Talk:The History of Middle-earth

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[edit] Untitled discussion

The nature of the THE HISTORY OF MIDDLE-EARTH is very complex. Christopher Tolkien shifted directions several times during the process of writing the collection, the extent of which he did not foresee at the outset. However, he stipulated several stylistic conventions and facts from the outset.

One of the conventions Christopher followed throughout the twelve volumes was to distinguish between the published SILMARILLION and the various texts. A footnote attached to the first use of the italicized name THE SILMARILLION in the Foreword to THE BOOK OF LOST TAKES, PART ONE reads --

When the name is printed in italics, I refer to the work as published; when in inverted commas, to the work in a more general way, in any or all of its forms.

Years later, Christopher elaborated on this point in the foreword to THE WAR OF THE JEWELS --

...I use the term 'Silmarillion', of course, in a very wide sense: this though potentially confusing is imposed by the extremely complex relationship of the different 'works' -- especially but not only that of the QUENTA SILMARILLION and the ANNALS; and my father himself employed the name in this way....

I point this out because, through the years, people have been far less careful than Christopher in distinguishing between the published book and the body of separate works which collectively he and his father identified as 'The Silmarillion'. More importantly, though Christopher himself distinguished between THE BOOK OF LOST TALES and 'The Silmarillion', many readers have not. But the foreword to THE BOOK OF LOST TALES, PART ONE, establishes the distinction as a fact of record in the first paragraph --

THE BOOK OF LOST TALES, written between sixty and seventy years ago, was the first substantial work of imaginitive literature by J.R.R. Tolkien, and the first emergence in narrative of the Valar, of the Children of Iluvatar, Elves and Men, of the Dwarves and the Orcs, and of the lands in which their history is set, Valinor beyond the western ocean, and Middle-earth, the 'Great Lands' between the seas of east and west. Some fifty-seven years after my father ceased to work on the LOST TALES, THE SILMARILLION, profoundly transformed from its distant forerunner, was published; and sixty years have passed since then.

Wikipedia articles should be careful not to repeat the errors of fact which have become accepted as substantially true through the weight of repeated erroneous usage.