Why do you read HoME?

[Elmo]

The Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth in Morgoth's Ring is a great piece of writing that gives a glimpse on how Elves and Women felt about their different fates. It's such a sad yet beautiful work.

[Galadriel55]

I haven't actually read HOME, but I want to read the First Age volumes - does that count?

I've tried reading the LOTR ones (the only ones I found in my library), but I ended up just skimming them for either bits of story that I like best or Tolkien's own sketches and writing. Basically, I picked out the berries from the pie. Why? Because I like tidbits like that. But I'm not patient enough to go through CJRT's methodical recounting. Some of it is really interesting, and I actually love reading about that stuff when other Downers post about it in their own words, but reading HOME sometimes feels like you're reading an encyclopaedia. This means, it is generally interesting, but often not in the best format.

However, I'm more into the First Age than the Third, and I think it's the Age with more mystery and more corners to explore and stories to fill. I imagine that I would be more interested in encyclopaedically delving into that. Also, some of it is completely unused stuff, either notably different stories from The Sil, or something else entirely. So I would still want to inspect those books.

[Aiwendil]

I'm more or less of the same mind as Morthoron. While I respect the attitude that Inziladun has expressed, and that I think many people would agree with, about 'not seeing how the sausage is made', I must say that to me that is a wholly alien way of thinking. I find that when I like a piece of art, learning more about it can only lead to my liking it more, never less.

For me, the kind of study that HoMe allows only enriches and deepens my appreciation of Tolkien's work. Now, part of that may just be that I like studying things; and undoubtedly part of my enjoyment of HoMe is a kind of academic enjoyment of having a large body of interrelated texts laid out in a clear and scholarly manner. And then there's the (related) enjoyment of studying it as a history - one which has the unusual property of existing in two dimensions of time (i.e. the internal chronology of Middle-earth and the external chronology of Tolkien's life and writing).

But as much as I love it for those reasons, I think the main thing that I prize about HoMe is simply its literary value - or rather, the literary value of many of the texts it contains. Simply put, it contains a lot of great writing: a lot of great characters, vivid scenes, compelling stories, and beautiful turns of phrase. I can see that if one were not interested in it from the academic side, one might find Christopher Tolkien's (excellent) commentaries difficult to get through, but I think that even in that case, there's enough literary value there that it's worth 'picking out the berries', as Galadriel puts it.

Some of my favourite berries:

- The later 'Tuor' and 'Turin' (UT)
- Aldarion and Erendis (UT)
- The vivid descriptions of the Valar and the 'mythological' portions of the Legendarium in the Book of Lost Tales (HoMe I)
- The Lay of Leithien (HoMe III)
- The little poem 'Winter Comes to Nargothrond', which for all its brevity is one of my favourite pieces of verse, ever (HoMe III)
- The Notion Club Papers (HoMe IX)
- The Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth (HoMe X)
- 'The Wanderings of Hurin' (HoMe XI)

[Mithadan]

At the risk of sounding old (I'm really not that old... really) Tolkien and I go back to about 1971 when I first read The Hobbit with LoTR to follow shortly thereafter. Of course, back then there was no internet. The publication of The Silmarillion and later of Unfinished Tales received broad press coverage. I purchased each on the days they were released.

I didn't love The Silmarillion at first. It was a bit too much like a history book to me. It took another read or 2 to really begin the appreciate it. Unfinished Tales I liked more. The First Age pieces were more like how I envisioned The Silmarillion to be. The balance was more like a novel than history so I appreciated it more on the first read. I later came to like The Silmarillion as much as LoTR. I had no problem with the shadowy distant history being revealed.

Lost Tales flew under the press' radar, at least so far as I knew. I stumbled upon volume one in a bookstore. I found the style and quality of the prose to be less than Tolkien's later work. I almost didn't buy volume 2, but did and was glad I did so. It was worth it for the fall of Gondolin alone. I also enjoyed the idea of the faring forth and the prophecy of Mandos.

You see, I didn't conceive of Tolkien's writing to be a lifelong effort of editing and rewriting at that point. And I had no real interest, then, in the evolving development of his tales. I liked The Hobbit, LoTR and the Silmarillion at that point and had hoped that Tolkien had more substantially finished work about Middle Earth.

I didn't know anything more about HoME until around 1997 when I stumbled upon a copy of Lays of Beleriand and later The Shaping of Middle Earth at airports. I liked Lays very much, though it was slow going. It showed where Tolkien intended to go with his tales. Shaping I liked less. Again, I was not highly interested in the step by step evolution and found it to be generally redundant. I felt similarly about the Lost Road.

I skipped the History of the Lord of the Rings entirely at that point and moved straight on to Morgoth's Ring. Again I skimmed the early sections about the Annals and the later Silmarillion. However, the Athrabeth and the balance of the book was fascinating to me. It was fresh and new material.

By this time I had found the on-line Tolkien world and this message board. Morgoth's Ring and the War of the Jewels I treated as an education and as material for posts. Peoples of Middle Earth was also a winner for me. Again, it presented new or merely hinted at material. By this time, I had completely gotten over any reservations about "historical" Middle Earth.

