The Single Greatest (Publishing) Tragedy in Tolkien's Life (yet another rant)

[davem]

It seems we pro-HoMe-ers are all a bit uncomfortable with the 'Myths Transformed' period & feel it was a mistake for Tolkien to try & change his Legendarium in the way he did. It probably was, & I wish he hadn't gone that way, because he would quite probably have managed to finish things like the ones Aiwendil mentions.

Having said that, & I realise I'm possibly sidetracking this thread here, wasn't that 'period' actually inevitable right from the start? Right from BoLT the conceit was that this was as much history as Myth. These accounts were what really happened - a phrase Tolkien was to use repeatedly over the years of his approach to writing them. In other words, the Legendarium was to be a replacement for England's lost mythology (though, as Flieger has pointed out, what Tolkien actually stated in his letter to Waldman was not that he wanted to write a mythology for England but rather a mythology he could dedicate to England), & was to be, originally, the accounts of the Elves themselves - the eyewitnesses - written down by Eriol/Aelfwine. So it was never intended to be taken by readers as a mythology that Tolkien 'made up' but rather as one that he was passing on. This culminates in the conceits of the Red Book & the single page of an ancient manuscript that sparks off the journey of Lowdham & Jeremy in NCP.

So, if the Legendarium was to be history as well as myth, the true account of what had really happened, then Tolkien would eventually have had to bite the bullet & account for why the world of the early Ages was so physically different from the world we live in now. Of course, he tried various explanations -principally that the world was physically changed at the Fall of Numenor - actually that doesn't work because we know that this world was never flat.

It was his very desire to produce a mythology which would be accepted by those (the English) he wanted to dedicate it to that (he seems to have felt) required it not to contradict known history or science. More, that required, I suppose, that it fitted in as closely as possible with what we know about the world. Inevitably he was going to fail & get himself tied up in all kinds of knots, but as I say, the more I think about it, the more I feel that he was heading for that period right from the start, when he chose to build on pre existing foundations (like Cynewulf's Crist) rather than lay his own...