Tolkien

by Raymond Edwards

  Unfinished Tales

  Three years later, another volume, Unfinished Tales, appeared; it collected fourteen long texts, in various stages of incompleteness, dealing with a range of subjects across the legendarium. These included the texts of the last, longer versions of two of the three Great Tales, Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin (originally meant to be a full retelling of the fall of the city, the first since 1917) and substantial fragments of the Tale of the Children of Húrin (otherwise known as Narn i Chîn Húrin).

  The History of Middle Earth

  Christopher Tolkien now began the enormous task of preparing and publishing the various component texts that underlay the 1977 Silmarillion. The result, embracing also the drafts of The Lord of the Rings, some technical treatises on the Elvish languages and various miscellaneous works (such as two unfinished ‘time travel’ novels, The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers), was published in twelve volumes between 1983 and 1996, under the overarching title of The History of Middle Earth. This, taken together with his earlier work on The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales, is a very considerable work of textual scholarship, collating large numbers of manuscript and typescript texts, held in various different places (some of Tolkien’s manuscripts were sold by him in his lifetime to American university collections; the remainder are in the Bodleian Library in Oxford). Tolkien and his readers have been fortunate in his literary executor, who combines an exhaustive knowledge of the material, expertise in his father’s academic interests and training in the delicate and rigorous art of editing texts (his major academic publication was an edition of the Norse King Heidrek’s Saga). It has been said that ‘one man’s imaginative genius has had the benefit of two lifetimes’ work’.2

  The Children of Húrin

  In April 2007, Christopher Tolkien published an edition of a complete text of this, a prose version of one of the three Great Tales; fragments had appeared previously, but this is as near as we are likely to come to an achieved text.

  Academic texts

  The primary text here is the volume titled The Monsters and the Critics, which collects seven ‘essays’ by Tolkien (in fact, all but one were originally public lectures) on academic subjects. It includes the famous Beowulf lecture, his Andrew Lang lecture On Fairy Stories and two texts (English and Welsh and A Secret Vice) giving extensive personal reflexion on Tolkien’s own linguistic taste, and on his ‘private languages’. None of the pieces is overly technical, indeed Tolkien’s written style (as opposed to his spoken delivery, which was reportedly terrible) is beguiling. For anyone interested in the intellectual sources of Tolkien’s fiction, or indeed in the language and literature of the old north, this is the best place to start.

  The Monsters and the Critics appeared in 1983. It was not in fact the first of his academic works to be posthumously published. The previous year saw a small edition of a book called The Old English Exodus – Tolkien’s edition of the poem, with translation and commentary reconstructed from his notes. This probably represents in some form the material that Tolkien mentioned to the OUP in the 1930s as a possible future edition.3 The published text met with a mixed reaction from current scholars of Old English, and has never been reprinted (and is accordingly both rare and expensive). It is probable that a comparable edition and commentary exist for the Old English poem Elene, which Tolkien had also tentatively proposed for publication.

  In January 1983, another of his former pupils edited Finn and Hengest, which gives texts of Tolkien’s lectures on a much-disputed passage from Beowulf and a parallel, fragmentary poem known as the Finnesburg Fragment; as with Exodus, Tolkien had also prepared editions of the texts; unlike Exodus, this book is still in print. Tolkien first lectured on this subject in 1928, and did so regularly during the 1930s. Unlike his Beowulf lecture, his theory here has (sadly) had almost no influence on subsequent criticism of the text; probably most fans of The Lord of the Rings coming to this book will find it baffling. For a patient reader with an interest in northern antiquity, however (and this sort of reader is more likely to be found amongst Tolkien fans than elsewhere), it is a luminous text; the fact, moreover, that Tolkien begins his exegesis of these poems with a long annotated glossary of names is additional confirmation, if any were needed, of the way his mind worked: first names, then the stories enfolded in and around the names.

  There are extensive lecture notes amongst the Tolkien papers held in the Bodleian Library; brief extracts from them feature in The Keys of Middle-Earth by Lee and Solopova. None has yet been published in extenso, and it is unclear whether the condition of the texts (often in rapid and elliptical pencil) would often permit this.

  The one exception is the earlier texts that underlay the famous ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’ lecture; these appear, edited and copiously annotated by Michael Drout, in Beowulf and the Critics; they represent Tolkien’s lecture series ‘Beowulf: General Criticism’ given several times in the early 1930s.

  The expanded text of the lecture On Fairy Stories was given in a number of different versions; the various longer and shorter texts of this, and Tolkien’s original drafts, have been edited in an attractive volume by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson.

  Christopher Tolkien has also given us an edition of the Völsung and Gudrún poems from the early 1930s (The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, May 2009); it also includes a text of an introductory lecture on the Elder Edda.

  Tolkien made two translations of Beowulf, a complete one in prose, and a partial one (600 lines) in alliterative verse. These were begun when Tolkien was at Leeds, and worked on during the 1930s. The manuscripts are in the Bodleian Library; Christopher Tolkien’s edition of the prose translation, with a generous commentary drawn from his father’s lectures, finally appeared in May 2014.

