Are you Satisfied?

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

The books aren't like drugs to me. What they are like, is comfort food for my mind, but comfort food which is different in a little way every time. Like my grandmother's roast beef dinners. Sometimes the joint (heh - the beef ) would be a diferent cut, but it was always good.

Oh, my goodness, Lal! You make Tokien sound like a certain candy that a young wizard discovered once he learned there was more to the world than muggles!

Originally Posted by Lal

I don't need there to be any more, because I always find nourishment in what is already there. I like finding a passage I have read many times over and discovering that it leads me down a new path, whether about new ideas or about what other stories may lay behind it. I wonder if this is all part of the 'experience of story' as Bethberry has called it?

Possibly, for I think a good story first of all reaches out to give us experience about things we don't necessarily have or haven't faced directly in real life but which are nevertheless vital to our imaginative life. Like forests, lovely, dark and deep but usually we have miles to go before ....

And what is particularly attractive about the Professor's work is, as you say, that the river can ripple in so many different ways as it polishes our stoney minds. The Legendarium is not a closed system, as Mr. Underhill points out with his quotations from Tolkien's letters and Child with her very apt comparison to the Arthurian legends--although I'm not sure it is necessarily necessary to call Middle-earth 'true myth' for this to be so.

But isn't it the mark of the really astute performer to leave his audience always already wanting more? Or the fan dancer for that matter!

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

The Legendarium is not a closed system, as Mr. Underhill points out with his quotations from Tolkien's letters and Child with her very apt comparison to the Arthurian legends--although I'm not sure it is necessarily necessary to call Middle-earth 'true myth' for this to be so.

Yes, in a way I'm happy that Tokien wasn't able to write more or 'finish' the legendarium as that would have closed off too many holes. Particularly as it's pretty clear that he sought to make M-E more and more orthodoxly 'Catholic' (with his formulations of Eru etc) as he grew older. LotR may express Catholic morality but it is not overtly or wholly Catholic -- it is very easy to read it as expressing an almost animist view. Had he written a companion piece to LotR in his later life, I daresay it would have been more overtly Catholic and we wouldn't have the wonderful ambiguities of the moment, for example, of Gollum's fall into the Cracks of Doom.

Something else that occurs to me is that both TH and LotR were written for Tolkien's children -- he had a specific audience in mind. Any later works would not have been so directly addressed and perhaps would have suffered.

Still want to have confirmation of the winged Balrog though...

[Roa_Aoife]

Ah, to be satisfied with such wonderful stories... A part of me will always crave more and more information, and that cannot be helped. I do, however, think Tolkien stopped in a good place. There may be loopholes, and unanswered questions, and so many more stories that could have happened... but that's what forums and fanfiction are for.

Besides, there are moe than enough stories to read and re-read, because if you think you got it all the first ten times, you are very, very wrong. He wrote in such a way that the story only becomes more complex and intriguing with each time. Read them all fifty times? I'm willing to bet you missed something.

[Fingolfin II]

Ah, it's been a long time since I've last contributed to the Downs. Anyway...

For me, I'm satisfied with the stories- oh yes, most definitely. However, I too would have liked to have read more about Middle-Earth and it's Peoples, because I'm one of those people who love depth and detail; something rich and abundant throughout all Tolkien's writings.

The way Tolkien covered practically every little thing that he could about Middle-Earth (I mean, come on, he created a world here) was very satisfying for me, yet inevitably there was always going to be some things that could not be explained in such depth or in one lifetime. For example, I would've liked to hear more about Oropher, but since he isn't really relevant to the plot of LoTR (though his death does explain some things about Thranduil and the Silvan Elves), I wasn't too dismayed and insisting on a novel-length back story of his life. I would, however, have liked to read more about Gil-Galad, whom I thought was not given as much emphasis as other 'important' characters (important in terms of his position as High King of the Noldor- not the same importance as, for instance, Sam, in terms of the actual story).

Anyway, I fear I diverge. When reading HoME, I was particularly struck by the Prophecy of Mandos, where Turin kills Morgoth with Gurthang and Feanor yields the Silmarils to Yavanna. I was satisfied in terms of 'closure' and knowing how the ultimate story ends, yet I was also dissatisfied - I know, weird - at how it ended and felt that if it was included, despite being poetically just and a good ending, it would just take away from The Sil's story just that little bit.

