Unfinished Tales

Unfinished Tales is an edition rather than a book in the ordinary sense: a gathering of narratives and expository pieces that J. R. R. Tolkien left at various stages of incompletion, assembled and annotated by his son Christopher and published in 1980. The materials differ widely in condition. Some run for many pages as sustained narrative and then simply break off; others survive as late discursive essays, as competing versions of a single episode, or as little more than an outline with notes attached. The editor made no attempt to complete or reconcile them. Where the drafts disagree, the disagreement is printed and identified as such, so that a reader sees the material at the stage its author left it rather than a smoothed synthesis.

The collection is arranged by the internal chronology of the world it describes. Three parts correspond to the First, Second and Third Ages, while a fourth gathers pieces that belong to no single point in the story and are closer to reference matter than to tale-telling. Each item carries its own endnotes, and most are framed by editorial discussion of manuscript state, approximate date of composition, and relation to the published works. A map and a general index serve the whole. The effect is a double-voiced volume in which Tolkien's prose and his editor's apparatus alternate, typographically distinguished, with the reader expected to move between the two rather than to read straight through.

The book assumes prior acquaintance. It is addressed to readers who already know The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion and who want detail, variant and background rather than a first entry into the legendarium. Where The Silmarillion had been worked into one continuous narrative with its seams concealed, Unfinished Tales leaves the seams deliberately in view; it was the first posthumous volume to display editorial method openly, and in that respect it set the pattern for the long series of draft editions that followed. Within the legendarium it therefore occupies a middle position: nearer to finished form than the working papers, less settled than what Tolkien himself saw into print. The German edition bears the title Nachrichten aus Mittelerde.

The contents of Unfinished Tales have no single date of composition. They were written over some three decades, in different moods and for different purposes, and Christopher Tolkien's headnotes are largely concerned with placing each item in that long span. The account of Tuor's journey to Gondolin belongs to 1951, a fresh beginning on an old story made in the years when its author was returning to the Elder Days after finishing The Lord of the Rings; it breaks off at the moment the city comes into view and was never resumed. The long Túrin narrative, the Narn, belongs mainly to the later 1950s and after, and was taken up again more than once without ever being brought to a single continuous form. Other pieces are late in a stricter sense, written in the last years of Tolkien's life and often occasioned by a question of detail rather than by a wish to tell a tale.

A number of the later items grew directly out of the work of publication. Christopher Tolkien associates the earliest writing on the Wizards with the preparation of the Index to The Lord of the Rings in the mid-1950s, when a term used in the narrative had to be explained and the explanation ran well beyond what an index could hold. The retrospective account of how Gandalf came to send the Dwarves to Bag End was composed after the novel was complete and was meant for the appendices, but was set aside there for want of room; it survives in more than one version, of differing length. The same is true of several of the Third Age pieces, which begin as annotations on a date, a battle or a place-name in the published book and expand into narrative or into essay. The Second Age material stands somewhat apart: the tale of Aldarion and Erendis is the only extended story of Númenor before its fall, and it too was abandoned, its later course preserved only in summary.

The edition itself was made in the years after The Silmarillion appeared in 1977. That volume had required its editor to choose among versions and to write connecting matter, and had left untouched a great quantity of writing that could not be reduced to a single narrative. Christopher Tolkien states in his introduction that he doubted whether material of this kind ought to be published at all, and that his doubt concerned not its interest but the risk of presenting an unstable text as though it were settled. His answer was to print the pieces as they stood and to make the editorial situation explicit in each case. Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth was published in 1980 by George Allen and Unwin in London and by Houghton Mifflin in the United States. The German translation followed in 1983.

The book proved to be a beginning rather than a conclusion. Within a few years Christopher Tolkien had embarked on the long series that traced the legendarium's growth from its earliest form onward, and much that Unfinished Tales had presented in isolation was later set within that developmental account. Two of its central texts were also revisited in separate volumes: the Túrin material was recast as a single continuous narrative in 2007, and the 1951 Tuor fragment was reprinted in 2018 within a gathering of all the versions of the fall of Gondolin, in both cases by the same editor and with the earlier edition acknowledged. The text of Unfinished Tales itself has remained substantially as it was first issued. Later printings, including illustrated ones, reproduce the 1980 arrangement and commentary rather than revising them, so that the book has kept the form its editor gave it.

Part One holds only two items, both drawn from the wars of Beleriand. The first carries Tuor from Hithlum down to the western shore and inland again to the hidden valley, and stops at the moment the city is seen; the editor adds a short account of the shape the rest would have taken. The second is the Narn i Hîn Húrin, the extended telling of Túrin's life, printed with condensed editorial bridges where no continuous text existed and followed by a discussion of the state of the later chapters. Part Two opens not with a story but with a topographical account of Númenor — the shape of the island, its six regions, its harbours, its climate and its husbandry — to which a map redrawn by the editor is attached. There follow the tale of Aldarion and Erendis, whose remaining course is given in synopsis; a regnal list of the island's rulers with their dates; and the long assembled treatment of Galadriel and Celeborn, itself carrying a series of appendices on the Silvan Elves, the bounds of Lórien, a haven on the Gwathló, and the meaning of the two names.

