The Book of Lost Tales [1/2]

What Hacker News says

1. nextaccounticJun 2022
   This is a misunderstanding. Firstly, Christopher published tons of material after the Silmarillion: the whole History of Middle Earth series, plus Unfinished Tales, Children of Húrin, Beren and Lúthien, The fall of Gondolin, and some other books.

   But more importantly, JRR Tolkien intended to publish the Silmarillion as an actual book with a canon narrative, just like Lord of the Rings, but he died before doing so. The Silmarillion, as published, was the product of an earlier thinking of Christopher Tolkien that tried to reconcile different versions of unfinished materials, written in a large timespan (a lot of it even before Lord of the Rings), into a single coherent piece. That is, to do the job of his father. At some places, Christopher had to write stuff almost from scratch, to fill gaps that his father intended to write but never managed to. And he did all this in just 4 years, with the help of just one other dude. So Christopher wasn't just the editor of the Silmarillion, he was also its uncredited co-author.

   Christopher later thought that presenting The Silmarillion as the authoritative work containing a single narrative, instead of showcasing the multiple, contradictory narratives that Tolkien wrote over the years, was too reducing and misleading. If Tolkien had managed to publish the book, he would have blessed a single coherent narrative as canon, but he didn't.

   As such, Christopher decided that his next work, The History of Middle Earth series (HoME for short), would actually showcase all draft versions and not just the one that Christopher decided to be canon. In this sense, HoME works better as the worldbuilding notes than the Silmarillion (and also other books like Beren and Lúthien, that describe many drafts of the story rather than just the one in Silmarillion)

   Here's what Christopher has to say about this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silmarillion and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silmarillion#Posthumous_pu...

   > Because J. R. R. Tolkien died leaving his legendarium unedited, Christopher Tolkien selected and edited materials to tell the story from start to end. In a few cases, this meant that he had to devise completely new material, within the tenor of his father's thought, to resolve gaps and inconsistencies in the narrative,[3] particularly Chapter 22, "Of the Ruin of Doriath".[4]

   > (...)

   > As explained in The History of Middle-earth, Christopher Tolkien drew upon numerous sources, relying on post-Lord of the Rings works where possible, ultimately reaching as far back as the 1917 Book of Lost Tales to fill in portions of the narrative that his father had planned to write but never addressed. In one later chapter of Quenta Silmarillion, "Of the Ruin of Doriath", untouched since the early 1930s, he had to construct a narrative practically from scratch.[T 21] Christopher Tolkien commented that, had he taken more time and had access to all the texts, he might have produced a substantially different work. In his foreword to The Book of Lost Tales 1 in 1983, he wrote that[T 22]

   > > by its posthumous publication nearly a quarter of a century later the natural order of presentation of the whole 'Matter of Middle-earth' was inverted; and it is certainly debatable whether it was wise to publish in 1977 a version of the primary 'legendarium' standing on its own and claiming, as it were, to be self-explanatory. The published work has no 'framework', no suggestion of what it is and how (within the imagined world) it came to be. This I now think to have been an error.[T 22]

   > If there was any other unpublished material worth publishing, his son would have already done it.

   I think this underestimates the huge job of publishing Tolkien's manuscripts. HoME was published from 1983 to 1996 and spans 12 volumes and some 5400 pages, and still doesn't contain everything!

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2. chxJun 2022
   Funnily enough, this is also a myth. You are quoting Letter #131. But you are likely quoting secondary or tertiary sources and forgot the rest.

   Here's what you quote:

   > Also – and here I hope I shall not sound absurd – I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its 'faerie' is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion

   And here's what you missed:

   > Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story – the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. (…) I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.

   Indeed it was long ago when that attempt was aborted: it was the Book Of Lost Tales which would have been the missing Anglo-Saxon mythology but that has been abandoned around 1920. Christopher Tolkien clearly stated most elements defining and peculiar to BOLT are not present in later works. There are many versions of the Silmarillion but there's only one version of BOLT.

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3. hcrispApr 2018
   It appears to be a combination of "The Coming of Tuor to Gondolin" found in "Unfinished Tales" and "The Fall of Gondolin" found in "The Book of Lost Tales 2" [1]. The first covers Tuor's journey from Dor-Lomin to Gondolin in detail but stops there (Christopher Tolkien called it "one of the saddest facts in the whole history of incompletion"). The second covers the fall of the city itself in great detail. I read the two in that order recently and enjoyed the account immensely; it's on the order of Lord of the Rings in terms of a compelling story, grandeur and beauty.

   [1] https://www.tolkiensociety.org/2018/04/the-fall-of-gondolin-...

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