[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I feel much the same, Kuruharan. I have never found LR to lose any of its appeal when I learn more about its world. On the contrary, I find the references more appealing as compressed meaning, evoking by allusion entire legends and poems. Authors writing in the realistic mode constantly make allusions to real-world myths and history, which can be followed up and used to gain a better understanding of their work, and a knowledge of Tolkien's wider legendarium does no more or less for a reader of The Lord of the Rings. In fact, the tantalising[1] glimpses that Tolkien gives us of wider vistas stimulate our natural inquisitiveness, so that it seems inevitable that we should always want to know more. Significantly, Tolkien himself approached his fiction in the same way. It's possible for a skilled author to refer to a wider body of knowledge which need not necessarily exist, and Tolkien could easily have done just that. The fact that he fleshed out the story of Queen Beruthiel, and wrote about the Five Wizards implies to me that he asked himself N&N questions about who they were, and answered them for his personal amusement. He may have seen the power of unexplored landscapes, but nevertheless he constantly set out to explore them. Fortunately, as I'm sure he realised, each new exploration simply opens up many more distant horizons, and eventually even his own prolific imaginings come to an end without the effect being spoiled.

It's natural that Tom Shippey should refer to Beowulf, since that poem looms large over his and Tolkien's area of professional interest. However, as I am sure that Professor Shippey is aware, the effect which the Beowulfian digressions have on a modern audience is not that which its author intended. When the Beowulf poet refers to the tragedy of Finnsburh or the destruction of Heorot, he is alluding to stories well known to his intended audience, just as a modern poet might refer to the death of Arthur or Robin Hood's last arrow. Tolkien himself awards Heorot a place in Germanic legend similar to that of Camelot, and many scholars, Tolkien and Shippey among them, have spent much study and thought in attempts to follow the references in Beowulf. Tolkien's own theories on the Finnsburh digression have been published relatively recently as Finn and Hengest, and some of his theories about other aspects of Beowulfian mythology are published in HoME V, from which it seems clear that he was fascinated by the unexplored vistas left so quite accidentally by the Anglo-Saxon poet. The very phrase terra incognita practically invites at the very least an immediate aerial survey.

A 1954 Silmarillion would have changed the effect of the LR references from that of Beowulf today to that of Beowulf in , for the sake of argument, 750 a.d. As I said in littlemanpoet's thread on the wrong kind of details, it's not so much detail as irrelevant detail, or detail clumsily introduced that really ruins a good fantasy story. Characters who know more than they ought to know, and explain it at more length than necessary; long, rambling digressions about social and political history: these are the killers of a good tale. Tolkien's solution is typically academic: simply add all of the details as a scholarly appendix and free up the narrative for storytelling. Since he did this, and even considered defecting to Collins so that LR and The Silmarillion could be published as companion volumes, it seems to me that at least in the late 1940s he still felt that he had left enough vistas unexplored to preserve the effect in his novel, even with the legends of the Elder Days in print. Even the posthumous material released by Christopher Tolkien raises many more questions than it answers, and Tolkien left us more of that than we could reasonably expect of him. That the Silmarillion was never completed seems to me more a result of despair, perfectionism and restless creativity in equal measure: despair that it would ever be accepted for publication, the desire to create the best possible version and a creativity that simply had to adapt and expand his earlier ideas. In the 1940s a definitive, complete Silmarillion seemed a realistic goal; by the end of his life, he had made so many major changes of direction that his latest thoughts could not be reconciled with his earlier publications. I don't think it had anything to do with preserving the magic, but it had a lot to do with Tolkien's character, and his working methods or lack thereof.

Besides, how would we have had so many threads if there weren't whole books of rejected, abandoned or otherwise unreleased fragments? When it comes to information about Middle-earth, more is more.

[1] This word is itself an allusion to the Greek myth of Tantalus. You don't need to know that to understand the sentence, but it's interesting, isn't it?