The Hall of Fire

Yep! I have The History of The Hobbit (the original two-volume edition) and love it. I was looking forward to it for a long time, and was still pleasantly surprised. He found many more connections to the legendarium than I had ever imagined possible. I will have to read The Hobbit again soon and loo...

Yes, great post, thanks very much. I have a few follow-up questions and thoughts. First is, what did Tolkien imagine Gandalf to be in The Hobbit ? One can assume that the concept of the Istari, the special Emissaries of the West, had not emerged. Would you nevertheless agree that he is not a Mannish...

What was Gandalf’s race? The usual answer is Maia. However, IIRC, Tolkien did not invent the term Maia/Maiar until the late 50s, a decade after completing the writing of The Lord of the Rings, and a quarter century after completing The Hobbit. So I guess I wonder what Tolkien would have said instead...

Many people hope so. It might be helpful in this discussion to establish acronyms for the various major versions of this tale: ToT - The Tale of Tinúviel (The Book of Lost Tales) LoL - The Lay of Leithian QS(A) - long-form draft of chapter 12 (Quenta Silmarillion) QS I - longish-form manuscript of c...

One thing that is kind of neat about the QS version is that the story is broken into five chapters, though they are grouped under the general heading, “Of Beren and Tinúviel.” Here’s how they break down (page numbers for the hardcover Silmarillion ): 12 Of the Meeting of Beren and Lúthien Tinúviel (...

I'm not sure what you mean about Thingol being incapable of pettiness I was referring to Christopher Tolkien’s remarks: “How [my father] would have treated Thingol’s behaviour towards the Dwarves is impossible to say. That story was only once told fully, in the Tale of the Nauglafring, in which the...

If he indeed publishes the BoLT Tinúviel, then Goodolin in the same format is absolutely a given.

Another interesting angle about the publication of Beren and Lúthien and The Children of Húrin as standalones is that it paves the way for movies on those topics (perhaps following a Fëanor-centric Silmarillion movie). Ironic that it is Christopher himself paving that way, though they won’t ever hap...

I don’t agree about “Of the Ruin of Doriath.” If they were going to feel at liberty to construct a narrative basically from scratch, IMO they could have hewn much more closely to the story of Tolkien’s own The Nauglafring. I see no reason why it the Nauglamír was changed to have already been made in...

As an aside, since you keep bringing up Guy Kay: have you read many of his works, and if so, which would you recommend? Sailing to Sarantium looks right up my alley. And could you talk a bit about why you think he would be a good fit?

Unfortunately, there is a massive misconception among the public, that all the posthumous publications are completely Christopher’s invention, based on his father’s “notes”. Literally everyone I talk to who has not read beyond Hob+LR has this impression, and they wrinkle their noses and roll their e...

That was just one of the “aspects of the story … that were afterwards lost” that I could think of.

Yes, it’s possible. Anything’s possible, honestly, as we have only the barest scraps of information about this publication, and we may be reading it too technically. It could be, as it were, the “original form” of the texts which were used to create Chapter 19 in the 1977 Silmarillion. Thus “the com...

Yeah, the only way I can parse it is that the main body of the book, the illustrated portion, is the version from The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, followed by a long appendix by Christopher Tolkien exploring the further development of the story through “passages … from later texts”. (There is no su...

Houghton Mifflin has the actual press release up: http://www.hmhco.com/media-center/press-releases/2016/october/jrr-tolkien-beren-and-luthien It says “In this book Christopher Tolkien has attempted…,” which gives a much different connotation (suggesting success) than the blog’s excerpt. It may be th...

I totally called it!

Great posts, especially Voronwë’s long one. Thanks! I definitely need that Tolkien’s Legendarium book, as well as Arda Reconstructed. Well, maybe I’ll see if I can borrow them from a library. I have little more to add to the conversation other than to reiterate my own preferences—less editorial inve...

My main goal would be to familiarize readers with Tolkien’s trilogy of long-form ‘Great Tales’ without asking them to delve into HoMe, which, in addition to its own daunting size and scope, requires you to first become an ‘expert’ (as one of you put it) in the frankly unexciting, summary-style 1977 ...

I look forward to it!

Suppose you had the opportunity to prepare for publication a set of books ‘rebooting’ the way the ‘Silmarillion’ and related texts are presented to the world (though not pretending that HoMe, etc., don’t exist). How would you do it? Here is what I would like to see: 1. THE FALL OF GONDOLIN and its L...