There is a myth that the Elves had a gender-neutral society, and this premise is often then used to defend Tolkien’s own regard of women. But the Elves don’t have a gender-neutral society. Yes, we have a passage in the dogged Laws and Customs among the Eldar that states,

In all such things, not concerned with the bringing forth of children, the neri and nissi (12) (that is, the men and women) of the Eldar are equal – unless it be in this (as they themselves say) that for the nissi the making of things new is for the most part shown in the forming of their children, so that invention and change is otherwise mostly brought about by the neri. There are, however, no matters which among the Eldar only a ner can think or do, or others with which only a nis is concerned. There are indeed some differences between the natural inclinations of neri and nissi, and other differences that have been established by custom (varying in place and in time, and in the several races of the Eldar).

I see this quote cited perhaps more than any other when people attempt to prove that the Elves had a gender-equal society. I won’t even touch on the problems with the L&C in general right now. We’ll assume that it’s a reliable document that can be taken at its word.

Yes, JRRT concedes that Elf-men and Elf-women are capable of the same things. How big of him. In the very next sentence, though, he immediately begins to backtrack on that, claiming that women mostly invest their energies into children rather inventing and creating things. Next, incidentally, their “natural inclinations” direct them to a life of what is traditionally woman’s work. Not that there is anything wrong with what is traditionally woman’s work, says the woman studying for that ultimate woman’s career in K-12 education. But the notion that women, by their very nature–and their procreative capabilities–are better suited for certain pursuits has been used in our real world history to deny them access to other types of work. This isn’t egalitarian. It’s an attempt to put a rational face on sexism.

And despite the fact that Elf women can do everything the guys can do doesn’t mean that they’re allowed to. One needs to look no further than the ascendancy of Fingolfin to the kingship over his sister Findis to see that the kingship of the Noldor wasn’t work for a woman. There is, furthermore, a pervasive expectancy of female obedience. Turgon believes himself within his rights to deny Aredhel from leaving Gondolin. Lúthien–the poster girl for JRRT’s supposed enlightened view of women–was expected to be obedient not only to her father but also to Beren, when he insisted that she not follow him on his quest. (She didn’t listen either time, but that’s beside the point; a mortal a fraction of her age and abilities felt it his place to order around an Elven princess of considerable wisdom and skill.) Even Fëanor, when arguing with Nerdanel at his departure, says, “Were you a true wife, as you had been till cozened by Aule, you would keep all of them, for you would come with us. If you desert me, you desert also all of our children” (Shibboleth of Fëanor). In other words, a “true wife” is one who follows her husband, against her own conscience even.

In Quendi and Eldar, we have another passage of interest when considering how Elves perceived gender equality:

But three Elves awoke first of all, and they were elf-men, for elf-men are more strong in body and more eager and adventurous in strange places. …

Imin, Tata and Enel awoke before their spouses, and the first thing that they saw was the stars, for they woke in the early twilight before dawn. And the next thing they saw was their destined spouses lying asleep on the green sward beside them. Then they were so enamoured of their beauty that their desire for speech was immediately quickened and they began to ‘think of words’ to speak and sing in. And being impatient they could not wait but woke up their spouses. Thus, the Eldar say, the first thing that each elf-woman saw was her spouse, and her love for him was her first love; and her love and reverence for the wonders of Arda came later.

As in L&C, we have again comments on the “nature” of women–that they are less adventurous than men–and the blatantly sexist declaration that women were literally born to love their spouses above all others. Yes, I realize that Q&E is supposed to be read as a legend, not history. Nonetheless, if these are the legends being taught by the supposedly egalitarian Eldar, it might explain where Fëanor got his ideas about what makes a “true wife” and the other hogwash about feminine nature presented in documents like L&C.

I often see people asserting gender equality among the Eldar when discussing the larger can-of-worms question about how JRRT perceived women in general. JRRT died before I was even born, and it is hardly my place to profess to know his private views. However, his letters and what we can see of how he depicted women in his writing certainly don’t suggest that he had particularly enlightened views. His relationship with his wife, his remarks to his son Michael in Letter 43, and his blatant disdain of feminism suggest that his ideas are actually fairly close to what he expresses in L&C and Q&E: That men and women have inherently different natures, and where women are concerned “it is their gift to be receptive, stimulated, fertilized (in many other matters than the physical) by the male” (Letter 43).

I don’t feel the need to apologize for Tolkien’s views or allow my utter disagreement with them attenuate the joy that I take from playing in his world. Nor do I feel that acknowledging that there is sexism in Middle-earth means that that world needs “fixing,” which often seems to be many people’s conclusion when someone like me insists that she sees sexism there. That is not the case at all. I don’t discuss gender issues in Tolkien’s world with any revisionist intent but, rather, because as an important work of literature that we connect with because we see ourselves in its characters, Middle-earth echoes those same attitudes can be seen on Modern-earth, and knowing to see them for what they are allows us to begin fixing them where it actually counts.

(My thanks go to Oshun and Pandemonium both for their always clear insights on gender in Tolkien’s world and helping me to form my thoughts into hopefully coherent words!)

While reading The Stories of English by David Crystal last night for the History of English class I’m taking, I encountered a section on the idea of “language purity,” particularly as it relates to English:

Thre is a curious myth widespread in the world: many people believe that their language can somehow be ‘pure’–comprising a set of sounds, words, and structures that can all be traced back continuously to a single point of origin–and that anything which interferes with this imagined purity (especially words borrowed from other languages) is a corrupting influence, altering the language’s ‘true character.’ In the case of English, it is the Germanic origins of the language, in their Anglo-Saxon form, which are supposed to manifest this character. …

There are certainly important stylistic differences between Germanic and Romance words … but support for any notion of a ‘return to purity’ is misplaced. No language has ever been found which displays lexical purity: there is always a mixture, arising from the contact of its speakers with other communities at different periods in its history. In the case of English, there is a special irony, for its vocabulary has never been purely Anglo-Saxon–not even in the Anglo-Saxon period. (p. 57)

I have encountered the notion of linguistic purity on numerous occasions in the Tolkien fandom. I want to start out by saying that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people who want to attempt to draw predominantly from a certain linguistic tradition in their writing, if that is what satisfies them and they feel best expresses what they want their stories to say. Apparently, according to Crystal, they’re in good company with the likes of Edmund Spenser, Charles Dickens, and George Orwell. What I’ve always objected to is the rather snobbish insistence that adopting such a style is somehow the superior choice or, worse yet, requisite for a truly respectful treatment of Tolkien’s works.