Originally Posted by Boromir88

Would you have liked to have seen more, perhaps more stories after the War of the Ring (maybe The New Shadow Tolkien started writing then abandoned because he wasn't happy with it?) Or are you satisfied with what we got?

I would have liked to have seen more stories after the War of the Ring, yet I must also admit that I don't know if there would be much more to write about, and whether another story about other heroes would have such an impact as Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and The Silmarillion did. It's sort of like a movie- the sequel is rarely as good as the original, especially when the directors keep making movies and drag out a brilliant movie into not-as-good sequels. This is definitely not the case with LoTR and The Hobbit- the flow is brilliant. I'm simply questioning whether it would have as 'brilliant' if Tolkien persisted with finishing The New Shadow and it was published. I read a few pages (of what exists) and was excited at allusions to previous happenings in the War of the Ring and the two boys' discussion of Morgoth, yet it didn't strike the same chord with me as I thought it might have. In fact, it almost seemed to undermine his other works with a story that Tolkien coined as nothing more than a 'thriller'. He didn't want to stray down that path and finish the book, saying that it 'wouldn't be worth it'. That quote just about sums up my (long-winded) opinion on this issue. Good topic, Boro!

[Child of the 7th Age]

But how can we make a judgment on The New Shadow as it now stands? The one thing we know is that Tolkien's work generally underwent a myriad of changes. The "original" LotR with its hobbit guide in boots (Trotter) and a character like Bingo is light years away from what eventually emerged.

Given the way Tolkien approached writing, I don't honestly think we can make any realistic judgment on the shadow . If it underwent as many changes as the early chapters of LotR, it might have turned out very differently, with a much "higher" tone. I just wish I knew what the author had in the back of his mind when he began to write those pages.

Fordim - I'm not in total agreement with your assessment of the later Tolkien. I find the character of Andreth amazing as well as her discussion with Finrod. What I would give for the tale of Andreth the Wise Woman's failed relationship with her beloved Elf! She is potentially the strongest female character that Tolkien developed. I would love to have more.....

[Formendacil]

I am satisfied with the stories as they stand.

What I would like is more information...

I must confess, I am an Appendices fan. I love encyclopaedic collections of information and scholarly articles and geneaologies and timelines....

It is stuff like this that really makes me like the HoME, and its stuff like this that I would wish to have more of.

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Formendacil

I am satisfied with the stories as they stand.

What I would like is more information...

I must confess, I am an Appendices fan. I love encyclopaedic collections of information and scholarly articles and geneaologies and timelines....

It is stuff like this that really makes me like the HoME, and its stuff like this that I would wish to have more of.

This is pretty much what I think too. I like all the extra information as it allows you to put things together and find out what else may have happened, or even to formulate theories or new tales of your own. As it is, the stories we did get are of superb quality, and I'd much rather Tolkien was the perfectionist that he was and spent so long in perfecting these at the expense of other unwritten tales.

I thought the The New Shadow was interesting, but was only a curiosity; I got the sense from it that Tolkien really did not have his heart in the writing of Fourth Age stories and that he found the prospect quite depressing. After all, what could they be about? New evils arising? After LotR, such new evils might seem like a huge let down. They could not be as evil as those deeds wrought by Morgoth and Sauron, as it might make the central tale of LotR seem a bit pointless and the deeds less heroic, and if the evildoings in such tales were less evil, then likewise these tales would not be quite so thrilling.

The Fourth Age was the age of Men. Elves and Dwarves were diminishing, and Men were forbidden from entering The Shire. The Istari had gone. The Orcs were being hunted down. As far as we know, the Oliphaunts were all wiped out. No, I'm sorry to say that the Fourth Age just couldn't cut it in comparison to those Ages which had gone before.

There are a lot of books, films, comedy series and so on where I feel like I would love to see more, but in many cases being saturated with more and more 'product' just results in diminishing quality. If they had made more episodes of Fawlty Towers, Father Ted and The Royle Family then I think each series would have got less and less amusing. You only have to look at soap operas or series such as The Wheel of Time, which all seem interminable with the same plots being revised in the case of soaps (how many times have Ken and Deirdre split up?) to see why more is not necessarily A Good Thing.