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A review by aiwendil
The Nature of Middle-Earth by J.R.R. Tolkien
3.75
This is a sort of informal volume 13 to the History of Middle-earth. A fair number of the texts presented in it have been previously published in the periodicals Vinyar Tengwar, Parma Eldalamberon, and Tolkien Studies, but it's nice to have them in a book (particularly because most of the issues of Parma Eldalamberon are out of print).
About half of the book is devoted to (and I realize this will sound ridiculously abstruse and esoteric to non-Tolkien fans) the numerous notes and tables wherein Tolkien tried to work out the consequences of his decision to change the Valian and Elven year from being equivalent to about 10 solar years to being equivalent to 144. In particular, he was trying to work out a chronology and a rate of Elvish growth and reproduction that would allow him to have a large enough population of Elves by the time they come into the stories. Much of this is very dry and repetitive, but in the course of working this stuff out, we see him arrive at a number of new ideas about the early parts of the story of the Silmarillion, particularly with regard to the awakening of the Elves and the Great March. The remainder consists of a variety of short texts on various subjects, many (or perhaps most) of them arising from etymological work on the Elvish languages - everything from Elvish death and reincarnation to which characters in The Lord of the Rings had beards.
Carl Hostetter (a name that will be familiar to serious Tolkien fans) has, in many respects, done an admirable job in deciphering, editing, and presenting these texts. In other ways, though, I do miss Christopher Tolkien's hand. In The History of Middle-earth, Christopher Tolkien always provided great clarity as to the chronology and relations between texts, so far as those could be determined, and his commentary offered an excellent guide to the development and evolution of his father's ideas. In The Nature of Middle-earth, the ordering of the texts at times seems arbitrary, and it can be a little confusing - for instance, when a text from c. 1968 is presented in the midst of a large group of texts from c. 1959 without comment - and there is very little commentary on the development of ideas seen in the texts. Strange, too, is the appendix, where Hostetter provides citations from the texts grouped under various concept headings, with the express purpose of demonstrating that Tolkien's Legendarium is indeed a "fundamentally Catholic" work. Quite frankly, I don't know what this is doing here; it belongs in a paper in Tolkien Studies or another journal, not in a book whose purpose is to present Tolkien's writings, and I wish that the pages devoted to it had been used instead to offer some guidance as to the relations among the texts and the place of some of the ideas seen here within the wider corpus of Tolkien's Silmarillion material. But in saying this, I do not mean in any way to denigrate the good work that Hostetter has done, and I freely acknowledge that he had a difficult task, and that it's easy for me to criticicize.
(Incidentally, and this is in no way a criticism of the book at hand, can I just mention that it's slightly perverse that we now have many detailed tables of calculation of Elvish populations, presented down to every minor emendation and correction, and yet there are still passages of actual narrative from the Lost Tales that have never been published - and we still don't seem to have any prospect of getting Tolkien's verse translation of "Beowulf"?)
About half of the book is devoted to (and I realize this will sound ridiculously abstruse and esoteric to non-Tolkien fans) the numerous notes and tables wherein Tolkien tried to work out the consequences of his decision to change the Valian and Elven year from being equivalent to about 10 solar years to being equivalent to 144. In particular, he was trying to work out a chronology and a rate of Elvish growth and reproduction that would allow him to have a large enough population of Elves by the time they come into the stories. Much of this is very dry and repetitive, but in the course of working this stuff out, we see him arrive at a number of new ideas about the early parts of the story of the Silmarillion, particularly with regard to the awakening of the Elves and the Great March. The remainder consists of a variety of short texts on various subjects, many (or perhaps most) of them arising from etymological work on the Elvish languages - everything from Elvish death and reincarnation to which characters in The Lord of the Rings had beards.
Carl Hostetter (a name that will be familiar to serious Tolkien fans) has, in many respects, done an admirable job in deciphering, editing, and presenting these texts. In other ways, though, I do miss Christopher Tolkien's hand. In The History of Middle-earth, Christopher Tolkien always provided great clarity as to the chronology and relations between texts, so far as those could be determined, and his commentary offered an excellent guide to the development and evolution of his father's ideas. In The Nature of Middle-earth, the ordering of the texts at times seems arbitrary, and it can be a little confusing - for instance, when a text from c. 1968 is presented in the midst of a large group of texts from c. 1959 without comment - and there is very little commentary on the development of ideas seen in the texts. Strange, too, is the appendix, where Hostetter provides citations from the texts grouped under various concept headings, with the express purpose of demonstrating that Tolkien's Legendarium is indeed a "fundamentally Catholic" work. Quite frankly, I don't know what this is doing here; it belongs in a paper in Tolkien Studies or another journal, not in a book whose purpose is to present Tolkien's writings, and I wish that the pages devoted to it had been used instead to offer some guidance as to the relations among the texts and the place of some of the ideas seen here within the wider corpus of Tolkien's Silmarillion material. But in saying this, I do not mean in any way to denigrate the good work that Hostetter has done, and I freely acknowledge that he had a difficult task, and that it's easy for me to criticicize.
(Incidentally, and this is in no way a criticism of the book at hand, can I just mention that it's slightly perverse that we now have many detailed tables of calculation of Elvish populations, presented down to every minor emendation and correction, and yet there are still passages of actual narrative from the Lost Tales that have never been published - and we still don't seem to have any prospect of getting Tolkien's verse translation of "Beowulf"?)