One of the very first comments I received on AMC noted my use of U.S. English and the reviewer’s distaste with that. I treated it in a rather jokey manner–as the new girl in town, I didn’t know what to expect from reviewers and didn’t want to piss anyone off–but the comment never sat right with me. My initial reaction was to think, “Duh. I write in U.S. English because I was born, raised, and learned to write in the U.S.” I brushed it off, but the remark stuck with me, obviously enough that I remember it more than five years and many hundreds of comments later.

Some years later, on a mailing list for a Tolkien fanfic group, the discussion turned to grammatical and spelling conventions used in fandom, and the following remark was made concerning the use of “American” spellings and grammar:

I am put off reading fanfics based on Tolkien’s work with American spellings, and in particular, American speech patterns.

. . .

I’m not suggesting that everyone has to learn British spellings overnight, but it baffles me when I see people go to the trouble of doing long and complicated Quenyan [sic] or Sindarin translations but can’t be bothered to stay true to Tolkien’s style of spelling and speech patterns.

. . .

I’m sorry for suggesting then that [a] site about fanfiction written based on works by a British Professor who worked for the Oxford English Dictionary might want to use British spellings.

This conversation became quite heated (not that I played any part in that *ahem*) and lots of interesting revelations came out of the woodwork. Several U.S. writers acknowledged that they had tried to train themselves to write using British spelling and grammatical conventions, with mixed success. Others noted that they didn’t read stories that used U.S. spelling and grammar conventions. I later learned that this was apparently a big issue in some corners of fandom, with authors not only avoiding U.S. conventions but attempting to avoid vocabulary with etymologies that did not hail back to Anglo-Saxon, especially French-derived words. I found myself surprisingly angry over the whole thing. The idea that the language with which I had been raised and in which I had written all of my life was not adequate for writing fan fiction was deeply offensive, as was the notion that it was somehow inferior to another set of spelling/grammar conventions. I noted that the language in which an author writes is tied deeply to her identity and that it is troubling, to say the least, to expect people to suppress their identities in service of imitating another writer, no matter how much one might admire him.

Dipping my toe into linguistics has been satisfying in the sense that it has validated my feelings in many ways. For one, yes, language is essential to identity. As a writer, my language is central to who I am, perhaps even beyond the attachment I’d feel toward it if I wasn’t a writer. For another, the notion of one language being “better” or “purer” than another is a load of hogwash.

From a canonical perspective, I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t another example of what I perceive to be a pretty deep divide concerning the motive for writing Tolkien-based stories and the approach taken during the construction of those stories. There seem to be two schools of thought here. One says that stories should be imitative and try to put the reader back into the world exactly as Tolkien constructed it, right down to a perceived “Tolkienesque” style. The other approach says that Tolkien-based stories should be transformative, fill in the blanks, and question or critique Tolkien’s ideas through fiction. I’m not saying that one approach is more valid than the other.

From my perspective, falling squarely into the transformative camp, nothing is more counterintuitive than suppressing my own style as an author in order to imitate a style of writing used by another author. For one, it seems to me an exercise in futility; I best create evocative text in my own language, not a language belonging to someone else, to which I have no emotional attachment and in which I do not perceive the world. For another, it is a distraction to my purpose, which isn’t trying to sound like Tolkien or re-create the experience of reading his books with my stories but expressing ideas related to his writing–again, a task best accomplished, for me, in my native language. As an author, I am not an invisible presence behind the scenes in my stories, trying to create the illusion that I’m JRRT and not Dawn Felagund. No, my stories concern who I am and my beliefs and experiences as much as they concern the world JRRT crafted. That requires the use of my own style, my own language.

I was privileged this past Christmas to receive The History of the Hobbit as one of my gifts.  The set included The Hobbit, and The History of the Hobbit, Part One: Mr. Baggins and The History of the Hobbit, Part Two: Return to Bag End.  Like HoMe, HoTH consists of examinations of the earliest manuscripts of TH.  Unlike HoMe, these volumes were not edited by Christopher Tolkien, but by John D. Rateliff.  I found these volumes much more “readable” than HoMe.  Mr. Rateliff’s style is more engaging and less dry than CT’s.  And of course, he had a less difficult job.  Unlike the many drafts of material that CT had to wade through, covering many decades of his father’s work and many alterations, as well as multitudes of scraps of paper with scribbled notes, Mr. Rateliff had two early handwritten drafts and two typescripts, and just a few handwritten notes.

One of the fascinating things I learned is that while JRRT was somewhat ambivalent originally as to whether the world of The Hobbit was the same as that of his larger world of Arda, there were more traces of Arda in the early drafts than in the later ones.  For example, in the earliest draft, when Gandalf (whose name at that time was not Gandalf, but Bladorthin, and at the time Gandalf was Thorin’s name!) was explaining to the Dwarves how he came by his father’s map in Dol Goldur, he credits Beren and Lúthien with overthrowing the Necromancer!

“Never you mind!” said Bladorthin: “I was finding things out, and a nasty dangerous business it was.  Even I only just escaped.  However, I tried to save your father, but it was too late.  He was witless and wandering, and had forgotten almost everything except the map.”

“The goblins of Moria have been repaid,” said Gandalf; “we must give a thought to the Necromancer.”

“Don’t be absurd” said the wizard. “That is a job quite beyond the powers of all the dwarves, if they could  be all gathered together again from the four corners of the world.  And anyway [others >] his castle stands no more and [his >] he is flown. [added: to another darker place]—Beren and Tinúviel broke his power, but that is quite another story.” (“The Adventure Continues”, p. 73)

At any rate, throughout the text, Mr. Rateliff points out many places in which the world of TH intersects with his older and as yet unpublished work that eventually became The Silmarillion.

When he gets to the part where Bilbo and the Dwarves are lost in Mirkwood, and encounter the Elves, we are treated to an examination of the Elves in TH, and how JRRT did not quite seem able to make up his mind if they were his Elves or the more common sorts of medieval and Elizabethan Elves better know by readers of the time.  It would be difficult to give all of the evidence that is covered in that chapter, but here is a passage he quotes from the second draft:

…most of [the wood-elves] are descended from the ancient elves who never went to the great FairyLand of the west, where the Light-elves and the Deep-elves (or Gnomes) and the Sea-elves lived, and grew fair, and learned and invented their magic and their cunning craft and the making of beautiful and marvelous things.

