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Unseen JRR Tolkien essays on Middle-earth coming summer 2021
- jfengel 6y agoSlightly more informative article: https://www.theonering.net/torwp/2020/06/23/108207-the-nature-of-middle-earth-new-book-with-tolkiens-unpublished-writings/ https://www.theonering.net/torwp/2020/06/23/108207-the-natur... That's very exciting. It's not, as I first expected, just a re-edit of material that's already in History of Middle-earth. They describe it as if it would have been one more volume of HoME, if Christopher were still around. Tolkien's thoughts evolved considerably after the published books, and what Christopher cobbled together to make Silmarillion ignores a lot of the later work in favor of stuff that's more consistent with The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was an inveterate reviser and re-inventer, and he never settled on definitive answers to a lot of questions -- and changed his mind even after publication. So you need to keep a kind of cognitive dissonance when reading this material, and in re-reading LotR in the light of the new material. Still, it can be incredibly exciting to see where he was going, and his truly superhuman ability to retcon as he did so.