Voronwë_the_Faithful wrote: Ah, but what is the Silmarillion, Alatar? A completed work by Tolkien, or an amalgamation of different uncompleted works selectively chosen, combined and edited by his son?
CD: How did you get involved with editing J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion?
GGK: Christopher Tolkien’s second wife was a Winnipeg woman, and our families knew each other. So when they were visiting her parents on occasion in Winnipeg he and I met -- when I was an undergrad at the University of Manitoba. My usual joke is that we got on about as well as an Oxford don and a University of Manitoba undergraduate are going to get along. When his father died in the winter of ’73, he was named literary executor and had the responsibility for putting together The Silmarillion. He invited me to come over in the winter of ’74/’75 to work with him on that. I think in the inception the model in his mind was that this would be academic work. The model was the classic senior academic working with the bright grad student who does a lot of the various kinds of legwork and research. The irony is that the Silmarillion editing ended up being at least as much if not significantly more a creative exercise than a scholarly one. The purely scholarly books are the ones that he’s been producing subsequently. The difference between those two is a measure of the difference in the nature of what the editing was all about.
Here is a quote for Unfinished Tales regarding the section in the Sil on Túrin:'The Silmarillion',again in the widest sense, is very evidently a literary entity of a singular nature. I would say that it can only be defined in terms of its history; and that history is with this book largely completed ('largely', because I have not entered further into the complexities of the tale of Túrin in those parts that my father left in confusion and uncertainty, as explained in Unfinished Tales, p. 6). It is indeed the only 'completion' possible, because it was always 'in progress'; the published work is not in any way a completion, but a construction devised out of the existing materials. Those materials are now made available, save only in a few details and in the matter of 'Túrin' just mentioned; and with them a criticism of the 'constructed' Silmarillion becomes possible. I shall not enter into that question; although it will be apparent in this book that there are aspects of the work that I view with regret.
I know that while most of the published Silmarillion is taken from the Quenta itself, some sections are taken from The Grey Annals and The Annals of Aman. It has been some time since I have read those works, and so I will not comment any further. Except to say that I do not recall a single mention of Guy Kay in all of the HOME. That is not to say that there are not any; I just don't remember any. Just the single mention in the Foreword to the Silmarillion itself:My father was still evolving this part when he ceased to work on it; and the shorter version for The Silmarillion was to wait on the final development of the Narn. In preparing the text of The Silmarillion for publication I derived, by necessity, much of this section of the tale of Túrin from these very materials, which are of quite extraordinary complexity in their variety and interrelations
In the difficult and doubtful task of preparing the text of the book I was very greatly assisted by Guy Kay, who worked with me in 1974-1975.
No big surprise there.MithLuin wrote:The stellar post, though, belonged to Scirocco
My understanding (I'm at work, so I can't look this up right now), is that the only completed versions of those tales were in the older (pre-LOTR) versions of the Sil, and that Christopher had to rewrite those to get them to fit with the more recent reworking of the earlier sections. I'll try to look that up when I have some time.Also, the Tale of Eärendil and the War of Wrath was pretty much in disarray, wasn't it? I know that it was sketched at various times, but was there anything approaching a final version of that? I thought (perhaps erroneously) that CJRT had to basically write that himself, though of course basing it on JRRT's writings. The transitions, of course, have been smoothed over by him as an editor, as well.
This does tend to bear out Kay's own testimony as posted above by Sassafras. Interesting to note the major part played by Kay in the Nargothrond story (I recommend reading CT's description of the editorial changes, which I truncated in the third quote above.) One of the few places such changes and developments are clearly documented....all the editorial labour of myself and of Guy Kay who assisted me was directed to the end that my father had stated in the letter of 1963: 'The legends have to be worked over... and made consistent; and they have to be integrated with the L.R....
Foreword, BOLT1
...It is proper to mention that here as elsewhere almost every substantial change was discussed with Guy Kay, who worked with me in 1974-5 on the preparation of The Silmarillion. He indeed made many suggestions for the construction of the text (such as, in the tale of Beren and Lúthien, the introduction of a passage from the Lay of Leithian), and proposed solutions to problems arising in the making of a composite narrative - in some cases of major significance to the structure...
Quenta Silmarillion, Ch 12-15, HoME V
...This story was not lightly or easily conceived, but was the outcome of long experimentation among alternative conceptions. In this work Guy Kay took a major part, and the chapter that I finally wrote owes much to my discussions with him...
The Tale of Years, HoME XI (regarding the story of Húrin at Nargothrond)
scirocco, I have often thought the same. I'm glad I am not the only one to have noted that and been a little frustrated by it.scirocco wrote:Which brings me to a hobbyhorse of mine. I find it strange in the extreme that CT should have gone to the monumental effort that he did, to document the phases of development of his father's works, and yet singularly omitted to document the final stage of that development, his own, into the published Sil. We are left to piece together how he achieved that feat. Sure, there are odds and scraps to be gleaned throughout HoME, but does no-one else find incongruous the contrast between, say, his own meticulous picking apart of no less than four versions of A Long-Expected Party, and his own sparse comments on his own work?
Yes, that's kind of what I was suggesting. Going through the published Silmarillion chapter by chapter, and comparing it with the various texts in the HOME to determine exactly what the sources for the text was, and exactly what was edited/added by CT (and Guy Kay). Would you be up for such an extensive (and at times tedious) task? Would anyone else be?Perhaps we need an Annotated Silmarillion to go with LOTR and Hobbit!
Thanks for pulling out those quotes. I figured that they were there; I just didn't remember them.Speaking of Guy Kay, CT does acknowledge on several occasions Kay's significant contributions to the preparation of the Silmarillion:
...all the editorial labour of myself and of Guy Kay who assisted me was directed to the end that my father had stated in the letter of 1963: 'The legends have to be worked over... and made consistent; and they have to be integrated with the L.R....
Foreword, BOLT1
...It is proper to mention that here as elsewhere almost every substantial change was discussed with Guy Kay, who worked with me in 1974-5 on the preparation of The Silmarillion. He indeed made many suggestions for the construction of the text (such as, in the tale of Beren and Lúthien, the introduction of a passage from the Lay of Leithian), and proposed solutions to problems arising in the making of a composite narrative - in some cases of major significance to the structure...
Quenta Silmarillion, Ch 12-15, HoME V
...This story was not lightly or easily conceived, but was the outcome of long experimentation among alternative conceptions. In this work Guy Kay took a major part, and the chapter that I finally wrote owes much to my discussions with him...
The Tale of Years, HoME XI (regarding the story of Húrin at Nargothrond)
Indeed. Maybe if we go through the text and come up a list of alterations and additions, we can then contact CT and Guy and ask them to confirm who did what.This does tend to bear out Kay's own testimony as posted above by Sassafras. Interesting to note the major part played by Kay in the Nargothrond story (I recommend reading CT's description of the editorial changes, which I truncated in the third quote above.) One of the few places such changes and developments are clearly documented.
Actually I'd be very interested. It would give me a purpose in reading HoME which I must say I can't read for pure pleasure. It's too much like hard work.Voronwë_the_Faithful wrote:Yes, that's kind of what I was suggesting. Going through the published Silmarillion chapter by chapter, and comparing it with the various texts in the HOME to determine exactly what the sources for the text was, and exactly what was edited/added by CT (and Guy Kay). Would you be up for such an extensive (and at times tedious) task? Would anyone else be?Perhaps we need an Annotated Silmarillion to go with LOTR and Hobbit!
, whereas I'd be happy with just seeing how CT arrived at the finished product.
