The Shaping of Middle-earth

The fourth of the twelve volumes in which Christopher Tolkien set out his father's unpublished writings, this book appeared in 1986 and carries a subtitle naming its three principal texts: the Quenta, the Ambarkanta and the Annals. It is a slim volume by the standards of the series, and it follows the working method established in the two preceding volumes. Each manuscript or typescript is printed as its own document, followed by a commentary keyed to numbered sections, in which the editor compares readings, records deletions and marginal additions, and argues the probable order and date of composition from the physical evidence of the papers themselves. Where a text exists in more than one state, the differences are set out rather than silently resolved, so that the reader is shown the evidence on which the editorial conclusions rest.

The contents are unusually varied in kind. Short prose pieces that continue the manner of the Lost Tales stand at the front; then come two connected attempts to tell the whole mythology in compressed form, the brief synopsis written in the mid-1920s and the fuller prose account that grew out of it. Alongside these narrative texts the volume prints material of quite different type: a description of the shape of the world, accompanied by the author's own diagrams and sections, and two sets of annals which set the same events out year by year rather than as a story. A reproduction and transcription of the earliest map of the northern lands is included, and an appendix treats a poem left aside from the main sequence. The reader therefore moves between synopsis, chronicle, cosmography and cartography within a single book.

Its place in the sequence is transitional. It stands between the early, expansive tales of the first two volumes and the long verse of the third on one side, and the later reworkings of the 1930s and after on the other, and it is here that the legends first take the condensed, chronicle-like shape that the published Silmarillion inherited. The book presupposes that knowledge: it addresses a reader who already knows the finished mythology and wishes to see how its parts were assembled, not one meeting Beleriand for the first time. The editorial voice throughout is cautious and unrhetorical, offering dating and interpretation as argument rather than assertion, and declining to fill gaps the manuscripts leave open.

The writings assembled in the book belong for the most part to the decade between the abandonment of the Lost Tales and the middle 1930s. The earliest of the connected accounts was set down in 1926 and had a practical occasion: Tolkien had sent the long alliterative poem on Túrin to R. W. Reynolds, who had taught him at school, and a short prose summary of the whole legendarium was needed if a reader coming fresh to the poem was to make sense of it. That synopsis was afterwards gone over and enlarged, so that the manuscript carries two layers of work rather than one, and the editor separates the layers in printing rather than presenting a single settled text. Out of it, at about the turn of the decade, grew the much longer prose narrative that is the only complete telling of the matter Tolkien ever brought to an end after the Lost Tales; the editor argues for 1930 from the evidence of associated papers and of the hand in which it is written.

The remaining pieces followed within a few years of that. The cosmological description, ascribed within the fiction to the loremaster Rúmil, belongs to the early 1930s and survives in more than one state, accompanied by diagrams and sections drawn by Tolkien himself. The two sets of annals were begun in the same period and were then turned into Old English as the work of the mariner Ælfwine, a labour carried some way and left unfinished; the Old English versions are printed beside the modern ones, since they occasionally preserve readings the English text has lost. The map of the western lands drawn in the same span of years was afterwards amended so often that the sheet became difficult to read, and it is therefore given both in reproduction and in transcription. An appendix takes up a poem whose earliest form goes back well before any of this, and which Tolkien reworked more than once before setting it aside.

Tolkien's own retrospective testimony bears on this period, though it was written some twenty years later. In the long letter to Milton Waldman of about 1951 he described the cycle as something that had been growing since his early manhood and that he had never composed as a book, but had let arise as a body of legend which he then rewrote again and again. He also recalled that when the mythology was offered to a publisher in the later 1930s it was not taken up, so that the compressed prose forms represented here remained wholly unpublished during his lifetime. That circumstance explains why the manuscripts survived in the states they did: nothing in the volume was ever brought to the settled condition that print would have imposed.

The book itself was published in 1986, by George Allen & Unwin in Britain and by Houghton Mifflin in the United States, some nine years after the appearance of the finished Silmarillion. It is the fourth instalment of a series begun in 1983, following the volume of the long poems, which had come out in 1985, and preceding the volume of the later 1930s writings, published in 1987. The pace was therefore close to one volume a year at this stage, and the editor's forewords make plain that the plan of the series was being settled as it went forward rather than fixed in advance. The series eventually ran to twelve volumes and was completed a decade later, in 1996.