This passage was greatly expanded in the First Typescript:

Are the wood-elves wicked? Well, not particularly, or indeed not at all, though they have their faults, and they don’t like strangers.  It is quite true that they are rather different from other elves; for most of them, as well as the few elves that live in hills and mountains are descended from those of the ancient tribes of the elves of old who never went to the great Fairyland of the West, where the Light-elves and the Deep-elves (or Gnomes) and the Sea-elves lived for ages and grew fair and wise and learned and invented their magic and their cunning craft in the making of beautiful and marvelous things before they came back into the Wide World.  Here the wood-elves lingered in the twilight before the raising of the Sun and Moon, and afterwards they wandered in the forests that grew beneath the sunrise.  They loved best the edges of the woods from which they could escape at times to hunt or to ride and run over the open lands by sun or moon or star; thought after the coming of Men they took ever more and more to the gloaming and the dusk.

-1/2/30:3-4, rejected ending to the First Typescript.

(“In the Halls of the Elvenking”, p. 405)

[All subsequent quotations are from this chapter.]

There is a long explanation after this, of the differences in the three Elven kindred, which is probably far more familiar to those of you who are more interested in the first two Ages than the Third, than they were to me.  But he does go on to explain that it seems clear that the Elvenking was of the Teleri, or Sea-Elves, including an explanation for the Elvenking’s golden hair.

Mr. Rateliff goes on to what I found the most interesting theory in this portion of the book:

If Tolkien’s wood-elves as a whole harken back to folklore beliefs about ‘the Fair Folk’, then in his depiction of the Elvenking he is drawing on a specific modern literary source: his own unpublished writings.

He goes on to point out a number of similarities between the Elvenking’s Halls and the caves of the Rodothlim, who later evolved into the Elves of Nargothrond.

Then he goes on to say:  “A much closer parallel to the wood-elves can be found in the woodland realm of Doriath, located in the heart of a dark forest known for its impenetrability, a place where most travellers get lost and perish miserably.”

He points out that Doriath was a place of the Sea-elves, and that at its heart was the cavern-stronghold of Menegroth, reached only by a guarded bridge over a stream.  He also quotes from “The Tale of Tinúviel” in BoLT, a description which sounds uncannily like the description of the Elvenking’s Halls in Mirkwood.

The strongest parallel between Doriath and the wood-elves’ realm, however, is the Elvenking himself, who strongly resembles one of the most famous characters in the legendarium: King Thingol Greycloak, ruler of the woodland realm of Doriath and high king of the Elves of Beleriand.

To understand, then, exactly how the wood-elf king in The Hobbit relates to the earlier stories, it is necessary (as so often) to make the mental effort to exclude from our minds knowledge of what Tolkien later resolved while working on the sequel, or that subsequent layer created as much as  twenty years afterwards will prevent us from seeing clearly what he was doing at the time he created the character—that is, when writing the story of Mr. Baggins adventures as a stand-alone work deriving in varying degrees from his already voluminous writings about Middle-earth.  Seen in this light, while the Elvenking strongly resembles King Thingol in general, the evidence for and against the identification is contradictory.

Two elements Tolkien goes out of his way to include in the narrative support the argument that the two kings are one and the same, while two unstated facts argue against it because of the dissonancy they would create between things we know to be true of Thingol that do not appear to apply to the Elvenking.

The two elements he says argue for the Elvenking being Thingol is  (1) The mention of the three Elven kindred, which means that the wood-elves are part of the mythology of Arda, of the “great Fairyland of the west”.  “In fact, only one Sea-elf in the whole legendarium ever visited Valinor and returned to live in Middle-earth, this being the figure originally known as Linwë Tinto (BLT I, 106) then Tinwë Linto (ibid., pages 130-131) or Tinwelint (‘The Tale of Tinúviel’, BLT II, 8) then from “The Lay of Leithian”, onwards as King Thingol.” and  (2) the enmity displayed between the dwarves and the elves.

The original ending to the first typescript included this passage:

…they did not love dwarves and thought he was an enemy. In ancient days they had had wars with some of the dwarves whom they accused of stealing their treasure.  It is only fair to say that the dwarves gave a different account and said that they only took what was their due, for the elf-king had bargained with them to shape his raw gold and silver and had after refused to give them their pay. If the elf-king had a weakness it was for treasure, especially for silver and white gems, for though his hoard was rich yet he had not as great a treasure as other elf-lords of old, since his people neither mined nor worked metal or jewels, nor did they trade, not till the earth more than they could help.  All this was known to every dwarf, though Thorin’s family had had nothing to do with the old quarrel I have spoken of.

Mr. Rateliff says this is a clear allusion to the Lost Tale known as “The Nauglafring: The Necklace of the Dwarves.”

But this, he says, leads to the first of the two elements that are evidence against the argument: in the original tale, Thingol’s death is a part of the story.  He goes on to say, however, that this is not as certain as it appears, and quotes another passage that implied he still lived.

The second element which is important in the tale of Thingol, but left out of the Elvenking’s story in TH, is the absence of a major player in the story: “There is no  Faërie Queen at the Elvenking’s side in Mirkwood.” Thingol’s queen, Melian the Maia, was a vital part of his story, and her absence here might seem a strong argument against the Elvenking being Thingol.

Mr. Rateliff’s own conclusion is that JRRT left his options open, never identifying the Elvenking by name, so that he could have been either the older character or a new one with many of the same characteristics.  And years later when he wrote LotR, he decided that they were indeed two different characters.

I’ve only briefly summarized his speculations here.  I thought it something that it might be fun to share, and I’d love to see other people discuss the possibilities that it opens.

JRRT was more than a “man of his time” where his regard of women is concerned. A self-described reactionary, many things from his personal life and his writings point to the fact that he was a rampant sexist in excess of what one would expect even from a man who was well into adulthood before women earned the vote in his country. Yet whenever the question of JRRT’s sexism comes into a discussion, someone trots out Lúthien as an example of how, though not all of his books provide fair depictions of women, his sexism clearly wasn’t entirely unmitigated. Lúthien, after all, is not only gorgeous but has enough super-magical powers to outsmart the Dark Lord, bring Beren back to life, and move Námo Mandos to mercy. She’s a superhero in a cape woven from her own hair. JRRT’s defenders like to point to her as evidence that he valued women’s strength and independence (because, no matter what you think of the Beren and Lúthien story, she clearly possessed both).

I don’t normally put much stock in an author’s intent, as I think I make clear here on a fairly regular basis. Texts must stand on their own, independent of what their authors wished them to say when writing them. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve ever started a sentence with that loathed phrase beloved of canatics: “Tolkien clearly intended …” So this will be a first.

