The History of Middle-earth

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1. TRiG_IrelandSep 2026
   Currently taking a brief break from the History of Middle-earth series (The Lays of Beleriand is astonishingly beautiful) to read a fascinating book called Fascist Yoga, about how the wellness movement has some surprising links with white supremacism.
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2. jfengelJun 2023
   Between the letters and the History of Middle-earth, we have an incredible insight into the creative process. I don't know of any other author whose work is so profoundly documented -- and it happens to be an author whose process is so radical.

   Not just in the languages, though those are the most obvious, but the lifetime obsession. It can be hard to recall that in his lifetime he only ever published The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He never published The Silmarillion, because he kept revising and revising. It was never fully compatible with either The Hobbit (it wasn't intended to be) or The Lord of the Rings. The published document we have is a posthumous construction (for which his son really deserves co-author credit.)

   I do believe it's important to continue to think of the published works in themselves, and not just as part of a vast secret being dribbled out with the rest of his papers. The new edition of his letters will surely illuminate our appreciation of them, but it would be disrespectful to forget that he published his books as stand-alone novels. The Lord of the Rings is unchanged (pace some lightly edited later editions), and it's a monumental work that merits a lifetime of re-re-rereading.

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3. rimunroeSep 2022
   > Then i guess don't give them pointy ears.

   Not giving them some distinguishing physical characteristic sounds like a great way to make the work more difficult to understand. Personally I don’t mind the change.

   > I remember reading they had long hair, regardless they are called something different and have completely different lives.

   Some of them had long hair, but presumably others don’t. I’m not aware of any part of the Legendarium which suggests all elves had long hair. That would seem like an uncharacteristic thing for Tolkien to write about them.

   > While true, in fantasy all kinds of mixes are possible that result in creatures like minotaurs, half-orcs, half-demons, half-dragons, etc., and those are obviously not human.

   This is not D&D. As far as I know, there’s nothing in the Legendarium suggesting there can be unions of anything other than Men and Elves, Men and Orcs, and Elves and Maiar.

   A union of an Elf and Maia happened exactly once, and is a bit of an odd becuse Maiar choose the physical form they take. Melian presumably clothed herself in the body of an Elf, at least as far as mattered.

   The Men and Orcs thing is unusual in two ways. One is that it’s not explicit how they were combined. Saruman did it… somehow, but the implication is that it was through his art (magic). yhe other is that, depending on the day, Tolkien considered Orcs to be anywhere between corrupted Elves/Men, fallen Maiar, or something like animals. He wasn’t ever comfortable with the ramifications of any of these different origins had, but I think that at the time of writing Lord of the Rings, the idea was that they were corrupted Elves. I’m not super sure on that though. Either way though, I can see a lot more philosophical justification for Men and Orcs being crossed than Men and dragons, balrogs, or anything else that isn’t an Elvish/Mannish being.

   Anyway, this is a long way to say that just because it happens in other fantasy settings doesn’t mean it applies here. Tolkien thought about this kind of stuff a lot, and wrote extensively on it. If you’re interested in reading more about this kinda thing, I highly recommend the History of Middle Earth series of books, especially Morgoth’s Ring, which deals a lot with the nature of existence (both physical matter and things like souls) in the Legendarium.

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4. jfengelJul 2022
   The History of Middle Earth gives an almost unprecedented insight into how an author works. Which is fortunate, since Tolkien himself is an unprecedented writer.

   He had a singular way of revising, almost pathologically, holding some key points utterly fixed and revamping everything else to make them fit. It's why he never finalized The Silmarillion, and why when his son finally did publish it, he discarded a lot of the work done post-Lord of the Rings.

   I believe you are correct: Tom was one of those fixed points, for no reason he could explain. He later said that Tom was left as a deliberate mystery. Which is a bit disingenuous, but that's fine. Tolkien worked by instinct, and his works are extraordinary. If his instinct tells him that Tom needed to be in the narrative, that's fine by me.

   If other readers are perplexed by it, they will hopefully forgive it long enough to get through the book and read it again. It's very much the kind of book that you won't fully understand in a single reading, if ever.

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5. DanAndersenJun 2018
   For anyone interested in the development of LotR over time, I really recommend listening to the Signum University online lectures going through the History of Middle-Earth series. Dr Corey Olson is going through each of the volumes in turn and offering great analysis of how the story began to emerge, just as you describe.

   The lecture playlists (so far) can be found at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUxTFUltO4uXhEfqgI6GtIg/pla... .

   Notable things about Tolkien's writing process:

   - LotR was originally just meant to be a shorter sequel to The Hobbit. It's always fun to see his early notes about how few chapters he expects the book to take.

   - When The Hobbit was first released, it was emphatically not part of the full legendarium that Tolkien was working on, re: the Silmarillion. He borrowed heavily from his private stories about the Elves, but it wasn't until he was writing LotR that he actually realized that everything was all connected into the same continuity.

   - Tolkien was extremely conservative in his writing, in a waste-not attitude. He hated to just cut out things he had written, and instead would do a lot of recycling and reworking so that bits of dialogue and description he had done in earlier drafts would be preserved but with their context completely altered.

   - Tolkien sometimes claimed that his worldbuilding started with a map, and then he placed a story inside of it, but looking through his early notes shows that's not quite true. He tended to think in terms of a series of adventures he wanted his characters to have, and would wiggle around locations on his still-nebulous maps to make the distances work (he was very particular about getting the distances and travel times all right!).

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6. BerislavLopacApr 2018
   Actually, the posthumous books edited by Christopher Tolkien are not based off his father's extensive notes and manuscripts -- they ARE, quite literally, his father's extensive notes and manuscripts, organised and annotated by Christopher into a coherent series of publications.

   Whether you should try them or not depends on what is your personal favourite form of reading material. Tolkien himself once quoted G.W. Dasent: "We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled." If you enjoy a good soup, I recommend you to read The Silmarillion and The Unfinished Tales, even though they might not be as delicious as The Lord of the Rings. But if you are a connoisseur of raw bones, enjoying reading the different versions, drafts and scraps of those stories before they were published (and many others never actually published, like the beginning of a LoTR sequel, or a time-travel novel connecting Numenor with 20th century England) -- in other words, if you enjoyed the Appendices as much as LoTR itself -- you will definitely find the right reading material in the HoMR books.

   More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Middle-earth

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