Failing like Tolkien in Constant Revisions
Tolkien's never-completed revisions, and my own
I remember one time I was urging a friend to read the Silmarillion, Tolkien's posthumous prequel to Lord of the Rings, and remembering all the beautiful characters and scenes from it.
And then I realized that a lot of the beautiful things I was remembering weren't really in Silmarillion - but in Tolkien's drafts assembled and published posthumously in History of Middle-Earth.
This points out to us how much Tolkien kept revising over and over again and adding things to his legendarium throughout his life. Even the published Silmarillion is posthumous, since he could never in his lifetime find a version he was at ease with declaring final - and it was only the sampling of texts that demanded minimal editing for Christopher Tolkien to put together and publish.
I'm sad that Tolkien never finished his revisions and brought his legendarium into a publishable book. But, I can't blame him for it - because I've done very similar things when I tried writing a fantasy series.
Fortunately, Christopher Tolkien then gave over his life to assembling and publishing the rest of his father's drafts and notes in Unfinished Tales and the twelve-volume History of Middle-Earth (HoME), so it's possible to read them all. In fact, one of the first blog posts I published here was a guide to reading History of Middle-Earth. But the problem is that, unless you want to wade through countless drafts, you need that sort of guide.
Some of Tolkien's drafts were narratives that could have gone in a longer book - if they'd been consistent with each other, or if they'd been finished. For example, take the beautiful "Wandering of Hurin" in HoME XI: War of the Jewels, which is a heartrending short story with nothing worse than a few inconsistencies with Silmarillion. Or, take the poignant "Aldarin and Erendis" in Unfinished Tales, which has nothing worse than being unfinished.
But then, take the two contradictory tales of Galadriel and the Elessar (the stone she gives Aragorn as a gift). Both of them are in Unfinished Tales; both of them are good stories in their own right - but they contradict each other. In one, the stone dates back to the First Age; in the other, it was made by Celebrimbor in the Second Age as a copy of the First Age stone. This's an unusually direct example of the sort of contradictions that crop up throughout HoME. How old was Feanor when his father remarried? Did the Istari arrive in the Second Age or Third? Did the Numenorian kings grow beards? Tolkien never spent the effort to revise everything and reconcile it into a single narrative.
Because of this, many fans have just given up on the idea of having a single canon for the legendarium. We can't even just take Tolkien's later statements to override previous statements. Or if we do, that would mean throwing out many lengthy and good stories in favor of short notes, because Tolkien often jotted short notes without rewriting previous stories. Ever after he completed Lord of the Rings, he kept insisting he was trying to revise his legendarium into a publishable Silmarillion. But in practice, up to the last month of his life, he kept coming up with new ideas.
Perhaps Tolkien would appreciate how this echoed his early desire to make a mythology for England: real-world mythologies don't have single definite canons either, and different tellers kept putting new twists on old tales. Still, as a fan, I'm very sorry Tolkien did this.
But as an amateur writer, I can see how he ended up doing it this way.
I've tried writing a fantasy trilogy of my own. Gem and Crown was the working title. I started it as a teenager, went through several drafts without ever completing any of them, and kept trying until I finally gave it up more than a decade later. In the process, I extensively worldbuilt the magic system, politics, and history - spurred on both by my own interest in history and how I'd given that interest to a couple of my characters.
I didn't reach anywhere near the depths of Tolkien's worldbuilding - in part because I don't have his talent or background in mythology, in part because I took several breaks to simultaneously work on unrelated stories, and in part because I just didn't work on it anywhere near as long as Tolkien. I built my world over less than two decades; Tolkien built his over most of his life. But, I've detected some of the same trends and impetus in myself that I can see in Tolkien's work.
We both have sets of disconnected or semi-connected notes that contradict each other and previous drafts. They both touched on history, motivations, connections between events, and more history. Tolkien would add etymology; I would add politics. Sometimes I would justify this to myself as building needed background elements for my story; occasionally I'd be right. But the real motivation was usually just because I liked doing this - I liked developing a history for my world and quickly referencing or hinting at new stories in it. And, I hardly ever reconciled the drafts once written, because I liked telling new stories more than revising the old stories. I'm sure Tolkien was the same way.
Unfortunately, Gem and Crown also imitated Tolkien's legendarium in another way: it never got finished for publication.
My problem wasn't in the worldbuilding; it was in the story. I didn't fully appreciate that until I joined a writers' group and started getting feedback on each chapter of my newest draft. There were many comments I could address, but others pointed out a fundamental problem: my protagonists weren't fit for the plot I was going to send them into.
Tolkien had the sense to keep his hobbits' away from the major decisions of the War; he knew they couldn't realistically have agency there. Instead, inspired in part by his own experience in World War I, he had another sort of story arc for them amid the war. My characters were almost as unsuited for what I was sending them into, and I didn't see how to change that without rebuilding the central premise of the story.
Tolkien never faced quite this realization. He avoided that disconnect; instead, he kept producing more drafts and notes up to the last month of his life, even after realizing he'd never have time to turn them into one coherent narrative himself. I hope I would've surmounted that challenge. But had I gone on, I could easily imagine myself ending up in Tolkien's problem - because even if I didn't have as many notes and drafts yet, mine had similarities to his.
Occasionally, for both of us, the drafts involved grand revisions to the fundamental worldbuilding.