In 1951, JRRT had finished The Lord of the Rings and was corresponding with Milton Waldman in hopes that Collins would publish LotR along with The Silmarillion. In Letter #131, JRRT describes his opus, from the Music of the Ainur to the conclusion of LotR. In discussing the Tale of Beren and Lúthien, we get this revelation:

It is Beren the outlawed mortal who succeeds (with the help of Lúthien, a mere maiden even if an elf of royalty) where all the armies and warriors have failed: he penetrates the stronghold of the Enemy and wrests one of the Silmarilli from the Iron Crown.

Firstly, a show of hands as to who thinks Beren did most of the work in retrieving that Silmaril? Beren would be in a wolf’s belly if not for Lúthien, to say nothing of her later “help,” without which he would also have been dead, many times over. (Impressive for a mortal.) But what struck me here as particularly revealing of JRRT’s attitude towards women is his note that Lúthien is “a mere maiden even if an elf of royalty.”

The sentence before this clarifies what JRRT sees as the significance of this particular story:

Here we meet, among other things, the first example of the motive (to become dominant in Hobbits) that the great policies of world history, ‘the wheels of the world’, are often turned not by the Lords and Governors, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak … .

So, in short, the fact that Lúthien is descended from one of the Powers that JRRT celebrates as exceptionally wise in the very same letter means nothing. (Of course, that Power is also a woman.) Neither does her heritage as the daughter of Elwë, one of the Elves selected as ambassadors to Aman. All of these facts–and her deeds–are attenuated by her status as a “mere maiden,” and the heroics that so many of her fans embrace and cite as evidence that JRRT understood women as competent beings, even a little bit.

(Here we go.)

Tolkien clearly did not intend this. Based on what he told Waldman, he wanted her story to serve in the same capacity as Sam and Frodo’s, illustrating how even the weak can overthrow the powerful. He assumed that his readers would understand this based on her femaleness alone.

Nor do I think that the published story can in any way be defended as a change of heart in favor of recognizing a clearly powerful character as such, rather than a product of her circumstances that serves as an apt vehicle for one of his most valued themes. According to Douglas Charles Kane¹, paraphrasing Christopher Tolkien’s notes in The Lost Road, the published Beren and Lúthien story was based on two texts, completed in 1951, the same year that JRRT wrote to Milton Waldman. In short, the story was likely fresh in JRRT’s mind, and the published Silmarillion shows no major edits in favor of shifting Lúthien from a weak to a powerful character. (Furthermore, the basic structure of B&L was among JRRT’s earliest works in The Book of Lost Tales.)

Lúthien is certainly the best evidence that JRRT wasn’t a complete and unapologetic sexist, and I’ve seen it used as such many times. I’ve probably even used it myself in presenting The Silmarillion as a work that presents women more fairly than do The Hobbit and LotR. This quote not only debunks that idea but flips it on its head. When we see Lúthien, after all, we are not supposed to see one strong enough to overcome impossible odds in pursuit of her goals. We are not supposed to see a hero who earned her place as a cornerstone in the legends of her people. Nope, she is a mere maiden. She proves to the rest of us that, on occasion, even the inherently weak can “help” the privileged and powerful accomplish good things.

1. Douglas Charles Kane, Arda Reconstructed, p. 173.

All thoughts and opinions are welcome. The only rule I have for this place is that I ask that people remain civil to each other. It is one thing to disagree with a point or idea and quite another to attack a the person expressing it. The first is okay; the second is not.

Finally, although this is a continuation of the LotR Genfic discussion, and although I am the webmaster of the Many Paths to Tread archive, my website is affiliated with neither, and this discussion is occurring independently of the list on which it originated. So, if you find yourself annoyed or angered by the conversation here, please don’t take it out on either of those groups.

My door, however, is always open to questions or concerns at DawnFelagund@gmail.com.

For those of you on the LotR Genfic list, you can find the original discussion thread here.

I often say that I hated The Silmarillion the first time that I read it, and that much is certainly true. Fresh from my first reading of LotR, I wanted more of the same and, mistakenly, believed that The Silmarillion would meet my expectations. I remember clearly to this day standing in the aisle at the bookstore, in the fantasy section, reading the blurb on the back of the book that mentioned how the Silm was the story of the early history of characters like Elrond and Galadriel. I know them! I thought. They weren’t my favorite characters, no (believe it or not, I was a Hobbit fan before being seduced by the much more turbid history of the Elves), but like the sight of an acquaintance can make an unfamiliar journey more comfortable to contemplate, so the attested presence of Elrond and Galadriel reassured me that I wouldn’t become adrift in the pages of The Silmarillion.

Which is, of course, exactly what happened.

The Silmarillion isn’t a wonderfully written book. It’s not particularly enticing or absorbing. While there are passages that make me sigh with the happy contentment of a wordsmith who has just encountered a perfectly constructed phrase, there are just as many that I have had to read multiple times, mentally diagramming the sentence, to even understand. And most of the lines that get heavily quoted in the House of Felagund are throwaway quips. “Travel lightly but bring your swords!” my husband and I avow each Wednesday before we head off to German longsword practice. “Get thee gone!” I’ll snip at the dogs when they’re being annoying. If I’m in a particularly foul humor, “thou jail-crow of Mandos” might be further appended to that. The Silmarillion certainly isn’t my preferred book to read, even though I’ve probably read it more times than any other and I read parts of it several times a week for my research. But when I hunger for a book where my mind can drift into new worlds and savor the author’s words, it’s not The Silmarillion that I pick up. It’s usually a Romantic- or Modern-era novel for classic/mainstream literature or Ursula K. LeGuin, Neil Gaiman, or Peter S. Beagle for fantasy.

So what is it that makes this book so damned special? Clearly it is. I first read it almost six years ago and yet my passion for it shows no sign of waning.

For me, there are two kinds of books. There are those that I read for the chance to become lost in the author’s vision. The Lord of the Rings was that way for me. I remember leaving Frodo and Sam at Shelob’s lair and shouting, “Noooo!” at the book like some character in a hammed-up melodrama. Then there are those books where the author’s vision stops just shy of satisfaction and leaves me contemplating more questions than the book answered. That is The Silmarillion.

Once I managed to wrap my brain around the Silm (and the fact that it wasn’t LotR), I found that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Fëanor, especially, bothered me. At first, I couldn’t quite figure out why it was that he fascinated me; why I couldn’t stop thinking about him. There was a cult of personality around him; there was a certain injustice in his story that stung me deep; there was my own identification with some aspects of his character; there was his obvious fallibility; there was–most of all–the feeling that I couldn’t quite articulate that I wasn’t getting his whole story.

