Morgoth's Ring

This is not a narrative but an edition: a scholarly presentation of manuscript material, arranged and annotated by Christopher Tolkien, published in 1993 as the tenth instalment of the series he devoted to his father's papers. The volume is divided into five parts, each gathering a distinct group of texts rather than continuing a single story, and it is the first half of a pair — the material of the Elder Days that occupied Tolkien after The Lord of the Rings was finished was too large for one book, and the remainder went into the volume that followed a year later. The two are meant to be read together, and the editor says as much when explaining how the division was made. Readers who open it expecting a continuous history of the First Age will find instead drafts, annals, philosophical dialogue and speculative essays, printed in the order of their composition and their bearing on one another.

The editorial manner is sober and technical. Each text is introduced with an account of the manuscripts behind it, given a designation, dated where dating is possible, and followed by numbered commentary keyed to passages; variant readings, marginal notes and cancelled sentences are reported rather than smoothed away. Where his father left a matter unresolved, the editor sets out the alternatives and declines to choose for him. The prose of the commentary keeps its distance from the prose it discusses, so that the seams between draft and gloss remain visible on every page — an approach that makes the volume useful as evidence precisely because it refuses to be a finished book.

Its place in the legendarium is therefore secondary and evidential. Nothing printed here supersedes the narrative published in 1977; what it offers is the record of how that narrative was still being rethought late in Tolkien's life, including revisions that would have altered the framework of the whole had he carried them through. The audience is a reader who already knows the published account of the First Age and wants to see the work behind it. Taken by itself it will mislead; taken alongside the finished texts it shows how provisional their foundations remained.

The texts gathered in the volume were not written for it, and they did not come from one moment. Nearly all of them belong to the years after The Lord of the Rings was finished, when Tolkien turned back to the matter of the Elder Days with the intention of bringing it into a state fit for publication. The first sustained wave of that work falls around 1950 and 1951, and it produced, among other things, the Annals of Aman, a chronological framework for the years of the Trees written at the same season as the corresponding annals of Beleriand that were reserved for the companion volume. To these years also belongs the first phase of revision of the long prose Silmarillion, carried out on the manuscript that had been left standing since the later 1930s. The editor dates these campaigns from the paper, the typescripts and the relation of one text to another, and says where the dating is inference rather than record.

The cosmogonic opening has the longest and most tangled history of anything printed here, and the volume sets its forms side by side. An earlier text of the 1930s stands behind them all; a short-lived version of about 1946 recast the creation of the world on the assumption that it had always been round, and was then set aside; the later form of about 1948, revised again afterwards, is the one from which the published account descends. Because the round-world experiment was abandoned rather than cancelled, it survives as a separate document, and the editor prints it whole instead of reducing it to a footnote. The arrangement makes visible something that a single reading text would hide: that the shape of Arda was still an open question two decades after the story of its making had been written down.

A second and later phase of work, from the closing years of the 1950s and running into the 1960s, supplies the volume's last two parts and its most unsettling material. To about 1959 belongs the debate between Finrod and Andreth on death and the fate of Men, which Tolkien furnished with a commentary and an appended tale of his own; from the same period come the essays on marriage, naming and the fate of the slain among the Eldar that were attached to the revision of the Silmarillion. Later still are the loose speculative papers grouped as the final part, in which the sun and moon, the length of the Elvish year, the origin of the Orcs and the nature of Melkor's power are all reconsidered without any of the answers being carried through. One of those notes compares Melkor's dispersal of his strength into the substance of the world with what Sauron did in making his ring; the title of the book was taken from it, and is the editor's phrase for the whole argument rather than Tolkien's chapter heading.

The book itself appeared in 1993, ten years into the series that had begun in 1983 with the first part of the early Lost Tales, published in Britain by HarperCollins and in the United States by Houghton Mifflin. It is the tenth of twelve; the companion half of the post-1950 Silmarillion material followed in 1994 as The War of the Jewels, and the sequence closed in 1996. No revised edition has been made. The volume has been reprinted in paperback and taken up into collected issues of the series, but the text and commentary stand as they were set in 1993, so that references to part, text and note remain stable across printings. It has never been translated into German: of the whole series only the two parts of the Lost Tales exist in German, and the English title is therefore the correct form to cite in German-language work as well.

