[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

It seems to me that if we ask what Tolkien's legendarium was for, we are asking for it to be something it is not. So far a lot of comments appear to assume that there was some sort of common purpose behind The Silmarillion, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, which seems difficult to support; and if we try to tie in other works, such as Smith of Wootton Major or The Adventures of Tom Bombadil there are even more insurmountable difficulties in our path.

Tolkien began writing the stories that became The Silmarillion during the First World War, one of the earliest being a poem inspired by the Old English word Earendel. At this time he seems to have been writing a personal legend to put a story to the word. He said himself that a good name was often his main inspiration, and Tom Shippey has demonstrated very ably how philological problems often led Tolkien to build up fictional explanations. Later he composed other legends, such as that of Beren and Lúthien, which again seem to have been written for the sake of writing them, with no particular audience or any motive in mind other than to produce the story. This seems to have been his primary motivation until one day he relieved the tedium of marking examination scripts by writing 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit'. Given the word 'hobbit', Tolkien had all the material he needed to write a story about one, and since he had children of his own it became a children's story with which to amuse them. It was only after several years that the question of an audience outside Tolkien's own circle became an issue, when he was persuaded to publish this first tale.

At that point in the late 1930s everything changed. After The Hobbit was published, he began systematically to revise the Silmarillion material with a view to publication. He was now trying to create a finalised and definitive version of his legends for public consumption. Having found that he had an audience, Tolkien wanted to share with them the stories which he had enjoyed creating. This seems to have been his major motivation: to publish the work that was closest to his heart. When Allen and Unwin asked for a sequel to The Hobbit and intimated that the Silmarillion was not what they wanted, Tolkien duly sat down and began to write a sequel; but as his drafts show us the import, structure, themes and connection with the earlier legends arose during composition, not as premeditated aims. Even when, after nearly twenty years, he finally published The Lord of the Rings, he was still looking for a way of getting his legends of the Eldar into print. The Silmarils were in his heart, as he said himself, and he wanted to share what he had created with the world.

The point, which really only echoes Lalwendë's post above, is that in every case other than The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien had begun to write with no purpose other than to do just that. The stories were what mattered, not the audience or any sort of agenda, less still a single meaning. Work on The Silmarillion was tied up with his private languages, and all of his stories were involved in some way with his professional interests, but these were inevitable in that Tolkien the philologist, Tolkien the mythmaker, Tolkien the storyteller, Tolkien the father, Tolkien the Roman Catholic and Tolkien the composer of languages were all the same person. To return to the well-worn analogy of the man and the tower, Tolkien didn't know what sort of structure he wanted to build, or what it would look like. He liked building and happened to have a large stock of stone lying around. At first he thought, perhaps, of a shed to house some tools related to his work; then a workshop; then a gallery, perhaps even a cathedral, and finally a tower, so that the structure became all of these things and none. He used the stone that was to hand, but, like the Beowulf poet, he chose each piece and its setting for an aesthetic reason: because he liked its colour or shape, or because its carvings were pleasing to him. It is not profitable to pull Beowulf to pieces to find out more about Finn and Hengest, although coincidentally it contains a lot of what we do know about them; but the selection of that particular story for the particular place it occupies in the narrative has a specific and intentional effect, and unless we know more about the tragedy of Finnsburh we will not entirely understand that effect. In fact we will think, as the critics thought against whom Tolkien set himself , that the story is light, with little value other than what it tells us about other matters.

Similarly, it will profit us nothing to pull Tolkien's work to pieces to find out about Voluspá or The Wanderer, since we will not actually learn any more about those texts by so doing. We may, however, appreciate the effect that Tolkien was trying to achieve by considering a particular borrowing in its narrative setting. Tolkien used the materials that he did in the way that he did because he found the result aesthetically pleasing, and part of that effect for him, just as for the author of Beowulf, was the knowledge of the whole story and his personal appreciation of the borrowed material for its own sake.

So what is it for? Nothing. It all exists for and of itself and the act of creating it, except The Lord of the Rings, which arose out of a specific demand from Tolkien's publishers. Even that work was composed ad hoc, and eventually reflected more what Tolkien wanted to write than what Allen and Unwin wanted to publish. Although he often composed stories to entertain people close to him, particularly his own children, he was mainly writing things which gave him pleasure, and I think that a lot of his motivation in trying to publish the earlier Silmarillion was to share that pleasure with any like-minded people there might be. Once he knew without a shadow of doubt that there were a lot of like-minded people in the world, he began to worry about other issues: the religious orthodoxy of his creations, their internal consistency or simply what on earth was beyond that horizon. The idea that there was a single purpose or aim at all times and for all works is reaching too far.