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#1 | |
Animated Skeleton
Join Date: Mar 2014
Posts: 50
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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. |
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#2 | |
Ghost Prince of Cardolan
Join Date: Aug 2012
Posts: 785
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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".
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"Since the evening of that day we have journeyed from the shadow of Tol Brandir." "On foot?" cried Éomer. |
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#3 | ||
Ghost Prince of Cardolan
Join Date: May 2007
Posts: 1,036
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For myself I think Quenta Silmarillion as a mostly mannish affair was a natural enough resolution. Last edited by Galin; 07-22-2015 at 02:00 PM. |
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#4 |
Loremaster of Annúminas
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 2,330
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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.
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The entire plot of The Lord of the Rings could be said to turn on what Sauron didn’t know, and when he didn’t know it. |
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#5 |
Spirit of Mist
Join Date: Jul 2000
Location: Tol Eressea
Posts: 3,396
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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.
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Beleriand, Beleriand, the borders of the Elven-land. |
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#6 |
Late Istar
Join Date: Mar 2001
Posts: 2,224
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It's from HoMe IX, the third section, 'The Drowning of Anadune'.
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#7 | ||||
Ghost Prince of Cardolan
Join Date: May 2007
Posts: 1,036
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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")
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I dunno, that seems natural enough to me. |
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#8 |
Loremaster of Annúminas
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 2,330
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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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The entire plot of The Lord of the Rings could be said to turn on what Sauron didn’t know, and when he didn’t know it. Last edited by William Cloud Hicklin; 07-25-2015 at 10:49 AM. |
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