The Completed Tolkien

The Fall of Gondolin
by J.R.R. Tolkien
HarperCollins, 2018, 304 pages, $45
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With the release of The Fall of Gondolin last August, Christopher Tolkien’s forty-year commitment to the compiling and publishing of his father’s works has come to a conclusion.

This book, like last year’s Beren and Lúthien, collects a variety of partial or unfinished editions of the story and presents them between two covers. The Fall of Gondolin is Christopher’s “indubitably” final volume based on his father” literary output, and it also marks the culmination of the publication of the three “Great Tales” centred on Middle-earth’s First Age. The first of these, The Children of Húrin, was published in 2007.

But this “new” Tolkien trilogy makes an odd companion to The Lord of the Rings, the book which made him famous (and rich). That book holds a beloved place in the reading experience of many, and its cultural dominance has produced a somewhat ironic situation from the point of view of Tolkien’s whole creative output. His life’s work, the “Silmarillion” sequence (of which the three “Great Tales” are a part) is considerably less accessible for readers inclined towards immersive prose forms like novels, which often invite access into an intimate imaginary space. Virginia Woolf, who sought in her brilliant works to break from the “objective” representational modes of the Victorians, conceived of fiction’s proper purpose as the study and representation of interior psychological space. In its published form, Tolkien’s Silmarillion eschews this mode completely. It interprets the language of the King James Bible and combines it with something like Hesiod’s Theogony. It does not seek to represent the interiority of character or motivation; these are baldly stated or are otherwise opaque and must be inferred by the reader, not by gaining access to a character’s mind but through the work of interpretive imagination.

Does all this make it an artistically “regressive” work? This suggestion might be true if we conceive of the literary arts in starkly “positivist” terms, and surmise that each generation not only interprets but improves upon its artistic inheritance. But this implies that the artistic value of The Iliad is to be discerned in something other than its literary merit. Would this merit diminish if it were discovered that The Iliad was a twelfth-century forgery?

Tolkien’s whole oeuvre constitutes an answer to this question. If his work possesses literary merit, then it cannot be that in prose only the realist modern or postmodern novel constitutes genuine “literature”. The aloof grandeur of The Silmarillion is attractive for many of Tolkien’s readers, but whatever its merits, The Silmarillion remains something wholly dissimilar from any other twentieth-century work.

Yet within The Silmarillion Tolkien considered the three “Great Tales” to be stories worthy of “novelistic” elaboration. In the 1950s, towards the final years of the composition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien sought to recast the long prose versions of the tales. In The Children of Húrin, Christopher Tolkien presented a complete prose piece composed by his father. Beren and Lúthien and The Fall of Gondolin were never written up to the same extent, and these volumes collect various versions of the stories which Tolkien never completed.

The Children of Húrin is Tolkien’s chief tragedy, and he was centrally concerned with the story during the 1950s. In the words of Christopher Tolkien his father saw a “deep significance” in the character of Túrin, who stumbles through his life in a constant attempt to thwart his unsavoury fate. That this is the only one of the “Great Tales” that is (almost) complete speaks to Tolkien’s abiding interest in the tragic dimensions of human life, and provides some counterpoint to the oft-made assertion that as a writer he was only interested in stories with happy endings.

Beren and Lúthien resembles the French romances of the Middle Ages and combines elements of these with fairy tale: there is a love interest, a quest, and talking animals. For Tolkien this story was the most personal—Lúthien, who takes a leading role in the story, was in part inspired by his wife Edith. The recent volume, The Fall of Gondolin, was his First Age epic, culminating in the dramatic siege and destruction of the secret Elvish city of Gondolin itself, a close analogue of Troy, but one displaced to a fantasy landscape and inhabited by immortal beings.

In The Fall of Gondolin, Christopher Tolkien introduces first the original “lost tale” centred on the destruction of the city of Gondolin, the first piece of prose ever written in the “Middle-earth” universe, and follows this with the much condensed 1920s “Silmarillion” versions. Fittingly, the “Last Version” completes the book. The “Last Version” was written in 1951 in the mature style of The Lord of the Rings and The Children of Húrin—heavy with incident and abounding with novelistic detail—but it remained incomplete at Tolkien’s death in 1973. For Christopher Tolkien, this was his father’s most “grievous abandonment”.

