elements and themes and plopped them into his creation. With great respect to the authors who have followed such a course, it is a simplistic one and unflattering to the creator. Nor did I think that mere critical comparisons with the earlier greats of English and European literature were wholly productive. There was something deeper and more meaningful to Middle-earth than that.

I decided to eschew the derivative approach and avoid, as much as I could, comparisons with other works and examine and analyse the Middle-earth works as they stood – alone. And the obvious starting point, and one which has received scant examination in the earlier literature, was myth. Tolkien had left for me, and for others, an abundance of clues – that he was creating a Mythology for England – and I began my examination from the point of view of myth and mythology. Rather than examine the works as derivative from other mythologies, it became clear that the approach should be thematic – study the themes that are common to most, if not all, mythologies and ascertain what elements are present in Tolkien’s work. As this book shows, the elements are satisfied.

The starting point must be The Silmarillion, a difficult book to read and with which to come to terms. But it is essential to an understanding of the creation and development of the Tolkien cosmos, as well as being a history of the Elves in Middle-earth, and it establishes the framework within which is set the Third Age as portrayed in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Yet The Silmarillion gives hints of other writings and accounts that deal with the Matter of Middle-earth. Some of these accounts are collected in Unfinished Tales, and in this volume we find more detail of the acts of Tuor and of Túrin, a background to the realm of Númenor, the Tale of Aldarion and Erendis, and much information about the Istari, the palantíri and the early history of the Third Age. For one interested in the stories, Unfinished Tales is essential. For the aficionado it provides a penetrating insight into the manner in which Tolkien worked.

The publication of The Book of Lost Tales I, the first volume of an extended ‘History of Middle-earth’, came shortly after the completion of this manuscript, and whilst it was being prepared for publication. The Book of Lost Tales I comprises a part of what may be called a ‘proto-Silmarillion’. Most of the ingredients of the tales of The Silmarillion are present, although it is obvious, both from the Tales themselves, and the notes by Christopher Tolkien, the editor, that the Tales underwent many fundamental changes before they became The Silmarillion. But Lost Tales I is, in my opinion, almost as significant as The Silmarillion in that it indicates that it was always Tolkien’s desire to create a Mythology for England. To give even greater credence to his intention (as if we needed more than the confessed desire of the writer), the manner of the telling of the Tales is significant. Eriol, a traveller from Middle-earth (or The Great Lands), comes to the Isle of Tol Eressëa and in his travels in that land comes to a dwelling which is, in some respects, a forerunner of Imladris in Middle-earth. During his sojourn he requests and is told tales of early Arda. Most of the tales are told in a common-room before a Tale-fire which is ‘a magic fire, and greatly aids the teller in his tale’.¹ The tales are told by Lindo, Rúmil and Gilfanon, Elvish inhabitants of Tol Eressëa. Now the significance of the setting is that the Tales are recounted orally, and indeed are so written that they have a lyric and rhythmic quality when read aloud. Thus, in introducing his myth, Tolkien resorts to the oral or bardic tradition of story-telling, a feature of mythological tale-telling that predates Homer. Apart from the themes of the cosmological myths that comprise Lost Tales I, the whole cycle is distinctively myth oriented and is a clear indication of Tolkien’s desire and intention. Christopher Tolkien gives us tantalising hints of things to come in later publications, but perhaps most interesting is the reference to Ælfwine of England. Ælfwine is another realisation of the character Eriol.

Later, his name changed to Ælfwine (‘Elf-friend’), the mariner became an Englishman of the ‘Anglo-Saxon period’ of English history, who sailed west over sea to Tol Eressëa – he sailed from England out into the Atlantic Ocean; and from this later conception comes the very remarkable story of Ælfwine of England, which will be given at the end of the Lost Tales. But in the earliest conception he was not an Englishman of England: England in the sense of the land of the English did not yet exist; for the cardinal fact (made quite explicit in extant notes) of this conception is that the Elvish Isle to which Eriol came was England – that is to say, Tol Eressëa would become England, the land of the English, at the end of the story.²

Apart from the very method of tale-telling, the major themes that I have examined in The Silmarillion are present, as one would expect, in Lost Tales. Certainly some major changes in plot as well as changes in matters of detail have occurred. But this too is consistent with the development of myth. The tales of myth are never constant, and there is no one ‘authorised version’ (even the Bible has its Apocrypha). Rather, as I note later, the tale-tellers vary, refine and embellish. But the constant ingredient is the basic theme, and certainly the themes that Tolkien propounds and illustrates do not change.

The Silmarillion, Lost Tales and, to a degree, Unfinished Tales set the stage for the drama at the end of the Third Age recounted in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The mythology is complete and the questions that have been bedevilling readers for the last forty or fifty years may now finally be answered. But I believe that the main inspiration for the questions and the curiosity that readers have for Middle-earth lies deep in the realms of myth. Because the Middle-earth saga was conceived as a mythology the reader, perhaps only subconsciously, recognises myth as the sound of a far-distant trumpet echoing through the mind. Can the reader, perhaps, recognise within his own experience the desire for a subcreated realm of faerie that is as meaningful to him or her as were the great tales that rang through the rafters of the mead halls of early England and the Viking lands, or which were majestically and sonorously intoned by Homer sitting by the tale-fire on an evening in ancient Greece? Perhaps that ‘desire for dragons’ that we all have is now realised in Tolkien’s created mythology for England.