Part Three gathers five pieces bearing on the Third Age and on the background of The Lord of the Rings. The first treats the ambush at the Gladden Fields in which Isildur fell and the Ring was lost, and closes with a note on Númenórean measures of length. The second explains in four movements how Gondor and Rohan came to be allied, beginning with the Northmen and the Wainriders and ending with the oath of Cirion and Eorl and with the tradition of Elendil's burial on the Halifirien. Then come the retrospective conversation about the errand to Bag End, already noticed above; an account of the Ringwraiths' search in Eriador, given with alternative versions and with a companion piece on Saruman's designs upon the Shire; and finally the campaign at the crossings of the Isen, to which is appended a description of how the Riders of the Mark were mustered and commanded.

Part Four abandons narrative almost entirely for three expository essays. One concerns the woodland people of Drúadan and the Púkel-men, and encloses a brief tale of a carved stone; one assembles what could be recovered about the Wizards, their coming, their number and the names given them in different tongues; and one draws together the scattered evidence about the seeing-stones, their properties and their several seats. Throughout the volume the apparatus is uniform: each item is followed by its own numbered notes, editorial matter is kept typographically apart from Tolkien's own prose, and an index of some length covers all four parts, glossing names as well as locating them. A general map stands at the end, derived from that of The Lord of the Rings and supplemented with places named in these texts. Because the ordering is chronological rather than thematic, a reader looking for a particular matter is best served by the index; the parts themselves answer the question of when, not of what.

Much of what the book contains has no counterpart anywhere else. For the Second Age it is in practice the only narrative source: apart from the reign-lists and the short retrospect given in the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings, nothing else follows Númenor through its long middle centuries, and the story of Aldarion and Erendis is the single extended tale set on the island before its ruin. The same is true of smaller subjects. The order of the Wizards, their number and their sending; the making and disposition of the seeing-stones; the woodland people who appear for a few pages in the march to Gondor — in each case the published works name the thing and leave it unexplained, and the explanation, such as it is, exists only here.

Where a subject does appear in the published books, the relation is one of expansion outward from a fixed point. The loss of Isildur's Ring, which the chronicle and the council's retrospect dispose of in a few sentences, becomes a detailed account of an ambush, with numbers, ground and motive supplied. The alliance summarised in the Appendix on the House of Eorl is traced back through generations of dealings with the Northmen and carried forward to the oath that founded Rohan. The essay on the seeing-stones begins from what the narrative shows of one of them and reasons outward to their sites and to the rules that governed their use. None of this stands on its own; every piece keeps the published text as its measure, and a reader who does not already hold that text will find the pieces unanchored.

The volume is also where the unsettled places of the legendarium become plainly visible, and the assembled treatment of Galadriel and Celeborn is the chief instance. Its several strands disagree about how and when Galadriel left the Blessed Realm and what part she took in the departure of the Noldor, and about Celeborn himself, who in one version is a kinsman of Thingol in Doriath, as the published Silmarillion has him, and in another an Elf of the Teleri who never dwelt in Beleriand at all. The editor prints the strands side by side and declines to arbitrate. Elsewhere the hesitation is smaller but of the same kind: the names given to the two emissaries who passed into the East are offered with an express caution that they are not secure.

For citation this encyclopedia places the book at the K2 layer, with The Silmarillion: posthumously edited matter, below what its author saw into print and above the working papers. Three consequences follow in practice. Where a statement here cannot be reconciled with The Lord of the Rings or its Appendices, the published book governs and the divergence is recorded rather than adopted. Where the material is fuller than the compressed Silmarillion chapters — as it is throughout the tales of Tuor and of Túrin — it is preferred for detail without thereby outranking them. And because the individual texts differ so widely in date and in finish, weight attaches to a passage according to what the editor says of its manuscript, not uniformly to the volume as a whole.

The introduction to the volume is in part an argument with its own expected readers. Christopher Tolkien sets out there the objection he took most seriously — that printing narratives their author had abandoned, in versions between which he had not chosen, risks lending a false solidity to what was never settled — and answers it by making the instability part of the presentation instead of concealing it. He also distinguishes two dispositions among readers of the invented world: those for whom its value lies in its unreached distances, and those who want the history, the geography and the languages set out in detail. The book is addressed to the second without any claim that the first is mistaken. The appearance of The Silmarillion three years earlier is treated as what had made the question a practical one rather than a theoretical one, since it had left a large body of writing outside the published narrative.

What can be documented of the book's reception is chiefly its printing history. It was issued simultaneously in British and American editions in 1980, went into paperback, and has been reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic since without alteration to its contents. Translations followed into the principal European languages; the German version came three years after the original, under a title that renders the sense of the material rather than the English wording, and one that consequently omits the reference to Númenor carried by the full English title. An illustrated edition, with paintings by Alan Lee, John Howe and Ted Nasmith, was published in 2020, again reproducing the 1980 text and commentary.

Its contents also reached readers who had not come to the collection itself. When the Túrin narrative was later issued as a continuous book, its preface was written for those who knew the Elder Days only by name, and it states expressly that the aim was to present the tale without the editorial apparatus that had surrounded it before. The same holds for the Tuor fragment, reprinted in 2018 within a volume devoted to the versions of the fall of Gondolin. In both cases the 1980 edition is named as the earlier home of the text, so that a body of writing first assembled for a specialist readership passed into books meant to be read straight through.