The War of the Jewels

The War of the Jewels is not a story but an edition. It presents Tolkien's later writings on the Elder Days in the state in which he left them, each text introduced, dated where dating is possible, and followed by numbered commentary keyed to passages in the text just printed. The book is arranged in four principal parts, closing with a long index of the kind that had become standard in the series; the material ranges from continuous annalistic and narrative prose through unfinished chapters to discursive linguistic and antiquarian essays, so that the reader moves between quite different registers within a single volume. It is the companion and continuation of the preceding volume, the two together covering the body of work Tolkien devoted to the matter of Beleriand after The Lord of the Rings was finished, and the division between them is one of editorial convenience rather than of subject.

The editorial voice is that of a scholar handling his father's papers in public. Christopher Tolkien writes in the first person, marks the boundary between manuscript evidence and his own inference, records where a reading is uncertain or a leaf displaced, and does not smooth away contradiction. A recurring concern is the relation of these late papers to the published Silmarillion of 1977: the commentary points out, without apology and sometimes at length, where the constructed text departed from what its sources actually said, and why. The result is a book that documents an editorial history as much as a fictional one, and that asks to be read with the earlier published works open alongside it.

Its intended reader is accordingly not a newcomer. The volume assumes familiarity with the shape of the First Age narrative and with the conventions of the series, and it addresses those who wish to see how the tradition grew and what it cost to reduce it to a single finished form. Within the sequence it stands at the end of the Beleriand strand, the last place where the older legends are treated at length before the series turns to the later ages of Middle-earth.

The writings gathered in the volume belong overwhelmingly to a single stretch of Tolkien's working life, the years immediately after The Lord of the Rings was brought to completion. Having laid the long book aside about 1949, he turned back to the legends of the Elder Days and began, in 1950 and 1951, a concerted attempt to bring them into a form fit to stand beside it; the letter of 1951 in which he set out the relation of the two works to a prospective publisher belongs to exactly this moment. The annalistic account of Beleriand printed as the first part of the book, and the first campaign of revision upon the older Quenta, are products of that push. The effort was interrupted rather than finished: once The Lord of the Rings went into production between 1952 and 1955, the Elder Days waited.

A second and more scattered phase followed in the later 1950s, and it is here that the character of the material changes. The renewed work on the Quenta did not proceed as a steady rewriting from beginning to end but stopped, doubled back, and turned aside into questions of history, chronology and language; the long essay on the names and speech of the Elves that closes the book is placed by its editor at the end of that decade, on the evidence of the papers rather than on any date in Tolkien's hand. The narrative of Húrin's later wanderings, and the successive attempts at a tale of years for the First Age, belong to the same broad period. None of it was carried to a finished state, and no single text of the whole was ever established by its author.

The publishing history of these papers is therefore an editorial one, and it runs in stages. Parts of them were drawn upon for the constructed Silmarillion of 1977; three years later, in 1980, a further selection of longer pieces appeared, among them the tale of the children of Húrin as far as its editor then judged it printable, so that the account of Húrin's wanderings after his release stood over. In 1983 the series of manuscript volumes began with the earliest Lost Tales, and worked forward chronologically through the drafts of the great poems, the middle Silmarillion texts and the whole composition of The Lord of the Rings. Only at the tenth and eleventh volumes did it reach the post-1950 Elder Days material, which was divided between them, the first appearing in 1993.

The volume itself was published in 1994, by HarperCollins in London and by Houghton Mifflin in Boston, and closes with an index made to serve both halves of the divided material rather than this book alone. Two years later a twelfth volume brought the series to an end, turning from Beleriand to the later ages and to the apparatus of the published novel. Reprints have followed, singly and within collected issues of the series, but no revised edition has been made, and the 1994 arrangement of parts, commentary and index is the one cited. The book has never been translated into German: of the twelve volumes only the two earliest, containing the Lost Tales, exist in German, so that the English title remains the correct form of reference in German-language writing as well.

