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Middle-Earth Revised, Again

© Michael Martinez

In Letter 187 (dated to approximately April 1956, 20 months after The Fellowship of the Ring was published in August 1954), J.R.R. Tolkien told H. Cotton Minchin "as 'research students' always discover, however long they are allowed, and careful their work and notes, there is always a rush at the end, when the last date suddenly approaches on which their thesis must be presented. So it was with this book, and the maps...." He was speaking, of course, about The Lord of the Rings, and the maps associated with the text. In the course of the letter, Tolkien described parts of the project which had to be abandoned:

I am, however, primarily a philologist and to some extent a calligrapher .... And my son after me. To us far and away the most absorbing interest is the Elvish tongues, and the nomenclature based on them; and the alphabets. My plans for the 'specialist volume' were largely linguistic. An index of names was to be produced, which by etymological interpretation would also provide quite a large Elvish vocabulary; this is of course a first requirement. I worked at it for months, and indexed the first two vols. (it was the chief cause of the delay of Vol iii) until it became clear that size and cost were ruinous. Reluctantly also I had to abandon, under pressure from the 'production department', the 'facsimiles' of the three pages of the Book of Mazarbul, burned tattered and blood-stained, which I had spent much time on producing or forging. Without them the opening of Book Two, ch. 5 (which was meant to have the facsimiles and a transcript alongside) is defective, and the Runes of the Appendices unnecessary.

Well, two of the facsimile pages (nos. 1 and 3) have now been published in J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator. I have yet to see the second page reproduced. And much material which JRRT had worked on through the years has also been brought forth since 1980, the year in which Christopher Tolkien first published Unfinished Tales. There is now far more information available about Middle-earth, in the form of paintings and doodles, essays and notes, maps, and linguistic analysis, than Tolkien ever dreamed could be possibly published. But what do we have to show for all that? We can research Middle-earth to our hearts' content, but do all these things bring us any closer to realizing what Tolkien had in mind than just The Lord of the Rings itself? A question was recently posed to me which is seldom asked any more: "Which books are considered unimpeachable resources?"