The book has been reprinted in hardback and paperback and, after the publishing house that issued it was absorbed, has been kept in print by HarperCollins, latterly also in collected form with the neighbouring volumes of the series. No revised edition was made. Where the editor's conclusions here were later modified — a dating reconsidered, a sequence of manuscripts reordered — the correction appears in the course of a subsequent volume rather than in an amended text of this one, so the volumes must to some extent be read against each other. The later development of the texts printed here is likewise carried forward elsewhere: the prose narrative of 1930 is taken up in its expanded form in the fifth volume, and the annalistic tradition begun here is continued by the much fuller sets of annals printed in the tenth and eleventh.

The book falls into seven numbered divisions, preceded by a short foreword in which the editor sets out what the volume covers and how it stands in relation to those already published. The first division gathers the brief prose pieces that carry on directly from the Lost Tales; the second prints the compressed synopsis of the mythology; the third the longer prose account, which takes up more of the book than any other single item. The fourth division is given over to the earliest map of the western lands, the fifth to the description of the world's shape, and the last two to the annals of Valinor and the annals of Beleriand, in that order. An index of names closes the volume, as it does throughout the series.

The two appendices belong to the third division rather than to the book as a whole, and a reader looking for them at the end will not find them there: the first prints the surviving fragments of an Old English rendering of the prose account, the second the poem that stands outside the main sequence. The Old English versions of the annals are likewise placed inside their own divisions, immediately after the modern texts they render, rather than being collected apart. Sectional numbering is imposed on the synopsis and on the prose narrative alike, so that a passage in the one can be set beside its counterpart in the other without hunting; the numbering is the editor's device and has no authority in the manuscripts. Within the fifth division the diagrams and world-maps are reproduced in the body of the text at the points the description refers to them.

Because the volume is arranged by document rather than by story, no single division contains a given legend entire. The fall of the fortified city, the theft of the jewels, the departure of the exiles: each is told over again in the synopsis, in the longer narrative and in the two sets of annals, at differing lengths and with differing emphasis, so that a reader following one thread must move back and forth between four places. The commentaries supply the cross-references, both within the book and forward to the volumes that continue the same texts, and the index is in practice the quickest way in, since it collects the scattered mentions of a name under one head. The map division serves a comparable purpose for places, being the only point at which the geography of the period is shown as a whole.

Measured against the books that were printed in Tolkien's lifetime or prepared for print after his death, the volume occupies the ground between the mythology as a private growth and the mythology as a finished object. The long prose account written about 1930 is the last point at which the whole matter of the Elder Days stood complete in a single telling brought to an end by the author himself; what came afterwards was expansion, displacement and abandonment. The Silmarillion published in 1977 is therefore not simply a later state of that account but a text assembled from writings of many dates and degrees of finish, as its editor set out plainly at the front of the book, and as the introduction to the volume of unfinished pieces that followed it explains at greater length. The fourth volume thus supplies the last coherent whole lying beneath a constructed one, and a good deal of the published book's chapter order, its proportions and its habit of rapid summary can be followed back to it.

The annalistic manner has a counterpart among the published works, though not a descendant. The chronological tables appended to The Lord of the Rings set events out year by year in the same dry register, and the reader who has met them will recognise the method at once. The resemblance is one of habit rather than of derivation: the yearly entries printed here were made before the later book was begun, which by Tolkien's own retrospective account was not until the closing years of the 1930s. Nothing in them anticipates the Third Age, and the matters that dominate the later book — the Ring, the hobbits, the war in the south — have no place in this stratum at all. What the annals do supply is the frame of dates on which the later chronology of the First Age was built.

The cosmological description has no published counterpart whatever, and this is where the volume most clearly parts company with the received account. The story of the drowning of Númenor records the outcome — the seas bent, the shape of the world altered, the ancient West withdrawn beyond mortal reach — but nowhere sets out the symmetrical world of enclosing seas, airs and outer walls that the change was understood to undo. Tolkien himself, writing to correspondents about the Númenórean legend, treated that alteration as one of its central points rather than as a detail of scenery. The cosmography preserved here is accordingly presupposed by the published books without being described in them, and it was itself later abandoned for a quite different scheme, so that it stands as neither the final nor the discarded conception but the one on which the surviving narratives silently rest.

Some of the material gathered here has since been made available in a second arrangement. The separately issued volumes devoted to the tale of Beren and to the fall of the hidden city print the successive versions of a single legend in order of composition, so that the compressed prose forms of this period can be read within the growth of one story rather than as documents of one decade. The volume given to the children of Húrin takes the opposite course, offering a continuous narrative and leaving the variant states aside. Read together with those books, the fourth volume shows what the story-by-story presentation must omit: the moment at which the legends were made to stand as a single connected whole.