At the risk of taking taking this discussion a bit off track.....
Boromir - Great question!
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So desperate am I for more stories of Middle-Earth that I actively participate in the next best thing to something penned by the professor: the RPG forums!
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Fordim, I think you've made an incredibly important point. It seems to me that this thread has a certain tension running through it because we are coming at this problem from two different angles. We are interpreting this question in different ways. There are those folks who focus quite strictly on the author and either are content with what we have, or would simply like to see a story or two penned, but
only from Tolkien's own hand. Then there are others who have something else in the back of their minds. Though admittedly a smaller group, they focus on Middle-earth itself. Part of their sorrow lies in the fact that Middle-earth is such a fragmentary and shifting world. I am unable to read HoMe or UT or even Silm without lamenting that more of the hints we have from the author's own hand never came to fruition.
As much as I love Tolkien, I am in the group of those who fix on the world rather than the author, although it's taken me a long time to get there. When I first read Tolkien in the mid to early sixties, there was no "separate" Middle-earth. There was only a book called the Hobbit and one called the Lord of the Rings. All that changed with the subsequent publications. Frankly, I found them mind boggling. Suddenly, I realized that Tolkien had indeed been crafting not simply a series of books, but a true mythology.
Let me clarify one point. I am not saying that there is a strict division between the two camps of 'author versus world'. We can all heartily agree that anything penned by Tolkien is clearly superior to that which is written by anyone else (even PJ
). But, for some of us, the desire to "fill in the holes" is strong and we are willing to contemplate the holes being filled in by other, if lesser, hands. Sometimes I even wonder if our differing attitudes about the movie is partially conditioned by our answer to this question. In any case, when I read what Mithadan or Gil or Pio has written (also check out Dreamdear's story via Google), there are some pretty talented folk out there who seem to be equally obsessed with filling in the picture.
Why else would some of us spend so much of our time on RPG's or fanfiction? Surely some of the RPG writers on this site are capable of coming up with worlds of our own, yet we stubbornly continue to come back to Middle-earth. Is it just Tolkien that pulls us in or the world that he has created? Surely it must be a little bit of both. When I say these things, I know I take my life in my hands, since I risk the possibility of being bombed out of the forum by those hurling tomatoes at hearing such heresy.
But before you throw up your hands in exasperation, think about this.... If Tolkien really wanted to pen a mythology, how could be be content with his world becoming "static and dead", subject only to the back and forth dialogue of critics? I use the word "critics" in a positive way here. I am not just talking about dunderheads like Bloom but insightful folk like Shippey and Flieger. Still there are limits to what these individuals are dong. At heart, they are scholars; what I really want are storytellers.
In my heart of heart, I believe this. If Tolkien's writing is true myth, then it can and will be treated as such. The most comparable example would be the Arthurian legend. Just as a thousand different authors through the centuries have interpreted and re-interpreted the Arthurian legend, so too will writers in ages to come tred softly in Middle-earth and tell their own tales. Are Malory's wonderful stories or those of the Gawaine author in any way lessened by the fact that a talented writer like T.H. White gave us such a beautiful and gently humorous portrait of Arthur in
The Once and Future King? I think not.
The bald truth is there will be no more tales from the author's pen unless those retellings happen in the world beyond (one can only hope!) But eventually copyright
will go away. If Tolkien's books are just novels and no more than that, they will remain closed and dead and a little dusty. But if Tolkien has truly written a myth, one that can stand with the other great myths of mankind, then it is inevitable that others will follow the road to Middle-earth just as they have followed into other worlds and ages. Everyone on this forum will likely be dead and gone by the time this actually happens, but my guess is that we are seeing the tiny beginnings of that, especially with the essentially "folk" nature of the internet that has encouraged such a proliferation of tales, both the good and the bad. I wish I could be alive to see it happen.
Now, let the tomatoes come....