I want to discuss something about how many of us have felt about Middle Earth. Very often I've heard or read people explaining that while reading
The Lord of the Rings (especially), they felt 'drawn into' the world. I was no exception. But I wonder, did Tolkien himself feel the same way?
Tolkien is a little unusual compared to most authors. Very rarely do we get such a detailed look at the creative process and the development of a narrative than we do with
The History of Middle Earth series. But it acts as more than just a look into the development of the tales, sometimes even offering us different stories, perspectives and ideas.
I, for one, loved reading what I have read of
The History series. I include
The History of The Hobbit in this, as well, though I have not studied it very thoroughly. What I want to get at is the fact that besides offering us new insights into Middle Earth, there is something odd about reading these old drafts.
From the
Fall of Gondolin to
The New Shadow, we get a sense that Tolkien himself was being drawn into this world just as we were when we first picked up
The Lord of the Rings or
The Hobbit. Indeed, it speaks very closely to my own creative process. It was something Tolkien said in the introduction to
The Lord of the Rings that illustrated this very nicely.
Quote:
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"This tale grew in the telling, until it became a history of the Great War of the Ring and included many glimpses of the yet more ancient history that preceded it."
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More than a good summery of the writing of
The Lord of the Rings, I would guess this may be how he felt about the mythology at large. The vast expanse of time he spent putting together the mythology alone should speak of this.
But, you may say, most stories grow in the telling. This is true enough, but I suspect it is deeper and more pronounced with serious fantasy; if it includes a world of many histories. The wideness of Middle Earth and its differing races, themselves differing from age to age, create, as if for themselves, a tapestry of history.
While I read some of
The History of Middle Earth, and
The History of The Hobbit, I get the sense that Middle Earth held that pull for Tolkien. Perhaps because the author himself was so drawn into the world, this desire melted through onto the page and has, for many, ebbed up and caught them too.
Given the fact that
The Fall of Gondolin is one of the first stories of Middle Earth that old John Ronald wrote down, I do not think it is surprising that when he re-enters Middle Earth in
The Hobbit, it is at a late stage in the history. Gondolin's fall comes relatively late in the story of the
War of the Jewels. Perhaps it began simply as Tolkien's desire to tell of the fall of the city of the elves and grew into his exploration of who the enemy was and why Gondolin was such a threat.
For a long time, I thought of the story of
Gondolin to be one of the key stories in Middle Earth and I find it not at all strange that it gets a mention in
The Hobbit. You might say that
Gondolin comes to represent the culmination of the ages, in Middle Earth terms. The history grows behind it and then forth from it, as it were a source of many rivers heading in many directions.
The point I want to get at is this; do you feel that Tolkien was drawn into Middle Earth in the same way that we are? His constant re-writes and re-drafts speak to me of a man desperate to explore this world, just as we discuss and debate them.
If not, what level of insanity have I fallen into?
