Why do you read HoME?

[Orphalesion]

Originally Posted by Galin

My thought is that JRRT solved this by recasting Quenta Silmarillion as a mostly Mannish tradition, and he was going to give the Round World point of view in other accounts (or notes), for comparison.

Oddly enough (or ingeniously enough, I think) in my opinion a main "other" source being the confused mannish tradition of the fall of Numenor (The Drowning of Anadune). In it Men confuse the Elves with the Valar for instance, or certain points of geography, or don't all believe what the Elves teach... but the tradition includes that the Western Elves teach the World was always round (believe it or not, Men of Numenor)...

... the King of Numenor even wants to test this teaching by sailing East to get around the ban! But it never happens, and other stuff happens. Or you have the Elvish account of the Awakening of the Quendi, where (despite being a fairy tale mixed with counting lore) the Sun already exists before the Elves awake. Possibly too, the account of the Death of Feanor's youngest son... if that was to stand as a variant Elvish telling of the matter of Losgar (outside of the main QS text), it at least implies the Sun already existed, if I recall correctly.

Thus no need for a completely Elvish Silmarillion, with its always round worldedness and early existing Sun. That's why I think Myths Transformed was abandoned, even though the Dome of Varda made it into a later "LQS" text.

My opinion anyway.

That's well and good if you are interested in Mannish Legends. I am not.

I'd rather have a Silmarilion that would recount the "actual" history of Middle Earth. To me it seemed more a "cop out" because Tolkien might have been afraid that he was no longer up to the task of restructuring the Legendarium in such a significant way.

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Orphalesion

That's well and good if you are interested in Mannish Legends. I am not.

I'd rather have a Silmarilion that would recount the "actual" history of Middle Earth. To me it seemed more a "cop out" because Tolkien might have been afraid that he was no longer up to the task of restructuring the Legendarium in such a significant way.

I think such an approach risks treating this fiction as too "real". Ultimately I think the major concern is that the "actual history", which might be better understood as a "version more cohesive with modern scientific knowledge", would not retain the original poetic qualities of the old story. It might have a new one, but it would be different.

I don't think the original version of the story being treated by the author in later years as a "Mannish legend" diminishes from its potential meaning. For me at least the meaning is more important than what is "true" according to the internal narrative. It's all fiction at the end of the day, even fiction within fiction. It's not like one version is actually "true".

[Galin]

Originally Posted by Orphalesion

(...) I'd rather have a Silmarilion that would recount the "actual" history of Middle Earth. To me it seemed more a "cop out" because Tolkien might have been afraid that he was no longer up to the task of restructuring the Legendarium in such a significant way.

I think Christopher Tolkien is correct about JRRT's thinking, in a period before his father had even finished The Lord of the Rings.

"Where could such ignorance of the Elves be found but in the minds of Men of a later time? This, I believe, is what my father was concerned to portray: a tradition of Men, through long ages become dim and confused. At this time, perhaps, in the context of the Notion Club Papers and of the vast enlargement of his great story that was coming into being in The Lord of the Rings, he began to be concerned with questions of "tradition" and the vagaries of tradition, the losses, confusions, simplifications and amplifications in the evolution of legend, as they might apply to his own -- within the always enlarging compass of Middle-earth.

This is speculation; it would have been helpful indeed if he had at this time left any record or note, however brief, of his reflections. But many years later he did write such a note, though brief indeed, on the envelope that contains the texts of the Drowning of Anadune:

"Contains very old version (in Adunaic) which is good -- in so far as it is just as much different (in inclusion and omission and emphasis) as would be probable in the supposed case:

a) Mannish tradition
b) Elvish tradition
c) Mixed tradition"

note by JRRT loosely dated to "sometime in the 1960s"

Now granted the note itself dates from the 1960s specifically, but the texts that inspired Christopher Tolkien's comments here are much earlier, again, dated to before The Lord of the Rings was even completed.

For myself I think Quenta Silmarillion as a mostly mannish affair was a natural enough resolution.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Well, Tolkien himself couldn't make up his mind about it; this can be seen in the 'round-world' Downfall of Anadune and related papers ca 1945-6 which were later explicitly rejected in the 'flat-world' Akallabeth. There are elements of the Appendices dating from around 1949 which greatly suggest the round-world story, and others which entered circa 1954-55 which are flat-world.

