Quote:
Originally Posted by Bêthberry
At the risk of being accused of arrogance for quoting myself, I feel I should add something that I just learned myself this morning and which relates to my comment about CT.
Another Tolkien friend asked about Guy Favriel Kay's role in editing the Silm, having just learned about his role in helping edit the Silm. Quite a few other Tolkien fans were also surprised to hear of his work with CT. It hasn't been widely acknowledged and in the 1977 Foreward (repeated in the Second Edition), CT makes a concluding comment to thank Kay for his work. It isn't clear if this is simply academic courtesy or an acknowledgement that Kay played a significant part in helping with the edition. Kay himself is reluctant to speak in detail about it. He has said that he learned a great deal about narrative writing working on Tolkien Sr's drafts and manuscripts. And he has gone on to become a highy regarded fantasy writer himself, winning international awards and becoming a best seller with translations into several languages.
As part of my searches about Kay's contribution, I came upon the fact that CT has acknowledged that chapter twenty two of the Quenta Silmarillion was in fact not an edited version of one of JRRT's texts but largely rewritten by CT himself.
It is dicey to quote this because the source was not given but I suspect it is in book 11 of HoMe, a copy of which I don't have at hand right now.
The upshot of this of course influences what people might call canon. There are many online discussions asking how much of the Silm reflects CT's writing and even how much reflects Favriel Kay's work. Certainly I find the style in CT's edition of the Silm much different from JRRT's style in HoMe and the later editions of Tolkien Sr's work and for that reason I am not sure that we can say that the Silm is canon, if by canon we mean, as Tar Elenion says,
And as an addenda to this, I note the following discussion about Vincent Ferré's article in The Great Tales Never End which apparently fails to make any mention of Guy Favriel Kay's contributions to editing the Silm. https://www.tolkienguide.com/modules...=4534&start=20
A review of Ferré's article can be found in the respected Journal of Tolkien Research https://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloft.../vol14/iss2/8/, which faults Ferré's omission.
So was CT the first fanfiction writer? He was certainly a fan. |
Many years ago, Kay gave an address at (IIRC) Mythcon where he talked about his work on the Silm; it was not recorded or transcribed but a fairly well-known Tolkien figure - I keep wanting to say John Rateliff but it may have been someone else - published a summary of Kay's remarks.
One takeaway is that Kay was not yet an author- he was a 19-year old college student studying law. CT needed, basically, a gopher- somebody to make photocopies and fetch coffee. Since Kay's parents were friends of Baillie Tolkien's parents back in Winnipeg, his name came up and he got the gig.
The other takeaway is that Kay's role grew; CT started using him as a sounding board, and eventually as a first-pass "assembler" of JRRT passages (The "constructed" Silm is a bit like multiple decks of cards shuffled together)- and then CT would write the final text. So GK had a fair bit of input into the final product, and CT later did say that his "discussions" with Kay underlay the Doriath chapter.