The Single Greatest (Publishing) Tragedy in Tolkien's Life (yet another rant)

[littlemanpoet]

Okay, this is going to be traveling all over the place. I'll state some points that have been cooking in my gray matter for some while now (and some more recently), and I hope this will help you see how I get where I got.

I've been reading Letters and the Authorized Biography lately, and so far I've managed about half of the first page of the Canonicity thread, which I've discovered was tackling issues that have been hovering around my awareness for some time. That said:

1. I read Tolkien's Letter # 353 (written within the last 30 days of his life) in which he declares

Galadriel was 'unstained': she had committed no evil deeds. She was an enemy of Fëanor. She did not reach Middle-earth with the other Noldor, but independently. Her reasons for desiring to go to Middle-earth were legitimate, and she would have been permitted to depart, but for the misfortune that before she set out the revolt of Fëanor broke out, and she became involved in the desperate measures of Manwë, and the ban on all emigration.

In a much earlier letter, # 213, Tolkien says

...one critic (by letter) asserted that the invocations of Elbereth, and the character of Galadriel as directly described (or through the words of Gimli and Sam) were clearly related to Catholic devotion to Mary.

Letter #213 reveals that Tolkien was not conscious of Galadriel as reminiscent of the Virgin Mary while he wrote LotR.

2. In some thread or other I was reading recently (I can't remember whether it was "Smith of Wooton Major in Middle Earth?" or the Canonicity thread), it was stated that The Silmarillion was complete when Tolkien was trying to get them both published by Allen & Unwin.

3. The huge success of LotR resulted in demand for the publication of The Silmarillion, but Tolkien was faced with a difficult choice: either allow the Sil to be published as it was in its pre-LotR completed state with no mention of Galadriel and other entities that were not in that version of the Sil, OR rewrite the whole thing, finding a way to harmonize LotR and the Silmarillion. Being a natural niggler, Tolkien chose the latter. Being a natural niggler and without the prodding of C.S. Lewis, Tolkien took the rest of his life and still never succeeded in completing the thing.

Instead, we now have the plethora of Christopher's industrious tearing apart of the tower of story to see what stones were used, otherwise known as The History of Middle Earth. Christopher's father would have deplored it, I rather think, even though the current state of affairs is surely quite interesting, educational, and entertaining to those who love Middle-earth.

The Tragedy: It's a shame that The Silmarillion wasn't accepted by Allen & Unwin along with LotR.

See, if both had been accepted, Tolkien would have had to throw up his hands and say something to the effect of "the tales do have contradictions, yes, but they are separate works that must stand on their own merits". Instead, he apparently felt that he had to take on the gargantuan, impossible, and unnecessary task of harmonizing the whole mythology, removing as many contradictions as possible. Just imagine if he had been freed from that burden, freed to write all manner of tales, some like Smith, some like The Hobbit, some like LotR, some like that which is found in Unfinished Tales.

I don't think this could have happened. I just wish it had.

Back to points (1) and (2). Letter #353 reads like a papal bull. Here he is, toward the end of his life, trying to turn his mythology more and more into a mirror of primary reality (as in Morgoth's Ring). And not unlike the pope declaring Mary without sin from birth (the basis for which is very debatable even among those who accept the scriptures as divinely inspired and/or the church as the interpreter of that scripture), here is Tolkien declaring Galadriel completely without blemish, just the victim of bad timing. Blah. It seems like patent nonsense to me. He let the Virgin Mary thing take root, which wasn't even conscious to him in his writing of LotR, and seems to have turned it into a primary principle for his attempted harmonization. It's what comes from spending a lifetime trying to iron out knots that cannot by ironed out, not unlike the centuries the Roman church has spent trying to make a cohesive and logical system out of received revelation which necessarily contains paradox.

Oh, and by the way, even though I was born and raised protestant, I have a far higher opinion of and appreciation for the Roman Catholic church than most of my kind. Just wanted to get that straight.

I feel that Tolkien's latter creative life was misspent. That's the shame. I would much rather have more of his creative power in writing story than the reinterpretive philosophizing and theologizing he spent his later years in. Maybe that's what giving up the Star was partly about in SWOM.