I don't think Tolkien felt up to the massive work of recasting the fundamental cosmology, in effect jacking up the house and replacing its foundation; while the idea of a distorted Mannish version has appeal, it also has problems for whatever fictional theory of transmission Tolkien might have decided on. Bilbo's "Translations From the Elvish?" Bilbo had direct sources of information in Elrond, Glorfindel and sometimes Gandalf to set him straight. Akallabeth written by Elendil? Elendil personally lived through it and would have known the form of the Old World. Surviving Gondorian manuscripts? Don't fit especially well as a co-transmission with the memoirs of two Shire-hobbits.

I'm not saying the problem was intractable, but Tolkien certainly never worked it out, and CT wisely kept silent.

In any event, whatever Tolkien's intentions for transforming the cosmological myth, his ideas were only notes and jottings that never received narrative form, and CT would not have been justified, I think, in replacing the completed QS and AAm texts with material of his own devising "based on" notes and jottings.

[Mithadan]

Galin, can you please provide the source of your CRRT/JRRT quote? I find this topic interesting and I know of a related quote from JRRT that I will dig up, but the question of timing of JRRT's intentions is relevant.

[Aiwendil]

Originally Posted by Mithadan

Galin, can you please provide the source of your CRRT/JRRT quote? I find this topic interesting and I know of a related quote from JRRT that I will dig up, but the question of timing of JRRT's intentions is relevant.

It's from HoMe IX, the third section, 'The Drowning of Anadune'.

[Galin]

Sorry about the lack of source Mithadan. And thanks Aiwendil! Also there is an *error* in my quote above, as C should say: Mixed Dunedanic tradition (not simply "mixed tradition")

I don't think Tolkien felt up to the massive work of recasting the fundamental cosmology, in effect jacking up the house and replacing its foundation;...

Perhaps. But I wonder if maybe he just didn't like the new ideas (as brief as they are, in a sense) as much as the old ones. Add that to the idea that the Silmarillion need not be "Elvish" as told to an Anglo-saxon upon Tol Eressea...

... while the idea of a distorted Mannish version has appeal, it also has problems for whatever fictional theory of transmission Tolkien might have decided on. Bilbo's "Translations From the Elvish?" Bilbo had direct sources of information in Elrond, Glorfindel and sometimes Gandalf to set him straight.

I've heard this before, but to my mind getting everything straight isn't the point. Bilbo is translating a particular work. He and Glorfindel might know about its inaccuracies, but that's no reason to alter a work of antiquity. Especially (I think) if one is a Hobbit! I don't find this problematic at all, especially given that the "truth" of the big questions will be in some part of Bilbo's translations, if not in others.

Akallabeth written by Elendil? Elendil personally lived through it and would have known the form of the Old World.

Well (in DA) upon learning that the world was like an apple, even the King of Numenor wanted to test the theory by sailing East, but he never got the chance. Moreover, we don't really have Tolkien drawing the final picture here for us: he could easily have stamped "mixed dunedanic tradition" on Akallabeth, instead of Elendil.

Surviving Gondorian manuscripts? Don't fit especially well as a co-transmission with the memoirs of two Shire-hobbits. I'm not saying the problem was intractable, but Tolkien certainly never worked it out, and CT wisely kept silent.

Granted you are not saying that the problem was intractible, but here again I find nothing very problematic about sources hailing from Gondor as well as Imladris.

I dunno, that seems natural enough to me.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Here is at least a conceptual framework to play with: Bilbo was working in Rivendell making use of Elrond's library. But there was a problem here- the Elves don't write "history" in the way we mortals understand it. Being immortal, their requirements were different and they were much more inclined towards poetic recastings of things commonly known (among themselves), stuff even more obscure to an outsider than Bilbo's mock-elvish Earendil poem was to us pre-Sil LR readers.

The "Elvish" Bilbo translated, then, was not works by Elves but rather Dunedainic works in Sindarin, those surviving books from the royal library at Fornost which had been committed to Rivendell for safekeeping: histories written by Men which were far more comprehensible to Bilbo's mortal mindset. (According to this theory, even the Annals would not have been contemporaneous Elvish records a la medieval chronicles, but a Numenorean or Dunedainic reconstruction of the timeline of the Elder Days.)


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