The Great Tolkien Reread: Unfinished Tales

The problems that confront one given responsibility for the writings of a dead author are hard to resolve. Some persons in this position may elect to make no material whatsoever available for publication, save perhaps for work that was in a virtually finished state at the time of the author’s death. In the case of the unpublished writings of J.R.R. Tolkien this might seem at first sight the proper course, since he himself, peculiarly critical and exacting of his own work, would not have dreamt of allowing even the more completed narratives in this book to appear without much further refinement.

There comes a point in the lifecycle of every sufficiently successful story in which it becomes an IP. At that point, there are two stories rather than one: there is the story itself, and the story about how it became that story. The fruitful collaborations, necessary compromises, backstage drama, and financial shenanigans that all combined to produce something that seems, in hindsight, inevitable. Eric Stoltz being replaced after he’d started shooting Back to the Future; George Lucas planting a script line in The Empire Strikes Back in case Mark Hamill decided not to return for a third film; Kevin Feige forcing Ike Perlmutter out of Marvel—often these stories can feel more dramatic, and with higher stakes, than the fantastical adventures they produce on page or screen.

In the case of the Tolkien legendarium, the story is, roughly, this: J.R.R. Tolkien was an inveterate tinkerer and reviser. In his entire lifetime, he managed to complete only two novels (albeit that the second one is a grand epic more than a thousand pages long), both of which float atop an absolute ocean of uncollected, uncompleted material. Some of the stories in what eventually became The Silmarillion were composed even before the completion of The Hobbit, and yet in the nearly two decades between The Lord of the Rings being published and Tolkien’s death—decades in which he became one of the most popular and successful authors on the planet—he could not bring the book into a publishable form. It took the work of his son, Christopher, and of a random undergraduate named Guy Gavriel Kay, to complete the work after his death—by which we almost certainly mean that they ghost-wrote at least some of it.

This is a sad state of affairs for those of us who love the world that Tolkien created and want to know more about its stories and history. As Christopher Tolkien writes in the introduction to Unfinished Tales (or, to give it its full title, Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth), it would have been inconceivable to leave The Silmarillion unpublished simply because its author did not manage to finish it. Whatever else I say about him in this or in future essays, he deserves our thanks for that work. But alongside that worthy impulse, there is another very obvious thread running through the post-Tolkien era of the Tolkien industry: an awareness that there is a vast market hungry for new material, and very little with which to feed them.

You can sense this awareness already within Tolkien’s lifetime. Ballantine Books hit the jackpot when they published the first (legal) US editions of The Lord of the Rings in 1965, which helped launch their vitally important Ballantine Adult Fantasy line. But when readers came back for more material from the author, all Ballantine had to offer them was The Hobbit. They quickly cobbled together, from previously published stories, poems, and essays, a volume titled The Tolkien Reader (1966), but it was only with the publication of The Silmarillion in 1977 that the Tolkien estate could begin to feed the hunger for more Middle Earth material.

For the next fifty years, the estate has wavered between the impulse to feed that hunger—and reap the rewards—and an awareness of how increasingly thin, fragmentary, and in some cases unpublishable the remaining material is. Between 1983 and 1996, Christopher Tolkien published The History of Middle Earth, a twelve-volume series that organizes his father’s notes and the various versions of the invented history he crafted into something resembling a coherent narrative. A scholar himself before he became the steward of his father’s legacy, Christopher presents the work as something like an academic resource, full of notes on the development of the text, and highlighting the contradictions between different versions. Starting in the late 2000s, the estate shifted gears and began publishing “rediscovered” Tolkien stories, which as far as I can tell are the same materials from The History of Middle Earth and other volumes, but with the frayed edges stitched together by an unknown hand.

Published in 1980, Unfinished Tales can be seen as an intermediate step between The Silmarillion and later extruded Tolkien products. As Christopher writes in his introduction, none of the materials here were complete enough, or of a sufficient thematic unity, to be included in The Silmarillion. Nevertheless, he thinks that there are things here of interest to readers who were engaged by The Silmarillion or the appendices to The Lord of the Rings. At the same time, he also quotes this warning from a 1955 letter by his father—a warning that Tolkien, it seems, directed as much at himself as at Christopher or other readers.

I am not now at all sure that the tendency to treat the whole thing as a kind of vast game is really good—certainly not for me, who find that kind of thing only too fatally attractive. It is, I suppose, a tribute to the curious effect that story has, when based on very elaborate and detailed workings of geography, chronology, and language, that so many should clamour for sheer ‘information’, or ‘lore’.

