Work on the Great Tales themselves was at best sporadic. In the years 1958–60, Tolkien turned again to the Narn i Chîn Húrin, which was within striking distance of being finished. It never reached a fully satisfactory form, however; and meanwhile, in 1958–9, he began another subsidiary text, to take up the unresolved elements of the Narn and round out the long and involved tragic history of Túrin; it seems to have been meant as a supplement to the Narn rather than part of The Silmarillion proper. The resulting text was titled The Wanderings of Húrin, and is the last true narrative addition Tolkien made to his account of the Elder Days.
From this period date various shorter ancillary works that sought to clarify particular issues now problematic or inconsistent in the light of the material already published. These are (from 1958) The Laws and Customs among the Eldar and The Converse of Manwë and Eru; (from 1959) The Reincarnation of Elves; Athrabeth; Concerning Galadriel and Celeborn.10 As we have seen, several of these texts seem to have been meant, or were incorporated as, appendices to the projected Silmarillion: Laws and Customs deals with marriage, death, reincarnation and remarriage, Converse with reincarnation (as, obviously, does Reincarnation); the Athrabeth is a debate between Finrod and a mortal woman about death (it also contains the barest hint of a natural theology of the Incarnation); whilst Quendi and Eldar examines the elves’ names for themselves in an extended philological treatment, and also includes an Elvish myth of their Awakening. The sheer multitudinousness of the questions to be addressed and problems to be resolved, all of which needed to be wholly consistent, must have seemed, often, overwhelming.
The question of transmission and framework was still unresolved. Ælfwine was still named as translator of the Quenta, and of the Laws and Customs, and was explicitly addressed in the Dangweth; but the Akallabêth was now attributed to no less a figure than Elendil, founder of the Númenórean kingdoms in Middle Earth.11
At this time, Tolkien tentatively introduced a device that might, he hoped, rescue his legendarium from the flat-world–round-world dilemma we noted above. This was the ‘Dome of Varda’, a great mist-wrought barrier set above the world and inscribed on its inside with facsimiles of the constellated stars; this was to hide the world from Melkor in the time of its fashioning, and thus preserve the appearance of a naïve flat-world cosmology whilst retaining a round-world one in fact. It also hid Valinor from the light of the Sun, now supposed of primæval making but, after assault by Melkor, giving only fierce and tainted light; the Two Trees were endowed with the last of the holy light of the One, which the Sun had borne before it was ravished, and were set in Valinor to light it alone. After the destruction of the Trees, the Dome was removed, and the light of the Sun was over all. This was at best a cumbersome account, and one that exists only as roughly drafted, and in several incompatible variants; but it is telling that the latest manuscripts of the Quenta omit the chapter on the making of the sun and moon from the last fruit and blossom of the Trees. The scale and implications of these changes, however, were such that, even had they been less tentative, they could not quickly have been implemented.12
I have said little about Tolkien’s work on his invented languages, mostly because with some few exceptions little detailed material has been published that was written later than the 1920s; it remains true, however, that throughout his life the linguistic core of his legendarium was constantly evolving, and was the subject of persistent revision, discussion, elaboration and general tinkering, which often generated or reacted from the narrative growth of his various tales. Tolkien clearly spent unquantifiable time and effort on this – the extant linguistic manuscripts run, apparently, to three thousand pages; we should not see this as a distraction exactly, since it remains true that Tolkien’s imagination was intimately bound up with linguistic speculation, but it must to some extent have meant a dispersal of effort.