In writing about what motivated and inspired J.R.R. Tolkien, Professor Shippey writes that “One sees that the thing which attracted Tolkien most was darkness: the blank spaces, much bigger than most people realise, on the literary and historical map …” (38). There are facts–information known, attested, documented–and there is the space between where little or nothing is known. What lives in those shadowy spaces between what we know? Staring hard into them, one begins to fancy that something moves there. There is a form of life and reality, existing just beneath one’s awareness, just out of reach of what one can “put a finger on” and document as fact.

When I read The Silmarillion, I found myself staring into a lot of those shadowy spaces. And the more I read and the more I learned, the more I saw moving there, just out of reach of “fact,” though not imagination. It was not the “facts” of The Silmarillion that so intrigued me. It was the possibilities of what lay in those unknown realms between.

Tolkien studied medieval languages and literature, and the problems we face, in studying The Silmarillion, are much the same as the problems that he would have routinely encountered in his own studies. There is the question of authorship, to start: The Silmarillion being a posthumous work that was still very much in-progress at its author’s death, we have no idea what a “Silmarillion” would have looked like had Tolkien just five more years to complete it more to his satisfaction. Even attempts to trace what was JRRT’s and what was editorial intervention/invention proves challenging: witness Douglas Charles Kane’s Arda Reconstructed. We often have multiple versions of the same texts where each has changes and additions that the others do not. The versions of the text are often imperfect. JRRT was fond of writing drafts in pencil and then writing over them in ink. His handwriting was, at times, worse than Luxeuil minuscule. He liked to compose drafts in a seemingly random fashion in notebooks and on the backs of unrelated papers. He liked to fold his work inside of newspapers. He possessed–like medieval writers–a maddening unawareness of the value of his own work would one day hold for students of that work. And then there are the historiographical questions: If an author takes great pains to invent, declare, and even create histories for his imagined narrators, then are we as readers supposed to ignore that information and take his words at face value? Or are we–as I advocate–supposed to keep the narrator’s point-of-view ever in mind and the story they present only one tiny drop in a vast ocean that comprises “truth”? Suddenly, a book is not a story but history and myth. The more I read, the more I found myself asking these questions and the deeper the shadows became and the more they shimmered with imagined possibilities.

And the more questions I begin to answer, the more questions I find to ask. For me, this is the magic that is The Silmarillion; this is why it’s not the best-written book I’ve read and hardly the most entertaining but my favorite nonetheless: because it invites my imagination out to play.

So happy birthday, Silmarillion. I look forward to commemorating many more.

Of course, my first thought–upon seeing the photo–was “OME! Light-up jewelry! That’s probably what the Silmaril that Fëanor wore looked like!” It even has that sharp, blue-white light, as I’ve always pictured the Silmarils.

But these he was not suffered to approach; for though at great feasts Fëanor would wear them, blazing on his brow, at other times they were guarded close, locked in the deep chambers of his hoard in Tirion.

In truth, I’ve always had a problem with imagining that passage, at least in a way that makes it seem appealing (as I’ve always assumed it was meant to be). And–with no offense intended to Alison Lewis–her newfangled Silmaril necklace sort of shows why. As cool-looking as it may be in a photograph, can you imagine actually interacting with someone wearing light-up jewelry “blazing” on any body part, much less the brow? It’d be distracting, to say the least. I’ve always had a mental image of Fëanor wearing the Silmarils looking something like one of those cartoonish miner’s hats with the bright lamp on the front of it. That’s all well and good if one is delving for mithril but in conversation at a party? Could you even look such a person in the eye? And wouldn’t it rather ruin the mealtime ambiance? And what if the lights were dimmed for, say, Maglor to play a concert? “Oh, look, there’s Dad standing in for an exit sign over by the door!” “In case of fire, walk–do not run–to the nearest Silmaril-wearing Elven lord.” I mean, these things are bright enough for us to see one of them sailing across the sky with Eärendil; what must have three looked like, worn by one Elf in a confined space? “Don’t worry about the lamps, Anairë, dear. Fëanor just sent word that he’ll be attending.”

Am I reading too much into it? Absolutely. I think this relatively minor matter of Fëanor’s choice in accessories (and the fate of said accessories a couple hundred pages later) illustrates something important about the “canon” one can glean from The Silmarillion: It’s not meant to be taken literally. The image of an Elven lord of unimaginable beauty wearing three radiant (not blazing) stones that he crafted from untainted light is an amazing image. And the notion of that untainted light being preserved in stones and placed within the earth, sea, and sky is a lovely concept. The two, however, don’t reconcile very well. And I think we lose something if we try too hard to make them.

Saying “I don’t understand the need for slash in Tolkien’s world” is patently ridiculous. Tolkien’s world is our world. Tolkien’s characters are us, or at least our deep ancestors. Complaining about the existence of homosexuality among a human population is like complaining about the fact that we have noses or cry when sad or seek food when hungry. It’s part of human nature. Always has been, always will be.

Tolkien wrote fantasy, yes, so if I can suspend disbelief long enough to believe in immortal beings that make glowing trees and put that light into stones that get stolen and result in battles between dragons and vampires and werewolves and an immortal servant of a dark power who eventually implants himself into a magical ring that gets thrown into a volcano by a Hobbit (a what?) … yes, I can perhaps suspend disbelief long enough to believe that no one in Tolkien’s world was gay.

But pretending like this is the default or only correct way to see Middle-earth is stupid.

Secondly, claiming that slash “disgraces” Tolkien’s world is offensive. It is no different than saying that people who are gay “disgrace” our world. Homosexuality is one of many sexualities observable in the human species. While not the most common (I would argue that would be bisexuality, in a less heteronormative society), it is no better or worse than any other, including heterosexuality. It is simply the way that people are. We have words for people who judge a person as lesser because of the traits she or he was born with.

When people say that gays and lesbians “disgrace” the world into which they were born because they were born as gays and lesbians, we call those people homophobic. I think some people in fandom need to get used to the label.

As part of my between-semesters study, I am reading secondary sources about JRRT’s world. It is easy, at times, in fandom (actually, in life), to place myself within an echo chamber of likeminded folks who share many of the same opinions and ideas that I do. Most of my closest fandom friends self-identify as “canon heretics” (as, by the title of this weble, I clearly do as well); if any of them advocate for strict canonical interpretation, they do it outside of my hearing. Yet slapping each other high fives gets old after a while, so I committed part of my break between semesters to reading those secondary sources that have earned acclaim and respect and, presumably, have ideas that are more “mainstream” than mine.