The book opens with a short foreword in which the editor explains what he has included and why, and how the material was split between this volume and its companion; there is no introduction of the discursive kind, and the reader is put into the first text within a few pages. What follows is arranged in five parts, each with its own editorial preface, and the parts stand in a sequence that is broadly one of subject rather than strict chronology of writing. Part One is given to the Ainulindalë, printed as a series of successive texts, each designated by a letter, with the differences between them set out in commentary rather than collapsed into a single reading version. Part Two contains the Annals of Aman, presented with the annal numbers as Tolkien wrote them and followed by a long note-by-note commentary in which the editor compares the entries with the corresponding passages of the prose narrative.

Part Three is the longest division and the structural centre of the book. It carries the later revisions of the long prose Silmarillion, and is itself divided into two phases of work, the first taken chapter by chapter through the opening matter of the legendarium, the second returning over some of the same ground with much heavier rewriting. The chapter titles and numbering follow those of the manuscript being revised, so that a reader who knows the published narrative can move between the two by chapter name. Attached to this part, rather than kept separate, are the essays that grew out of the second phase: the account of the case of Finwë and Míriel, and the extended treatise on the marriage customs, naming practices and mortality of the Eldar. The revision does not run to the end of the story here; it breaks off in the early Beleriandic chapters, and the remainder was reserved for the volume published the following year.

Part Four is a single work with its apparatus: the dialogue of Finrod and Andreth, followed by Tolkien's own commentary on it and, appended to that commentary, the short tale ascribed to Adanel concerning the early history of Men. Part Five gathers what would not fit anywhere else — a run of separate papers, numbered with roman figures and mostly untitled by their author, in which cosmology, the reckoning of time, the origin of the Orcs and the nature of Melkor's power are each taken up and left unfinished. Because these pieces are numbered rather than named, citation of them is by number, and the editor's headings are supplied. The apparatus at the back is slight for so technical a book: an index of names and topics, keyed to page, with the notes printed after each text instead of being collected at the end. Cross-references throughout point either to earlier volumes of the series by their short titles or to the companion half of this one.

The volume stands directly beneath the opening third of the narrative published in 1977. The account of the Music, the shaping of Arda, the coming of the Valar into the world, the making and the death of the Two Trees, the awakening of the Elves and the oath and flight of the Noldor all descend from the texts gathered here, and not from the older prose versions that earlier volumes of the series had printed. It therefore presupposes two things at once: a reader who knows the published Silmarillion well enough to notice where a sentence has shifted, and the earlier volumes in which the base manuscript of the later 1930s was set out, since the revisions printed here are revisions of that manuscript and are unintelligible without it. It also presupposes the whole design that Tolkien described to a publisher in 1951, in which the tale of the Silmarils, the fall of Númenor and the war of the Ring form one connected body of legend; the late work was an attempt to bring the first of these into agreement with the last.

Where it collides with the published account, the collisions are structural rather than incidental. The finished narrative keeps a flat world lit first by the Lamps and then by the Trees, with the Sun and Moon made afterwards from the last fruit and flower of Laurelin and Telperion, and bent into a globe only at the drowning of Númenor; the later material tests the alternative in which Arda was a sphere from the beginning and the Sun as old as it, which would leave the whole early chronology of the Trees without a foundation. The published book states, with an explicit reservation, that the Orcs were bred from Elves taken captive and marred by Melkor; the late essays reopen the question and reach no settled answer. The fate of the slain among the Eldar, treated briefly in the finished text as a passage to the halls of Mandos and a possible return, is worked out here into a doctrine with rules and hard cases, some of which the earlier telling cannot accommodate. Tolkien had already been pressed on the last two points by a correspondent in 1954, and his answers there show the difficulties were not new to him.

Some of its matter has no counterpart anywhere else. The judgement of the Valar on the death of Míriel and the second marriage of Finwë is present in the finished narrative only as a few sentences of event; here it becomes a case argued at length, and it is the fullest treatment in the legendarium of what death means for a people not made to die. The dialogue on hope and mortality between an Elvish king and a mortal woman likewise stands alone: the published text says plainly that death is the gift of Ilúvatar to Men, and the dialogue asks whether it can be received as one. The argument that gives the book its title belongs to the same late layer and reaches forward rather than back, setting Melkor's expenditure of himself into the very substance of Arda beside the smaller and more deliberate act by which Sauron put his power into a ring — a comparison that makes the First Age the precondition of the Third rather than its prologue.