I am on a lifelong quest to read everything ever penned by J. R. R. Tolkien.
I’ve read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings many, many times, and the unabridged audiobooks are on a fairly constant rotation in my car. The Silmarillion, which was published posthumously and sets forth the mythology and history of Middle Earth, has become an increasingly foundational book for my philosophy as a reader and my work as a writer. Then, several years ago, I discovered a beautiful thing: Tolkien’s son, Christopher, devoted himself to publishing all of his father’s notes. You can now trace the development of the whole world through multiple corrected versions, painstakingly edited and commentated upon by the worthy Christopher.
I am currently in volume 4, The Shaping of Middle Earth, which includes the earliest versions of The Silmarillion as a unit. For a writer, it is both terrifying and comforting to find that major plot points in these beloved tales first appeared as pencilled notes scribbled hastily in a margin.
(For any fellow Tolkien fanatics: in the first three versions, the Valar did not make war upon Morgoth because of Earendel’s plea. When Earendel arrived in Valinor, the Valar weren’t even there; they were already tearing down Thangorodrim. The idea of Earendel, as the son of both Kindreds and bearing the light of the Silmaril, being the only one who could pass through the Enchanted Seas and move the hearts of the Valar to have mercy upon the suffering of Middle Earth: yup, that vital point was jotted down as a side note on the third revision of the tale.)
If you were to ask me – and many people have, with concern and pity in their eyes – WHY I would absorb myself thus, I believe I could give a better answer now than I have ever been able to articulate before.
My efforts to become a disciplined writer myself have helped me understand what I like to read and why. As I wrote in last week’s post, I have been reflecting of late on the importance of Story, and one of the primary roots of story is Myth. I admire Tolkien because he sought to create a mythology for England – a truly English mythology, free of the French influence so prevalent in the Arthurian legends. He wrote fairy tales as if they were history, allowing us to believe that they could have happened – to think that, if only we could be quiet and careful enough, we might surprise a Hobbit tending his garden, or come across a wandering Elf singing in the woods.
As with all mythology, Tolkien’s work provides an explanation for some of our deepest longings. Why does the sea have such a hold over the human heart? Perhaps it’s because, as Tolkien said, the Blessed Realm – the home of the gods – used to lie across the seas to the West; and, until the sin of Numenor, when Valinor was removed from the circles of the world, you could actually reach it if you simply sailed West. Now it is beyond our reach, until the final breaking of the world – but our spirits still feel the call of Wonder ’cross the waves.
This idea that myth arises from truth is becoming a chief theme of my writing. When I reflect – when good writing allows me to believe – that our true history has left seeds of vision in our imagination, and that though the realities are lost to us, we continue to tell stories of these beings and events still half-remembered by the corner of our soul’s eye, something deep in my spirit rises up and cries “YES.”
Add to this idea my griffin fetish, my love affair with Ireland, and my fascination with the Irish monks who saved civilization after the fall of Rome, and you have my current novel, The Ancient.
I’m eighty-five pages in and alternately terrified and comforted by the way the story is surprising me daily. After living with Anna & the Trumans for over a decade while writing the Gatekeeper trilogy, it is difficult to be forging a trail into new territory once again. I pray often that, as I stumble my way blindly through this story – which, thrillingly, feels like it is a whole thing in itself, and one that it is my responsibility to discover, not to invent – that the result will be akin to the feeling I have when reading this rare gem from The Shaping of Middle Earth:
(This is from a poem that Tolkien never published, though he wrote several versions of it. It is entitled “The Horns of Ylmir” and is supposed to be the song Tuor made for his son Earendel, describing the vision brought to him by the sea-god Ylmir.)
“Thus murmurous slumber took me mid those far-off eldest things
(In a lonely twilit region down whose old chaotic ways
I heard no sound of men’s voices, in those eldest of the days
When the world reeled in the tumult as the Great Gods tore the earth
In the darkness, in the tempest of the cycles ere our birth),
Till the tides went out, and the Wind died, and did all sea musics cease
And I woke to silent caverns and empty sands and peace.”
I think my only struggle with Tolkien is the words and names I can not pronounce to save my life. I know what it is to be captivated by a story and want every possible detail. I love that you are well on your way of reading every line penned by the man who created such an amazing world. You sound inspired <3 and that is exciting!
I sort of read over those, though some of them I’ve learned through frequent exposure. They sound so other-worldly rolling around in my brain . . .
Yes!! When reading Tolkien, I often feel he has reminded me of something I had known but had forgotten!!! Whispers of eternity past . . .