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Middle-Earth Revised, Again - Page 4

© Michael Martinez

But 1965 is probably the high mark of post-LoTR era Middle-earthian contemplation for Tolkien. Although he would not produce any more books on the subject, he had been quite active behind the scenes, working on material which would eventually be placed in the hands of his son Christopher. One of the most recent stories Tolkien had worked on at this point was "Aldarion and Erendis: The Mariner's Wife" (begun around 1960, but a typed version was made in early 1965). Christopher Tolkien says that, of all the texts included in Unfinished Tales, this one was the most incomplete (and presumably he was not thinking of the various scraps and notes he assembled for the chapter on the Istari). An accompanying text, "A description of Numenor", is dated to the same period, as is "The Line of Elros", which contains "several minor chronological puzzles, but also allows clarification of some apparent errors in the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings" (Christopher Tolkien, "Introduction" to Unfinished Tales). Tolkien did not stop there, however. Ninni Pettersen has assembled a chronology for Tolkien's various books and essays. Although one must speculate on certain dates, Pettersen's work is about as good as you're going to get outside the Christopher Tolkien household. The only other LoTR-compatible text JRRT worked on in the 1965-6 years was the collection of writings that Christopher assembled into the essay on the Palantiri (for Unfinished Tales). Although he did not find much to change in The Fellowship of the Ring, Christopher points out that his father "made substantial emendations to a passage in The Two Towers, [Book] III [Chapter] II 'The Palantir' ... and some others in the same connection in The Return of the King, V 7 'The Pyre of Denethor' ... though these emendations were not incorporated into the text until the second impression of the revised edition (1967)." Tolkien returned to Middle-earth in 1968, but it would not be until early 1969 when he would produce the last substantial body of work associated with The Lord of the Rings. Although I have not mentioned his post-LoTR work on The Silmarillion thus far, it did consume a great deal of his time. Most of the work Tolkien did in the 1950s, after LoTR was published, was concerned with The Silmarillion. And in this last phase of his life, The Silmarillion competed with The Lord of the Rings for his time. But the canonical Middle-earth did not include The Silmarillion. That is, in 1969, Middle-earth was only canonically, or authoritatively, defined by the books which had been published to that time. The essays Tolkien wrote from 1969 through 1972 about matters in The Lord of the Rings (and, by association, The Hobbit) were largely anchored by the 1965 editions. It is difficult to find incompatibilities between these texts and the published works, although the linguistic essays gouge the canon at almost every opportunity.

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