The History of Middle-earth

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This article is about the book series. For the fictional history of the continent, see History of Arda.

The History of Middle-earth
The front cover of Volume 9
EditorChristopher Tolkien
AuthorJ. R. R. Tolkien
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
GenreHigh fantasy
PublisherGeorge Allen & Unwin (UK)
Publication date
1983 to 1996
Media typePrint (hardback and paperback)
Pages12 volumes
Preceded byUnfinished Tales 
Followed byThe Children of Húrin 

The History of Middle-earth is a 12-volume series of books published between 1983 and 1996 that collect and analyse much of Tolkien's legendarium, compiled and edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien. The series shows the development over time of Tolkien's conception of Middle-earth as a fictional place with its own peoples, languages, and history, from his earliest notions of "a mythology for England" through to the development of the stories that make up The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. It is not a "history of Middle-earth" in the sense of being a chronicle of events in Middle-earth written from an in-universe perspective; it is instead an out-of-universe history of Tolkien's creative process. In 2000, the twelve volumes were republished in three limited edition omnibus volumes. Non-deluxe editions of the three volumes were published in 2002.[1]

Scholars including Gergely Nagy and Vincent Ferré have commented that Tolkien had always wanted to create a mythology, but believed that such a thing should have passed through many hands and be framed by annotations and edits of different kinds. When Christopher Tolkien, a philologist like his father, edited the History, he created an editorial frame, inadvertently reinforcing the mythopoeic effect that his father wanted.

Structure and contents[edit]

Further information: J. R. R. Tolkien bibliography

The History of Middle-earth was published in 12 volumes by George Allen & Unwin in the UK between 1983 and 1996 as follows:

The History of Middle-earth
Volumes, grouped Contents
  1. The Book of Lost Tales, Part I (1983)
  2. The Book of Lost Tales, Part II (1984)
  3. The Lays of Beleriand (1985)
  4. The Shaping of Middle-earth (1986)
  5. The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987)
 These five books track the early history of the legendarium (material that Christopher Tolkien compiled and edited to form the one-volume The Silmarillion) and related texts. Often there are multiple versions of a tale;[2] Christopher's notes indicate the likely date of each version.
    The History of The Lord of the Rings
  1. [1] The Return of the Shadow (1988)
  2. [2] The Treason of Isengard (1989)
  3. [3] The War of the Ring (1990)
  4. [4] Sauron Defeated (1992)
 These four books discuss the development of The Lord of the Rings; book nine also discusses the Númenor story in the form of The Notion Club Papers.
    The Later Silmarillion
  1. [1] Morgoth's Ring (1993)
  2. [2] The War of the Jewels (1994)
 These two books focus on legendarium material that Tolkien worked on after The Lord of the Rings was published, including the Annals of Beleriand and the Annals of Aman.
  1. The Peoples of Middle-earth (1996)
 The last book discusses the development of the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings and examines assorted writings from the last years of Tolkien's life.

A combined index was published six years after the series was completed as The History of Middle-earth: Index (2002).

A shorter version of volume 9, omitting material not related to The Lord of the Rings, was published as The End of the Third Age; this is usually sold as a boxed set along with volumes 6, 7 and 8 as The History of the Lord of the Rings.

Christopher Tolkien, who edited the books, made the decision not to include any material related to The Hobbit in The History of Middle-earth. His reasons for this were that it had not been intended to form part of the mythology, was a children's story, and had originally not been set in Middle-earth; it was revised during the writing of The Lord of the Rings. The History of The Hobbit was published separately, in two volumes, in 2007 and was edited by John D. Rateliff.

Reception[edit]

Charles Noad, reviewing The War of the Jewels in Mallorn, comments that the 12-volume History had done something that a putative single-volume edition of The Silmarillion (such as Tolkien had hoped to publish) with embedded commentary could not have achieved: it had changed people's perspective on Tolkien's Middle-earth writings, from being centred on The Lord of the Rings to what it had always been in Tolkien's mind: Silmarillion-centred.[3]

Reviewing The Peoples of Middle-earth, Noad adds that "The whole series of The History of Middle-earth is a tremendous achievement and makes a worthy and enduring testament to one man's creative endeavours and to another's explicatory devotion. It reveals far more about Tolkien's invented world than any of his readers in pre-Silmarillion days could ever have imagined or hoped for." He concludes that thorough study of the twelve volumes would be essential for understanding "Tolkien's imaginative art".[4]

Liz Milner, for A Green Man Review, writes that the series provides "an unprecedented opportunity to examine a great writer's creative development over a period of 60 years".[5] She adds that Christopher Tolkien's editing demonstrated "the endurance and cleaning power of Hercules", given that his father's papers were all in disorder.[5]

Analysis[edit]

A life's work[edit]

Further information: Tolkien's legendarium
Sample from "The Music of the Ainur" in Book of Lost Tales 1 (History volume 1, 1983)
Christopher Tolkien's commentary J. R. R. Tolkien's text
In another notebook identical to that in which The Cottage of Lost Play was written out by my mother, there is a text in ink in my father's hand ... entitled: Link between Cottage of Lost Play and (Tale 2) Music of Ainur. This follows on directly from Vairë's last words to Eriol, and in turn links on directly to The Music of the Ainur ... The Link exists in only one version, for the text in ink was written over a draft in pencil that was wholly erased.     'But', said Eriol, 'still are there many things that remain dark to me. Indeed I would fain know who be these Valar; are they the Gods?'
    'So be they', said Lindo, 'though concerning them Men tell many strange and garbled tales that are far from the truth...'; but Vairë said: 'Nay then, Lindo, be not drawn into more tale-telling tonight, for the hour of rest is at hand, and for all his eagerness our guest is way-worn. Send now for the candles of sleep, ...

