The Road Goes Ever On and On

I love J. R. R. Tolkien. And I join others similarly enamored in saying that the only problem with The Lord of the Rings is that it isn’t long enough. So I extend my deepest admiration and thanks to his son Christopher for devoting his life to working through the good professor’s mountains of notes and palimpsested drafts in order to give us more of Middle Earth. The Silmarillion is my second favorite book, so for that alone I owe Christopher Tolkien a huge debt of gratitude.

I don’t need everything he’s published in the last forty years, though; the two volumes of Lost Tales, which promised to give me a longer Silmarillion, only confused me by the variant stories and names. And I don’t begin to want to read the most recent additions to “The History of Middle Earth” providing early drafts of The Lord of the Rings. But the world is a better place after the publication of the extended version of the tragic saga of The Children of Hurin. And what Tolkien fan wouldn’t treasure the fragments of The Lost Road, in which the medieval Saxon Ælfwine discovers the Straight Road leading to the Blessed Realm (hidden from mortals after the Valar made the world round at the fall of Númenor) and writings that show the connections between Sindarin and Old English? I’m blessed just to know that Elendil = Ælfwine = Alvin = elf friend.

This month I reread the first of Christopher’s collections of fragments and drafts after The Silmarillion: the Unfinished Tales. It was published in 1991, long before Christopher started numbering his volumes with roman numerals as if they were Super Bowls or Chicago albums. It had been, as the math tells me, twenty-nine years since I read the book, and I had forgotten almost everything. The memory that stood out the most clearly was mostly inaccurate. But I was in a the bliss of Valinor all over again as I reread it.

First of the many highlights in the book, I have to mention the extended version of Gandalf’s explanation for why he sent a hobbit with dwarves to kill Smaug, and what exactly any of it had to do with defeating Sauron. The little story was Tolkien’s means of retrofitting The Hobbit, which he wrote before he had ever conceived of the importance of the ring Bilbo obtains from Gollum, let alone imagining the Lord of said Ring, into the narrative logic of the great trilogy. Did he ever mean to publish the fragment, or was it only for his own satisfaction?

The book also contains such gems as an essay on the background of the Wizards, which reveals some of the reason Radagast the Brown had so little to do with anything everyone else saw as important. There’s also a geographical description of the island of Númenor and a story about the origin of the palantiri. Confusing but fascinating were the many versions of the tale of Galadriel. Apparently, Tolkien tried late in his life to work out the details of a story in which Galadriel’s struggles with conformity were revealed. Whether she merely refused to cooperate with the elves at the end of the First Age or actually committed some perfidy, Tolkien developed the idea that she had lived for centuries afterwards with guilt and shame and self-doubt. The touching scenario, in any of the five or six versions offered, explains so much about the scene with Frodo at the scrying pool! The story of Aldarion and Erendis is beautifully melancholy, but what I remembered as the central image of Erendis staring hopelessly out to sea doesn’t happen until the last sentence of the last editorial endnote. (Women should not marry sailors – or musicians.)

But this time, for me, the best part of Unfinished Tales was the extended story of Tuor. This hero gets far fewer pages in The Silmarillion than his cousin Turin, but I think his story is even better. Tuor befriends Ulmo, the Vala of the Waters, and is led by swans to find a magic shield. He’s given a divine task of warning Turgon. He lives incognito with bandits for a while. Maybe it’s all the ways in which Tolkien draws from the Arthurian legends here that attracts me so much. Sadly, though, this Unfinished Tale ends just when Tuor gets to the hidden city of Gondolin. (The description of the hidden path’s seven successive gates is by itself enough to sell me on this truncated story.)

But, like discovering the warming appearance of Eärendil in a cold evening sky, I now find that Christopher Tolkien, still hard at work, has only two years ago published a polished version of the complete tale of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin. I’ll start hinting to my family now that I will be as happy as a hobbit with a full larder if I could start reading that book on December 25.