The title Unfinished Tales turns out to be only half true. Unfinished they may be, but very few of the materials collected in this volume could be described as tales. There are informational passages—a description of the island of Númenor, granted to Middle Earth’s human residents as a reward for their role in the defeat of Morgoth at the end of the First Age; or an essay about the Istari, the wizards, that offers some background on what manner of being Gandalf and Saruman are. Others are clearly outtakes. “Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin” is a bit of travel writing excised from The Silmarillion (perhaps our best indication that it is not fully the work of J.R.R. Tolkien); “The Quest of Erebor” is narrated by Gandalf, not unlike his recounting of being imprisoned by Saruman in “The Council of Elrond”, and reveals how a chance encounter with Thorin Oakenshield led to the events of The Hobbit. Chapters like “The History of Galadriel and Celeborn”, meanwhile, are a mere gathering together of half-formed thoughts and contradictory ideas about Galadriel’s actions and movements before, during, and after the events of The Silmarillion that don’t come together into a coherent image.

Still, if you’re the sort of nerd who is subject to the “curious effect” that Tolkien describes in his letter, there are gems in almost every chapter here, even if you sometimes have to dig for them. And there are at least two stories here that I consider as close to complete as makes no difference, and which are among the most interesting works Tolkien has written. The first, “Narn I Hîn Húrin”, we will discuss at a later date. The second, “Aldarion and Erendis: The Mariner’s Wife”, is unique in several respects. It is a tale of Númenor, a place glimpsed in other parts of Tolkien’s writing mostly through chronologies or broad-stroke histories. It is a psychological drama, in which the chief event is the dissolution of an unsuccessful marriage. And it is a story about women.

Númenor is, for my money, the most intriguing and least explored corner of the Tolkien legendarium. Against the alleged uncomplicated nobility and goodness of the characters in The Lord of the Rings, it offers a nonstop, turgid royal court melodrama, in which people whose superhuman qualities—extreme longevity, foresight, profound wisdom and vigor—are matched only by their oversized egos back themselves into increasingly destructive choices, crowing about their honor and dignity the whole way down.

“Aldarion and Erendis” begins with one such figure, the crown prince Aldarion, disappointing his father by taking to sea. On his journeys, Aldarion meets and befriends figures that readers of The Lord of the Rings will recognize, such as Círdan the Shipwright and the elven king Gil-galad. The readers, however, hear about all this second-hand, in Aldarion’s increasingly infrequent returns from his increasingly lengthy voyages. Though exhorted by his father to remain home and take seriously his role as heir and future king, Aldarion instead intensifies Númenor’s shipbuilding, forming a league of seafarers and kickstarting the island’s colonial adventures in Middle Earth.

When Aldarion meets Erendis, a young noblewoman, and is immediately taken by her, it’s treated as a solution by everyone in his vicinity, despite the fact that the two have profound differences in temperament and opinion. Erendis loves her home and doesn’t want to leave it, and is angered by the deforestation caused by Númenor’s increased shipbuilding. Most importantly, the life of a mariner’s wife, constantly waiting for her husband to return from the sea, does not appeal to her.

They rode together then to the house of Beregar her father, and there Aldarion made plain his desire for betrothal to Erendis; but now Erendis was reluctant, though according to the custom and the life of her people it was now full time for her marriage. Her love for him was not lessened, nor did she retreat out of guile; but she feared now in her heart that in the war between herself and the Sea for the keeping of Aldarion she would not conquer. Never would Erendis take less, that she might not lose all; and fearing the Sea, and begrudging to all ships the felling of trees which she loved, she determined that she must utterly defeat the Sea and the ships, or else be herself defeated utterly.

One might think that this is a very comprehensive list of reasons why Aldarion and Erendis should not marry, but then one is not a Númenorean. Genuine attraction and love, as well as constitutional pig-headedness, keep these two on a collision course even as they keep discovering what feel like irreconcilable differences (“‘Name any tree that you love and it shall stand till it dies,’ said Aldarion. ‘I love all that grow in this Isle,’ said Erendis”). We’ve all known this sort of couple, who are well suited in some ways and an absolute disaster in others, and who unfortunately need to prove to themselves that they can’t make it work. It’s surprising to find them in a fantastical setting, and in a society in which the roles of men and women are supposedly so proscribed—in which Erendis is advised that “A woman must share her husband’s love with his work and the fire of his spirit, or make him a thing not lovable.”

