The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two

The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two is not a work its author published but a work its author left behind: an edition of the earliest sustained prose mythology J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, drawn from manuscripts of the years around the First World War and set out by Christopher Tolkien with a scholarly apparatus running alongside. It completes the sequence opened in the first part, carrying the collection forward to the point where the project was abandoned rather than finished, and its bulk is divided between the recovered texts and the editor's discussion of them. None of the material was prepared for the press by the man who wrote it. Some of it is fully worked prose; some breaks off in mid-course; some survives only as compressed outlines and jotted alternatives, and the volume prints these as they stand rather than smoothing them into continuity.

The arrangement is regular and repeats itself from chapter to chapter. Each tale is given first in its own text, in the deliberately archaic and heavily ornamented manner Tolkien used at that period, and is then followed by a commentary in which the editor sets the early version beside the later forms of the same matter, marks where the story was afterwards altered or dropped, and identifies what can be dated. Numbered notes and a record of the changes of names in the manuscripts close each section. Reference matter stands at the end of the volume, including an account of the names used across both parts, which is at the same time an early witness to the two Elvish tongues as Tolkien had then devised them.

In the shape of the legendarium as a whole the book sits at the very beginning, before the verse of the following decade and long before the compendious prose that yielded the published Silmarillion; it also preserves the outer frame, the mariner who reaches the Elves and hears their history, which later disappeared. The narrative stance is therefore double: a tale told within a fiction of transmission, and around it an editor's cooler voice reconstructing how the fiction came to be written. Readers meeting this material for the first time will find it presupposes acquaintance with the later, settled versions, since the commentary argues throughout by comparison with them. The volume is addressed to those interested in how the mythology grew rather than to those wanting the story itself.

The composition of the tales gathered in this volume belongs to a narrow band of years at the close of the First World War. Tolkien began the cycle in 1916–17, and the story of the fall of Gondolin — the earliest of the long tales of the Elder Days to be written out at length — was set down while he was on sick leave from the army in 1917, a circumstance he recalled plainly, and without much elaboration, in letters written nearly forty years afterwards. Work went forward over the next few years and had reached its furthest extent by about 1920, at which point the sequence was laid aside with several of its intended parts unwritten and its close only sketched. He was then in his twenties, had published nothing of the mythology, and would publish none of it for the rest of his life.

What followed the abandonment was not silence but replacement. From the early 1920s onward Tolkien recast the same matter repeatedly — first in long alliterative and octosyllabic verse, then in successive prose summaries and expansions — so that the tales of this volume became the discarded first stratum of a structure rebuilt many times over. Christopher Tolkien, describing his father's method after his death, emphasised that the legendarium was subject to continual revision rather than steady accretion, and that the earliest forms were left standing in manuscript while the later ones diverged from them. Tolkien himself, in his long account of the cycle written to a publisher in 1951, presented it as the labour of decades constantly begun again. The published Silmarillion of 1977 drew on the latest strata, not on these; several episodes here have no counterpart in it at all.

The editorial recovery came later still. After the Silmarillion of 1977 and Unfinished Tales in 1980, Christopher Tolkien turned to a sequential publication of the drafts themselves, beginning with the first part of the Lost Tales in 1983 and following it with the second part in 1984, both from George Allen & Unwin. The division into two volumes was a matter of length rather than of the manuscripts, and the second completes what the first opens; the reference apparatus for the whole collection, including the account of the names, is placed at the end of this volume. The texts had to be established from notebooks in which pencil drafts were overwritten in ink, and the edition records that condition rather than concealing it.

A German translation by Hans J. Schuetz appeared with Klett-Cotta in the same rhythm as the English volumes, the first part in 1983 and the second in 1984, and the English text has since been reissued by HarperCollins without a revised edition displacing it. The series it opened continued at roughly annual intervals through the 1980s and ran to twelve volumes, concluding in 1996. Two of the tales printed here were afterwards given separate presentation: the story of Beren and the Elf-maiden in a volume of 2017, and that of the fall of the hidden city in one of 2018, each edited by Christopher Tolkien and each setting the earliest version at the head of a comparative sequence. Those late books reproduce material first made public in 1984 rather than adding to it, and the 1984 volume remains the place where the tales stand in their own order.

