Tolkien's legendarium

• 1. Introduction

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  Tolkien's legendarium began with a poem in 1914. That poem was the earliest piece in a vast private mythology. J. R. R. Tolkien would spend most of his adult life building it. The legendarium forms the background to The Lord of the Rings, yet Tolkien never brought it to a completed state. He was still revising when he died in 1973. How does a private project, pursued across six decades without resolution, come to power the novels that readers eventually encountered? What questions about cosmology, theology, and language drove Tolkien to keep returning to these stories? And what became of the vast, incomplete collection he left behind?

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• 2. The Word Itself

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  A legendarium, in medieval Latin, referred mainly to texts describing the lives of saints. The Anjou Legendarium, from the 14th century, is a surviving example of the form. The synonymous English noun 'legendary' appears in the Oxford English Dictionary with quotations from 1513 onwards. Tolkien used the word in four letters he wrote between 1951 and 1955. He was then attempting to persuade his publisher to release the unfinished Silmarillion alongside The Lord of the Rings.

  In 1951, Tolkien described his legendarium's ending as a vision of the world's destruction and renewal. That vision, he wrote, culminated in 'the recovery of the Silmarilli and the light before the Sun.' In 1955, he traced the project back to the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic. The legendarium, he explained, had begun as an attempt to reorganise some of its stories.

  John D. Rateliff defined the legendarium narrowly, in The History of The Hobbit. He listed six specific bodies of text, beginning with The Book of Lost Tales and ending with the final Annals. Verlyn Flieger argued that the Silmarils give the whole legendarium its name. Their creation, she wrote, was the greatest event the mythology contains. Shaun Gunner of The Tolkien Society later called a 2021 volume the unofficial 13th entry in the series. That collection, The Nature of Middle-earth, was edited by Carl F. Hostetter and contains previously unpublished legendarium writings.

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• 3. A Mythology for England

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  'The Fall of Gondolin,' one of the legendarium's earliest stories, was completed in late 1916. Tolkien was then a British officer, in hospital and on sick leave after returning from France. He intended his stories to become a mythology that would explain the origins of English history and culture. That mythology would also provide the historical background for the Elvish languages he was inventing.

  The stories accumulated under the title The Book of Lost Tales. Tolkien never finished it. His biographer Humphrey Carpenter noted that by 1923 Tolkien had nearly completed the collection. Yet Carpenter wrote that it was 'almost as if he did not want to finish it.' Carpenter suggested several reasons for this hesitancy. Tolkien may have doubted whether any publisher would take the work. He was a perfectionist by temperament. And he may have feared finishing because he wished to go on inventing myth in Middle-earth.

  In 1926, Tolkien wrote a 28-page summary of his mythology for R. W. Reynolds, a friend to whom he had sent several of the stories. That synopsis, called the Sketch of the Mythology, was written to explain the background of the story of Túrin. From it Tolkien developed a fuller narrative version called Quenta Noldorinwa. This became the last version of The Silmarillion that Tolkien ever completed.

  'The Lay of Leithian,' begun in 1925, was one of two long poems Tolkien turned to instead of completing The Book of Lost Tales. He had begun 'The Lay of the Children of Húrin' possibly as early as 1918.

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• 4. The Ælfwine Frame

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  Ælfwine means 'Elf-friend' in Old English. In The Book of Lost Tales, an Anglo-Saxon mariner of this name sails to the island of Tol Eressëa. He is also called Eriol or Ottor Wǽfre. There the Elves tell him their history. He collects and translates these stories, becoming the figure whose voice frames the mythology. The name Ælfwine was not arbitrary. Tolkien gave the same meaning in other languages to several characters. Men named Alboin, Alwin, and Elendil all share the sense of 'Elf-friend.' They appear as protagonists in two unfinished time-travel novels. The Lost Road was written in 1936; The Notion Club Papers followed in 1945. In each novel, the protagonist reappears in a different historical era.