  Tolkien’s translation of three Middle English poems (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo) into modern English verse was published in 1975. His unfinished Arthurian epic, The Fall of Arthur, appeared in May 2013.

  Linguistic writings

  In the early 1990s, Christopher Tolkien entrusted the great bulk of his father’s purely linguistic manuscripts (those dealing, that is, with his invented languages) to a group of American scholars. The materials amount to roughly 3,000 manuscript and typescript pages. Some of the material has subsequently been published, in the journals Vinyar Tengwar and Parma Eldalamberon; sadly, whilst all issues of the first of these are still available to buy, early issues of the latter (which include, at time of writing, the text of the early ‘Gnomish Lexicon’) remain out of print. There seems little good reason for this, given the ready availability of print-to-order publishing.

  Still unpublished

  A volume of Tolkien’s Letters appeared in 1981; it is a fascinating volume, containing some 350 letters; many of them have been heavily abridged, however, and they represent only a fraction of the surviving letters (which number at least 1,500, with undiscovered texts still coming to light). The letters are the only part of Tolkien’s extensive private papers ever to be published. These exist in substantial quantities, some in the Bodleian Library, others still in the family’s keeping; they are not available for general consultation. There are, as far as I know, no immediate plans for any of them to be published.

  A biographer will obviously be disappointed that these materials have not yet been released; but those who have charge of such things can presumably reckon possible hurt to the sensibilities of the living better than we who have never seen them.

  There are numerous shorter poems by Tolkien scattered over six decades of miscellaneous periodical publications; some were collected in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, but many have never been republished, or even, in the case of some of his earlier poems, published at all. It would be a service for someone to collect all of these in a single volume, including such things as the Songs for the Philologists and Doworst.

  Supplement, 2020

  Since this book was first published, several further volumes of Tolkien’s w
ork have appeared. They contain only modest amounts of really new material; most of their contents reprint material previously published. The Story of Kullervo (2015) also includes other writings on Finnish legend; The Lay of Aotrou & Itroun (2016) gives drafts and variant versions as well as the text first published in 1945. The two volumes Beren and Luthien (2017) and The Fall of Gondolin (2018) are primarily compilations of different, previously published, versions of two of the ‘Great Tales’. None, really, adds anything of great moment.

  Chapter 17 – A Cinematic Afterlife

  As was mentioned above, Tolkien sold the film rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in 1969. This was not his first encounter with this world, however; in 1957, he was approached by a consortium of American filmmakers (Forrest J. Ackermann, Morton Grady Zimmerman and Al Brodax) who wished to turn The Lord of the Rings into an animated feature, and had prepared a script and some proposed artwork. Tolkien thought the art promising, but the script dreadful; he was prepared to compromise, however, if the fee was large enough. The details of this and all subsequent negotiations were left to Allen & Unwin. The filmmakers were given a six-month option, to run from the time when Tolkien submitted comments on their script. He sent in some detailed (and corrosive) comments in June 1958, asking for a thorough rewrite or, failing that, a very large fee indeed. Presumably they were disinclined to offer either; they let the option lapse.1

  Next was a proposal for a feature-length animated Hobbit, to be made by William L. Snyder’s Rembrandt Films (Snyder had won an Oscar in 1960 for best animated short film; he also made some Tom and Jerry cartoons). An agreement was concluded in April 1962, but questions were raised about the American copyright status of the text, and Snyder ended up producing only a token version (a twelve-minute montage of stills) with no more than a tangential relation to the book.2

  In the late 1960s, the Beatles were keen to make a version of The Lord of the Rings, with the four of them playing Gollum, Frodo, Sam and Gandalf. Tolkien, who detested the group, was furiously opposed; they did not secure the rights.

  After some years of preliminary negotiation, then, the film rights were sold initially to United Artists. The following year, the company asked the director John Boorman (then best known for the Lee Marvin noir Point Blank; Deliverance, Zardoz and Excalibur were all in the future) to make a film; Boorman and a screenwriter produced a script for a twoand-a-half-hour version, heavily spiced with the sex and drugs references tediously inevitable, it seems, at that time (pipeweed is a narcotic, mushrooms invariably hallucinogens, Galadriel a sexualized matriarch who seduces Frodo, and so boringly on). New management at United Artists sensibly dropped the project. Six years later, the rights were sold to the Saul Zaentz company, and assigned to their wholly owned subsidiary Tolkien Enterprises; they commissioned Ralph Bakshi, then well known for his animated films, to make The Lord of the Rings. In 1978, he released the first part of a projected two-part animated film, which combined rotoscoped live action with animated characters. It was not a success, and the second part was never made. Almost twenty years later, nothing further had been done before the New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson (then best known, to this writer at least, as director of the vastly entertaining man-eating aliens splatter-film Bad Taste) acquired the rights, via the Warner Brothers affiliate New Line Cinema.