Perhaps some of this miscellaneous writing was ‘displacement activity’, tasks Tolkien undertook to occupy himself because he was unable to engage properly with the main problem at hand: how to make The Silmarillion work. Its component tales were all written in a high style, without the mediation provided in his published works by hobbits; there was, for the contemporary reader, no obvious ‘way in’. On one visit, Rayner Unwin was shown ‘serried ranks of box files’ which contained the Silmarillion tales, ‘like beads without a string’.13 This, perhaps, is the essence of the problem: Tolkien could not find a string on which to thread the beads he had so lovingly crafted. For many years, as we have seen, Tolkien had tried out variations on the device of an Anglo-Saxon seafarer as a ‘framing device’ for the stories, and a means of accounting for their transmission; he could not wholly abandon the connexion between England, the Lúthien or Luthany of his earliest stories, with ruined Beleriand, or Eressëa the gull-haunted, but the simple device of a lost sailor no longer seemed adequate (although we should remember that the Dangweth Pengoloð was represented as answers to Ælfwine). Increasingly, he felt that the nature of the texts (particularly their apparent confusion regarding cosmology, and the fates of elves and men, a confusion he decided was incompatible with his now very elevated notion of elvish wisdom and knowledge, derived as it was from the Valar) required an intermediate stage of Mannish transmission, via Númenor and Gondor. This of course would most probably sever completely the direct link between England and the elves; unless, as Tolkien may have intended, the Númenórean tales were preserved in Tol Eressëa by the elves and seen by Ælfwine there. But this introduced a level of redundancy that was hardly satisfactory.
Latterly, he considered presenting the Silmarillion texts as tales ‘translated from the Elvish’ by Bilbo Baggins. Hobbits, perhaps, were now to be the means these texts were passed to the tenth-century Englishman Ælfwine.14 But these resolutions themselves raised further questions, and he could settle on no satisfying answer to the conundrum; this in itself tended to make work on the central texts slow and difficult.
From this time, also, comes the unfinished Aldarion and Erendis (which Tolkien seems to have called The Mariner’s Wife, or The Shadow of the Shadow), the only surviving tale of Númenor before its Downfall; it is a sympathetically drawn account of an unhappy marriage. Erendis’s mother tells her, ‘A woman must share her husband’s love with his work and the fire of his spirit, or make him a thing not loveable.’15
To it was prefixed, perhaps several years later, A Description of the Island of Númenor; this, and presumably also the story itself, was described as based on material preserved in Gondor. The Line of Elros, a Númenórean king-list, is undated but very likely comes from the same period, between 1960, when the story was first drafted, and 1965, when a final typescript of it was made.16
Tolkien himself recognized his long-standing tendency to be distracted into new projects:
When I was supposed to be studying Latin and Greek, I studied Welsh and English. When I was supposed to be concentrating on English, I took up Finnish. I have always been incapable of doing the job in hand.17
This is, surely, an overstatement of the case: ‘the job in hand’ was never wholly neglected; but we may recognize, here, a late and melancholy self-excoriation for what Lewis had years before called Tolkien’s ‘dilatory and unmethodical’ nature.
Chapter 15 – Unfinished Tales
I – Endings and renewals
In 1960, in another distraction, Tolkien started a wholesale rewriting of The Hobbit; he had grown to regret the tone of much of the book, particularly the intrusive narrator, and decided to recast the story to make it stylistically more like The Lord of the Rings, and to resolve some other niggling problems. After a few chapters, however, he got tangled in an unavailing attempt to make sense of the phases of the moon in the book, and put it aside.
The year 1962 saw the publication of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, collecting mostly older verse. The impulse to collect and publish them came from Tolkien’s aunt Jane Neave, now ninety, who the year before had asked him to put together ‘a small b
ook with Tom Bombadil at the heart of it’. The book appeared some months before her death in 1963.
Most of Tolkien’s poems were frequently rewritten and adapted to new contexts; they were, in this, not of course unlike much of his other work, although their shorter compass and more readily defined form meant that, for the shorter pieces in any event, he was much more likely to produce finished versions. Most of the poems in this collection had been published before, in some form or other; they were now reworked and given the character of marginalia from the notional archetype of The Lord of the Rings, the Red Book of Westmarch, although the preface refers to ‘the High-elvish and Númenorean legends of Eärendil’, alluding to Tolkien’s now (it seems) settled purpose to give his legendarium this ‘mixed’ character, transmitted (in part) through Rivendell.1 Charles Noad notes that ‘The Hoard’ begins, ‘when the moon was new and the sun young’, which assumes their creation in recorded history as in the older creation.2 The broadly comic aim of most of the pieces has probably masked the serious intent of some of them, particularly the last two, ‘Sea-Bell’ and ‘The Last Ship’; although not new, they were for this version given a newly elegiac cast.3 Tolkien felt that at some level his contact with faërie, with the sources of his inspiration, was now fading or uncertain. Allen & Unwin wrote to C.S. Lewis asking for a ‘puff’ quotation for the book; Lewis, in answer, wrote directly to Tolkien, although he did not know his current Oxford address and addressed his letter to Merton to be forwarded. He thought Unwin did not realize how much he, Lewis, was disliked, and that approval from him might actually damage sales; also,
The public – little dreaming how much you dislike my work, bless you! – regard us as a sort of firm and wd. only laugh at what wd. seem to them mutual back-scratching.
