Yes, Tolkien is Wonderful, but...

[William Cloud Hicklin]

As I was reading through the introduction to the Book of Lost Tales Part I, at one point Christopher Tolkien says that his father was reluctant to even introduce the Silm to his readers:

Whoa, whoa, whoa there, Nellie! Check for context!

Christopher Tolkien in the BLT I Foreword was quoting Tom Shippey, who was in turn quoting the JRRT letter: and CRT was in fact *criticising* Shippey for interpolating the words "to write The Silmarillion." JRRT never wrote them- and in any case, Shippey was under the very false impression that Tolkien hadn't, in fact, already written The Silmarillion*, much of it many times over.

In fact in the Second and Third Editions of The Road to Middle-earth Shippey has retracted his interpolation.


EDIT 11/7: In the 2004 edition of RME, Shippey writes, "I should have looked back at the antecedent sentences of the letter, and realised that what was meant was something more like 'I am doubtful myself about the undertaking [to make The Silmarillion consistent both internally and with the now-published Lord of the Rings, and above all to give it "some progressive shape."]'"

*By 1963 all the texts which wound up in the published Silmarillion had already been done, except for the very late revisions to 'Of Maeglin.' Tolkien wrote very, very little First Age narrative after his retirement in 1959; and of course in all its essentials the book pre-dated The Lord of the Rings. Shippey got this backwards in '82, before HoME was available.

[Beanamir of Gondor]

Aha. Rebuke duly accepted, William. to me for forgetting the context of the next page: I swear I read it. So the problem, essentially, was that LotR readers had fabricated their own histories of ME, having only ever caught glimpses of the past, and Tolkien was worried that by publishing the Silmarillion, his account of the history of ME might clash with what readers had imagined. Not the same argument: similar, but not the same.

In all honesty, that is a worrisome concept. Beren and Luthien were different in the Silm than I'd imagined them after hearing Aragorn's song in FotR.

Still, even if Tolkien never said that himself (about readers not wanting to know the history of ME), it is a valid question, is it not? Many readers of "The Hobbit" are perfectly content to lay back and never read further. Even more readers of LotR are content to quit with Aragorn's coronation, and go no further back than the bare details of the First Age coupled with the events of the Third Age--all those people who say, "Sure, I saw the movies and read the book, but I don't think I could read all those historical contexts."

I think I've rambled off the thread subject. Ugh.