The Book of Lost Tales, Part 1 - J. R. R. Tolkien [0]
The Book of Lost Tales
Part I
Christopher Tolkien
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Foreword
I The Cottage of Lost Play
Notes
Commentary
II The Music of The Ainur
Notes
Commentaries
III The Coming of The Valar and the Building of Valinor
Notes
Commentary
IV The Chaining of Melko
Notes
Commentary
V The Coming of The Elves and the Making Of Kôr
Notes
Commentary
VI The Theft of Melko and the Darkening Of Valinor
Notes
Commentary
VII The Flight of The Noldoli
Notes
Commentary
VIII The Tale of The Sun and Moon
Notes
Commentary
IX The Hiding of Valinor
Notes
Commentary
X Gilfanon’s Tale: The Travail of The Noldoli and the Coming of Mankind
Notes
Appendix: Names in the Lost Tales—Part I
Short Glossary of Obsolete, Archaic, and Rare Words
Searchable Terms
Other Books by J.R.R. Tolkien
Copyright
About the Publisher
FOREWORD
The Book of Lost Tales, written between sixty and seventy years ago, was the first substantial work of imaginative literature by J. R. R. Tolkien, and the first emergence in narrative of the Valar, of the Children of Ilúvatar, Elves and Men, of the Dwarves and the Orcs, and of the lands in which their history is set, Valinor beyond the western ocean, and Middle-earth, the ‘Great Lands’ between the seas of east and west. Some fifty-seven years after my father ceased to work on the Lost Tales, The Silmarillion,* profoundly transformed from its distant forerunner, was published; and six years have passed since then. This Foreword seems a suitable opportunity to remark on some aspects of both works.
The Silmarillion is commonly said to be a ‘difficult’ book, needing explanation and guidance on how to ‘approach’ it; and in this it is contrasted to The Lord of the Rings. In Chapter 7 of his book The Road to Middle-earth Professor T. A. Shippey accepts that this is so (‘The Silmarillion could never be anything but hard to read’, p. 201), and expounds his view of why it should be. A complex discussion is not treated justly when it is extracted, but in his view the reasons are essentially two (p. 185). In the first place, there is in The Silmarillion no ‘mediation’ of the kind provided by the hobbits (so, in The Hobbit, ‘Bilbo acts as the link between modern times and the archaic world of dwarves and dragons’). My father was himself well aware that the absence of hobbits would be felt as a lack, were ‘The Silmarillion’ to be published—and not only by readers with a particular liking for them. In a letter written in 1956 (The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, p. 238), soon after the publication of The Lord of the Rings, he said:
I do not think it would have the appeal of the L.R.—no hobbits! Full of mythology, and elvishness, and all that ‘heigh stile’ (as Chaucer might say), which has been so little to the taste of many reviewers.
In ‘The Silmarillion’ the draught is pure and unmixed; and the reader is worlds away from such ‘mediation’, such a deliberate collison (far more than a matter of styles) as that produced in the meeting between King Théoden and Pippin and Merry in the ruins of Isengard:
‘Farewell, my hobbits! May we meet again in my house! There you shall sit beside me and tell me all that your hearts desire: the deeds of your grandsires, as far as you can reckon them…’
The hobbits bowed low. ‘So that is the King of Rohan!’ said Pippin in an undertone. ‘A fine old fellow. Very polite.’
In the second place,
Where The Silmarillion differs from Tolkien’s earlier works is in its refusal to accept novelistic convention. Most novels (including The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings) pick a character to put in the foreground, like Frodo and Bilbo, and then tell the story as it happens to him. The novelist of course is inventing the story, and so retains omniscience: he can explain, or show, what is ‘really’ happening and contrast it with the limited perception of his character.
There is, then, and very evidently, a question of literary ‘taste’ (or literary ‘habituation’) involved; and also a question of literary ‘disappointment’—the ‘(mistaken) disappointment