Lewis ended, ‘I wish we cd. ever meet.’4 Christopher had been encouraging his father for years to go and see Lewis; now, at last, Tolkien gave in. He and Christopher went to The Kilns in the depths of the cold winter of 1962–3. But the visit was not a success; the two men had, now, little to say to one another.
Lewis had been ill with kidney and prostate problems for some time, and that July almost died of a heart attack. He was briefly in a coma, and then spent a week confused as a result of septicaemia. Tolkien visited him in hospital, and then, in September, he and his eldest son John drove to The Kilns. They talked about the ‘Morte d’Arthur, and whether trees died’.5 Lewis had resigned his job in Cambridge; by mid-November, his kidneys were failing. Death came suddenly, but hardly unexpectedly.
On 22 November 1963, C.S. Lewis died. He was only sixty-five. Tolkien wrote to his daughter, ‘this feels like an axe-blow near the roots’.6 The following year, Lewis’s posthumous work Letters to Malcolm: Mainly on Prayer appeared. Tolkien was appalled by it (‘a distressing and in parts horrifying work’7); he began an essay discussing Lewis’s religious views, which (Tolkien was increasingly convinced) had been dominated by the Protestantism, or better anti-Catholicism, of his Ulster childhood. The essay was called ‘The Ulsterior Motive’. It has never been published.
Tolkien had been asked, presumably some years earlier, to write Lewis’s obituary for The Times; he had refused. In January 1964, the Royal Society of Literature asked him if he would write an obituary for their journal; he again refused, this time giving a reason: ‘I feel his loss so deeply that I have since his death refused to write or speak about him.’8
II – American copyrights and other diversions
The collection Tree and Leaf appeared in 1964; this reprinted, for the first time since 1945, Leaf by Niggle, alongside the expanded text of the lecture On Fairy Stories. American copyright law required that a new edition of The Hobbit be produced; Tolkien was unable to find his 1960 revision notes, and so made only a small number of less radical changes, although along comparable lines. It appeared as the ‘third edition’ in 1966.
Christopher Tolkien had been elected Fellow of New College in 1963, aged thirty-eight; the following year, 1964, he and his wife separated. This was a grief to Tolkien.9
In 1964 Donald Wollheim, science fiction writer and editor at the American paperback science fiction publisher Ace Books, asked Tolkien for rights to publish The Lord of the Rings in paperback and (he claimed) was brusquely rebuffed; Tolkien, Wollheim said, deplored the thought of his book appearing in ‘so degenerate a form’ as a paperback.10 Wollheim was both annoyed and obstinate, and identified what he considered was a flaw in the copyright status of the existing American (hardback) edition of the book. He argued that since Houghton Mifflin’s edition of The Lord of the Rings was in fact merely a binding of pages printed in England by Unwin, the text itself was not printed in America and was thus not covered by American copyright law.11 Ace quickly produced a cheap paperback edition, which sold at 75¢ a volume besides Houghton Mifflin’s $5-a-volume hardback. It appeared in 1965, and sold briskly.
Between July and September 1965, Tolkien sent a series of revisions to his American publisher, Houghton Mifflin, to the end of establishing a secure copyright on their edition under even the loosest interpretation of American copyright law. These revisions might have been mere perfunctory removal of typographical mistakes and the other inevitable elisions that arise in any large book during the process of publishing; Tolkien, however, characteristically took this opportunity to make some more substantive changes. All of this was, of course, further distraction from work on The Silmarillion.
