The Book of Lost Tales Part I: A Readthrough

[Tar-Jêx]

Originally Posted by jallanite

The name changes he claims are mostly either non-existent, or very minor. They are at least no more than one might expect in a work published as an early version of Tolkien’s Silmarillion. One surely ought to expect some differences in plot and names from the published Silmarillion.

To complain that differences between the Book of Lost Tales and the Silmarillion are confusing to the point that the reader finds the works unreadable suggests to me that that reader must be very easily confused.

I fully admit Tar-Jêx’s right not to like the Book of Lost Tales but the reasons he presents for doing to do not make sense to me.

While I admit that I was wrong in saying that all of the names were different, there are still a great deal, and some of the more important ones. The renaming of the Solosimpi and Teleri can be quite a confusing one. After going back through the book, scanning for name changes, I noticed with the Valar that after the initial name changes, they still don't have just one name. Many of them have multiple different forms of their name, or just multiple names entirely. Melkor is an example. He was Melko, then Melkor, also known as Morgoth, Bauglir, Morgoth Bauglir, the Dark Lord, and other various 'evil' titles. This is also true for what I was referring to, the places. A great deal of them don't undergo name changes, but are called different things every other page.

We seem to have a misunderstanding, though, as I personally really enjoy BoLT. I was stating that a reader can be turned off and become disinterested when every place or item is being referred to by a different name every second page. A number of people I know that have tried to read BoLT found the name switching to be confusing, and never knew what was being referred to.