More! More! More!

[Lalaith]

The glimpses were definitely not enough for me, and I first read LotR as a seven-year-old.
I was desperate to know more about Valinor and Elbereth, about Feanor's hands at work, about Numenor before its fall, about the Elf-friends of old, the First Age and everything that happened there. I got some from getting a copy of Return of the King from the library with all appendixes complete (my paperback only had the Arwen and Aragorn appendix) but I wasn't truly satisfied until I got hold of the Silmarillion. I was a bit put off when it plunged first into the Ainulindale, (well, I was very young!) but I was delighted by all the stories of the Quenta Sil.
The Unfinished Tales I read much later, and while I really enjoyed them, I didn't have the same sense of urgency, I now knew the answers to most of what I really *needed* to know.

I never got that feeling of wanting more from the Hobbit, however. (Which was the first Tolkien I read) Yes, there was that paragraph about Deep-Elves and Sea-Elves etc, also the swords from Gondolin, but these references didn't have the same glamour, somehow.

But it is interesting, why Tolkien abandoned the attempt to edit the Sil for publication? Was it a classic case of scholarly procrastination - a touch of the Casaubons - or did Allen & Unwin not encourage him as much as they could have done, that the work would have a ready market, which might have put him off?