Top of the list, of course, was The Road to Middle-earth by Tom Shippey. Shippey is considered by many as the Tolkien scholar, and part of his appeal comes from the fact that he, too, is a philologist and even held some of the same academic posts as JRRT. If anyone can illuminate what it means to create a universe and write multiple books from a “philological perspective,” then presumably it would be Shippey.

One of Shippey’s theories regarding the construction of Middle-earth concerns “asterisk reality,” which is termed after the philological convention of using an asterisk to identify words that didn’t come from a source but were constructed based on the philologist’s knowledge of and extrapolation from other words and conventions in the language. Shippey maintains that it is this “asterisk reality”–the unknown that lies between two known points–that so enthralled JRRT. He saw stories in words: how they evolved and changed over time in response to happenings in the larger world. The “asterisk reality” attempts to glean those events from language and that–not the ever-popular “playground theory”–explains how JRRT began with a language and evolved a history for Middle-earth.

Perhaps the best-known example of this comes from the Shibboleth of Fëanor, published as an essay in the tenth volume of the History of Middle-earth series, Morgoth’s Ring. JRRT wished to explain how the Noldor came to replace the thorn (Þ) with the s sound. Before this, he had never conceived of the notion of friction between the sons of Finwë, but in explaining how the s began to be used, he delved the history of the House of Finwë and the tensions surrounding the replacement of one of the sounds used in Míriel Þerindë’s name, tension that became outright animosity between the two eldest princes and, eventually, the conflict between Fëanor and Fingolfin that underlies the entire history of the Noldor and without which it is impossible to imagine The Silmarillion. Between the thorn and the s lay this “asterisk reality” and the construction of a story from philological inquiry.

Now asterisk reality might sound familiar. You have known facts at Point A and Point Z and, between them, an infinite body of unknowns. Known Points A and Z might infer what lies between but it’s certainly nothing near to fact. So we start on a path from A and stop when our feet land upon Z. Shippey’s asterisk reality describes creating a story using philology, but it also describes what we know as “fan fiction” and, more specific than that, “gapfillers.”

So we are, essentially, practitioners of asterisk reality. The discussion of “canon” as it relates to Tolkien-inspired fiction also concerns this asterisk reality, perhaps even more so than the “facts” that bracket it. We all know that Maedhros was hung by his wrist from Thangorodrim; canon debates tend to center on how long he hung there and how he was kept alive and whether it’s possible that Fingon rescued him because they were lovers and not just cousins and friends. But all of these things are asterisk realities, so–however sound our conjecture and the evidence upon which it is based–a single definitive solution is impossible.

In The Road to Middle-earth, Shippey discusses JRRT’s work with early manuscripts in an attempt to demonstrate the existence of an “unconquered” (i.e., not French-influenced) version of the English language in the 12^th century. JRRT’s conclusions about the land in which such works were created and the scribes that penned them involved, at times, “a streak of wishful thinking,” in Shippey’s words. “The ghosts would be gentleman, scholars, Englishmen too. Tolkien felt at home with them,” Shippey writes before going on to say, “This sentiment may have been misguided: if we really had the ‘lays’ on which Beowulf was based, we might not think much of them, and if we had to deal with the scribes of Ancrene Wisse, we might find them difficult people” (pg. 41).

The notion of “canon,” as defined by the community in which we write, often seems to impose a sterility upon the texts with which we work. Canon is made up of facts, and if it cannot be appended with a clear citation, then it is not “canon.” To allow conjecture to flourish too much by combining “facts” from the text is acceptable to some, but it is not canon, and the prevailing attitude in the Tolkien-writing community is that such liberties demand explanation from the author (usually in the form of volumes of author’s notes), lest her or his conjectures be mistaken as uninformed and treated as such. But add a dose of the author’s “wishful thinking” and, suddenly, we’ve veered over the line for many people. One of the more memorable comments that I’ve ever received accused me of writing Another Man’s Cage for my own pleasure. Well, yes, as an author, shouldn’t I find pleasure in what I am writing? It is a story, a piece of fiction, not an instruction manual for a newfangled doohickey; if you remove my emotions, as the author, from the story, then what is left? “Canon,” I suppose, which amounts to a bare retelling of The Silmarillion or, in the case of AMC, not much at all. Yet I sometimes feel that this is what some Tolkien-writers feel is adherence to canon, with the expectation of apologies from authors who let too much of themselves show in how they work off of bare texts. They haven’t remained “clinical” enough. They’ve erred. They are often accused of allowing their own nefarious whims trump the “intent” that informed what JRRT placed upon the page. To some, this even amounts to insult against the author whose works we all admire, in one way or another.

Yet, as Shippey demonstrated in the quoted passage above, the very author whose intent we are supposed to descry was himself working in a field that not only relied heavily on hypothesis based on small and seemingly unrelated textual “facts” but allowed his own “wishful thinking” to touch upon the conclusions of his work. So, when I am fulfilling his great dream of having other hands and minds complete his stories, then I am supposed to believe that he would have wished me never to allow myself and my own “wishful thinking” to enter into that task? What, then, I would ask, is the purpose of what we do? Surely, the end result does not take us much beyond what JRRT himself accomplished in his lifetime, and I have a hard time believing that his “intent” ever included a wish for his work to stagnate so.

In describing what inspired Tolkien, both as an author and as a philologist, Shippey writes, “One sees that the thing which attracted Tolkien most was darkness: the blank spaces, much bigger than most people realise, on the literary and historical map …” (38). When I first read that line, I couldn’t help but to think that most of the fans I know who write stories based on JRRT’s books would use very similar words to describe why they do what they do. It is not so much the stories on the page as the unwritten spaces between them; the sense of a deep history behind each character and event, hinted at by JRRT and palpable to us, his readers and fans, that compel us to live part of our lives in Middle-earth. In constructing our stories to bridge the gap between fact, between canon, we rely on informed conjecture, yes, but also a healthy dose of our own wishful thinking, much as JRRT himself has done.

Douglas Charles Kane’s Arda Reconstructed is an attempt to take those published sources and answer some of these questions. Kane painstakingly, word for word, traces each line of The Silmarillion and locates from where in JRRT’s early writings it came. When first I’d heard of Arda Reconstructed from a fellow fan, I was over the moon. I had attempted this on my own as part of research projects before, and it is not an easy task. To have a book providing at least a starting point for this sort of research would make my own forays into Tolkien’s legendarium that much easier. However, I also operated under the assumption that the results of such a study would make for rather dry reading and would stand primarily as a reference, to be opened at need and otherwise unread.

