The Lost Road and Other Writings
I am currently trying to work my way through basically every text J.R.R. Tolkien has ever written. Or at least the published ones. Not just The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Not even just The Silmarillion and Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. ALL of them. Also, books written ABOUT Tolkien and Middle Earth. I've read critical theory reviews of his works, books about the deeper allegorical meanings (despite the fact that he famously hated allegory) and source works on which he based Middle Earth. I think, at this point, I've read four different translations of Beowulf. And it's not always an easy task. Christopher Tolkien, bless his heart, has patiently, methodically, painstakingly combed through all these random typewritten, handwritten, loose-leaf, bound manuscripts to try to trace the evolution of what Tolkien called his legendarium. And I've been trying to slog through all of it. The "finished" works (the ultimate definitive texts, not just LotR and The Hobbit, but the posthumous publications like The Silmarillion and The Lay of the Children of Hurin, Tolkien's translation and poetic renditions of Beowulf, are easier to read. I say easier because nothing Tolkien wrote, even The Hobbit, which was originally a children's story, is a quick easy read. But where Christopher Tolkien went through all of his father's writings to try to determine how the stories evolved and changed.... those get a little tougher. I cannot tell you how many times I've read different versions of The Lay of Leithian. So I usually read the texts in the collected history of Middle Earth a little slowly, taking breaks and picking up other books and then going back. But this time, I really struggled with the next step in the history of Middle Earth, The Lost Road and Other Writings. It was particularly painful. I'm not sure why, other than pretty much every one of the previous texts deal with the same subject matter: the creation of the world, the battles between the Elves and Morgoth, Beren and Luthien, Hurin, Turin, Earendel and Elwing, Numenor…. The younger Tolkien included nearly every revision of the stories covered by The Silmarillion in the previous books: The Book of Lost Tales I, The Book of Lost Tales II, The Lays of Beleriand, and The Shaping of Middle Earth, as well as The Unfinished Tales (I'm not quite sure where that one lands). By the time I got around to The Lost Road and Other Writings, I think I was pretty much done with re-reading slight variations on the same story. On the other hand, the next one, The Return of the Shadow, proceeds to the territory covered in LotR, so that should be a nice change.
None of this is to say that it isn't worthwhile reading; maybe just that this isn't worthwhile reading if you don't very much want to see how the names of the three Elf tribes changed as Tolkien wrote and re-wrote his legendarium, or if you don't care that almost the only change in a paragraph may be from Melko to Melkor or if you don't want to read an alliterative poem version of a particular story, as well as a rhyming poem version and a prose version.
One difference from the previously published texts is that The Lost Road and Other Writings digs into Erriol/Aelfwine's story, whereas he's very much just sort of mentioned in the other works. Aelfwine is an Anglo-Saxon character who somehow ends up in Tol Erresea, the Lonely Isle, and begins to write the story of The Silmarillion, or, rather, to emend a text as written by an Elf named Pengolod. Christopher Tolkien also really expands on one of J.R.R. Tolkien's crazier ideas, that he is a reincarnation of Atlantians, and the story of Numenor is just his way of putting his own past life history into text, though Christopher wisely leaves the reincarnation bit out of this particular book. Boy does he enjoy talking about Numenor and the Akallabeth, though... Sometimes, you can really adore an author and think s/he is brilliant, and still be fully cognizant of the fact that they might have some slightly bizarre ideas.
I think I'm ready to take a break from Tolkien for the rest of the year, though....
None of this is to say that it isn't worthwhile reading; maybe just that this isn't worthwhile reading if you don't very much want to see how the names of the three Elf tribes changed as Tolkien wrote and re-wrote his legendarium, or if you don't care that almost the only change in a paragraph may be from Melko to Melkor or if you don't want to read an alliterative poem version of a particular story, as well as a rhyming poem version and a prose version.
One difference from the previously published texts is that The Lost Road and Other Writings digs into Erriol/Aelfwine's story, whereas he's very much just sort of mentioned in the other works. Aelfwine is an Anglo-Saxon character who somehow ends up in Tol Erresea, the Lonely Isle, and begins to write the story of The Silmarillion, or, rather, to emend a text as written by an Elf named Pengolod. Christopher Tolkien also really expands on one of J.R.R. Tolkien's crazier ideas, that he is a reincarnation of Atlantians, and the story of Numenor is just his way of putting his own past life history into text, though Christopher wisely leaves the reincarnation bit out of this particular book. Boy does he enjoy talking about Numenor and the Akallabeth, though... Sometimes, you can really adore an author and think s/he is brilliant, and still be fully cognizant of the fact that they might have some slightly bizarre ideas.
I think I'm ready to take a break from Tolkien for the rest of the year, though....
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