  The scholar Gergely Nagy observed that Tolkien thought of his works as texts within the fictional world. The overlapping, sometimes contradictory accounts found throughout the legendarium were not inconsistencies; they were the intended effect. Tolkien even created facsimile pages of the Dwarves' Book of Mazarbul, discovered by the Fellowship in Moria, to carry this effect into the published novel. Nagy believed Tolkien was imitating the methods of scholars who had compiled and shaped national mythologies. His models included Elias Lönnrot, St Jerome, Snorri Sturlusson, Jacob Grimm, and Nikolai Gruntvig. Tolkien saw all of them as exemplars of a professional and creative philology.

  In the final conception, Tolkien moved the frame from Ælfwine to the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. Bilbo would collect the mythological stories into the Red Book of Westmarch, translating Elvish documents in Rivendell. The published Silmarillion dropped this frame entirely, but one trace remained. The Narn i Hîn Húrin begins with the note 'Here begins that tale which Ǽlfwine made from the Húrinien.' Tolkien never fully dropped the idea of multiple voices collecting these stories over the millennia. When Tolkien published The Hobbit in 1937, the novel had not been planned as part of the legendarium. He had written it privately for his children.

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• 5. Too Celtic

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  The reader at Tolkien's publisher described the Quenta Silmarillion as obscure and 'too Celtic.' In 1937, Tolkien had submitted that incomplete but more fully developed version of The Silmarillion to George Allen & Unwin. He had hoped to publish it alongside The Hobbit. The publisher instead asked him to write a sequel.

  Humphrey Carpenter notes that not until Tolkien began writing the sequel did he realise the significance of hobbits in his mythology. Writing The Lord of the Rings during the 1940s, Tolkien faced a double challenge. He had to create a narrative consistent with the published Hobbit, while also presenting a more comprehensive view of the large unpublished mythology behind it.

  When The Lord of the Rings was complete, Tolkien greatly desired to publish it alongside The Silmarillion. When that proved impossible, he turned his full attention to preparing the novel for publication. John D. Rateliff has provided evidence that The Hobbit and the Silmarillion were related from the start of The Hobbit's composition. With The Lord of the Rings published, Tolkien finally had space to turn back to the Silmarillion that had waited for decades.

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• 6. The Unfinished Task

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  The legendarium has been called 'a jumble of overlapping and often competing stories, annals, and lexicons.' Tolkien's plan was to revise it into a form he described as 'fit for publication.' That plan was never completed. In his later years, his attention drifted away from the narratives themselves. Much of his writing in that period addressed the theological and philosophical foundations of the work.

  The nature of evil in Arda, the origin of Orcs, and the customs of the Elves occupied him at length. He wrote extensively on Elvish rebirth, on the story of the Sun and Moon, and on the transition from a flat world to a globe. By this time he had doubts about fundamental aspects of the work that reached back to its earliest versions. He seemed to feel he needed to resolve those problems before producing any final narrative form. With one or two exceptions, he made little change to the stories themselves during his remaining years. The task of shaping all of this into a published book eventually fell to Tolkien's son Christopher, working from what his father had left behind.

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• 7. What Christopher Made

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  Christopher Tolkien published The Silmarillion in 1977. He had selected portions of his father's vast unpublished collection and shaped them into a semi-chronological narrative of the mythical world and its origins. The book's sales were sufficient to enable him to continue. He went on to publish many more volumes of his father's drafts in The History of Middle-earth, a 12-volume series. Some volumes presented completed tales; others showed the development of stories across multiple drafts.

  David Bratman, writing in the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, described The History of Middle-earth as a longitudinal study. It traced the legendarium's development through transcribed manuscripts, with commentary by Christopher. The scholar Gergely Nagy observed that Christopher had inserted himself 'in the functional place of Bilbo' as editor and collator. In doing so, Nagy argued, Christopher unintentionally realised his father's intention. The published book was doing what Bilbo's fictional Red Book had been meant to do.

  Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter edited a scholarly collection titled 'Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth.' Tolkien research, the collection's appearance showed, had quickly become a continuing area of study. The Lays of Beleriand, verse works Tolkien had been writing from 1918 onwards, appeared in the third volume of The History of Middle-earth. Each new volume gave scholars and readers a deeper view of the legendarium than Tolkien himself had ever been able to assemble.

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