In Tolkien's earliest drafts (in HoME volumes 1-2), the Valar were much more modeled after pagan gods. On the one hand, they engaged in questionable ethics of war; on the other hand, many of them had children. All of this got revised over time. They became less pagan gods, and more angels. Fionwë son of Manwe became Eönwë herald of Manwe, a Maia; no Vala or Maia except Melian (mother of Luthien) has a child in the published Silmarillion or later drafts. I have no real objection to this; even though it makes some of their decisions fighting Morgoth look naive, that's a fair characterization.
But another projected major revision would have totally redone the cosmology. Later in his life, Tolkien decided that real-world astrophysics should always have been valid. Middle-Earth should always have been round, and the Sun and Moon always in existence. But, Tolkien wanted to keep the image of Valinor being lit by the Two Trees, so - to block the sun - Tolkien decided Varda had to put a dome over it to keep out noxious fumes of Morgoth. Still, this would have eliminated many charming images and stories, even down to the Elves being "people of the stars."
Tolkien never revised most of his stories to align with the round-world cosmology. It would've been possible, but I think a lot of good images would have been lost and not much gained. Perhaps this's what stopped him. Regardless, after his death, Christopher Tolkien decided (I think correctly) to leave this out of the published Silmarillion rather than try to revise other things to accord with it.
Tolkien wrote about some of his motives for these grand revisions: he had doubts about the initial ethics he had given the Valar, he felt uncomfortable at the differences between the Valar and real-world Christian theology, and he wanted to align his legendarium with real astrophysics so it'd be believable as a prehistory of real Earth.
I can't fault Tolkien's motives there; I also tried several revisions of Gem and Crown's fundamental worldbuilding. My first draft was, I'm still convinced, excessively moralistic. This was both wrong in that it weakened the narrative, and that it played in with my then-misunderstanding of Christian theology. (In my partial defense, I was a teenager at the time.) Perhaps Gem and Crown could've been completed more quickly had I continued with my initial worldbuilding, but it would've been a weaker story. But then again, it would have perhaps been finished.
And then, I revised my magic system several times. The first draft had hardly any magic; one draft had magic common enough to be practiced in every village; my latest draft had rare magical plants and jewels but little more. In part this stemmed from the theological revisions, but in part it was that I was changing my mind on what sort of world I wanted to write about. I think this was the same sort of urge that led to Tolkien's abortive round-world revision.
I don't blame Tolkien for wanting these revisions. I can't; I've felt the same urges and given into them! And I'm not faulting my own decisions; I think my final worldbuilding was stronger than my first on almost every point where it'd changed. The only place I fault Tolkien on his grand revisions is at the object level: I think his round-world cosmology is weaker than the flat-world cosmology in the published Silmarillion.
Tolkien died with his work still unfinished.
He'd given it almost all his writing energy throughout his life. Even stories like The Hobbit and Roverandum, which started as separate, were drawn into the well of Middle-Earth. I can guess why he did that - a well-built world with room for so many stories is exciting to write. I even constructed a fragile multiverse with room for both Gem and Crown and various other seemingly-unconnected story outlines I had.
Over time, I cut off a number of subplots from Gem and Crown in an attempt to make the story shorter and more writeable. Tolkien tried the same thing at several points, turning his lengthy (and unfinished) poems and prose narratives about Beren and Luthien, Turin Turambar, and Tuor into the shorter Silmarillion chapters about them. I'm sorry that he never completed the longer poem of Beren and Luthien, but I can hardly blame him here either given that I'd done the same thing!
Unlike Tolkien, I have other stories in mind, and I want to write them. Some of them are the subplots I'd cut off from Gem and Crown; others are completely different; others I expect will eventually share ideas mined from the central plot arc. I think this's more convenient than Tolkien's putting all his stories in one multiverse, and I think he might have agreed given the effort he spent revising his Silmarillion notes to line up with Lord of the Rings.
I've declared Gem and Crown abandoned. But even though it failed, I'm glad I tried writing it. It was fun, it gave me practice writing, and it helped me understand more the nature of story as I tried to figure out how to improve it in each draft. A lot of what I've written on this blog stems in part from my staring at Gem and Crown puzzling over how to improve it and then finally declaring it unfixable. If I do write another novel - as I still hope to - that will benefit from it too.
And on top of that, it's helped me understand one of my favorite writers better.
"Perhaps Tolkien would appreciate how this echoed his early desire to make a mythology for England: real-world mythologies don't have single definite canons either, and different tellers kept putting new twists on old tales. "
What I was thinking before getting to this part was: Tolkien should have just done this deliberately. Publish a book of Myths and Legends of Middle-Earth, and who cares if they contradict each other? How many explanations do the myths and legends of actual Earth have for why the sun rises in the morning? How many different versions are there of Robin Hood? Just how many real-but-shadowy Viking leaders can Ragnar Lothbrok sire, anyway?
I'm a devout scientific materialist and have been essentially my whole life. But I'm with you on preferring the flat earth cosmology that was published for Middle-Earth, with the Two Trees and Varda kindling the stars and Earendil's ship becoming the morning and the evening star—and then the vast convulsion that overthrew Numenor, "the breaking of the world." It's an essentially poetic conception that isn't improved by trying to make it consistent with scientific astronomy. I'm willing to accept as part of the conception that when Eru remade the world, he not only made the Earth round but vastly multiplied the distance to the stars and galaxies.
Years ago, when I ran a campaign set in Middle-Earth, I specified that the Elves had not merely telescopic vision, but the ability to see over the horizon—because they could travel on the Straight Road, and their vision was still adapted to it; for them the earth and the seas didn't curve away. Eventually I came to think of it as an elegant metaphor for their immortality within the world: A man's life has a horizon, but an elf's doesn't. I've always wondered if Tolkien had consciously thought any of that through.