J.R.R. Tolkien and Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth

One of the oldest stories in J.R.R. Tolkien's literary experiments, the tale of the great Mannish hero Hurin and his fate-crossed children goes all the way back to the mythology for England in The Book of Lost Tales. Through the years, Tolkien revised and reinvented the characters and the story. The second version of the tale was a very long epic poem, called "The Lay of the Children of Hurin".

Hurin and his son Turin Turambar became important figures in the Silmarillion mythology, and when Tolkien devised the Middle-earth mythology for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Hurin and Turin were drawn into the larger mythology.

The stories of Hurin and Turin were told only in abbreviated form in The Silmarillion. A much larger text, called "Narn i Chin Hurin", was nearly completed when J.R.R. Tolkien died in 1973. Those portions of the story which Christopher did not use in The Silmarillion were included in Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth.

However, in 2007 the full tale will be published in a single narrative form in The Children of Hurin, a long-awaited amalgamation of the various Turin texts, including "The Wanderings of Hurin" from The War of the Jewels.

Until now, only Douglas Anderson -- editor of The Annotated Hobbit, has provided the Tolkien scholarly community with a substantial resource for studying The Hobbit. But the late Taum Santoski started the task of assembling a narrative history of the texts composed for The Hobbit in a style similar to Christopher Tolkien's The History of Middle-earth.

Upon Santoski's death it fell to John Rateliff to complete the task. But Rateliff, like Tolkien before him, has had many other obligations and concerns. Now, more than ten years later, his work is nearly finished and fans eagerly await the publication of The History of The Hobbit, which is expected to comprise two volumes.

Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth marked the beginning of the transition in Christopher Tolkien's career from collaborator with his late father to editor and annotator. Realizing that The Silmarillion would raise many questions to which some answers existed, as well that its inconsistencies would inspire criticism and curiosity, Christopher had already decided to publish as much of his father's unfinished papers and notes as could be orchestrated in a sensible manner.

What neither the reading public nor even the growing community of Tolkien scholars knew -- and which Christopher himself underestimated at first -- was that a huge amount of material regarding Middle-earth and the mythologies that preceded it lay buried in disorganized boxes. J.R.R. Tolkien had sold many of his papers to the archive at Marquette University in America, but many more works which Tolkien only created after the sale resided with Christopher.

Unlike The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales did not represent an effort to approximate J.R.R. Tolkien's vision of a specific book. Nonetheless, many of the narratives and incomplete stories that Christopher included in the book were, most likely, written after The Lord of the Rings' publication with the express intention of comprising a "companion volume" that would have revealed more about Middle-earth and explained many of the obscure details referred to in both The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.

Through subsequent scholarship it has become evident that by the late 1960s J.R.R. Tolkien had wanted to create a set of four books: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and a Middle-earth companion volume. But the task was too big. It had become monumental, and in an interview recorded for a 1992 Centenniel celebration of his late father's birthday, Christopher Tolkien concluded that "it had simply become too big...he was too tired. Too old, too tired." J.R.R. Tolkien could never hope to give substance to his vision. But Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth reveals something of what J.R.R. Tolkien wanted to say further about Hobbits and Middle-earth.

The History of Middle-earth

The large quantity of preliminary materials -- including abandoned texts and essays, partially completed stories, anecdotes, and early versions of manuscripts -- pertaining to Middle-earth and the several mythologies that predated it would have lain dormant in various archives had Christopher Tolkien not set out to retell the story of The Silmarillion as his father had developed it.

Going all the way back to the beginning of his father's literary career, Christopher Tolkien finailly published the mythology J.R.R. Tolkien had created for England, The Book of Lost Tales. Alluded to in a few letters and interviews, this mythology proved to be the uneven seed from which sprang many later tales and characters. But nearly all that is associated with Middle-earth's compelling stories is missing from this mythology: there are no Hobbits, no Numenoreans, no Wizards (Istari) or Rings of Power, not even landscapes, histories, and peoples that are so thoroughly yet briefly documented in the appendices and essays included in The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth.

The Lays of Beleriand documents an intermythos period in Tolkien's career, when he redefined and reshaped the stories of Hurin and his children and of Beren and Luthien. These two lays, long epic poems, created a new world -- Beleriand -- which had no place in England nor even in an imaginary prehistoric Europe. They were simply poetic vignettes of a fantastic landscape and creatures. But J.R.R. Tolkien still nourished the hope of creating a mythology, even though he would no longer dedicate it to England.

The Shaping of Middle-earth leads the reader through J.R.R. Tolkien's early attempts to define and describe a mythological prehistory, the world of Beleriand from the two lays expressed in narrative form. Tolkien drew upon his skill as a linguist and literary scholar to create a body of literature that explained this mythical world in terms that a modern, scientific society could understand. His avocation was to create a philological mythology driven by two Elven languages of his own design. Language and history were intertwined in Tolkien's philological point of view. They were inextricably joined together, one affecting the other.

In The Lost Road and Other Writings, the early phase of Tolkien's mythological expression was completed by the mid-1930s, when he wrote what would become the most complete and polished form of a Silmarillion narrative. The narrative was to be supported by several supplemental texts, of which some had been written but only in seminal form. And yet, while he worked on the Silmarillion mythology, Tolkien's inventive mind had already begun devising new, unrelated worlds for Atlantis, Hobbits, and other topics. Some of these worlds were destined to be brought together in a new mythology.

The next four books were devoted primarily to revealing how The Lord of the Rings took shape in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The Return of the Shadow, The Treason of Isengard, The War of the Ring, and Sauron Defeated were eventually republished as a separate set of books called The History of The Lord of the Rings.

The next two books, Morgoth's Ring and The War of the Jewels, documented J.R.R. Tolkien's post-Lord of the Rings attempts to redefine and rewrite The Silmarillion and associated texts in a form that would be compatible with his exploding vision of Middle-earth. All the pieces were in place, but they needed to be refined and polished. Despite several attempts to start the process, Tolkien nonetheless became distracted by other matters, including the various texts that eventually became The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, The Road Goes Ever On, and Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth.

And in 1965 Tolkien had to take time from his overburdened schedule to revise both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In doing so, he nearly rewrote The Hobbit completely, a process that will be documented in The History of The Hobbit by John Rateliff (continuing the work of the late Taum Santoski). These tasks, as well as Tolkien's growing desire to completely revise the entire Middle-earth mythology to make it more scientifically acceptable, sealed the doom of The Silmarillion. It would never be completed in any form compatible with the Middle-earth mythology.

The final volume in this series, The Peoples of Middle-earth, revealed at last the early drafts of the texts that became the appendices to The Lord of the Rings as well as companion essays that Christopher Tolkien had alluded to. This book also included both versions of the incomplete narrative of a proposed sequel to The Lord of the Rings, The New Shadow. But in a final transitionary step, Christopher also include a text called "The Shibboleth of Fëanor". This linguistic essay, loaded with historical narrative data about Fëanor family and early history, foreshadowed the subsequent publication by the Elvish Linguitsic Society of yet more linguistic material Tolkien had composed for his own use and satisfaction regarding Middle-earth and its languages.