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A review by nwhyte
The Lost Road and Other Writings by J.R.R. Tolkien
3.0
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1785921.html
Getting to the end of the books about how the Silmarillion was (and wasn't) written now, this volume includes several interesting insights into how Tolkien's works reached us. At the core is the rather slim pickings of The Lost Road, the time travel novel which Tolkien began at around the same time C.S. Lewis began his Ransome trilogy. Tolkien abandoned it, and it wasn't really going in the right direction; what we have here is too episodic to be coherent, and in particular, the framing narrative has a set of slightly odd father-son dynamics going on - Tolkien's own parents were absent, largely through being dead, and the same is true of most of his more successful characters (Bilbo's parents are never heard of, he in turn abandons Frodo in the first chapter of LotR, Húrin is a distant captive while his son and daughter fall in love with each other) though there are exceptions (mostly father-figures who are over-controlling - Théoden, Denethor, Thingol).
The importance of father-son dynamics extends also to the making of this book, and I was particularly interested in a passage on page 302 where Christopher Tolkien expresses his regrets that the Silmarillion as originally published was not better; he reflects on the role played by Guy Gavriel Kay in assembling the texts but in the end takes full responsibility for it himself. I was not surprised to read that the story he feels was worst served is the tale of Beren and Lúthien.
There's also a lot of meaty material on the languages - an essay called the Lhammas and a set of Elvish etymologies, which brought home to me that for Tolkien his invented structure was much more than just Quenya and Sindarin, it also included half a dozen other languages spoken by different branches of the Elves, barely mentioned in the stories. I have dabbled enough in philology to sense the uniqueness of this achievement - very few sf or fantasy writers come anywhere near Tolkien's level of detail in his invented names and words, and some (eg Robert Jordan) are so bad at it that it's painful.
Apart from that, we have the Fall of Númenor, and yet another rehash of the main text of the Silmarillion. I am looking forward to the next volume which is about the early versions of LotR.
Getting to the end of the books about how the Silmarillion was (and wasn't) written now, this volume includes several interesting insights into how Tolkien's works reached us. At the core is the rather slim pickings of The Lost Road, the time travel novel which Tolkien began at around the same time C.S. Lewis began his Ransome trilogy. Tolkien abandoned it, and it wasn't really going in the right direction; what we have here is too episodic to be coherent, and in particular, the framing narrative has a set of slightly odd father-son dynamics going on - Tolkien's own parents were absent, largely through being dead, and the same is true of most of his more successful characters (Bilbo's parents are never heard of, he in turn abandons Frodo in the first chapter of LotR, Húrin is a distant captive while his son and daughter fall in love with each other) though there are exceptions (mostly father-figures who are over-controlling - Théoden, Denethor, Thingol).
The importance of father-son dynamics extends also to the making of this book, and I was particularly interested in a passage on page 302 where Christopher Tolkien expresses his regrets that the Silmarillion as originally published was not better; he reflects on the role played by Guy Gavriel Kay in assembling the texts but in the end takes full responsibility for it himself. I was not surprised to read that the story he feels was worst served is the tale of Beren and Lúthien.
There's also a lot of meaty material on the languages - an essay called the Lhammas and a set of Elvish etymologies, which brought home to me that for Tolkien his invented structure was much more than just Quenya and Sindarin, it also included half a dozen other languages spoken by different branches of the Elves, barely mentioned in the stories. I have dabbled enough in philology to sense the uniqueness of this achievement - very few sf or fantasy writers come anywhere near Tolkien's level of detail in his invented names and words, and some (eg Robert Jordan) are so bad at it that it's painful.
Apart from that, we have the Fall of Númenor, and yet another rehash of the main text of the Silmarillion. I am looking forward to the next volume which is about the early versions of LotR.