Of book-length monographs of the year, the most attention has gone to Christopher Tolkien’s edition of the previously unpublished, and indeed previously almost unknown, Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. Among secondary scholarly studies, there has been much interest in and some contention over the portrait of Christopher Tolkien as an editor in Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published Silmarillion by Douglas Charles Kane, an attempt to put in narrative form a lengthy and thorough table tracing the sources in The History of Middle-earth texts of the work published as The Silmarillion in 1977. Other noted books of the year ...

“Tolkien’s Sigurd & Gudrun: Summary, Sources, & Analogs” by Pierre H. Berube (Mythlore 28 no. 1/2: 45-76) is a useful table, rather akin to the ones for The Silmarillion in Kane’s Arda Reconstructed (discussed below) identifying which source texts Tolkien used for individual sections of his two lays, including citations of elements he rejected; plotting and thematic analogs in his own fiction; and most prominently a detailed and fairly sardonic plot summary, divided into chunks covering a few stanzas each.

Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published Silmarillion by Douglas Charles Kane (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2009) is a valuable work of reference. Kane closely compares The Silmarillion, as edited for publication in 1977 by Christopher Tolkien (with assistance from Guy Gavriel Kay) to the inconsistent “Silmarillion” manuscripts published in (mainly) The History of Middle-earth series. With the caveat (which might be expressed more strongly) that even those apparent sources are themselves edited and incomplete, Kane discusses in turn each of the 28 chapters in The Silmarillion. He includes tables that identify every paragraph’s principal and supplementary sources for all but five chapters (where Christopher Tolkien had already performed a similar analysis, or for which no sources can be traced). With Kane’s work as a guide, no researcher examining The Silmarillion with reference to Tolkien’s motives or his other works should again be daunted from the necessary task of checking against the relevant history. Doggedly, skillfully, Kane shows that most of the words in The Silmarillion are those of J.R.R. Tolkien, while much of their arrangement, at all levels, is editorial. Working mainly from 1950s historical annals associated with the “Quenta Silmarillion,” but reaching back to the 1910s “Lost Tales,” Christopher Tolkien spliced chapters, paragraphs, and even sentences; Kane explicates one paragraph that has been combined from six different sources (76). In all, he finds The Silmarillion is assembled from more than 20 texts. The only chapter whose words are not primarily J.R.R. Tolkien’s is “Of the Ruin of Doriath,” where the last version completed dates from 1930 and disagrees with later “Silmarillion” developments. This has been known since the 1994 publication of The War of the Jewels, where Christopher Tolkien says (356) he was “overstepping the bounds of the editorial function” (Kane tends to repeat himself and cites this phrase three times). However, as Kane acknowledges, this pastiche is quite skillful, and the description of Thingol’s death in particular has been widely praised—but usually as the work of J.R.R. Tolkien (see Verlyn Flieger’s Splintered Light and Brian Rosebury’s Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon, in addition to, as Kane notes [216], Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth). Kane’s evaluation of the constructed Silmarillion is less rigorous than his source-tracing. By seldom questioning the work’s large structure, he implicitly endorses the text; his chief complaints, summarized in a concluding chapter, are that it is edited too much for the sake of consistency, condensation, and literary convention, thus omitting philosophic passages (particularly the Second Prophecy of Mandos and the “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth”), lively details, and a needed framing structure; he also bemoans the reduction in the already limited role of female characters. Apart from the last point (which is unsystematically considered) these are reasonable conclusions to which Kane responds mainly with astonishment, expressing too little consideration for Christopher Tolkien’s uncertainty (mentioned repeatedly in The History of Middle-earth) as to the scope and purpose of the posthumous editing of his father’s texts and for the sheer difficulty of interpreting them.

Michaël Devaux cites Kane’s work in “Dagor Dagorath and Ragnarök: Tolkien and the Apocalypse” (translated from French by David Ledanois in Hither Shore 6: 102-17), an attempt to make sense of Tolkien’s comment (Letters 149) that the “Silmarillion” mythology would conclude in a final battle that was indebted to and yet not particularly like the old Norse tradition of Ragnarök. Examining Tolkien’s changing schatological conceptions as presented in The History of Middle-earth volumes (like Elizabeth Whittingham’s book, The Evolution of Tolkien’s Mythology), Devaux finds Tolkien reducing the role of the Valar as the story becomes less like Ragnarök and more like the Christian
Apocalypse. He also identifies apocalyptic imagery used earlier in The Silmarillion narrative.

First, I greatly enjoyed this book. My Silmarillion would have been different than Christopher Tolkien's, and different from Voronwë's, but having the raw material to explore the multitude of Silmarillions that could have, and may yet, exist, is invaluable.

Secondly, a question: Has there been any indication that Christopher Tolkien has noticed the publication of Arda Reconstructed, and if so, has his opinion been made known?