The Book of Lost Tales, Part 1 - J. R. R. Tolkien [2]
I am afraid all the same that the presentation will need a lot of work, and I work so slowly. The legends have to be worked over (they were written at different times, some many years ago) and made consistent; and they have to be integrated with The L.R.; and they have to be given some progressive shape. No simple device, like a journey and a quest, is available.
I am doubtful myself about the undertaking…
When after his death the question arose of publishing ‘The Silmarillion’ in some form, I attached no importance to this doubt. The effect that ‘the glimpses of a large history in the background’ have in The Lord of the Rings is incontestable and of the utmost importance, but I did not think that the ‘glimpses’ used there with such art should preclude all further knowledge of the ‘large history’.
The literary ‘impression of depth…created by songs and digressions’ cannot be made a criterion by which a work in a wholly different mode is measured: this would be to treat the history of the Elder Days as of value primarily or even solely in the artistic use made of it in The Lord of the Rings. Nor should the device of a backward movement in imagined time to dimly apprehended events, whose attraction lies in their very dimness, be understood mechanically, as if a fuller account of the mighty kings of Nargothrond and Gondolin would imply a dangerously near approach to the bottom of the well, while an account of the Creation would signify the striking of the bottom and a definitive running-out of ‘depth’—‘nothing to reach further back to’.
This, surely, is not how things work, or at least not how they need work. ‘Depth’ in this sense implies a relation between different temporal layers or levels within the same world. Provided that the reader has a place, a point of vantage, in the imagined time from which to look back, the extreme oldness of the extremely old can be made apparent and made to be felt continuously. And the very fact that The Lord of the Rings establishes such a powerful sense of a real time-structure (far more powerful than can be done by mere chronological assertion, tables of dates) provides this necessary vantage-point. To read The Silmarillion one must place oneself imaginatively at the time of the ending of the Third Age—within Middle-earth, looking back: at the temporal point of Sam Gamgee’s ‘I like that!’—adding, ‘I should like to know more about it’. Moreover the compendious or epitomising form and manner of The Silmarillion, with its suggestion of ages of poetry and ‘lore’ behind it, strongly evokes a sense of ‘untold tales’, even in the telling of them; ‘distance’ is never lost. There is no narrative urgency, the pressure and fear of the immediate and unknown event. We do not actually see the Silmarils as we see the Ring. The maker of ‘The Silmarillion’, as he himself said of the author of Beowulf, ‘was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote’.
As has now been fully recorded, my father greatly desired to publish ‘The Silmarillion’ together with The Lord of the Rings. I say nothing of its practicability at the time, nor do I make any guesses at the subsequent fate of such a much longer combined work, quadrilogy or tetralogy, or at the different courses that my father might then have taken—for the further development of ‘The Silmarillion’ itself, the history of the Elder Days, would have been arrested. But by its posthumous publication