I was wrong on the latter as well. Kane’s research reveals several interesting trends as far as the construction of The Silmarillion is concerned. Several of them hit my own buttons as a researcher and fan-writer.

During a discussion of Arda Reconstructed on the SWG mailing list, the most frequently asked question was, “Exactly what is this book?” I feel like the book has two important components. Firstly are the charts–one per chapter with the exception of the chapters where CT has already provided a similar breakdown of sources as part of the HoMe series–that detail the sources of each line of The Silmarillion. At times, CT (and Guy Kay) took whole swaths of JRRT’s original sources and plunked them, nearly verbatim, into the published Silmarillion. At other times, they created a patchwork from numerous sources by cutting and pasting in ways that are dizzying to behold. These charts show this and, for me, these alone are worth the price of the book. I don’t even want to imagine the combined number of hours spent on such sleuthing. I’m just glad that, now, I don’t have to do it.

The second component of the book is the author’s commentary, which is largely based on observations made while, presumably, compiling the charts. Here, the book gets interesting and here, also, the book will prove problematic for some. The saying goes that if you put two Tolkien fans together, you will end up with three opinions, and Kane is not shy about expressing his, which I’m sure will imperil him in the minds of others in the community. But so it goes.

He traces several trends that occurred during the compilation of The Silmarillion that I found particularly interesting because, as noted, they relate directly to research interests and “canon” interpretations of mine. Firstly is the diminishment of female characters during the compilation of the published Silmarillion. I’ve already heard this idea poo-pooed: They were minor characters to start and were cut as part of a general goal of downplaying minor characters. Only this isn’t what Kane’s evidence shows. Nearly all of the women of Aman, for example, had at least one detail removed by CT and Guy Kay, seemingly without reason. Other roles were eviscerated, shoving female characters into the background when, according to Kane’s research, it seemed that JRRT intended them to maintain more prominent roles, often illustrative of some of the philosophical ideas that the “Silmarillion” was meant to include.

Míriel Serindë is one such character. With the total elimination of “The Story of Finwë and Míriel,” not only is Míriel moved to the margins of the story, but the philosophical and cultural concepts that she was meant to illustrate are lost as well. Ungoliant undergoes a diminishment that greatly reduces her complexity: the complexity of character that JRRT achieved in very few words being one of the truly notable aspects of the “Silmarillion.” Nerdanel is reduced from a strong and independent woman to one who, as I illustrated in my essay A Woman in Few Words, receives only four mentions in the text, all of which concern her status as a wife and mother. JRRT’s original material on her character, as my essay also illustrates, shows her importance beyond her relationship to important males.

Still other female characters–like Andreth and Nellas–were eliminated from the published story altogether, despite evidence in the published sources that JRRT meant to include them.

Also taken from the published Silmarillion are all references to the mythological sources of the stories being presented. Again, this is an argument that I have been making for years, largely in the context of fan-writings and the attempt to establish an absolute “canon” regarding events and characterizations. My point has always been that this is complicated–even rendered impossible–by the fact that JRRT framed his stories as tales told not by himself as an omniscient and omnipresent narrator but by sources that either lived through the events being described (as in Pengolodh’s depiction of the fall of Gondolin) or received information from other sources (as in Rúmil’s construction of the Ainulindalë based on what he was taught by the Valar). That this was JRRT’s intent is hard to argue against, even though I am generally averse to assigning “authorial intent” to any of the posthumous published works. From The Book of Lost Tales on through the final written sources, JRRT often directly ascribed a source of the tales he was telling or information he was presenting. Some of his later ideas–such as the attempt to integrate a round, heliocentric world with his existing mythology–directly rely on this framework. Yet this information is completely missing from the published Silmarillion. Where did it go and why?

Kane makes a compelling argument that, in an effort to achieve consistency, CT eliminated these attributions because they themselves presented inconsistencies. JRRT ascribed tales as being passed through two lines: from the Elves on Tol Eressëa to the mortal mariner Ælfwine, or from the Elves via the escaped Númenóreans. Kane suggests the CT thought it should be one or the other but not both–that having both would introduce inconsistency into the story–and so struck them altogether. Kane regrets this choice, and I agree. As a reader, it adds the illusion of historical depth and context that the published Silmarillion lacks. As a fan-writer, I wonder, if these attributions had been made clearer, would we see a greater allowance for imagination and invention in Tolkien-based fanworks? It would be more difficult to argue something from The Silmarillion as inarguable fact with a living, breathing narrator easily perceived just on the other side of it.

Kane makes a third intriguing point: the complexity of characters presented in The Silmarillion. The characters in all their shades of gray are what first seized my imagination about the book over even LotR, which is much more prone to dualism where its characters are concerned. “Silmarillion” characters, though, have always defied such easy classification. Just ask a room full of Tolkien fans whether Fëanor or Maeglin or Manwë are good guys or bad guys and observe the variety of responses that you get.

Yet Kane demonstrates a tendency of CT, during the assembly of the published Silmarillion, to edit the texts in such ways that characters are greatly reduced in complexity. Ungoliant has been mentioned; Melkor receives similar treatment. Fëanor and his sons are deprived moments that show them more sympathetically. Manwë’s tendency to look like an ignorant buffoon is not present in the source texts, but many readers walk away from The Silmarillion with this impression–I certainly did. Kane doesn’t suggest this, but I wonder if these changes were aimed at satisfying the notions of really evil villains and really fabulous heroes that seem present in many of the epics on which The Silmarillion is patterned. Garnering sympathy for the bad guys is a relatively new phenomenon and still not one that is universally liked, especially among fantasy fans. Perhaps CT felt that taking the book in this direction would be keeping truer to the epic form and make it appealing to the same fans who adored LotR.

Without having researched any of Kane’s claims for myself, I come away from Arda Reconstructed with just one major complaint. Arda Reconstructed uses only the published source texts–The History of Middle-earth, Unfinished Tales, and so on–which is advantageous in that it allows any reader to reconstruct Kane’s work (Arda Reconstructed Reconstructed?) but is also limiting as far as drawing conclusions about the correctness of CT’s decisions in putting together The Silmarillion.