The body of the volume falls into six numbered chapters, set out in the order in which the tales are imagined to be told to the mariner rather than in the order of their writing. The first is the tale of Tinúviel, the earliest telling of Beren's quest for a Silmaril; the second, headed Turambar and the Foalókë, gives the story of Túrin and the dragon; the third is the fall of Gondolin; the fourth, called the Nauglafring, treats the making of the dwarves' necklace and the ruin that follows it in Doriath. These four are continuous narrative prose, and they carry the greater part of the volume's length. A reader looking for the earliest form of any one of the three great tales of the Elder Days will find it here and nowhere earlier, since the versions of the following decades are printed in the later volumes of the series.

The last two chapters are of a different kind and should not be approached as narrative. The fifth, on Eärendel, assembles what exists of a tale that was never written out: outlines, scattered notes on the voyages, and a group of short early poems on the mariner, given with what can be established of their dates and successive readings. The sixth, on Eriol or Ælfwine, is the place to look for the intended close of the whole collection and for the machinery of the outer story — the return of the Elves, the fading of the island, and its equation with England — none of which was carried beyond draft. Because the frame is opened in the first part and only wound up here, the two halves have to be read together at these points; the second volume assumes the setting established in the first without restating it.

A short foreword at the front states the principles of the edition and its relation to the preceding volume, and the reference matter for both parts stands at the back: the appendix on the names, followed by an index covering the tales, the outlines and the commentaries alike, which is in practice the fastest way into a book whose material is scattered across drafts. The commentaries are the connective tissue of the whole and serve as the finding-place for dates of composition, for the fate of a given episode in later writing, and for the manuscript state of each text; where a story was afterwards abandoned, that is said in the commentary rather than in the tale. Several strands given at length here — the version of the ruin of Doriath, and the whole of the closing frame — have no counterpart in the published Silmarillion, and the reader who tries to map the two books chapter against chapter will find the correspondence breaking down in the last third.

Three of the long narratives that the published Silmarillion carries as separate chapters — the winning of the Silmaril by Beren and Lúthien, the fate of the children of Húrin, and the fall of the hidden city — receive in this volume their first extended treatment, and in a proportion the later book reverses. In the 1977 volume they are episodes set into a compressed and largely annalistic history, subordinate to the account of the wars of Beleriand that surrounds them; in the early cycle they are the substance itself, and the surrounding history is thin and mostly unwritten. The fourth of the great matters, the voyages of Eärendil, which closes the published Silmarillion and supplies its resolution, had reached no narrative form in the early period at all. Anything the published book states about these four stories is therefore a settlement arrived at decades afterwards, and not a condensation of what stands here.

Where later writing overtook this material it did so unevenly, and the volume's standing differs from tale to tale. The story of Túrin was carried much further: the long version printed in Unfinished Tales, and the continuous text assembled from it in 2007, give the developed form, and the early telling survives chiefly as evidence of what the story looked like before its principal turns were fixed. The story of Tuor was not: the late narrative of his journey, also printed in Unfinished Tales, breaks off as he comes in sight of the city and never reaches the assault, so that the account written in 1917 remains the only complete one Tolkien ever produced. The ruin of Doriath falls between the two, since the published chapter tells that matter along quite different lines from the early text, and the reader who compares them is looking at two stories rather than two versions of one.

Of all this matter, only a little surfaces in the books Tolkien himself put into print, and it does so in the settled forms rather than the early ones. Aragorn tells the Elder Days story of the mortal man and the Elf-maiden to the hobbits on the road east of Bree, and at Rivendell verses on the mariner are sung in the hall; the descent of Elrond from that mariner and from that pair is set out in the genealogical matter appended to the third volume. These are the names and relations as they were finally fixed, and they diverge in spelling and in substance from what the earliest cycle contains. That divergence sets the volume's authority: it records an abandoned stage of the invention and has no standing against the published books where the two disagree. Its value lies in showing what the mythology looked like before its author had decided, which is a different thing from showing what the mythology is.