Are you Satisfied?

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Formendacil

I am satisfied with the stories as they stand.

What I would like is more information...

I must confess, I am an Appendices fan. I love encyclopaedic collections of information and scholarly articles and geneaologies and timelines....

It is stuff like this that really makes me like the HoME, and its stuff like this that I would wish to have more of.

This is pretty much what I think too. I like all the extra information as it allows you to put things together and find out what else may have happened, or even to formulate theories or new tales of your own. As it is, the stories we did get are of superb quality, and I'd much rather Tolkien was the perfectionist that he was and spent so long in perfecting these at the expense of other unwritten tales.

I thought the The New Shadow was interesting, but was only a curiosity; I got the sense from it that Tolkien really did not have his heart in the writing of Fourth Age stories and that he found the prospect quite depressing. After all, what could they be about? New evils arising? After LotR, such new evils might seem like a huge let down. They could not be as evil as those deeds wrought by Morgoth and Sauron, as it might make the central tale of LotR seem a bit pointless and the deeds less heroic, and if the evildoings in such tales were less evil, then likewise these tales would not be quite so thrilling.

The Fourth Age was the age of Men. Elves and Dwarves were diminishing, and Men were forbidden from entering The Shire. The Istari had gone. The Orcs were being hunted down. As far as we know, the Oliphaunts were all wiped out. No, I'm sorry to say that the Fourth Age just couldn't cut it in comparison to those Ages which had gone before.

There are a lot of books, films, comedy series and so on where I feel like I would love to see more, but in many cases being saturated with more and more 'product' just results in diminishing quality. If they had made more episodes of Fawlty Towers, Father Ted and The Royle Family then I think each series would have got less and less amusing. You only have to look at soap operas or series such as The Wheel of Time, which all seem interminable with the same plots being revised in the case of soaps (how many times have Ken and Deirdre split up?) to see why more is not necessarily A Good Thing.