The History of Middle-earth

• 1. Introduction

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  The History of Middle-earth is not a chronicle of dragons and wars. It is something stranger: a 12-volume record of one man's mind at work, compiled over decades, published between 1983 and 1996, and built from manuscripts so disordered that Christopher Tolkien had to convert a barn in Oxfordshire into a workspace just to begin sorting them.

  J. R. R. Tolkien died in 1973, leaving behind a vast and unsorted mass of handwritten drafts. Many were in pencil. Many had been erased and overwritten. Pages were annotated on top of earlier annotations. There was no tidy archive, no final version, no clear intention about what should go where. What existed was a lifetime of creative effort that had never been meant, in any straightforward sense, for the public eye.

  His son Christopher, a philologist like his father, spent 45 years turning that disorder into something a reader could hold. The questions that follow are not simply about Middle-earth. They are about what it means to finish someone else's life's work, and what happens to a mythology when the making of it becomes visible.

• 2. Father and Son

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  J. R. R. Tolkien was born in 1892 and died in 1973. He spent most of his academic life at the University of Oxford, specialising in philology, with a particular focus on Old English works such as Beowulf. The novels that made him famous, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, were products of a much larger imaginative project that he called his legendarium. That project occupied him throughout his life but was never published in his lifetime.

  In 1967, Tolkien named Christopher as his literary executor and more specifically as his co-author of The Silmarillion. After his father's death, Christopher carried the manuscripts to his home in Oxfordshire. He was joined in the early stages by a young writer named Guy Gavriel Kay, and by 1975 the two had discovered how complex the editing task was likely to be.

  In September 1975, Christopher resigned from his position as lecturer at New College, Oxford, where he had worked since 1963, to devote himself entirely to the editing. He moved to the south of France and continued the work for the rest of his life. Before beginning the History, he had already published The Silmarillion in 1977 and Unfinished Tales in 1978. Those two books were a form of preparation. They were also, as it turned out, incomplete.

• 3. The Manuscripts

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  Christopher Tolkien described the challenge plainly: the drafts were handwritten, often hastily, making them hard to decipher. Earlier pencilled versions had frequently been erased and overwritten, making it impossible to read what came before. Drafts were annotated or extended on the same sheets, folding multiple stages of revision into a single physical page.

  Even dating the manuscripts was a puzzle. Relative dates had to be worked out from evidence within the texts themselves, or occasionally from the type of paper his father had used. A stock of paper from a particular place or time could establish the earliest possible date for a manuscript, but rarely more than that.

  The 12 volumes that emerged from this effort are organised chronologically by the period of Tolkien's life in which the material was written. The first two volumes, The Book of Lost Tales Parts I and II, cover writings from 1914 to 1920 and include the earliest versions of tales that would eventually become The Silmarillion. Volumes three and four move into the 1920s and 1930s. Volumes six through nine, published between 1988 and 1992, document the writing of The Lord of the Rings itself. The final volume, The Peoples of Middle-earth, covers Tolkien's last years, from 1960 until his death. A combined index followed six years after the series completed, published in 2002.

• 4. What the Series Reveals

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  The reviewer Charles Noad, writing in Mallorn, observed that the 12-volume History had done something a single-volume edition of The Silmarillion, even one with embedded commentary, could not have achieved. It had shifted people's understanding of Tolkien's work away from being centred on The Lord of the Rings, toward what Tolkien himself had always considered central: the Silmarillion mythology.

  Noad described the series as a whole as a testament to two people at once, crediting both one man's creative effort and another's explicatory devotion. A reviewer for A Green Man Review wrote that the series offered an unprecedented opportunity to examine a great writer's creative development across a period of 60 years, and compared Christopher's editorial endurance to that of Hercules.

  Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, writing in VII, called Tolkien's mythology as documented in the History a work of extraordinary power and scope, and noted that only with the History's publication could it finally be judged on those terms. They also recorded the range of objections the series had attracted. Some readers felt it should never have been published, that showing Tolkien's missteps and false starts did him a disservice. Others objected on grounds of canonicity, arguing that Tolkien had not approved these texts for publication. Hammond and Scull answered that the History was not meant to present a fixed design, but a living creation, and the process by which Tolkien gave it life.

• 5. Mythology by Many Hands

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  The scholar Gergely Nagy traced a specific idea in Tolkien's thinking: that a true mythology had to appear as though it had passed through many hands, been annotated by different editors, and accumulated the marks of transmission over time. Tolkien looked to Elias Lönnrot, the compiler of the Finnish epic the Kalevala, as an exemplar of what he called a professional and creative philology.

  Nagy argued that when Christopher Tolkien edited the History using his own skills as a philologist, he inserted himself in the functional place of Bilbo, as editor and collator of old manuscripts. This was not a deliberate recreation of his father's intent; Nagy described it as inadvertent. But it had the effect of reinforcing what his father had wanted to achieve all along. Tolkien's legendarium had become, in reality and not only in fiction, a complex work produced by different hands, edited and commented upon over a long period.

  Vincent Ferré extended this observation by noting that Christopher's editing of the History presented his father's writings as historical, as a real set of legends from the past. Ferré compared this to Christopher's editing of The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, which framed his father's academic writing as scholarly work in precisely the same way. The same philological method shaped how both the fiction and the criticism were received.

• 6. Frames Within Frames

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  Elizabeth Whittingham wrote that Tolkien had recognised a structural problem at the heart of the Silmarillion material. The impression of depth he had created in The Lord of the Rings relied on references to older events. But the Silmarillion stories were themselves those older events. There was no further past to gesture toward.

  His solution was a frame story. A man from a later age, Eriol in The Book of Lost Tales, travels to Middle-earth and listens as the Elves recount their history. As Whittingham put it, Eriol's perspective becomes the reader's, separating readers from tales of past loss and faded glory. The device gave the oldest stories the quality of distance that made them feel mythic.

  Verlyn Flieger, citing Christopher Tolkien's own introduction to The Book of Lost Tales Part I, noted that Christopher acknowledged he had made an error in not providing any frame story for the 1977 Silmarillion. Flieger's view was that the one-volume Silmarillion gave a misleading impression of coherence and finality, as if it were a definitive canonical text, when the legendarium it was drawn from was a jumble of overlapping and often competing stories, annals, and lexicons. All the same, she argued, the 1977 book was essential. Without it, the History would never have been published. The 12-volume series provided exactly the framework Christopher felt the earlier book had lacked.

  C. S. Lewis, Tolkien's friend and fellow Inkling, had his own way of engaging with the framing instinct. Lewis so enjoyed The Lay of Leithian that he invented two fictional scholars, Peabody and Pumpernickel, who offered commentary on what Lewis pretended was an ancient text.

• 7. Legacy of the Series

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  In 2000, the 12 volumes were republished in three limited edition omnibus volumes. The combined index appeared in 2002. A shorter version of the ninth volume, under the title The End of the Third Age, was also made available, usually sold as a boxed set with volumes six, seven, and eight under the collective title The History of the Lord of the Rings.

  Christopher Tolkien chose not to include any material related to The Hobbit in the series. His reasons were stated plainly: The Hobbit had not been intended as part of the mythology, was a children's story, and had not originally been set in Middle-earth. Its revision during the writing of The Lord of the Rings was a separate matter. The Hobbit's own editorial history was published separately in 2007, edited by John D. Rateliff, in two volumes.

  In all, Christopher Tolkien edited and published 24 volumes of his father's writings. Hammond and Scull predicted that the History would start a new era in Tolkien studies. The mock-scholarly essay by Mark Shea, which imagines future source critics analysing the works attributed to both Tolkien and Peter Jackson as a redaction of The Red Book of Westmarch, Elvish Chronicles, Gondorian records, and oral Rohirric tradition, suggests that the editorial frame Christopher built has already taken on a life of its own.