Christopher Tolkien (1924–2020)

I tried to read, this, I really did, back when I first finished The Lord Of The Rings and wanted more more MORE. The opening chapters defeated me, however, which really is a pity. I wasn't sure how to deal with a brand new creation myth, for one thing. As a Catholic teen, it seemed to close to blasphemy. As a Catholic teen who wasn't all that enamoured of being a Catholic, it was too much like religion. Then again the archaic language was also off-putting, and though the chapters were short, show more the reading was long, so it seemed to take forever to get to the point. So I gave up. Still, I must have dipped in and out of it, flicked through, read passages here and there, because this time I did read it, and quite a bit of it was oddly familiar.

I think the creation myth is interesting, because it isn't 'let there be light' or anything like it. Everything here starts with song, then comes the world. Getting light to the world is a long and fraught process, and, indeed, that's where a lot of the trouble comes from. First you have the lamps, which mean old Melkor knocks down, then you have the trees, which Ungoliant eats, then at last you have the sun and the moon, put up in the sky as a last resort where mean old Melkor can't get them.

Once you get past the creation myth and the descriptions of the Valar and the lands of the West, the story really kicks off, and keeps kicking all the way. We already know from the appendices that The Lord Of The Rings is only the tail end of a story that begins when Iluvatar starts the singing, a tale packed with the epic and the extraordinary, any one page of which could be spun into a trilogy of its own. The silmarils are created, Melkor steals them, Feanor, the first great elvish asshole, swears his vow, murders his kin, heads back to Middle Earth and the fun starts. So we have sieges and chases and betrayals and cruel fates and massive destruction and triumph in adversity and the whole damn thing. It gets especially Wagnerian around poor old Turin, a veritable Siegfried, and the whole shebang ends, appropriately, with a literal deus ex machina.

Marvelous stuff. Mythic grandeur, evocative with magic, drenched with evil, tragic with nobility and rife with unbearable sadness. I would have loved it.

There's also a bit about that fecker Sauron and the fall of Numenor, more detailed than the account from the appendices, and another chapter about the lead-up to the War of the Ring, more detailed in some ways and less in others, so they both make good additions if you're into that sort of thing. I know I am.

2021 - listened to this on audio, the recording by Martin Shaw is justifiably legendary in its own right. show less

It is unreasonable of me to rate this 5⭐, and yet this is where we find ourselves! 🧐

Of the 144 pages, about 35 contain Tolkien's words, but they are interesting in being post-apocalyptic science fiction! Set hundreds of years in the future following an environmental catastrophe, archeologists/philologists draw comically inaccurate conclusions about mid-20th century Oxford based on fragmentary documents relating to the consumerist worship of motor vehicles, with consequent traffic show more congestion and its fatal ecological impact. The satire that starts out whimsically enough, rather like LotR, proceeds to a very dark place.

Given the story is written as a mock academic piece with fictitious footnotes, the editorial contributions of Tolkien Jr are not always easily distinguishable from the story, which actually nicely added to the meta-ness of it.

The bulk of the book, then, is Ovenden's social history of Oxford's mid 20th century industrial and urban development, and the town planning battles (with maps) that raged around motor infrastructure, as this forms the context for Tolkien's story.
It's unlikely I'd otherwise give a 5⭐ review to a local history essay about urban development, and yet as it relates to Prof. T., here, as I said, do we find ourselves 🤨 show less

L'errore più grande che si possa fare (e che ho fatto alla prima lettura) avvicinandosi a questo libro è credere, come affermato nell'introduzione, che sia una lettura affrontabile con una vaga conoscenza dello sfondo su cui si intrecciano gli eventi, riassunto in due balzelli nell'introduzione stessa. Questo libro è da leggere necessariamente *dopo* il Silmarillion, pena la pressoché totale incomprensione degli eventi descritti. La storia è uno dei tre racconti principali scritti da show more Tolkien sulla Prima Era, ripresi e riscritti durante tutto il corso della sua vita, sia in prosa che in poesia, e sicuramente il più tragico e forse quello di maggior impatto. La versione qui proposta dal figlio, riassunta nel relativo capitolo del Silmarillion, espande quella presente nei Racconti incompiuti, garantendoci finalmente una lettura continua e completa. Una leggenda dei tempi antichi riportata nella forma più meritevole. show less

I read this when it first came out and I was a know-it-all teenager. Blah blah blah elves, I thought. Interminable begats. What a snooze. Ahem.

In retrospect, I was the snooze, asleep or so rapt with my own navel that I failed to recognize some of the most complete and powerful world-building since, well, humanity's own. Clearly influenced by any number of ancient sagas, yet entirely free-standing. The level of internal consistency is breathtaking for a world this detailed.

So yeah, I was so show more wrong. I wonder if this means I'm going to have to wade through all the other Middle Earth history Christopher Tolkien edited and pumped out? show less