Ok, so I’m not really a big fantasy fan in general. I’ve read the LotR trilogy and The Hobbit. Great books, despite my non-interest in the genre. Anyway, I’ve heard that he’s written other books about Middle Earth. So I’m at the bookstore today, and I see ‘Lost Stories of Middle Earth’ or something like that in a few volumes. His son finished them, that’s all I know. Well, I start looking through it, and all I can say is ‘woah’.
He often rambled on in his novels about people’s history and whatnot, even though the casual reader had no idea what he was talking about. And these books (Lost Stories, and probably Silmarillon also) are basically hundreds of pages of just that. To add to that, the appendix is basically words and their origins and roots in the Middle Earth languages. It was like a friggin’ dictionary of a language he made up. I know he was a philologist, but I think this is going too far. It is just like Geeks speaking Klingon, only worse probably.
Was Tolkien really as crazily intranced in this world he created as I think he is? It makes me think that he died insane thinking he was really a Hobbit or something.
Well, he had a life outside Middle-Earth. He was a happy man with an engrossing hobby which gave/gives other people a lot of pleasure.
How can he be too engrossed? He didn’t die insane thinking he was a hobbit. He created a fictional world which just happens to be the most realised fictional world we’ve got. I can’t see the harm.
IANA true Tolkien geek. I’m sure they’ll be along soon…
But I did read that one of Tolkien’s motivations for creating Middle Earth and all of his writings about it was to provide a history for the Elvish language. His goal was to create a new language, and being a linguist he knew that languages don’t just appear out of nowhere. They grow and evolve over time. Writing about Middle Earth was a way to simulate this history for his new Elvish language. So he wasn’t always writing with the intent of providing reading entertainment for others. You are right that these rambling histories don’t always make for an interesting read.
Remember it took him decades to do all this in essentially what little spare time he had. In an interview he said about beginning “The Hobbit”: "I wrote it as a relief from examining school certificates as they were then called. One of the candidates had mercifully left one of the pages with no writing on it, which is the best thing that can possibly happen to an examiner. And I wrote on it: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ "
He said in another interview re Elvish: “I wouldn’t mind other people knowing it and enjoying it. But I didn’t really want to, like some people who have been equally inventive in language have done, is sort of make cults and have people all speaking it together. I don’t desire to go and have an afternoon’s talking Elvish to chaps.”
*Tangent * But I did read that one of Tolkien’s motivations for creating Middle Earth and all of his writings about it was to provide a history for the Elvish language.
Alternatively, you could say that the language developed in the process of filling in the detail of the world he’d already begun to create. I guess language and world developed in parallel.
Many writers do create material (e.g. character biographies) that helps develop a work, and I think Tolkien took it to excess if that were merely what it was for. However, according to a accounts I’ve read, he was also interested in creating a complete ‘English mythology’. Wales, Scotland and Ireland have more or less parallel mythologies of ancient heroes and gods, that persisted long enough to be written down, but in England they were swamped by other influences - or perhaps never had a chance to develop. That would explain the sheer quantity.
*Splanky *
*But then again, most of Tolkien’s work is swamped by other influences also- Norse (and other) mythology contributes heavily to his work. *
Well, true. But I think it is successful - perhaps by accident - as a simulation of accreted mythology: Norse and Germanic sources with overlays of newer ideas like mediaeval chivalry.
If you want to see how “into languages” he was, read HOMES book #11, “Peoples of Middle-Earth”. Here he writes at length about choosing names for people, and comes up with 3 or 4 different versions of the derivation of “Lobelia”, from the common tongue, how it was pronounced in the local language, how it was pronounced back in the 2nd age, along with alternate versions of its derivation.
It’s great that he loved languages, it’s fortunate he was able to make his living studying languages, and I am grateful that his love of languages resulted in LOTR and Silmarillion. I’m also grateful that modern psychiatry didn’t get ahold of him and feed him SSRI’s (like prozac). But he was eccentric.
Tangent hit it on the head. If he had been a “normal” author–wrote Lord of the Rings, and then spent 20 years doodling background notes about his invention–that would’ve been a bit odd. But he did it the other way around: he invented languages, because that was his hobby. He built a mythology around the people who spoke those languages, because he felt his country needed one. And then he wrote a novel that used that mythology as a background, because his publisher asked him to.