That Tolkien never completed it is partly explained by his realisation that his Silmarillion stories would not be published alongside The Lord of the Rings, but his continued work on The Children of Húrin suggests a parallel explanation: his chief emotional loyalty not with the angelic and divinely inspired Tuor, the hero of The Fall of Gondolin, but with his beleaguered anti-hero Túrin Turambar. Likewise, the story of Beren and Lúthien remained almost complete only in a 1920s verse form, and despite some later effort on Tolkien’s part no mature prose version was ever written. For whatever reason, Tolkien turned to tragedy and prose in the wake of the completion of his magnum opus, and never really abandoned it.

What then, are we to make of the trilogy as we have it now? The “Great Tales” trilogy, indeed the “Silmarillion” cycle in general as we now have it, resembles the medieval Norse Volsungasaga, a work not only distant in its cultural attachments but actually ruinous in the form in which it comes down to us. There is some conception of its narrative arc, but elements of full story remain opaque or are missing altogether. Likewise Tolkien’s Great Tales grant a sense of only occasional “closeness” to the action; in The Children of Húrin most saliently, or in the unfinished “Last Version” of the Gondolin story. Readers are otherwise consigned to a distant vantage point.

Yet this distance can invite a degree of imaginative engagement that might at first seem improbable. If we are not exactly drawn into the minds of the characters in The Silmarillion, we are instead granted access to their entire shared cultural, spiritual and ethical space—a feat of literary craft otherwise achieved only in texts composed by multiple authors (or perhaps whole cultures) like the Iliad or the Bible.

This is perhaps why Tolkien was so attached to the character of Túrin, whose life skirts the fault lines of several major events in the First Age mythos. He is a large, dominant figure like Achilles, flawed, but noble in his doomed purpose to master and overcome his base mortal nature. But the Túrin story itself, in its fuller treatment, lends an alternative and sometimes uncomfortable perspective to the “Silmarillion” mythos. At the beginning of The Children of Húrin the sister of Túrin, Lalaith, falls sick and dies. This loss prompts Túrin, then himself only a child, to inquire as to the nature of his sister’s death, and even death itself. His interlocutor, never introduced in the more aloof Silmarillion telling of the story, finds himself incapable of providing a satisfying answer to Túrin’s question. “Then Lalaith will not come back?” Túrin asks. Sador, a former soldier lamed by ill-fortune, can only reply that “She will not come back.” The scene is heart-wrenching, not only for what it implies about Túrin’s sensitivity to the injustice of apparently pointless suffering, but also because it softly rebukes the theodicy present in The Silmarillion itself: that suffering has a higher purpose, and is ultimately comprehensible. The narrative cannot help but corrode the myth. Even The Lord of the Rings never quite considers such questions so baldly; through its narrative the sadness and inevitability of loss are subtly evoked, but in The Children of Húrin loss and suffering are given a truly poignant and devastating quality.

The understated struggle between a Christian world of ultimate purpose and the “pagan” world of tragedy is never fully resolved in Tolkien’s legendarium, but the conflict could only have been given such poignancy by a Christian writer. The close, often conciliatory world of The Lord of the Rings depicts a world of loss, but one where cynicism is impossible. The Children of Húrin gives Tolkien’s world a tragic form, but never relinquishes the possibility of human dignity.

The completion of Christopher Tolkien’s project with the publication of The Fall of Gondolin ought to revive interest in Tolkien as a literary artist. It is often said that Tolkien initiated the fantasy genre as a viable publishing business. This is true, but Tolkien and his work stand oddly outside of the genre as it has developed today, and the themes and approaches popular in contemporary fantasy owe as much to American fantasists like Jack Vance as they do to Tolkien. He is more akin in his experimental mode to Borges than to George R.R. Martin, and more akin in his occasional melancholy to Kazuo Ishiguro than to popular fantasy writers like Joe Abercombie. Only Ursula K. Le Guin is comparable in these senses. With the appearance of the “Great Tales”, it is time to reconsider Tolkien not only as “world builder”, but as writer.

Ben Bassett is a PhD candidate at Monash University, studying the Roman period in Egypt from an archaeological perspective.