Constructing Middle Earth

[bibliogramma]

The Lays of Beleriand
The Shaping of Middle Earth
The Lost Road and Other Writings
Sauron Defeated
J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Christopher Tolkien

I first read J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy when I was 12, and I’ve re-read it at least a dozen times since then, and probably more. Each time I find new things to consider, new perspectives to explore.

I’ll grant that it’s a far from perfect creation, but what captivates is the scale of that creation. The weight and depth of history and custom and culture, of myth and poetry, that lies behind the story is evident in every page, and it’s the astonishing complexity of the world of Middle Earth that entrances. I never forget, when reading Tolkein, that he is one of the greatest world-builders in all of literature.

And the best way to see how it was done is to read the collected writings of J.R.R Tolkien, meticulously edited by his son Christopher Tolkien. I’ve been working my way though the 13 volumes of Tolkien’s early writings on the creation of Arda, the battles between Melkior and the Valar, the history of elves, dwarves and men, the tales of Middle Earth.

It’s exciting to watch the development of each element of The Silmarillion and The Lord of The Rings, the choices made and the roads not taken, and to see the wealth of detail growing, the world of Arda becoming more rich and solid with each successive approach to the material.

I’d read the two volumes of Lost Tales before this year, and have now read – due to the limited availability of specific volumes in a printing that uses paper stock that doesn’t emit some kind of chemical that doesn’t gas out and that I cannot tolerate – the books that cover the development of the material that went into The Silmarillion, some of the material that falls between the two great works and deals with the history of the Númenóreans, and the material that went into the last chapters of The Lord of the Rings. Not a problem, I sometimes read the books out of sequence, too.

A delight for literary detectives, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the books.