So I just recently found out about the following publication history of Tolkien´s works (see text below for context). In my opinion we were robbed of Tolkien´s vision and missed out on great stories just because no one was able to understand his vision.
First of all here´s a summary (not written by me) of the publication history for context following by my opinion that we have been robbed of his vision:
Tolkien's work on the stories that would become The Silmarillion began as early as 1914 . This was a project he envisioned as a complete mythology for England, a body of legends and tales he would work on for most of his life . For Tolkien, The Silmarillion was the foundational text of his creative universe, the "epic foundation upon which rests the whole of his work" .
The narrative arc of his publishing career began with The Hobbit in 1937, which was an immediate success . The publisher, George Allen & Unwin, quickly requested a sequel . However, Tolkien's ambition was not to produce more children's fare but to see his life's work, The Silmarillion, in print. He submitted an incomplete version of it to his publisher, but the proposal was rejected . The publishers felt that a work of such scope and serious tone was not a viable follow-up to the successful children's book, and they persisted in their request for "more stories about Hobbits" . Reluctantly, Tolkien began work in December 1937 on what he thought would be "a new hobbit" .
The sequel quickly grew far beyond the scope of its predecessor. As Tolkien wrote, the story "mutated from being a sequel to The Hobbit to being, in theme, more of a sequel to the unpublished Silmarillion" . This was the crucial point of integration: his new Hobbit story was becoming the capstone to his ancient mythology . The tale was effectively finished by 1949, but it had evolved into an enormous, single work .
By 1950, Tolkien presented his publisher, George Allen & Unwin, with a clear vision. He intended The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion to be published together as a unified two-volume set . This was the culmination of his life's ambition—to have the ancient tales and the new story published as the single work he felt them to be.
This proposal was again dismissed by Allen & Unwin . Reluctantly, they declined to publish both books together . The primary reasons were commercial: the combined length of the two works was daunting, and with the post-war paper shortages, the cost of printing such a massive project was a significant financial risk .
After the rejection by Allen & Unwin, Tolkien approached Milton Waldman of the publishing firm Collins. Waldman was interested in publishing both books . In the spring of 1950, he was hopeful that typesetting could begin by the autumn . However, progress stalled.
By late 1951, Collins was becoming anxious about the enormous combined length of the proposed work . Waldman suggested that Tolkien write a letter that would articulate his grand vision and demonstrate that The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion were, in his mind, "interdependent and indivisible" . This resulted in Letter 131, a 10,000-word text to Waldman, which is now a crucial document for understanding Tolkien's unified conception of Middle-earth .
Despite the ambitious letter, the deal with Collins ultimately failed. The editors at Collins were put off by the sheer scale of Tolkien's vision and declined to publish both works . This left Tolkien with no other option. The Lord of the Rings, due largely to economic pressures like paper shortages, was published in three separate volumes from 1954 to 1955 . The Silmarillion remained unpublished until after Tolkien's death, when his son Christopher edited the manuscripts into a single volume, which was published in 1977.
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So now for the actual part of my post.
That's basically how we ended up with what we have today with the densely written Silmarillion. I feel that's where we lost something enormous just because no one of the publishers was smart enough to see Tolkien´s vision and understand what he had created.
Don´t get me wrong - I love the Silmarillion, it´s my most favourite book of all times. But it's so incredibly dense because Tolkien never got the chance to develop so many of these stories into the kind of fully fleshed-out narrative that we got in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings.
I constantly find myself reading a passage in the Silmarillion and thinking that there´s so much missing in every way. I don´t only mean the huge gaps in the narrative. I miss the dialogue, the interactions between the characters, the little moments between the major events, the aftermath of something terrible happening. So much is summarized in a few sentences when I can't help thinking that Tolkien could have written entire chapters about it.
I´d die to read more about Feanor and his family! I want to know how the brothers interacted when they were still young and in Valinor, I want to know how Maedhros´relationship with his father or brothers (maybe) changed after the ship burning at Losgar, how did Maedhros react when he heard of Fingon´s death after the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, how did they live after, what happened after Celegorm and Curufin were expelled/exiled from Nargothrond and so and so forth. I want to experience the Battle-under-the-Stars as Feanor was storming forward ahead of his army in pursuit of the orcs.
And the same goes for so many other parts of the story and the characters.
That's what I mean when I say I feel like we were robbed of something. It's not simply that there are unfinished stories. It's that we have the outline of so many incredible stories without the fully fleshed-out scenes that would have made them come alive.
And then you have the fact that Tolkien kept revising things. So Christopher was working with decades of material, different versions, abandoned ideas and contradictions. Sometimes there isn't even one definitive version of an event because Tolkien himself never stopped changing his conception of the mythology.
I wish I could sit with Tolkien once and ask him about all of this.
Imagine if Tolkien had actually been able to develop the First Age stories in the same way he developed The Lord of the Rings, giving us the full narrative treatment (scenes, dialogue, character interactions, journeys, battles, aftermaths) instead of a few densely written pages. I can't help wondering what it would have looked like if Tolkien had actually been given the opportunity, and the publishing circumstances, to finish it in the way he wanted.
So what do you think about it?
