Christopher Tolkien to finish lost Middle Earth novel

[Bêthberry]

According to the Globe and Mail's National Bestsellers List of Saturday, April 28, 2007, the top selling fiction hardcover in Canada was . . . drumroll please . . . The Children of Hurin. For the first week on the list, too.

[Hilde Bracegirdle]

How did the masses suddenly get such good taste?

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Hilde Bracegirdle

How did the masses suddenly get such good taste?

Oh, I suspect it can be attributed to a kinship of gloomy, sombre, dark, defeatist Northern spirit. It isn't for nothing that Vimy Ridge became part of the mythology.

[Maédhros]

It's funny...prior to reading I heard many people expressing their wishes that the other Great Tales receive the "CoH" treatment but I just shrugged it off because I knew they weren't nearly as far along. But now I almost finding myself thinking, "Please, Chris...anything you can scrape together!"

It is funny, but in this Board, there is a Project that indeed have done that with the Tales of the Children of Húrin, Beren and Lúthien and the Fall of Gondolin. IMO (biased of course) the work that Findegil did in the creation of the text of the CoH, has way more detail that the work that has been published by the Estate, (even thought I don't have the book and haven't read it) since it includes parts of the Lay of Leithian.
And the Fall of Gondolin, wow, that is very nice indeed.

[littlemanpoet]

I think that Christopher has tied his own creative hands far too much. There are glaring examples of this in Turin.

[davem]

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

I think that Christopher has tied his own creative hands far too much. There are glaring examples of this in Turin.

There are - & I'm sure that it would have benefitted from the inclusion of elements from the Lay. However, in some ways that would have worked against his purpose - which was making his father's work available, rather than just making the story available in the best possible form.

Of course, you are right about it being one of the great tragedies of Tolkien's creative life that he got distracted into writing those 'lesser' (but still fascinating) works. Christopher has given us a glimpse of what might have been. CoH works, but its pretty clearly not what Tolkien would have given us had he managed to complete it to his satisfaction. I wonder if his reputation among the 'literati' would have been different had the First Age Trilogy been published.

Its incredibly sad that the other tales will languish mostly unread in a fuller form - well, tbh, in any form, given that most casual fans don't even attempt the Sil, let alone UT & HoM-e.

I wonder why Tolkien chose the path he took - can't help wondering how much influence his correspondents had in the post LotR period, with their constant questioning of the works theological credentials, or their pointing up of 'similarities' with Christianity. I can't help feeling that Tolkien the amateur theologian/philosopher took that path too eagerly, & that we lost probably his greatest work for that very reason.

[Child of the 7th Age]

I wonder why Tolkien chose the path he took - can't help wondering how much influence his correspondents had in the post LotR period, with their constant questioning of the works theological credentials, or their pointing up of 'similarities' with Christianity. I can't help feeling that Tolkien the amateur theologian/philosopher took that path too eagerly, & that we lost probably his greatest work for that very reason.

Yes, that is possible. Tolkien was deluged with questions in his final years and many of these (though far from all) touched upon "religious and philosophical" issues. While something like that could constitute a "distraction", I still think there is a great deal more going on than that.

The question that I keep asking is whether Tolkien still had the same ability to create when he was older that he did when he was middle aged. When he was younger Tolkien had enormous pressures on his head.....the need to produce as an academic, the money required to pay off piles of hospital bills, the time to be a good father. Despite all this, those were the most productive years of his life.

Once the money from Rings started coming in and his children grew up, some of those pressures were reduced. That was even more so in retirement when he found himself with time on his hands. Theoretically, with that huge chunk of extra time, he could have found the hours to put at least a few of his major stories into shape as well as producing something like the Athrabeth. The more basic question is this: did he still possess the star that gave him entry to faerie, or did he feel that it had slipped away? There are some authors who have that ability right up to the moment they die. Many stop writing completely, and still others continue to write but what they write lacks that inner magic that makes stories come alive . I would honestly put Tolkien in the latter category. I find Tolkien's later writings interesting for their ideas, but I do not warm to them the way I do to the magical stories of his younger years.

I don't think this was just a lack of time, answering peoples' letters about why the characters did, responding to fans' personal questions, or even getting "fixated" on religion, though all those could have played some part. (Indeed, I think an argument can be made that it was PJ's movies that gave rise to such a fascination with Tolkien's religious roots.) Many of those same letters raised questions about the First and Second Age so that they actually could have been an impetus for Tolkien to turn again to his source material and begin to write anew. Sadly he did not.

I there are two reasons for this. First, Tolkien seemed unable to pick out one story and focus on that alone. He was always jumping from one aspect of the Legendarium to another. He was so in love with Middle-earth as a whole that he couldn't focus on one part of it to the exclusion of all others. If only he had done that... If only we had a complete Tale of Gondolin, or Beren and Luthien. I think we would all trade in the later writings for that. I do feel that the process of aging separated Tolkien from faerie. Aging does change people. I have watched this happen in myself and in parents and friends. It can be painful to see. Yet this is the doom of Man, and I do not think the older Tolkien was capable of producing the same magic that the younger one did.