One major addition was the ‘Note on the Shire Records’ appended to the Prologue; here, the volumes of ‘Translations from the Elvish’ given by Bilbo to Frodo (three volumes in the revision, merely ‘some books’ in the earlier text) are implicitly declared to be The Silmarillion, made from ‘all the sources available … in Rivendell, both living and written’.12 This was in line with Tolkien’s now-favoured source for his legendarium (since at Rivendell were kept the surviving records of the Númenórean North Kingdom), although it was not wholly satisfactory, since the ‘living sources’ could presumably have disposed of any supposed misunderstandings in the ‘Mannish’ recensions of (for instance) the creation myth. Tolkien may have intended to add a rider, as described in an undated note (probably from the late 1950s or early 1960s): ‘A note should say that the Wise of Númenor recorded that the making of the stars was not so, nor of Sun and Moon’,13 although one wonders why in that case the legends themselves were not emended, except (perhaps) by presumed reverence for older records, notionally on the part of the Númenórean sages but in fact by Tolkien himself. There is a further question, within the internal consistency of the legendary itself, as to the supposed time when these ‘mixed’ Númenórean myths were written down, since at no point within the history of the legendarium were the Houses of Men not in contact with High Elves who knew the ‘true’ cosmogony. Doubtless Tolkien could have improvised a plausible explanation, but it would inevitably have partaken to some degree in the nature of special pleading. In any event, however, the Anglo-Saxon link to Eriol Wæfre/Ælfwine now looked tenuous in the extreme.
Six months after the Ace edition, Ballantine, another publisher of paperback science fiction, brought out an authorized paperback, incorporating Tolkien’s revisions, which were enough to establish its copyright status.14 The price of their book included a royalty to Tolkien, however; it sold at 95¢ per volume, 20¢ more than the Ace pirate edition.
It was at this juncture that Tolkien’s scrupulous courtesy to his fans paid dividends. He had answered numerous written queries by hand, often at some length; amongst the fans who received such letters was the young Gene Wolfe, who got one dated 7 November 1966 giving a brief but courteous answer giving the (English) etymologies of the words orc and warg.15 Tolkien now added to all such replies a brief request to make the irregular nature of the Ace edition known, and to buy instead the Ballantine text, which in addition was printed with a message from Tolkien on its back cover asking readers to buy it rather than any ‘unauthorized’ edition. The various Tolkien societies were also enlis
ted to help. Within six months of publication, Ballantine had sold over a million copies, Ace no more than a hundred thousand. Ace came to an out-of-court settlement, paid Tolkien a lump sum of $9,000 in lieu of royalties (reckoned as a rough 4 per cent on copies sold) and undertook not to reprint the book. Naturally, the controversy only helped sales. The next British edition, brought out by Unwin in 1966, incorporated the changes made to the Ballantine text, and became the ‘second edition’ of the text. Further revisions, which Tolkien had submitted too late for the 1965 American paperback, were also incorporated into the next Unwin printing of 1967. This text of the book was current for the next twenty years.16
In the strange heady days of the mid- to late 1960s, The Lord of the Rings became what is usually called a cult classic, first in America but then afterwards in Britain also (the first British paperback, a single volume with severely abridged appendices, was produced in 1968 at thirty shillings, or £1 10s.). A full British paperback text, in three volumes with appendices, became available only in 1974.
A BBC documentary of 1968 gives a good sample of the sort of softminded nonsense that often accompanied this enthusiasm, in the minds of some at least of its readers.17 Tolkien Societies sprang up across the world: the Tolkien Society of America was founded in February 1965, and a British analogue followed four years later: the author found himself famous. This was (surely) a source of pleasure and satisfaction (the book’s success was, Tolkien reflected, ‘as if the horns of hope had been heard again’18), as well as of money, which for the first time in Tolkien’s life was not a constant worry; but also of further distractions. Tolkien had no full-time secretary, and an increasing volume of fan-letters, many of which requested, and got, sometimes long handwritten answers. Whilst this exercise, which was in origin perhaps one of simple courtesy, was often useful in bringing to light problems that needed to be clarified, the resulting tangents along which Tolkien was frequently led did not make it easier for him to concentrate on The Silmarillion.
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