Silmarillion genetics

[Airyyn]

Hello everybody,

I posted recently an infography about the Silmarillion on deviantART :
http://airyyn.deviantart.com/art/The-Si ... -467125374

This picture gives the character strings identical between the Silmarillion and the texts published in HOME. Each different color is associated with a HoME book, and one 4*4 pixels square is equivalent to a word. It permits to visualize the composition of the published Silmarillion...

When I started this work, I didn't know Arda reconstructed (and currently, I didn't read this book yet).

Airyyn.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Airyyn, that is a truly impressive piece of work. Thank you so much for sharing it. And, of course, I hope you get a chance to read Arda Reconstructed and enjoy it.

[Passdagas the Brown]

This looks great and must have taken a significant amount of time!

Now pardon my ignorance, but despite your explanation, I have little idea of what the chart means...

[Voronwë the Faithful]

It took me a while to figure it out, too. If you look at the top, a color is assigned to HoMe Volumes 1-5 and 9-12 (so excluding the volumes dedicated to the history of LOTR and the Notion Club Papers) and UT. Then there is a rectangle assigned to the Ainulindalë (a), the Valaquenta (v), each chapter of the Quenta Silmarillion, the Akallebeth (a, again) and Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age (t, for some reason). The colors in each rectangle show how much from the volume of HoMe (or UT) that that color is assigned to was used for that particular chapter in the published work.

[Airyyn]

I would add that I am also the author of an essay about geopolitics in Beleriand (in french) :
http://www.jrrvf.com/jrrvf2/precieux-he ... beleriand/

I drew all the maps accompanying this essay.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I clicked on the link, but I don't read French, and I don't think that Google translate does your writing justice.

[Airyyn]

Hello,

After the design of the infography on the Silmarillion posted on DeviantArt, I wrote an essay about the composition of the Silmarillion.
Unfortunately, this is an essay in french. But each chapter is accompanied by a computer-generated picture which summarizes accurately the composition of the Silmarillion from HoMe books.

Here for example the picture of the chapter 9, The flight of the Noldor :
http://www.tolkiendil.com/_media/essais ... png?cache=
With the following caption :
One word is a 10*10 pixels square, one line is 50 words. The colored stripes are the passages strictly identical between the Sil and HoMe.
[X.292] : means this passage is from tome 10 page 292.
[*V.235] : the asterisk ahead means this passage is simply quoted by Christopher.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Nice!

[Airyyn]

Hello all,

I am back with another infography, concerning the composition of The Children of Húrin.

It was a less complex task than establish the composition of the Silmarillion. As you can see, the Children of Húrin is primarily derived from Unfinished Tales (this is not surprising), some parts are from The War of the Jewels and there is many quotes from the HoMe series. The white parts of the graphic gives the unpublished material, coming from new manuscripts or editorial additions.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

It's actually a lot more complicated than that. It would be more correct to say that the material in the Narn, CoH, and the Túrin chapter in The Silmarillion are all derived from the same sources, including but not limited to the Grey Annals published in WotJ, but most of which was too complicated for Christopher to publish. As I note in discussing the Túrin chapter:

The reason this chapter is probably the most difficult to attempt to
trace is because the material from which it is derived is the one area
that Christopher indicates he did not completely present in The History
of Middle-earth. He stated in the foreword to The War of the Jewels
that the history of his father’s work on “The Silmarillion” was largely
completed with the publication of that book, and then clarified that
it was incomplete only in the sense that he did not enter “further into
the complexities of the tale of Túrin in those parts that [his] father
left in confusion and uncertainty, as explained in Unfinished Tales, 6”
(WotJ, x).

The quote from Unfinished Tales that he is referring to is the following:

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. (UT, 6.)

In his discussion on the “later Quenta,” Christopher states that in
December 1937 his father abandoned the writing of the continuous
Quenta Silmarillion at the beginning of the story of Túrin (which was
then chapter 17). Christopher further points out that his father made
no changes to this chapter in the last typescript of the “later Quenta.”
He adds that his father did eventually return to that text, but that the
many additions and corrections that he made, particularly in the latter
half of the chapter, are “best regarded as an aspect of the vast,
unfinished work on the ‘Saga of Túrin’ that engaged him during the
1950s, from which no brief retelling suitable in scale to the Quenta
Silmarillion ever emerged” (WotJ, 244).

The Grey Annals does continue to the end of Túrin’s story (at which
point it too ends), but much of the first part of this chapter is taken
from the different sources described above. Those sources also were
used to generate the Narn account published in Unfinished Tales and,
of course, the newly released The Children of Húrin.