Nothing came of
my post in the Chapter-by-Chapter forum trying to drum up interest in a CbC of
The Book of Lost Tales, positive OR negative, and that's probably result enough to put away the idea it was a worthwhile endeavour right now. Still, I want to reread the book(s) and I want to discuss the things I read with fellow Downers--or at least to put my observations up here. Whether anyone finds something to respond to is not entirely up to me. So here's a thread to that effect.
What is the Book of Lost Tales?
The Barrow-downs is full of exceptional Tolkien fans, most of whom already know what
The Book of Lost Tales, and quite a few of you have already read it, but for the sake of completeness, and in case we have any burgeoning fans who are nearer the beginning of their journey through the volumes of Middle-earth than the end, I will start by explaining:
The Book of Lost Tales Part I and
The Book of Lost Tales Part II are the first two volumes of
The History of Middle-earth series. Sadly (or so thought my approximately-thirteen-year-old self when I first encountered it), it is NOT a twelve-volume history of Arda; instead, it chronicles the history of how Middle-earth came to be written, from the first attempts in the 1910s through the late texts of the 1960s.
The Foreword:
The first section of
The Book of Lost Tales Part I is the foreword, in which Christopher Tolkien sets the goals of the project. The thing I find the most fascinating about this section is the context in which it was written. Published in 1983,
The Book of Lost Tales Part I debuted three years after
Unfinished Tales and six years after
The Silmarillion, only ten years after J.R.R. Tolkien's death--in other words, less time elapsed from Tolkien's death until the beginning of the HoME than elapsed during the run of the HoME--the last volume,
The Peoples of Middle-earth would be published in 1996, thirteen years later. In other words, as I see things, the HoME began as a very early
And on the note of time passing, the texts begins "
The Book of Lost Tales, written between sixty and seventy years ago...[/i]. Thirty-one years later, those numbers would read "between ninety and one hundred years ago." We're closing on (or have passed, depending on when you want to celebrate it) the centennial of Middle-earth's creation. Does anyone have plans to celebrate? We should really do something--maybe in 2016 or 2017.
The Foreword, which not only introduces
The Book of Lost Tales but, though it was not a guaranteed thing at the time of writing, the entire History of Middle-earth series, is probably the most definitive
apologia of Christopher Tolkien's literary executorship, explaining why he published the sort of
Silmarillion that he did, neither taking the more creative path that one might call the Guy Gavriel Kay route, nor the pure scholarship route. He says, speaking of what had come before, "The published work has no 'framework,' no suggestion of what it is and how (within the imagined world) it came to be.
This is now think to have been an error" (p.5, emphasis added).
One can agree or disagree with CT about what he *should* have done, and there are no shortage of fans who disagree with what he did after this beginning-of-the-HoME course correction, but I do not think it is possible to give him anything other than praise for being willing to say he made a mistake--a mistake that made plenty of money and plenty of gratitude from fans who wanted more of Middle-earth.
And although CT thinks he took the wrong tack, I think it is important to note that he isn't saying that
The Silmarillion ought to have been more dry and academic and more like the HoME than it was. He says that "of course, 'The Silmarillion' was intended to move the heart and imagination, directly, and without peculiar effort or the possession of unusual faculties." CT admits that
The Silmarillion will not be for everyone; his problem isn't with the style of the book, but with the fact that it came divorced from a proper Transmission Conceit--the aridity of the book stems from its genre as a historical redaction, but this isn't an illusion-building strength unless there's a framework to help demonstrate how and why this history has passed down.
In both defending what he has done and what he will do going forward, Christopher Tolkien can almost be read as constantly warning the reader to turn away from the book in hand. Given the complaints he's addressing, that
The Silmarillion had "even produced a sense of outrage - in one case formulated to me [CT] in the words 'It's like
the Old Testament!': a dire condemnation against which, clearly, there can be no appeal." In other words,
The Silmarillion was not another
The Lord of the Rings, and that warning applies doubly to
The Book of Lost Tales.
Personally, though I find that reading
The Book of Lost Tales is like taking a step back towards immediacy from the distance of
The Silmarillion, and in that respect it *IS* more like
The Lord of the Rings, though he is right that the framework HERE, of editorial commentary and divergent, hastily written texts, makes it difficult matter. It is, CT says, "liable to be an intricate and crabbed thing, in which the reader is never left alone for the moment."
What if...?
One thing I want to do with this posts, in addition to making observations, is to posit some what-ifs. "What if [x] had survived into the Silm?", for example. But here, at the beginning of this thread, I have a different question:
What if someone published YOUR wastepaper basket (as CT has been accused of doing)? Of course, in this case, JRRT never seems to have thrown out a draft, never requested his papers be destroyed, and told his son to do as he saw fit--and, in general, Tolkien fans have been grateful indeed for all we've been given (if greedy for even more).
That gives a lot of fodder to drawing impressions about Tolkien, but is it something YOU would want? Personally, I destroy anything I REALLY don't want people to see, but the rest of it I keep, if only because *I* will probably enjoy digging it, bad prose and all, someday. But I have the luxury of thinking there will be no audience for my wastepaper basket. If there was an audience for yours, would you be inclined to pre-emptively burn it? Can you even envision having someone you would trust to make judgements about what to share and what to burn? That part truly awes me... though perhaps, as I have no children thus far, that is an aspect of Tolkien's life I simply haven't got the experience to compare to.