I've gone through most of HoME at least twice and my favorite volumes more so. I now appreciate the evolution of Tolkien's writing, though I have given up on achieving any vision of what the final version of The Silmarillion might have looked like. I still keep my eyes open for fodder for posting here (wishful thinking?).

Even now, HoME sometimes surprises me. I mentioned in my opening post in this thread that when I heard that the Downs was going to be resurrected, the first book I picked up was Morgoth's Ring. I read it carefully, not skimming the Annals of Aman and the versions of the Silmarillion and noticed something. The prose, particularly in Annals was beautiful. Much better than the early versions and in many cases superior to what is found in The Silmarillion.

So why I read HoME has evolved over the years. I went from hoping for new stories, to looking for details missing from the published "canon" works, to looking for hints regarding what the Silmarillion should have been, to looking for information to post, to appreciating both the prose and the breadth of Tolkien's conception.

[Faramir Jones]

You started a good thread, Mithadan. I certainly agree with your reasons that HoME is 'difficult. Some of it is archaic. It is certainly highly redundant. It is long. Many would argue that it is overly scholarly and inaccessible'. But I agree with Kuruharan in that they are part of the reason why I read it. I'm one of the people who has bought all 13 volumes, the last being the general index.

I understand you, Inziladun, when you say you are uneasy in knowing 'too much about how the sausage is made', although I would agree with Pitchwife when the latter says 'For me, a poem or novel doesn't lose its appeal by studying how it does its job, I'd rather say I learn to appreciate it on an additional level'.

I agree with you, Aiwendil, in that I also have at times picked out the parts that are 'great writing', and have ignored Christopher Tolkien's excellent commentaries.

The volumes I bought in the order of 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 12, 10, 9, 11, 2, 6, 8 and 13.

I didn't, however, read them in that order. I read Volume 1 much later, after I began to read the others. I was particularly entranced with the verses in Volume 3, and laughed at C. S. Lewis' 'criticism' of The Lay of Leithien. Also, I wanted to know about the story of the Appendices in LotR, as well as the dropped last chapter, all revealed in Volumes 12 and 9. There were also the issues in Volume 10 of the evil of Morgoth, the laws of marriage among the Elves (which had political implications), and Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, which was very moving. There was then The Wanderings of Húrin, in Volume 11, followed by filling in the corners.

Looking back, I first wanted to read the books to find out some of the background to what I had already read, particuarly in The Silmarillion. Christopher Tolkien had made me aware of the work his father had left unfinished, of which I had had a taste in Unfinished Tales; so I wanted to know the unfinished pieces themselves, and the context of the life of their author from which they emerged, then the efforts by his heir to produce a coherent narrative.

I then realised, before I got to the end, and before Christopher Tolkien mentioned it, that my going through the volumes (in my own particular order) was a disorderly reading of a biography of Tolkien himself. It made me appreciate how he was able to produce (and in certain cases publish) so much work against a background of a career and raising a family.

In the last number of years, I've been writing on Tolkien, so have been using HoME as a source of research materials, both the pieces inside themselves and CT's commentaries on them. I've also been rereading some pieces for the sheer enjoyment of doing so.

[jallanite]

HoME was for me a must-read. I didn’t like The Silmarillion much when it first came out, but the Book of Lost Tales, the first two volumes of the HoME series, gave me much of what I then felt I was missing in The Silmarillion.

The writing was fuller and more detailed and more poetic, with even bits of real poetry, at least more than in the published Silmarillion. That it was more archaic in style did not bother me at all. I was used to reading archaic prose, such as Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, the fantasy novels of William Morris, the fantasy novels of William Hope Hodgson, and various other works, so that archaic English hardly registered with me as being archaic.

I felt that Christopher Tolkien ought to have merged the text of the Book of Lost Tales into the published Silmarillion.

Years later I realized why this was impossible, at least for someone so fixed on putting out the work of his father and only the work of his father with no additions or changes. The very names no longer fitted. The Gnomish language used for the seven names of the city of Gondolin no longer fitted with Sindarin as revised. True, readers would mostly not pick up on such apparent ephemera, but much of the charm of Tolkien’s work is the feeling that came through that Tolkien had cared deeply about such apparent ephemera. That it did matter.

So what we have is what is possible: the record of what Tolkien thought years before The Silmarillion was published, somethling that Christopher Tolkien himself did not think was possible, until he found himself forced to defend the position that the published Silmarillion was indeed mainly his father’s work and not mainly something quickly cobbled together by himself and an assistant, really their invention.

And HoME was an immense publishing success. Originally published only in hard-cover only for hoped-for specialists, it proved popular enough to unexpectedly jump into paperback and to reach twelve volumes, to stay in print and stay in print. In 2000–01, the twelve volumes were republished in three limited edition omnibus volumes. Non-deluxe editions of the three volumes were published in 2002.

The HoME series seems to me to have been possibly more of a publishing success than most fantasy books.

[Kuruharan]

Originally Posted by jallanite

The HoME series seems to me to have been possibly more of a publishing success than most fantasy books.

This is either high praise for the quality of Tolkien's early work and ruminations or a stinging condemnation of the fantasy out there.

Or maybe it says more about us the fans...