[Sir Kohran]

The impending release of The Children Of Hurin, over thirty years after Tolkien's death, got me wondering...

We all know that Tolkien spent decades - indeed, much of his life - working on the Legendarium that centered around the world of Middle Earth. The amount of sheer material he produced overall is absolutely staggering - the universe he created is probably larger than most mythologies. He has hundreds of characters, ranging from minor incidental people to incredibly complex and well developed protagonists. I'm not even going to go into the depth of languages. The Legendarium he created in his mind and in his notes is without a doubt one of the biggest one-man creations of the century, if not all of history.

What I find puzzling is how little of his work actually made it to print. Tolkien only really published four solid books on Middle-Earth in his lifetime - The Hobbit, The Fellowship Of The Ring, The Two Towers and The Return Of The King. For the amount of material he produced, having published a relatively small amount of it in just four books seems strange. This situation becomes even worse when we consider the last three as one book - The Lord Of The Rings (which is how Tolkien himself considered it). So essentially Tolkien only really published one main work - The Lord Of The Rings, with The Hobbit as a sort of prequel. In this regard Tolkien's material seems tiny by comparison to others. Look at the other fantasy/sci-fi franchises - Harry Potter has (or will soon have) seven quite long books, and Star Wars spans six big movies, with goodness knows how much more in the expanded universe. The Redwall series has over fifteen books. By comparison the amount of work Tolkien brought to the public seems very small (ironic, considering that his work provided the foundations for quite a bit of those listed). And yet we know that the amount of material Tolkien produced was actually much, much bigger. Yet he never published most of it.

In later years, his son Christopher Tolkien has published most of the Legendarium, primarily with The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, etc. and now with The Children Of Hurin. But if it wasn't for this, I imagine that most of Tolkien's vast universe would never have made it beyond his private work. From what I know of him, he seemed to be quite content to live his entire life without it going anywhere further than The Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit.

So what it boils down to is...why did Tolkien put so little of his work out in public? After all the hard work he put into it, why was he so reluctant to go beyond one trilogy and a prequel?