  After an inevitably protracted development and production process, the resulting three films were released, one a year, between 2001 and 2003. Taken together, the three films are a cinematic monster, running to nine hours in all for theatrical release; a subsequent ‘special extended’ edition occupies a full twelve hours. Others have ably discussed the various changes and compromises introduced into the screenplays as against the book’s narrative, some inevitable and in their place effective, others bizarre or distasteful; whilst many reckon the film versions great masterpieces, this is not a universal view. I shall not particularize my own reactions here; enough to say that, aside from the first of the films, which I enjoyed well enough, I am not a fan.

  At the same time, Tolkien Enterprises licensed a bewildering variety of additional merchandise to coincide with the films’ release and borrowing their images of Tolkien’s characters and world: computer games, board games, miniature figures in a variety of sizes and materials, books and guides and goblets and chess sets, Lego, ringtones, watches and a panoply of other nick-nacks and gewgaws. The Zaentz corporation, and New Line Cinema, did very well out of it all; it is unclear how much of the money made its way back to the Tolkien Estate, but the always healthy sales of the books (in, inevitably, film tie-in editions) rose dramatically.

  A decade later, and with this now being for the younger generation the defining visual character of Tolkien’s work (and maybe, for some, also its narrative character), Jackson turned to The Hobbit. The first two films of this project were much more promising. The Hobbit is simpler in narrative structure, and, suitably garnished with additional dwarven material culled from Appendix A III of The Lord of the Rings, offers a strong and visually very promising tale of loyalty and revenge, with a subsidiary development of the hero (from unpromising domesticity to morally competent agent) of a type familiar to screenwriters and thus audiences. It is a children’s tale, and can readily admit (indeed, it already to some extent contains) the sort of cartoonish divertissement (comic trolls, squabbling rock-giants, pompous and hubristic goblin-kings) that would, and did, sit uncomfortably in the grand narrative of The Lord of the Rings. Even Jackson’s regrettable tendency to play dwarves for laughs has some support in the original tale. The second film has much more narrative amplification than the first, some (Dol Guldur) good, some (Laketown) indifferent, some plain bad: the barrel-escape from the Elvenking’s halls has become a rollercoaster platform fight in the now familiar vein of computer-game cinematography; whilst an inserted elven-dwarven love triangle is simply ridiculous. Rivendell, in the earlier films, was memorably described as apparently furnished with garden-centre statuary, hardly a convincing version of the last hold of the Noldor, the supreme makers of Middle Earth; their distant Silvan and Sindarin cousins in Mirkwood are perhaps better served, although Jackson’s Thranduil is distressingly reminiscent of Caligula as he might have been played by David Bowie in his cross-dressing phase. All in all, though, it is not as bad as it might be; and the dragon is splendid. However it concludes, though, it will not really be The Hobbit we (but perhaps no one henceforth) grew up with. But this should not surprise anyone, I think.

  Postscript, 2020

  The third Hobbit film was much worse than anyone might reasonably have predicted. We need not catalogue its horrors. Now there is to be a television series, produced by Amazon, of unspecified episodes from the Lord of the Rings appendices. It is probably best not to expect too much.

  In the summer of 2019, a biographical film, Tolkien, was released, without the cooperation of the Tolkien family. The script inevitably perhaps played fast and loose with the facts; elisions, inventions and temporal dislocations abound. The film is watchable, but has only a tangential claim to biography.

  Epilogue

  ‘“At any rate, I shall get this one picture done, my real picture, before I have to go on that wretched journey,” he used to say.’1

  What are we to make of Tolkien’s achievement? In one sense, like Niggle, he died with his great picture unfinished – the Silmarillion texts were never set in order, never fully achieved, and were published in a form that, although superficially finished, is in fact radically disparate and incomplete. Perhaps, if Tolkien had been more focussed and disciplined, less ‘dilatory and unmethodical’, less susceptible to despondency, inertia and sloth, he might have been able to finish the legendarium to his own satisfaction, or something approaching it. Perhaps; certainly, other men have laboured under difficulties and calls on their time as great as or greater than his, and have finished their ‘life’s work’ in a way that Tolkien never did. But if he had done so, he would have been a different man; the same sources that ga
ve rise to his characteristic type of magnificent and heroic melancholy also yielded self-doubt and depression; the perfectionist who brought his prose style to such a pitch of achievement was also, for this very reason, liable to abandon in weary disgust writings that were good, but not so good that bringing them to that perfection was not an insupportable burden; or whose delight in intricate structure and close-woven narrative could, in a moment, become enmeshment in confused strands whose entanglement was irresolvable.

  All of these things are true; and yet, what is remarkable, The Lord of the Rings was finished and published. Aside from the incalculable delight it has brought to generations of readers, it has also unsealed a whole vast area of the human imagination (Niggle’s Parish, if you like, of which we are all now to some extent free). None of the myriad popular forms in which high or low fantasy is now found would have happened without Tolkien; the same impulse that languished for decades in obscure pulp magazines is now definitively ‘mainstream literature’, if not, still, wholly respectable. But Tolkien’s legacy is not primarily his hordes of imitators, good, bad, indifferent; it is the enduring way he has given us of escape from a prison-house of the mind into the clearer, stronger reality he saw and embodied in words: it is his books, which convey, still, the perilous air of faërie into hearts ready, albeit unknown, to receive it and be awoken.