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Middle-Earth Revised, Again - Page 5

© Michael Martinez

In the introduction to Unfinished Tales, Christopher writes:

I judge these fragments [the 'Cirion and Eorl' essays] to belong to the same period as 'The Disaster of the Gladden Fields', when my father was greatly interested in the earlier history of Gondor and Rohan; they were doubtless intended to form parts of a substantial history, developing in detail the summary accounts given in Appendix A to The Lord of the Rings. The material is in the first stage of composition, very disordered, full of variants, breaking off into rapid jottings that are part illegible.

It is much to suppose that J.R.R. Tolkien intended to create, at the end of his life, a companion volume to The Lord of the Rings. And yet, one easily gets the impression that is what he was working toward, with or without clear intention. The works Christopher associates with this project were "Cirion and Eorl", "The Disaster of the Gladden Fields", the essay on the Druedain (only part of which was published in Unfinished Tales), "and the philological essays excerpted in 'The History of Galadriel and Celeborn'". Those philological essays form the basis of the appendices to the History of Galadriel and Celeborn: "The Silvan Elves and their Speech", "The Sindarin Princes of the Silvan Elves", "The Boundaries of Lorien", "The Port of Lond Daer", and possibly the writings behind the final appendix concerning the names of Galadriel and Celeborn. There is, however, another essay from the same period which has received only limited attention: "The Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor", published in Vinyar Tengwar 42 (the original title is given as "Nomenclature", so the current title is taken from Christopher's description of the text in The Peoples of Middle-earth). The material on the Druedain was actually lifted from an essay published in The Peoples of Middle-earth titled "Of Dwarves and Men". But though these essays and fragments constitute all that is presently published of the secondary canon for (Second and Third Age) Middle-earth, there is, in fact, still more material. Virtually any reply that Tolkien made in his letters to questions about Middle-earth contains information which is seldom if ever actually contradicted by later material. There are some points where Tolkien contradicts himself, either because he did not have the texts available to consult or because he was reporting on transitions. Another text which has intrigued readers is The New Shadow, published in The Peoples of Middle-earth. Set early in the Fourth Age, but near the end of King Eldarion's reign, the book would have followed a plot to overthrow the rightful king. But Tolkien concluded it would have been nothing more than a thriller, a type of story in which he had no interest, and he ceased to work on it.

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