Kane acknowledges this up front in the book:

It is possible, even likely, that som eof hte changes, omissions, and additions that I describe reflect textual material not included (for whatever reason) in those works, or some other source only available to Christopher (including, perhaps, personal conversations taht he had with his father). (pg. 25)

However, as the analysis proceeds, the reality of the methodological limits of the book sometimes seems to fall by the wayside in favor of expressing a strong, certain opinion about how The Silmarillion was created. On the one hand, I understand this desire. Few are the Silmarillion fans who don’t maintain a least one negative opinion as far as CT’s choices go. At the same time, one of the quips I hear uttered at times by Silmarillion fans is, “I could have done a better job of putting together The Silmarillion than Christopher Tolkien did,” and this unfailing makes me grit my teeth because, no, chances are that if just about anyone besides CT had attempted to create The Silmarillion, we would have an inferior book. I think that–given the time and effort put into it–the “mistakes” in the published text illustrate the enormity of the task more so than any shortcomings CT possessed.

Kane doesn’t go so far as this, obviously; in fact, he speaks in gratitude for CT’s role in bringing JRRT’s posthumous writings to fans and also points out the special relationship between them that made CT the ideal choice for compiling his father’s writings. But even with all of this, I don’t feel as though his conclusions are qualified enough in terms of their shortcomings. For example, when he discusses the diminishment of women in the published Silmarillion, he is often quick to place the responsibility for this onto CT’s shoulders, identifying these changes as wrong or, at best, puzzling. For example, in discussing the removal of the detail that Nerdanel, as well as Fëanor, learned metalsmithing from Mahtan, Kane remarks, “This is one of the most blatant examples of how Christopher’s changes appear to weaken an important female character” (pg. 80). And, true, the changes are puzzling, but the reason doesn’t necessarily lie in any choice that CT made. That is a spurious conclusion to draw based solely on the fact that the published material does not immediately illuminate the reason behind such changes.

In fact, another secondary work about J.R.R. Tolkien underscores the perils of drawing such conclusions. Shortly after finishing Arda Reconstructed, I found a copy of Paul H. Kocher’s Master of Middle-earth at the library. Master of Middle-earth was published in 1972, five years before The Silmarillion, so nearly everything about the Elder Days was left to piecing together details from LotR and The Hobbit or pure speculation. Even after the publication of The Silmarillion, The History of Middle-earth, and the other supplementary texts, I was often amazed at how on-target Kocher was in his speculations about the Elder Days. Yet, at times, he was also dreadfully off-base. For example, he writes,

If the navigable sea has any such boundaries Middle-earth cannot be a rounded sphere as we now conceive Earth. In the imrama tales this point posed no dificult to the wonder-oriented Celtic mind of the Dark Ages, which popularly accepted the world as bounded and flat anyway, or, when it did not, was quite willing to forget roundness under the spell of a good story. But is such a prescientific cosmology intended by Tolkien for Middle-earth? He never discusses the question explicitly one way or the other. He leaves us to survey the text of the epic and its Appendices for ourselves. Quite possibly he considers the question to be of no real importance to the story, and so is indifferent whether it is raised or not. (pgs. 12-13)

Never explicitly discussed? Of no real importance? Indifferent?? With access to the texts we have now, we know to be as wrong-headed as Kocher’s assertion that Idril must have become a mortal because she married one. The question of how to integrate scientific reality–so important to the underlying philosophy of “subcreation” that JRRT used in his stories–with the primitive but beautiful myths he had constructed actually pre-occupied JRRT quite a bit at the end of his life, and he’d even begun changing some of his writings to reflect a round, heliocentric world. My point isn’t to berate Kocher for not having read texts that weren’t even close to publication when he wrote his otherwise insightful book about JRRT’s mythology. My point is that the sources that build all of JRRT’s works are unbelievably complex, and even after the publication of The Silmarillion and more than a dozen texts to support it, there are still troves of unpublished notes and documents to which most of us don’t have access. And this is to say nothing–as Kane himself admits–of conversations between JRRT and CT to which even the most devoted researcher will never have access.

It may well be that CT is a misogynist intentionally bent on diminishing the roles of prominent women; it may be that he possesses a less nefarious (but no less harmful) bias that caused him to choose certain details over others when editing the book to a reasonable length; it may well be that he simply made some unfortunate changes in the interest of slimming and simplifying the text that gives that impression. Or it may be that there is somewhere a scribbled note indicating that Nerdanel should not have learned her father’s art. Or it may be that JRRT expressed to CT his uncertainty about the direction Ungoliant’s character was heading. It may be that we will never know, or that what seems a “trend” is really no more than an unfortunate coincidence, and the label of “misogynist” is too dire, in my mind, to attach to a person without full proof of malevolence or ignorance underlying his decisions.

And this, I think is the major shortcoming of Arda Reconstructed. If CT’s theoretical intellectual heir publishes another twelve volumes of the History of Middle-earth illustrating why CT made the changes that he did, then Kane’s book will become as much of an anachronism as Kocher’s: useful in some regards but generally unreliable for its opinions that fail to account for texts and information that it knows exists but cannot access and the possibility that such information will fundamentally alter one’s conclusions. It is not that those opinions should not be expressed. To the contrary, I suspect that Kane’s conclusions will make for some wonderful discussion and debate in the fan community. But I think the book should have done more to remind readers of the limitations posed by its methods and should have taken more care in assigning responsibility for choices with which the author did not agree.

So should you buy the book? Its price tag was a little wince-worthy on my starving student’s budget but, yes, it is worth every penny. As a researcher, I cannot be anything but grateful to Kane and relieved at not having to compile the information that he makes available in tidy tabular format in this book. The tables alone are worth the price of the book and, I suspect, will be well-thumbed in the years to come. The discussion is lively and moves surprisingly fast, given the density of the material that Kane covers. Aside from my misgivings about his certitude at points, he brings to light interesting trends that I think are worth considering and discussing, even if we never reach any definite conclusions.

As a fan-writer, too, Kane’s work if anything demonstrates the frailty of what we fans often identify as “canon”: that notion that there exist facts in JRRT’s writings that can unequivocally be determined as “right” or “wrong.” Several of my fellow fan-writers raised the question of how Kane’s work will change how fiction based on JRRT’s writings is perceived. Pie-eyed optimistic heretic that I am, I believe that Arda Reconstructed defends a less stringent notion of canon. It is a firm reminder of the state of flux in which many of JRRT’s writings were at the time of his death. While any single fan can take a work or works and pin it down as “This is truth to me”–as many do with the published Silmarillion–that really cannot be defended beyond personal preference, and Arda Reconstructed illustrates why.

I give Arda Reconstructed 3.5 Keebler E.L. Fudge “Elves Exist” cookies out of four.