The Peoples of Middle-earth

The Peoples of Middle-earth closes the twelve-volume series in which Christopher Tolkien set out his father's unpublished writings on Middle-earth, and it appeared in 1996, some three decades after the last of the works J.R.R. Tolkien himself saw into print. It is not a narrative book. What it offers is an edition: manuscripts and typescripts, presented in a chosen order, dated where dating is possible, and surrounded by the editor's account of how each stood in relation to the others. The material is grouped into parts of markedly different character, from the long treatment of the prologue and appendices of The Lord of the Rings to a set of later essays and two abandoned beginnings of stories, so that the volume reads less as a single argument than as a final gathering of what remained.

The voice throughout is the editor's, and it is a deliberately restrained one. Christopher Tolkien describes the physical state of a paper, reports what was written over an erasure, and marks where his father changed a name or a date; judgements are given as judgements, and uncertainty is left standing rather than resolved for the reader's convenience. Passages of the drafts are set out in full and then discussed, with numbered notes carrying the detail that would clog the commentary. The effect is documentary: the book is arranged to let a reader follow the movement of composition, not to smooth it into a finished shape.

It therefore assumes a reader who already knows the published works well enough to feel where a draft diverges from them, and who is willing to hold The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion in mind while reading around them. Within the legendarium the volume occupies a position outside the story rather than inside it: nothing here supersedes the books Tolkien completed, and much of it records paths he did not take. Its interest lies in showing the published texts as the outcome of long labour, and in preserving the late thinking that had no other home.

The papers assembled in the volume were not written as a body and do not share a date. The earliest layer belongs to the years in which The Lord of the Rings was being finished and prepared for press: the prologue went through a long series of forms, and the appendices were still being drafted, cut and rearranged while the earlier volumes were already printed, so that the third volume, which carried them, did not appear until 1955. Christopher Tolkien sets out the successive states of the prologue, of the note on languages and of the genealogical tables, and follows the tale of years through versions that differ from the printed text in dates as well as in wording. Attached to this part is the register of the heirs of Elendil, a chronicle of the kings and chieftains that was never published in that form and that supplied much of what stands compressed in the appendix on the realms in exile.

A second and much later layer consists of essays written in the last decade of Tolkien's life, most of them after 1968 and some belonging to his final years. These include the discussion of the long association of Dwarves and Men, the essay on the sound-change in the name of Fëanor's house and the quarrel it marks, the argument over the element ros, and a group of short pieces on Glorfindel, on Círdan and on the order of wizards that Christopher Tolkien prints as last writings. Dating this material is itself part of the editorial work, since much of it is undated: the evidence is the paper, the typewriter used, the state of the handwriting, and the relation of one text to another. Where a date can only be approximate the editor says so, and where two pieces cannot be ordered with confidence he leaves the question open.

Between these layers stand the two pieces given as the teaching of Pengoloð, on the changing of the Elvish tongues and on the waybread of the Eldar, which belong with the linguistic and antiquarian writing of the years around the completion of The Lord of the Rings. The volume ends with two narratives that were broken off. The first is the opening of a story set in Gondor in the reign of Eldarion, a century or so after the fall of Sauron, which Tolkien began not long after his great book was published and then abandoned; he explained afterwards in a letter that the tale would have become a thriller about conspiracy and boredom in a time of peace, and that he did not think it worth writing. The second is the tale of Tal-Elmar, seen from the side of the men of Middle-earth who watch the ships of Númenor come to their coast, which likewise stops before its story is under way.

The book itself was published in 1996 by HarperCollins in London and by Houghton Mifflin in Boston, thirteen years after the series had opened in 1983 and two years after the volume on the wars of Beleriand. In the foreword Christopher Tolkien explains why it closes the sequence: material he had once meant to treat at length is given briefly or set aside, the linguistic writings in particular are represented only in part, and the scale of the whole had grown far beyond what he first intended. He notes the help of Charles Noad, who read the texts, and supplies an index in the manner of the preceding volumes. Later printings, in paperback and in the collected reissues of the series, reproduce the text of 1996 rather than revising it, so that the volume stands as it was first set out, without a second edition to alter its readings or its dating.

The book falls into four parts of very unequal length, set between a foreword at the front and an index at the back, with the chapters running in one continuous numbered sequence rather than beginning again within each part. Part One is by far the largest and follows, in the main, the order of the material it explains: the prologue comes first, then the appendix on languages, the family trees, the calendars, the history of the Akallabêth, the tale of years of the Second Age, the heirs of Elendil, the tale of years of the Third Age, and finally a long chapter on the making of Appendix A, which is broken into sections dealing in turn with the realms in exile, with Aragorn and Arwen, with the house of Eorl and with the line of Durin. A reader tracing a particular passage in the back matter of The Lord of the Rings will as a rule find it under the chapter that carries the corresponding name, and the Númenórean material is placed here, rather than among the mythological writings, because of its bearing on that chronicle.

