Questions About Arda Reconstructed

[Huinesoron]

Originally Posted by Andsigil

What? No Priya Seth?

I assume when she discovered the Athrabeth includes Tolkien's actual insertion of a Biblical person into Middle-earth, she threw up her hands and went home.

hS

EDIT: I've not read Arda Reconstructed, but from what I've heard I agree with The Squatter of Amon Rûdh - I don't believe it even attempts to establish a 'definitive Silmarillion'. There's a fair amount of discussion of the book over at the Hall of Fire, where the author is a member; they have a subforum dedicated to it. ~hS

EDIT2: As someone who it's always wise to exercise caution when dealing with... we know that J.R.R. Tolkien imagined his Silmarillion coming to about the same length as The Lord of the Rings, so it would certainly have been a much chunkier book than the Silm we have! If he had stuck to that plan, I think we would have seen a kind of composite book: one that included all three parts of the pre-War of Wrath Silm we have ('Ainulindale', 'Valaquenta', and 'Quenta Silmarillion' proper), along with the Annals (he certainly wanted a timeline in LotR), and longer versions of the Great Tales. While I'm no stranger to writing for sheer pleasure, I can't imagine Tolkien wouldn't have intended The Children of Hurin to sit in his book alongside Beren and Luthien and The Fall of Gondolin.

He probably wouldn't have included the epic poems; I don't think he ever made any effort to integrate the Narn or the Lay into his narrative writings. The really interesting question is whether he would eventually have written a huge final section of which we have no trace; The Book of Lost Tales includes the intriguing comment that the tale of the Nauglafring was intended to be the first of seven tales dealing with Earendil - and the second was the entire Fall of Gondolin. Earendil was supposed to have adventures in the South (some versions have him killing Ungoliant), and then there's the War of Wrath... all of which Tolkien only ever hinted at in poems, with no narrative even started.

... of course, all of this misses the point, which is that 'J.R.R. Tolkien's Silmarillion' was always going to be exactly what it was: an unwieldy mass of manuscripts in various stages of revision, never quite coming together into a cohesive whole. It's a miracle we even got one Legendarium book out of the man (The Hobbit being somewhat different, of course); he was a chronic reviser.

Which brings us neatly back round to the challenge Christopher had to face to create our Silm, and the process which Douglas Kane laid out in his book. ^_^ ~hS

[Huinesoron]

Separate enough to warrant a separate post... I've just run across this infographic by Airyyn on deviantArt, which lays out exactly where in HoME the source line for each sentence of the published Silmarillion can be found - and which bits are editorial insertions by CT. It's sort of a neat distillation of the entire concept of Arda Reconstructed, and makes it brutally clear which chapters are 'Christopher-written'. (The ones that really pop out are the Valaquenta, 'Of Aulë and Yavanna', 'Of Maeglin', 'Of Beren and Luthien' (I'm surprised by these two, I suspect they may be victims of a CT 'this text is the same as in the published book'), the first half of 'Of Túrin Turambar', the bulk of 'Of the Ruin of Doriath' and 'Of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin', and 'Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age' (also I believe a 'same as published' document).)

hS

[Zigûr]

I used Arda Reconstructed in my PhD research so I've read some of it. It's useful as a reference for distinguishing which bits are genuine J.R.R. Tolkien, which aren't, and where they came from, but it doesn't propose a "true" Silmarillion if I recall correctly. It's an interesting read and worthwhile if you want to be redirected back to works found in earlier History volumes which form the Professor's own final say on various matters he never got around to revising.

[R.R.J Tolkien]

Thank you all for the posts I will check out the links as well. I am interested in how much and what Christopher edited, i was unaware he did to large extent.