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

[davem]

From the new Flieger book, 'Interrupted Music':

Very well then, if Iceland & Norway & Wales & Ireland had their great manuscript books, objects of scrutiny & examination by schollars, Tolkien's Middle-earth would have th efictive equivalent. If these real-world books had been translated, edited, regularized as to spelling, & published, Tolkien's mythos should have no less. He therefore would devise a similar treatment for the stories in his legendarium. But to provide these equivalents, Tolkien had to invent a 'pre-history' of existing texts, & geanealogy of transmitters: bards, minstrels, storytellers of all kinds stretching over a period roughly comparable to the prehistoric (migration) age, transmitters who diseminated the stories both vertically in time & horizontally across the geography of Middle earth. These had then to be succeeded by a further succession of historical 'redactors' & scribes, agents who could believably transfer the stories from their original oral tradition to tangible artifacts, to manuscript books. The final stage would be their appearance in print.
The task Tolkien set himself, then, was first to create an authentic & convincing oral tradition, a legacy of songs & stories attributed to identifiable bards & storytellers & perpetuated by subsequent performers. Second, he had then to devise a stage or stages of transmission in which this body of material could come to be written down by later redactors, with the process culminating on a few 'surviving' manuscripts in the manner of his medieval models. Third & finally, he had to create some sort of believable frame within which the manuscript material - much of it needing not just transference from one medium to another, but presumed 'translation' from one or more of his invented languages into English - could find its way into print in his own twentieth century.....

Commenting on CT's statement that he felt it was, in retrospect, an error to publish the Silmarillion in the form he did in 1977 she states:

The published Silmarillion gives a misleading impression of coherence & finality, as if it were a definitive, canonical text, whereas the mass of material from which that volume was taken is a jumble of overlapping & often competing stories, annals & lexicons.

Looked at from this perspective, I think we can see that, rather than being a project his father would have disapproved of, HoME does in fact do exactly what Tolkien pere wanted his Silmarillion to do & perhaps does it better than he could have done it himself....