The Silmarillion was compiled from the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, but it was published posthumously by his son Christopher Tolkien. It also credits a person by the name of Guy Gavriel Kay. I was curious just how much Christopher Tolkien and Guy Gavriel Kay contributed to the stories, or if it was just editing everything together. I decided to research it and find out.
It turns out Guy Gavriel Kay is a Canadian fantasy writer, and he is still alive. His type of fantasy actually sounds quite different from Tolkien’s works; his stories are mostly set in places based off real countries in medieval times, such as Italy or Spain.
From what I saw, putting The Silmarillion together took an enormous amount of effort. Most of the work sounded like piecing together various drafts, choosing the best versions of the stories Tolkien wrote, and changing details to make everything coherent. However, there was certainly some additional creative work involved. Guy Gavriel Kay and Christopher Tolkien worked hard to compose narratives for missing portions, the most notable being the story of the Fall of Gondolin and the story of the Ruin of Doriath. While it sounds like the Fall of Gondolin was a story that Tolkien wrote and changed a good deal, there was less to go on for the Ruin of Doriath. In the end it sounds like it was essentially an original sequence and had little or no basis on what J. R. R. Tolkien had in mind for that story.
I’ve heard that Christopher Tolkien regrets publishing The Silmarillion as a continuous narrative, but I do not think it was a mistake. The book’s overarching storyline is vital to the ideas of the separate smaller tales. If it were just a collection of drafts without that narrative, I think it would be a lot harder to see J. R. R. Tolkien’s vision for the mythology. What do you think, if you have read it?
~Ulmo
It turns out Guy Gavriel Kay is a Canadian fantasy writer, and he is still alive. His type of fantasy actually sounds quite different from Tolkien’s works; his stories are mostly set in places based off real countries in medieval times, such as Italy or Spain.
From what I saw, putting The Silmarillion together took an enormous amount of effort. Most of the work sounded like piecing together various drafts, choosing the best versions of the stories Tolkien wrote, and changing details to make everything coherent. However, there was certainly some additional creative work involved. Guy Gavriel Kay and Christopher Tolkien worked hard to compose narratives for missing portions, the most notable being the story of the Fall of Gondolin and the story of the Ruin of Doriath. While it sounds like the Fall of Gondolin was a story that Tolkien wrote and changed a good deal, there was less to go on for the Ruin of Doriath. In the end it sounds like it was essentially an original sequence and had little or no basis on what J. R. R. Tolkien had in mind for that story.
I’ve heard that Christopher Tolkien regrets publishing The Silmarillion as a continuous narrative, but I do not think it was a mistake. The book’s overarching storyline is vital to the ideas of the separate smaller tales. If it were just a collection of drafts without that narrative, I think it would be a lot harder to see J. R. R. Tolkien’s vision for the mythology. What do you think, if you have read it?
~Ulmo
1 comment:
I personally enjoy the Silmarillion the way it is. Though it must have been a lot of work and there is likely a large amount of content we cannot technically attribute to Tolkien, I appreciate that it reads like a series of vignettes rather than as a series of scraps. I, like you, agree this makes it much easier to see J.R.R. Tolkien's vision for the mythology. Had Guy Gavriel Kay and Christopher Tolkien decided to keep the drafts and scraps and compile them, the effect would have been more confusing and would have sucked readers out of Middle-earth.
-Varda*
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