In 1967, Tolkien named his son Christopher as his literary executor, and more specifically as his co-author of The Silmarillion. After his father's death in 1973, Christopher took a large quantity of legendarium manuscripts to his Oxfordshire home, where he converted a barn into a workspace. He and the young Guy Gavriel Kay started work on the documents, discovering by 1975 how complex the task was likely to be. In September 1975 he resigned from New College to work exclusively on editing his father's writings. He moved to the south of France and continued this task for 45 years.[6] In all, he edited and published 24 volumes of his father's writings, including the 12 of the History.[7] In those volumes, Verlyn Flieger writes,

Christopher arranged and edited in chronological sequence all the stories of his father's mythology. Now published as the twelve-volume series, The History of Middle-earth, this work presents Tolkien's mythology in its entirety, tracing the path of a remarkable vision, a musical score, if you will, from its earliest conception to its author's last meditations on his creation.[8]

Editorial framing[edit]

Further information: Editorial framing of The Lord of the Rings

The scholar Gergely Nagy observes that Tolkien "thought of his works as texts within the fictional world" (his emphasis), and that the overlapping of different and sometimes contradictory accounts was central to his desired effect. Further, Tolkien was a philologist; Nagy comments that Tolkien may have been intentionally imitating the philological style of authors such as Elias Lönnrot, compiler of the Finnish epic, the Kalevala, whom Tolkien saw as an exemplar of a professional and creative philology. This was, Nagy believes, what Tolkien thought essential if he was to present a mythology for England, since such a thing had to have been written by many hands. Further, writes Nagy, by publishing his father's writings, Christopher Tolkien, also a philologist, "inserted himself in the functional place of Bilbo" as editor and collator, in his view "reinforcing the mythopoeic effect" that his father had wanted to achieve, making the published book do what Bilbo's book was meant to do, and so unintentionally realising his father's intention. Tolkien's Middle-earth writings had become, in reality and no longer only in fiction, a complex work by different hands edited, annotated, and commented upon over a long period.[9]

Elizabeth Whittingham writes that Tolkien valued the impression of depth that the mention of much older events had created in The Lord of the Rings, and that he realised he could not do the same for the Silmarillion stories as they were in that older time. Instead, a man from a later age, such as Eriol of The Book of Lost Tales, could visit Middle-earth and listen to the tales of the Elves, providing a frame story. He records the stories, she writes, and "Eriol's perspective becomes the reader's, ... separat[ing] readers from these tales of past loss and faded glory."[10]

Flieger comments that Christopher's remark in the introduction to The Book of Lost Tales 1, that he had made an error in not providing any sort of frame story for his 1977 The Silmarillion, is at least partly correct. In her view, the one-volume Silmarillion "gives a misleading impression of coherence and finality, as if it were a definitive, canonical text", while in fact the legendarium from which it is adapted "is a jumble of overlapping and often competing stories, annals, and lexicons."[11] All the same, she writes, that book was essential, as without it the History would never have been published, and the twelve-volume work "provides exactly the framework its editor [Christopher] felt was lacking in the earlier and in some ways premature book."[11]

Vincent Ferré writes that Christopher Tolkien's editing of the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth, using his skill as a philologist, created an editorial frame for his father's legendarium, and for the books derived from it. Ferré comments that this presented his father's writings as historical, a real set of legends from the past, in just the same way that his editing of The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays presented his father's essays as scholarly work.[12]

  • Editorial framing of The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays by Christopher Tolkien presents it as a set of scholarly texts.[12]
    Editorial framing of The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays by Christopher Tolkien presents it as a set of scholarly texts.[12]
  • Christopher Tolkien's editorial framing of the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth presents his father's legendarium, and the books derived from it, as a set of historic texts, analogous to the presentation of genuine scholarly works like The Monsters and The Critics; and it creates a narrative voice throughout the series, a figure of Christopher Tolkien himself.[12]
    Christopher Tolkien's editorial framing of the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth presents his father's legendarium, and the books derived from it, as a set of historic texts, analogous to the presentation of genuine scholarly works like The Monsters and The Critics; and it creates a narrative voice throughout the series, a figure of Christopher Tolkien himself.[12]

References[edit]

  1. ^ "The History of Middle-earth". An Illustrated Tolkien Bibliography. TolkienBooks.net. 2014. Retrieved 16 July 2014.
  2. ^ Flieger 2005, p. 50.
  3. ^ Noad, Charles (1994). "[Untitled Review of The War of the Jewels]". Mallorn (31): 50–54. JSTOR 45320384.
  4. ^ Noad, Charles E. (1996). "[Untitled Review]". Mallorn (34): 33–41. JSTOR 45321696.
  5. ^ a b Milner, Liz. "J.R.R. Tolkien's The History of Middle-Earth". A Green Man Review. Retrieved 4 June 2024.
  6. ^ McIlwaine, Catherine. "Introduction" in Ovenden & McIlwaine 2022, pp. 7–10, 14–22
  7. ^ Ovenden & McIlwaine 2022, pp. 26–27 "Timeline"
  8. ^ Flieger 2005, p. xiv.
  9. ^ Nagy, Gergely (2020) [2014]. "The Silmarillion: Tolkien's Theory of Myth, Text, and Culture". In Lee, Stuart D. (ed.). A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 107–118. ISBN 978-1-119-65602-9.
  10. ^ Whittingham 2017, "Tolkien's Mythology of Creation".
  11. ^ a b Flieger 2005, p. 63.
  12. ^ a b c Ferré 2022, pp. 53–69.

Sources[edit]

External links[edit]

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