The three later parts are shorter and are ordered by kind rather than by date. Part Two collects the late essays, among them the discussion of Dwarves and Men, the piece on the shibboleth of Fëanor, the argument about the element ros, and a group of short notes given together as last writings. Part Three holds the two texts attributed to the loremaster Pengoloð, on the changing of the Elvish tongues and on the waybread. Part Four consists of the two narratives that were begun and left off. Because the arrangement is by category, a chronological reading is not possible from the table of contents alone; the dating is supplied in the editor's introductions to the individual chapters, and a reader who wants the sequence of composition must assemble it from those.

Within a chapter the shape is constant: an introductory account of the manuscripts, the text or texts printed with the editor's interventions marked, a commentary, and numbered notes gathered at the end rather than at the foot of the page. Several chapters carry appendices of their own, attached to the chapter and not to the volume, which take up matter too long for the notes — the names in Finwë's house, for instance, or the languages of the Atani. Earlier volumes of the series are cited by their numbers, so that a cross-reference sends the reader out of the book as often as within it. The index is a single alphabetical sequence of names with some subject entries, and it is the practical way into the volume, since the chapter titles do not always announce what a chapter contains. There are no maps and no facsimile plates here, the genealogical tables being printed inside the chapter that discusses them; unlike some of the earlier volumes, this one offers no illustrative apparatus beyond the texts themselves.

The book's centre of gravity lies against The Lord of the Rings, and against its back matter above all. Its first and longest part presupposes the printed appendices as the settled form: where a draft chronology gives a different year for the founding of a realm or the death of a king, it is the published tale of years that holds, and the earlier figure has interest only as evidence of how the final one was arrived at. The same is true of the genealogies and of the account of speech and writing, which reached print in a compressed and reordered state after much cutting. A reader who lifts a date from the drafts and sets it beside the appendices will often find the two at odds, and the disagreement is not an error to be adjudicated; the volume documents the book, it does not correct it.

The relation to the Silmarillion of 1977 is less easily stated, since that book is itself an edited construction and not a text Tolkien released. Several of the late essays gathered here were written after the drafts from which it was assembled, and in places they contradict it directly. The clearest instance concerns the youngest sons of Fëanor: the published narrative keeps both alive until the attack on the Havens of Sirion, where they fall, whereas a late essay has one of them burnt with the ships at Losgar and so never come to Beleriand at all. A second turns on the second element in the name of Elrond's brother, which the published book uses without explanation and which Tolkien in his last years tried more than once to account for, changing the derivation as he went. Neither disagreement was resolved before his death.

A third relation runs to Unfinished Tales, which had already published late writing of much the same kind sixteen years earlier and had set the pattern for printing an essay with a note on its date and state. The account of the order of wizards given there names its members and assigns them their errands in the West; the short notes at the close of the present volume come back to the question, give two of them other names and a different task, and leave the matter unsettled rather than fixed. The case of Glorfindel is comparable. The fall of Gondolin as published has an elf-lord of that name die covering the flight from the city, while the lord who rides against the Nine at the Ford is met in Rivendell long ages after; no book Tolkien published joins them, and the late notes argue an identity that the printed texts leave looking like a repetition of a name.

What layer, then, does the volume carry? Not that of the finished books, and not that of the constructed ones either. Its contents are drafts and private arguments, and their authority is the authority of witness: they show what Tolkien held at a given date, not what obtains in the world he made. Tolkien's own letters stand in a similar relation — they explain intention, etymology and design, and he said plainly there that he had meant the body of legend to remain open at the edges, a thing others might work in. Where the volume does tell something first, it is usually matter the finished books never reach, such as the long dealings of Dwarves with Men or the customs by which the Eldar gave and altered names, and there it has no rival but also nothing to be measured against.

Because the book came out as the last member of a numbered series, its circulation has been bound up with that of the eleven volumes before it. It has been kept available in hardback and in paperback, and it was gathered with the rest of the sequence into collected issues, among them a set that reprints all twelve texts in three large volumes. A separate index to the series as a whole was added afterwards, so that a name can be followed across the twelve books without opening each in turn; the individual index printed here remains the only guide within the single volume. In scholarly use the book is cited by its number in the series rather than by title alone, a convention the series itself established and which the earlier volumes had already fixed.

The book has not been translated into German. Of the whole series only the two parts of the Book of Lost Tales were put into German, by Klett-Cotta, and the volumes that follow them, this one included, were left in English; the English title is therefore also the form under which the book is named in German writing, and no German edition exists to supply an alternative. This is worth stating plainly, since the two published works it chiefly documents, the appendices of The Lord of the Rings and the matter behind The Silmarillion, are both long established in German, and a reader who knows those translations will find no counterpart for the drafts.

Its effect has been felt less in general reading than in the editing that followed it. The linguistic papers that the foreword sets aside as beyond the scope of the series were left to other hands, and late writing of the same kind that had found no place in the twelve volumes was afterwards gathered and edited by Carl F. Hostetter and published in 2021. Christopher Tolkien's own later books took a different form: rather than continuing the series he issued three single tales, in 2007, 2017 and 2018, each assembling one story from material he had already presented in draft. The present volume thus marks the end of one editorial method and stands as the point of reference for the textual history of the appendices.