The man’s creative genius and imagination really knew few, if any, limits. Though he began his larger mythology — what would become his massive legendarium — around 1913, J. R. R. Tolkien found great inspiration during World War I — seeking beauty beyond the horrors of the trenches at the Somme. The war, he claimed, “quickened” his mythology. He wrote much of it in “grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire.” Then, surviving the war, though not without depression and a deep survivor’s guilt, he niggled at this “legendarium” throughout his adult life, leaving it incomplete upon his death in September 1973. Granted, he had published The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, as well as his justly famous lectures on Beowulf, on fairy stories, and on Sir Gawain. But it was his son Christopher who edited and published The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, the twelve volumes of The History of Middle-earth, The Children of Húrin, Beren and Luthien, and The Fall of Gondolin. Additionally, Christopher published Tolkien’s academic and poetic work on Beowulf, on Germanic and Scandinavian mythology, and on King Arthur.
In other words, it took the lifetimes of two adult men to publish Tolkien’s writings. Yet even still, bits and pieces remain unpublished. Since Christopher Tolkien’s death in 2020, Carl Hostetter has masterfully edited Tolkien’s The Nature of Middle-earth in 2021, and now we have Brian Sibley’s excellent The Fall of Númenor, just out from William Morrow/Harper Collins.
Comments