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 Rateliff points out many places in which the world of TH intersects with his older and as yet unpublished work that eventually became The Silmarillion.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.

So. Welcome to The Crackpot. Please theorize, discuss, and debate to your heart’s content!

As part of my goal to catch up on my reading list during the semester break, I am trying to track down and read secondary sources of information about JRRT’s writings. I recently found at the library the book Master of Middle-earth by Paul H. Kocher and have been slowly working my way through it. It’s mostly about LotR and was published in 1972–five years before The Silmarillion hit the bookshops–and so is quaint in some places and, in others, mind-bogglingly accurate regarding aspects of the mythology that remained, at that point, unpublished.

So I’m up to the “Aragorn” chapter. And, while reading at lunch today, this passage leaped out at me regarding some critics’ contentions that Aragorn needed more complexity as a character in the form of “a sharp taste for sin”:

It is not clear why this demand, more appropriate to a realistic novel than to heroic fantasy, should be made . . .. What is clear is that if it were made of all alike it would blur the clear dichotomy between good and evil on which Tolkien has chosen to build his epic. (pg. 128)

Now, it’s really easy for me to say, “Pssh. This was clearly written before The Silmarillion made its way into the ‘canon,’” and disregard it as an anachronism. Only this is a point I’ve also seen made by people who have read The Silmarillion.

I remember when I was first dipping my toe into the Tolkien fandom, I had an almost insatiable hunger for textual analyses done by people who had read more than me. Which, at that point, was nearly everyone. This was in the heyday of TheOneRing.net before it became primarily a source for information and gossip about the movies, when Green Books still had a prominent place on the homepage and tORN still published fan fiction. Green Books was a favorite of mine in those days, and in reading a Q&A written by one of their columnists, I encountered the semi-rant against modern literature, which sullied its heroes and where one of Aragorn’s unquestionable goodness had no place and represented weak writing. Abashed, I realized that that was me: I had been taught and had myself aspired to write “complex characters,” who broke free of the constraints of “good guy” and “bad guy.” Yet, as I read more of JRRT’s writings and gained the confidence to question how others interpreted the texts, the more I realized that I did not agree with this columnist’s opinion at all. Traditionally, yes, epics make use of moral dualism, but I felt that JRRT’s writings were, largely, not so simplistic.

In fact, a “clear dichotomy between good and evil” is exactly the opposite of how I see JRRT’s writings. Especially in light of The Silmarillion, which–if anything–muddies the waters of clear good-evil dualism that LotR gives the impression of existing. With few exceptions, there are none in The Silmarillion who can be plunked neatly into Good or into Evil. Even Melkor: I remember once writing on the SWG email list that no one in the Silm is entirely evil except Melkor, and Rhapsody rightfully called me on it. Is Melkor even fully evil or is he the product of his circumstances? It’s a valid question to ask, I think, and once you start debating whether Melkor might be something other than fully evil, then the dichotomy to which Kocher and others refer goes out the window.

Of course, LotR presents characters that are more easily dichotomized, especially without knowledge of the earlier “Silmarillion” mythology to complicate characters like Sauron who appear, in LotR and The Hobbit, to be utterly evil but are shown as being more complex in the Silm. But I still don’t think that LotR is a “clear dichotomy between good and evil.” Firstly, there are characters like Boromir, Denethor, and Gollum, who walk the line. Secondly, there is the broader context of the novel as a history or set of myths passed down from loremasters who lived through the age (like Bilbo), presumably to JRRT in the role of the modern “loremaster” charged with bringing the forgotten myths back to our culture. This allows characters like Aragorn (or Lúthien, in The Silmarillion) to achieve a degree of moral perfection that they never could have possessed in reality. So while the story as it is told to us certainly creates that impression, awareness of it as a story about a period in history rather than an accurate historical account allows us to understand that the good-evil dualism is more in the bias or imagination of the storyteller than anything factual. (Of course, Kocher likely would not have been aware of this broader framework in which JRRT set his stories, but modern students of his work certainly should be.)

At the same time, when I read the History of Middle-earth books, I’m left with the impression that, in many ways, JRRT was pushing his characters, morally, to one side or the other as his work on the legendarium progressed. The Book of Lost Tales is rich with characters that are hard to place in one bin or the other as far as morality goes. Námo and Nienna, for example, are delightfully creepy, and Makar and Meássë certainly liven things up. The sons of Fëanor, at different points in JRRT’s early writings, all had their moments when they were depicted more sympathetically, as did Fëanor himself. Of course, as Douglas Charles Kane meticulously demonstrates in the recently published Arda Reconstructed, a lot of these losses were the result of Christopher Tolkien’s edits, not his father’s, and we often do not know why those edits were made. Perhaps JRRT indicated to CT that he wished the stories to move in this direction, or perhaps it is, as Kane argues, “editorial intervention” on CT’s part. Regardless, without even considering the published Silmarillion, the stories have always seemed, to me, to progress toward moral dualism as they evolved.

So, heretics and loremasters, what are your thoughts on this? Do you think that any of JRRT’s books show a good-evil dichotomy? Do you think The Silmarillion can be read this way? I realize that my reading of the books falls at one extreme and readings like Kocher’s at the other, but I’m curious what is out there in the way of middle ground.