WHEN I THINK ABOUT J. R. R. Tolkien's unpublished writings, I think of them in terms that probably would please the old master: as the literary equivalent of the Staffordshire hoardin England's West Midlands. Discovered in 2009 by a fortune hunter with a very good metal detector, the hoard contains mangled Anglo-Saxon weapons, golden jewelry, military implements, other metalwork, and rings inscribed with runic characters (though not the language of Mordor). All of it gives us — thanks to a team of devoted archaeologists — a richer understanding of the era of Anglo-Saxon Britain.
The same can be said of the “Tolkien hoard” — the reams of drafts, faded notes, indecipherable scribbles, and fragmented stories that were never published in Tolkien's lifetime. But because of the tireless work of his son, Christopher, we have an even richer understanding today of Middle-earth than we did when his father died in 1973.
Ever since the publication of The Silmarillion in 1977, Tolkien fils has slowly worked through these materials and produced annotated versions of tales taking place long before the events chronicled in The Hobbit (1937) and Lord of the Rings (1954–'55). Now, with nearly 30 works added to his father's oeuvre, Christopher Tolkien is finished. His service as his father's literary guardian and interpreter ended last August with the publication of the earliest story of Middle-earth that Tolkien ever wrote, The Fall of Gondolin. “I ‘presumed' […] that Beren and Lúthienwould be my last,” he writes in the new book's preface, referring to another story that he edited and published in 2017. “I must now say that ‘in my ninety-fourth year The Fall of Gondolin is (indubitably) the last.'”
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