Quote:
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Originally Posted by Andsigil
What? No Priya Seth?
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I assume when she discovered the Athrabeth includes Tolkien's
actual insertion of a Biblical person into Middle-earth, she threw up her hands and went home.
hS
EDIT: I've not read
Arda Reconstructed, but from what I've heard I agree with
The Squatter of Amon Rûdh - I don't believe it even attempts to establish a 'definitive
Silmarillion'. There's a fair amount of discussion of the book over at the Hall of Fire, where the author is a member;
they have a subforum dedicated to it. ~hS
EDIT2: As someone who it's always wise to exercise caution when dealing with... we know that J.R.R. Tolkien imagined his
Silmarillion coming to about the same length as
The Lord of the Rings, so it would certainly have been a much chunkier book than the Silm we have! If he had stuck to that plan, I think we would have seen a kind of composite book: one that included all three parts of the pre-War of Wrath Silm we have ('Ainulindale', 'Valaquenta', and 'Quenta Silmarillion' proper), along with the Annals (he certainly wanted a timeline in LotR), and longer versions of the Great Tales. While I'm no stranger to writing for sheer pleasure, I can't imagine Tolkien wouldn't have intended
The Children of Hurin to sit in his book alongside
Beren and Luthien and
The Fall of Gondolin.
He probably wouldn't have included the epic poems; I don't think he ever made any effort to integrate the Narn or the Lay into his narrative writings. The really interesting question is whether he would eventually have written a huge final section of which we have no trace;
The Book of Lost Tales includes the intriguing comment that the tale of the Nauglafring was intended to be the first of
seven tales dealing with Earendil - and the second was the entire Fall of Gondolin. Earendil was supposed to have adventures in the South (some versions have him killing Ungoliant), and then there's the War of Wrath... all of which Tolkien only ever hinted at in poems, with no narrative even started.
... of course, all of this misses the point, which is that 'J.R.R. Tolkien's
Silmarillion' was always going to be exactly what it was: an unwieldy mass of manuscripts in various stages of revision, never quite coming together into a cohesive whole. It's a miracle we even got one Legendarium book out of the man (
The Hobbit being somewhat different, of course); he was a chronic reviser.
Which brings us neatly back round to the challenge Christopher had to face to create our Silm, and the process which Douglas Kane laid out in his book. ^_^ ~hS