The first part prints the annalistic text known as the Grey Annals, a year-by-year chronicle of Beleriand written in the early 1950s to replace the older annals of the 1930s. It runs from the earliest reckonings of the Elder Days through the return of the Noldor, the long siege of Angband and its breaking, and forward into the years of the Nirnaeth and after, before breaking off unfinished in the course of the story of Túrin. Where the annals swell into continuous narrative that duplicates the fuller tale of the children of Húrin printed elsewhere, the editor abridges and sends the reader across rather than setting the same matter twice. This is the part to consult for chronology and for the sequence of events, since it is the only text in the book that attempts to hold the whole First Age in a single frame.

The second part continues the revision of the Quenta Silmarillion from the point at which the preceding volume left it, keeping the chapter numbering unbroken across the two books. It opens with the chapter on Men, and takes in the description of Beleriand and its realms, the establishment of the Noldorin princedoms, Turgon and the founding of Gondolin, the coming of Men into the West, and the ruin of Beleriand. Revision grows thinner as it advances: the later chapters, including those on Beren and Lúthien and on the fall of the hidden cities, were scarcely touched, and are represented by brief texts and editorial account rather than by finished prose. A reader tracing how a particular chapter of the 1977 book came to look as it does will find the evidence here.

The third part gathers writings that stood outside the Quenta altogether. The longest is the account of Húrin's wanderings after his release, chiefly among the Men of Brethil, which is the most substantial piece of continuous late narrative in the volume; with it stand a short piece on the supposed Elvish author of the tale of Húrin's children and its transmission, a late reworking of the story of Maeglin, a note on Ents and Eagles, successive drafts of a tale of years for the First Age, and a fragmentary account of the battles of Beleriand. These are miscellaneous in kind and uneven in length, and are best approached singly.

The fourth part consists of one long essay on the names of the Elvish peoples and on the divisions and history of their tongues, with attached discussions that extend to the speech of the Valar and to the naming of other kindreds. Appended to it is a short legend of the awakening of the first Elves, told in the manner of a tale rather than an analysis, which is often read on its own. The essay is the principal linguistic document of the book, and readers who come for philology rather than narrative will spend most of their time in these pages.

Measured against the finished books, the volume stands at the far edge of the tradition: it holds the latest state Tolkien reached in several matters of the Elder Days, and in a few of them it is the only extended treatment there is. The published Silmarillion tells its story with the annalistic scaffolding taken away, so that the reader follows a sequence of events without seeing the years that carried them; the chronicle printed here restores that framework and shows how the siege, its breaking and the disasters that followed were spaced out in the reckoning Tolkien kept for himself. The same is true of Húrin after his release from Angband. The narrative of the children of Húrin, whether in the collected form of 1980 or in the separate volume that later grew from it, closes with the deaths at Cabed-en-Aras and does not go on; the ruin that Húrin then carried into Brethil and Doriath is given in the finished Silmarillion in a few compressed pages, and at length nowhere else.

What the book presupposes is the settled outline it keeps circling. A reader who does not already know the coming of the Noldor, the founding and loss of the hidden realms and the end of the Silmarils will find no continuous story here to supply them, since the texts begin and break off according to where Tolkien's attention went. The linguistic part in particular assumes a good deal from elsewhere: the division of the Eldar into three kindreds, the distinction between the High-elven tongue and the speech of Beleriand, and the sense in which the Grey-elves were a people apart are all sketched in the appendix on languages that Tolkien himself published, and the late essay works outward from that ground rather than laying it. Its value lies in giving the reasoning and the internal history behind terms that the finished works use without explanation.

Where it disagrees with the published narrative, the disagreement is of a particular kind, and worth stating precisely. The Silmarillion of 1977 is an edited construction, assembled from texts of many dates, and its editor said so from the beginning; the papers gathered here are working drafts that were never brought to a settled form. Neither side of a conflict therefore carries the author's final word, and the most consequential case is the fall of Doriath, for which no late text existed at all: the chapter as printed was built out of much older material and out of editorial decision, and the volume acknowledges this openly rather than defending it. Elsewhere the divergences are smaller but numerous, touching the shape of Beleriand, the standing of the Edain and the last version of the story of Maeglin. The book thus sits beneath the published works rather than beside them, as the evidence from which they were made and against which they can be measured.