Tolkien's legendarium

• 1. Origins And Private Mythology

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  In 1914, J. R. R. Tolkien began writing poems and story sketches as a private project to create a mythology for England. He drew maps and invented languages while serving as a British officer during World War I. Much of this early work was written while he was in hospital or on sick leave after returning from France. The earliest story from that period is "The Voyage of Earendel, the Evening Star". Tolkien intended his stories to explain the origins of English history and culture. They also provided necessary historical background for his invented Elvish languages. By 1923, he had almost completed what became known as The Book of Lost Tales. Yet he never finished it, choosing instead to rewrite it repeatedly. His biographer Humphrey Carpenter suggests Tolkien doubted if a publisher would take such a work. He may have been afraid of finishing because he wished to continue his sub-creation.

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• 2. Evolution Of The Silmarillion

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  Tolkien first began working on the stories that would become The Silmarillion in 1914. Reading the Old English manuscript Christ I led him to Earendel and the first element of his legendarium. The first complete version of The Silmarillion was the Sketch of the Mythology written in 1926. This sketch was a 28-page synopsis written to explain the background of the story of Túrin to R. W. Reynolds. From the Sketch Tolkien developed a fuller narrative version called Quenta Noldorinwa. The Quenta Noldorinwa was the last version of The Silmarillion that Tolkien completed. He revised and rewrote the legendarium stories for most of his adult life. In 1937, he submitted an incomplete but more fully developed version called Quenta Silmarillion to his publisher George Allen & Unwin. The reader rejected the work as being obscure and too Celtic. The publisher instead asked Tolkien to write a sequel to The Hobbit. He soon turned to the sequel which became The Lord of the Rings.

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• 3. Framing Devices And Narrators

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  The stories in The Book of Lost Tales employ the narrative framing device of an Anglo-Saxon mariner named Älfwine or Eriol or Ottor Wäfre. He finds the island of Tol Eressëa where the Elves live and they tell him their history. Älfwine means Elf-friend in Old English. Men whose names have the same meaning such as Alboin, Alwin, and Elendil were to appear in two unfinished time travel novels. There is no such framework in the published version of The Silmarillion. The Narn i Hîn Húrin is introduced with the note Here begins that tale which Älfwine made from the Húrinien. Later narratives used the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins to collect the stories into the Red Book of Westmarch. Christopher Tolkien inserted himself in the functional place of Bilbo as editor and collator. This reinforced the mythopoeic effect his father had wanted to achieve. Tolkien went so far as to create facsimile pages from the Dwarves' Book of Mazarbul found by the Fellowship in Moria.

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• 4. Relationship To Published Novels

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  When Tolkien published The Hobbit in 1937 it was not originally intended for publication but as a story told privately to his children. The narrative of the published text was loosely influenced by the legendarium as a context but was not designed to be part of it. Not until Tolkien began to write its sequel did he realize the significance of hobbits in his mythology. In 1937, encouraged by the success of The Hobbit, Tolkien submitted an incomplete but more fully developed version of The Silmarillion called Quenta Silmarillion. The reader rejected the work as being obscure and too Celtic. Writing The Lord of the Rings during the 1940s, Tolkien was attempting to address the dilemma of creating a narrative consistent with a sequel of the published The Hobbit. He renewed work on the Silmarillion after completing The Lord of the Rings. He greatly desired to publish the two works together. When it became clear that would not be possible, Tolkien turned his full attention to preparing The Lord of the Rings for publication.

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• 5. Posthumous Publication History

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  With the success of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien in the late 1950s returned to the Silmarillion planning to revise the material into a form fit for publication. This task kept him occupied until his death in 1973 without attaining a completed state. The legendarium has indeed been called a jumble of overlapping and often competing stories annals and lexicons. Much of his later writing was however concerned more with theological and philosophical underpinnings rather than with narratives themselves. By this time he had doubts about fundamental aspects of the work that went back to the earliest versions of the stories. During this time he wrote extensively on such topics as the nature of evil in Arda and the origin of Orcs. His son Christopher chose portions of his late father's vast collection of unpublished material and shaped them into The Silmarillion in 1977. The sales were sufficient to enable him to work on and publish many volumes of his father's legendarium stories and drafts.

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• 6. Scholarly Interpretations And Definitions

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  Tolkien described his works as a legendarium in four letters from 1951 to 1955. He wrote in 1954 that actually in the imagination of this story we are now living on a physically round Earth. But the whole legendarium contains a transition from a flat world to a globe. John D. Rateliff defines Tolkien's legendarium narrowly as the body of work consisting of The Book of Lost Tales and other phases. Verlyn Flieger writes that the greatest event is the creation of the Silmarils which give their names to the whole legendarium. David Bratman states that The History of Middle-earth is a longitudinal study of the development and elaboration of Tolkien's legendarium through transcribed manuscripts. Shaun Gunner of The Tolkien Society called the 2021 collection The Nature of Middle-earth an unofficial 13th volume of The History of Middle-earth series. Scholars have used the term legendarium in a variety of contexts to encompass the entirety of Tolkien's Middle-earth writings for convenience.

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