In reality, Erendis is proud and stubborn, and Aldarion makes a lot of promises that he intends to keep but ultimately doesn’t. They are happy for a while, and then not. Erendis tolerates her husband’s absences for a time, until she can’t. They have a child who isn’t quite enough to hold them together. You could find this story in any random work of literary fiction, and Tolkien is surprisingly shrewd at capturing the nuances of character that make it impossible for two people who genuinely love each other to have a successful marriage.

Aldarion’s heart was hardened, for these words recalled his speech with Erendis as they passed through Emerië; and he thought (but untruly) that she had consulted with his father. It was ever his mood, if he thought that others combined to urge him on some path of their choosing, to turn away from it

Because this is still a tale of high fantasy and court intrigue, this troubled marriage ends up impacting on Númenorean politics. Aldarion’s mistreatment of his wife turns his people against him, and endangers his reign before it even begins. His father grows distrustful of him, seeing him as a thrill-seeker and a warmonger. His obsession with seafaring and the colonization of Middle Earth also raises fundamental questions about what Númenor is for. Should its people spend their lives looking inward, enjoying the gift that the Valar bestowed upon them, or should they share their abilities with others? Are Aldarion’s expeditions mere exploration for its own sake, or is he transforming Númenor into a militaristic power? Is Aldarion capable of appreciating things, such as the forests of Númenor, for themselves, or can he only see them as raw materials to feed his obsessions?

These questions are not answered so much as transformed in the story’s final movement, in which Aldarion returns after yet another long absence, and delivers to his father a letter from Gil-galad:

Long I have owed you thanks, for you have so many times sent to me your son Anardil Aldarion: the greatest Elf-friend that now is among Men, as I deem. At this time I ask your pardon, if I have detained him overlong in my service … A new shadow arises in the East. It is no tyranny of evil Men, as your son believes; but a servant of Morgoth is stirring, and evil things wake again. Each year it gains in strength, for most Men are ripe to its purposes. Not far off is the day, I judge, when it will become too great for the Eldar unaided to withstand. Therefore, whenever I behold a tall ship of the Kings of Men, my heart is eased.

What we have been reading, it turns out, is the first stirrings of what will become The Last Alliance of Elves and Men, culminating in the (temporary) defeat of Sauron and the (temporary) seizure of the Ring by Isildur. All of that, however, has been obscured from us in favor of a sad domestic drama. And even now that Aldarion is vindicated—his father, on learning of the new power rising, immediately resigns the throne, understanding that he will not be able to make the decisions necessary to prepare for the coming conflict—the damage that he has caused to his wife and child is irreversible. His final meeting with Erendis is unbearably bitter—”‘I was told in Armenelos that my wife was here, and had removed my daughter hither,’ he answered. ‘As to the wife I am mistaken, it seems, but have I not a daughter?’ ‘You had one some years ago,’ she said. ‘But my daughter is not yet risen'”. Though it’s clear that the two could reconcile, if they could just get over their pride and hurt, it’s also clear that they are no longer willing to do this.

Aldarion’s vindication, in fact, turns out to be short-lived. He gets his way with his father, and isolates his former wife from her circle of support. But he’s been gone too long, and can’t cement the necessary changes into Númenorean society. His daughter, when she assumes the throne, allows his military policies and friendship with the elves to lapse—in part, it’s suggested, because “deep in her heart, almost but not quite forgotten, was the firmness with which Aldarion had unclasped her hand and set her down when he was in haste to be gone.” (She also does some very classic child of divorce things such as pitting her parents against each other in order to get away with shit, dating inappropriate people, and having a rather unhappy marriage herself, all of which feels almost hilariously modern.) So, even though the story ends by revealing that Aldarion was dedicating himself to things more important than his marriage, in the end his neglect of the domestic damages the thing he dedicated his life to. It’s not a message you expect from Tolkien, and it is a delight to discover.

Now, however, we must admit that there is a twist. In his introduction to “Aldarion and Erendis”, Christopher Tolkien writes that “This story was left in the least developed state of all the pieces in this collection, and has in places requires a degree of editorial rehandling that made me doubt the propriety of including it.” So, is this a story by J.R.R. Tolkien, or a posthumous collaboration with Christopher, or a story by Christopher from an idea or outline by his father? Are the things that make it remarkable a reflection of how wide-ranging and surprising an author Tolkien actually was, or are they an indication that it is fanfic? These are precisely the sorts of questions that the Tolkien legendarium is designed to obscure. Unfinished Tales, like other works that we will discuss in this project, invites us to consider how much the answers to them really matter.

Next time: On September 8th, we return to The Lord of the Rings, kicking off The Two Towers with a discussion of “The Departure of Boromir”