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The Letters of JRR Tolkien Is Getting an Expanded Edition
- jfengel 3y agoBetween the letters and the History of Middle-earth, we have an incredible insight into the creative process. I don't know of any other author whose work is so profoundly documented -- and it happens to be an author whose process is so radical. Not just in the languages, though those are the most obvious, but the lifetime obsession. It can be hard to recall that in his lifetime he only ever published The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He never published The Silmarillion, because he kept revising and revising. It was never fully compatible with either The Hobbit (it wasn't intended to be) or The Lord of the Rings. The published document we have is a posthumous construction (for which his son really deserves co-author credit.) I do believe it's important to continue to think of the published works in themselves, and not just as part of a vast secret being dribbled out with the rest of his papers. The new edition of his letters will surely illuminate our appreciation of them, but it would be disrespectful to forget that he published his books as stand-alone novels. The Lord of the Rings is unchanged (pace some lightly edited later editions), and it's a monumental work that merits a lifetime of re-re-rereading.