Why do you read HoME?

[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.