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I expected that in these parts we would come to discussions about the Appendices. I must say that I was from the start reluctant about using material as Appendices. I could agree to ArcusCalion’s reasoning that with our very short versions of tales from The Hobbit and LotR including all the stuff in the main narrative would creat some unproportonality. But let us go through the Appendices one by one as ArcusCalion started to do:
1) The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen: I have not yet read the second draft, but in principal I agree to include it into the main narrative.
2) The Quest for Erebor: As soon as ArcusCalion posted The Stewards which covers the tale from The Hobbit, I started experimenting with the text to include The Quest for Erebor. The main part of The Quest for Erebor is the conversation between Gandalf and the the dwarves, Thorin in particular, and some description of motives and movements by Gandalf. That we loss the setting and the conversation with the hobbits and Gimil is true, but what do these part add to the story?
The main issue I see, and up to now I did not have a good solution, is the unproportionality we creat: We tell on some pages how Gandalf orgenised the beginning of the quest, but then we have one or two bleak paragraphs about the quest itself. I found one source that can help: LotR; Prolog; Of the Finding of the Ring. In the moment I am considering takeing up parts of the revisions to The Hobbit started by JRR Tolkien in 1960. They reach only to the approach of Rivendell, but that could be okay, since the tone of the story is much changed we could take it as an account based on Gandalf’s memories. Since Gandalf left soon after the finding of the Ring we could rather follow him to the With Council in Lórien and the attack on Dol-Guldur and then tell in short what eles happened to Thorin & Co.
Anyhow we have created such breaks before, but in these cases we did not have better description. In all this four cases we know where to find it, but we restricted our self not to include it.
3) & 4) The Hunt for the Ring & The Battle of the Fords of Isen: The issue about knowledge of the plot and characters of LotR is clear, but I wonder if must not cure that issue any how. I don’t know which text ArcusCalion considered as sources for our text in the chapter The War of the Ring, but I can see two sources that could help to make the narrative a bit more substantial: I remember a Letter to Milton Waldmann in which Tolkien gave a ‘short’ description of his whole legendarium. I am not sure if the full text is available but we should search for it. And we have in the three volume editions of LotR in volume 2 and 3 a short description of what has happen so far. In addition we could search in HoMe for plot synopsis or use LotR; Appendix B especially The Great Years both of which we might expand within our rules to full narrative.
A special case is The Marshals of the Mark. If we include The Battle of the Fords of Issen in the main narrative, I think we should shift this to volume 3.
In the result we would creat something like JRR Tolkien envisioned for his Silmarillion and the Atanatarion: Where the great publications of JRR Tolkien (The Hobbit & LotR) cover the events, our retelling is short, but where these primary sources leave holes or are short our text is as braod as we can manage.
At least I think it is worth trying to include these 4 sources into the main narrative. If we fail to do so or are unsatisfied with the result we can easily switch back to using them as Appendices.
Respectfully
Findegil
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