One clue that springs to mind is a couple of notes in HoME X, I think from a slightly later date. Connected to the Athrabeth:
Quote:
The newspapers in which the Athrabeth and the commentary were preserved (see p. 304) bear the inscription:
Addit. Silmarillion.
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Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth.
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Commentary.
On one of these wrappers my father added: 'Should be last item in an appendix' (i.e. to The Silmarillion).
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CT implies elsewhere that the 'last item' is the Commentary, indicating that the Athrabeth itself would be part of the text of the Silm proper.
Elsewhere, in a note that falls somewhere in the 1950s, Tolkien wrote:
Quote:
The three Great Tales must be Numenorean, and derived from matter preserved in Gondor. They were part of the Atanatarion (or the Legendarium of the Fathers of Men). ?Sindarin Nern in Edenedair (or In Adanath). They are
(1) Narn Beren ion Barahir also called Narn e-Dinuviel (Tale of the Nightingale)
(2) Narn e-mbar Hador containing (a) Narn i Chin Hurin (or Narn e-'Rach Morgoth Tale of the Curse of Morgoth); and (b) Narn en El (or Narn e-Dant Gondolin ar Orthad en El)
Should not these be given as Appendices to the Silmarillion?
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CT says that Tolkien must be distinguishing between long and short forms of the stories here, but I'm not clear on whether he means the Atanatarion would be the long or short versions.
Form mentioned looking at what Tolkien was working on in the early 1950s; as it happens I've been working on a timeline of what he did when. If we take the cutoff date as the first Myths Transformed piece, then the following falls in Tolkien's '600K Silm' period:
- Ainulinde revision
- Lay of Leithian revision (not sure about the other Lays)
- Annals of Aman
- Grey Annals
- 1950s Quenta
- Of Tuor
- Narn i Chin Hurin
- Dangweth Pengolod
- Tal Elmar revision
- Essay on the Istari
- Athrabeth first draft
(Note that in my hubris I disagree slightly with CT on the dating of the Athrabeth and the earliest Myths Transformed material. There's a swathe of texts written on 1955 notices which Christopher prefers to date later; but they form a very cohesive set, referring to each other and not to later materials, which I think makes it more likely that they were written at the time the '55 notices were received.)
What Tolkien seems to have envisaged is a Silmarillion written as a collection of texts, not a single narrative. Given the way he wrote the LotR Appendices, I imagine it not presented in chronological order, but one text at a time. You'd read the Quenta, then go back to the beginning with the Annals, then go into more depth with the Narn, then divert into a poem, then off into philosophical essays by Pengolod, and a fireside chat with Finrod. Does anyone know if there are academic texts made in this fashion, collecting all texts from a particular context under one cover? It feels like the sort of thing Tolkien might have encountered.
It looks like the published "Children of Hurin" is about the same 80K words as the published Silm. So let's ballpark the 'finished' Quenta, Narn, and Gondolin all at that length. Add in the Annals + Ainulindale/Valaquenta for another 80K, and perhaps the expanded Lay of Leithian as another. That's already 400K words; if the Athrabeth and other essays were envisaged coming to the same length again, we're pushing very close to 500K without having to imagine any 'new' texts at all.
I think he could have done it, too, were it not for two things. Firstly, the total lack of interest from publishers and basically anyone he showed the material to. Secondly, by the late '50s he became sidetracked onto the 'logical' basis of the Legendarium - first with the Myths Transformed materials (which mostly date from '55-'58), and then by all the Time and Aging stuff in NoME (mostly ca. '59). There's almost no
narrative work by Tolkien from the entirety of the '60s and '70s - I can find "Cirion & Eorl" and "The Faithful Stone", but that's about it.
hS