Christopher Tolkien to finish lost Middle Earth novel

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Sorry to hark back to conversation past, but I've noticed that comments on that Sunday Times article have been posted by Michael Drout and Verlyn Flieger. It's a shame that Tom Shippey didn't join them, but you can't have the opinion of every professor in the world on one article.

I think that their comments bear careful reading. The Sunday Times reviewer, as is becoming all too common with that organ, has done just enough research to appear knowledgeable, but not enough to provide an accurate idea of his subject. Less forgivably, he spends half the article commenting on the literary failings of LR without reference to the book he's supposedly reviewing. This is as good an example as you'll get of an apology to the in-crowd for liking something that's out: Appleyard doesn't want to lose his grown-up, serious-reviewer credentials by approving something written by Tolkien, who rather tautologically wrote fairy-tales about Elves. Incidentally, I'm not sure that Hugo Dyson would have published his opinion in quite those terms, and I'm reasonably sure that he wouldn't have been entirely happy to see his words in a Times review. The deleted expletive descends to the coarse prudery so beloved of our dear scarlet press, and so symptomatic of the provincial, petit-bourgeois mentality that self-styled intellectuals take such great pains to renounce.

The Wagnerian reference is another giveaway: Wagner's is a name that automatically implies that those who invoke him are intellectuals who understand music. As is often the case, though, Appleyard's invocation of Wagner reveals a lack of understanding of both the composer and Tolkien, not to mention the real relationship between their works. I expect that Wagner here is used as shorthand for an operatic style of presentation (which is also the epic style of presentation, which predates opera) unless the reviewer is so badly informed as to think that Wagner actually invented those stories himself. All in all, it confirms my general impression that newspaper literary reviews tell one more about the reviewer than the work reviewed, which renders them useless save as a beginner's guide to being a pretentious bore.

Anyway, since better people than I have pointed out the deficiencies of that article there remains little more for me to say than that Michael Drout promises to post on his site his own critique of Tolkien's style, which, since M.D. actually knows what he's talking about, should be worth a look. This pointless babble from News International I can do without: what isn't obvious or derivative in it is wrong.

Originally Posted by Neithan Tol Turambar

I do not read ANY of CT's middle Earth history because much of that material was rejected by Tolkien himself as it did not entirely harmonize with his inner vision.

There's no easy way to say this, but that rules out reading The Silmarillion as well. CRT put that together from the very material that yielded The History of Middle-earth, even writing some passages himself. There is no pure vision of the Silmarillion material endorsed by JRRT, and even what he rejected can only be inferred from his later revisions. Some parts of the HME were at one time or another under consideration by publishers; some of it had already been published; some of it is taken from lectures that Tolkien delivered annually to students. The old Fall of Gondolin was probably more publicised before 1977 than anything about Hurin, since it was read to the Oxford essay club (strictly speaking, a forum for academic papers) by its author. It's more complicated than Tolkien rejecting something and CRT publishing it later; rather JRRT left behind a lot of drafts, many of them incomplete, and little or no indication of what he wanted to retain or reject. Yes, the LR material in volumes 6-9 was definitely never intended to see the light of day, but even that is a stage in the evolution of a grand idea that never fully emerged. Part of the reason for that was that there simply wasn't a single inner vision, rather there were many, each of which informed particular stories or phases of development. The picture will never be complete, but that's no reason not to appreciate each fragment on its own terms, since each has value of itself. Moreover, since JRRT specifically appointed CRT to publish, withhold or destroy his unpublished works at his own discretion, we might regard JRRT's approval as given to all of the posthumous publications. I don't say that this is definitely the case, but it's one way of looking at things; in fact, all that I can say about this with any certainty is that HME contains most of Tolkien's best writing, both verse and prose; make of that what you will. With any luck The Children of Hurin will give a glimpse of that to readers who would never get through the History.

As for asking what Tolkien said, I consider it the first and most important step to finding a meaning: unless you know exactly what was said you can't hope to interpret what was meant. Meaning is an elusive enough beast even without the additional cover of misquotation and paraphrase.

On the 17th I'll be doing something; possibly I'll be trying to buy a copy of the new book, but more likely I won't. It isn't going anywhere.