December's Deliciously Delirifacient Dabblings Into Fictional Diversions

[thatollie]

I got A Storm of Swords for Christmas so I sat down and read it. Now I'm back.

 

[Extollager]

I've just begun to read Scull and Hammond's The Art of The Hobbit, which reproduces, so far as is known, every least sketch Tolkien made in connection with the book as well as all of his finished art.

It's interesting to me that they state the best text of Tolkien's novel is the 2002 edition of The Annotated Hobbit, which appeared before the edition that was bound with the boxed set of John Rateliff's History of The Hobbit. Apparently they don't regard that edition as quite as good as the one in TAH 2nd ed. My guess is that the differences are very minor.

The art book comes in a nice slipcase. I got to see much of Tolkien's original Hobbit art at a 1987 exhibit in Milwaukee. I'm not one for speaking lightly of "unforgettable experiences," but seeing the original of "Bilbo Woke Up with the Early Morning Sun in His Eyes" was just that.

BTW, here is part of the Scull-Hammond Tolkien collection:

 

[jojajihisc]

Wow....

 

[Devil's Advocate]

Wow....

I second that.

 

[Spade]

I'm reading Eon by Greg Bear. This is my second try at reading this. It's been about five years though. I still feel like I need a map while reading this.

 

[Hilarious Joke]

I'm also now reading Ice Station by Matthew Reilly. Thought I'd give a different genre a try.

 

[GOLLUM]

I've just begun to read Scull and Hammond's The Art of The Hobbit, which reproduces, so far as is known, every least sketch Tolkien made in connection with the book as well as all of his finished art.

It's interesting to me that they state the best text of Tolkien's novel is the 2002 edition of The Annotated Hobbit, which appeared before the edition that was bound with the boxed set of John Rateliff's History of The Hobbit. Apparently they don't regard that edition as quite as good as the one in TAH 2nd ed. My guess is that the differences are very minor.


BTW, here is part of the Scull-Hammond Tolkien collection:

Yes, the production values for The Art of The Hobbit are very good! Beautiful fold-out plates and at $40 US (or less) it's not exorbitantly priced.

I also have the John Rateliff's History of The Hobbit and don't worry, it's excellent. For anyone who isn't aware it contains a study of Tolkien's original drafts including pointers as to the key differences with what became the published 'accepted' or 'standard' text that to my knowledge applies up to the present day.

I also have the History of LOTR by Hammond & Scull, which is similarly very good as well as a single copy of the Hobbit 70th anniversary HB edn. as well as a beautiful 50th LOTR anniversary edn. leather bound with gold-gilt paging and slipcase. In fact I have pretty much everything penned by Tolkien that's been published during and after his lifetime in terms of stories, poems etc.. other than the multi-volume set featuring the history of middle earth edited by Chris Tolkien.

The Scull-Hammond Tolkien collection is...very impressive. It looks conspicuously like the way my own personal library is arranged in terms of both order and appearance actually. although Tolkien only takes pride of pace in one small corner of mine.....

Thanks for sharing mate and Happy New Year....

 

[Extollager]

In fact I have pretty much everything penned by Tolkien that's been published during and after his lifetime in terms of stories, poems etc.. other than the multi-volume set featuring the history of middle earth edited by Chris Tolkien.

I didn't buy all twelve of those thick volumes while they were being published. I didn't think of myself as that much of a Tolkien completist. I bought The Lays of Beleriand in the 1980s, but none of the others till the past ten years or so.

But there is some very interesting material in them, although I haven't read any of them straight through.

First I would mention theunfinished fictional works: The Lost Road, The Notion Club Papers, and two short false starts, one being, as I recall, a story set in Middle-earth about the Numenorean survivors in the Second Age, and the other being a story occurring soon after Aragorn's death in the very early Fourth Age.

The Notion Club Papers is the longest of these items and really is quite interesting although I don't know that it would have been very marketable! Roughly speaking, the first part of it is an extended near-future symposium on science fiction and related topics, with various dons etc. as participants, and the second part is a thriller in which catastrophic energies from the Second Age burst out in our own near-future!

You might be interested: there is a well-established blog dedicated to The Notion Club Papers out there:

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/

The blogger is Professor of Theoretical Medicine, University of Buckingham, UK.

Here's some art related to the Notion Club Papers:

Other good things in the History of Middle-earth series include scraps in which Tolkien wrestles with the origin and spiritual nature of the Orcs, etc. The volumes on the drafting of The Lord of the Rings contain some things that will surprise many admirers of the final version, e.g. that "Strider" (Aragorn) was originally "Trotter," a mysterious hobbit who walked around on wooden shoes! I have a thesis about the role that memories/impressions of Rider Haggard's Heart of the World may well have played in getting Tolkien out of the difficulties he was in here. I also think there is good reason to think that crucial elements of LOTR's resolution on Mt Doom were indebted to Haggard's Montezuma's Daughter.

And a Happy New Year back to you, Gollum, and to all Chronsfolk!

 

[Jeni]

So far this month I have read :

Prince of Thorns Mark Lawrence
Among Thieves Douglas Hulick
A Game of Thrones George R R Martin

I started A Clash of Kings George R R Martin but am in no particular rush to finish it, so I've put that to one side until I've finished reading The Name of the Wind Patrick Rothfuss.

 

[jojajihisc]

Got about 3/4 through Paul McAuley's The Invisible Country and had to put it down. I didn't realize when I started it was a collection set mostly in the same universe as Fairyland (which I haven't read) and wasn't looking for something with a common theme but a varied sampling of his short fiction. Still a decent book, I just want to go elsewhere at the moment.

 

[GOLLUM]

I didn't buy all twelve of those thick volumes while they were being published. I didn't think of myself as that much of a Tolkien completist. I bought The Lays of Beleriand in the 1980s, but none of the others till the past ten years or so.

But there is some very interesting material in them, although I haven't read any of them straight through.

First I would mention theunfinished fictional works: The Lost Road, The Notion Club Papers, and two short false starts, one being, as I recall, a story set in Middle-earth about the Numenorean survivors in the Second Age, and the other being a story occurring soon after Aragorn's death in the very early Fourth Age.

Other good things in the History of Middle-earth series include scraps in which Tolkien wrestles with the origin and spiritual nature of the Orcs, etc. The volumes on the drafting of The Lord of the Rings contain some things that will surprise many admirers of the final version...

And a Happy New Year back to you, Gollum, and to all Chronsfolk!

Indeed. Thank you for providing this handy summary. It gives me with a clearer idea of some of what I may be missing.

I still won't be purchasing the series as I'm not quite that much of a Tolkien completist either.

All the best to you in 2012 Sir and roll on Dickens....

 

[Extollager]

Indeed. Thank you for providing this handy summary. It gives me with a clearer idea of some of what I may be missing.

I still won't be purchasing the series as I'm not quite that much of a Tolkien completist either.

All the best to you in 2012 Sir and roll on Dickens....

Here is a true "handy summary" of the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth:

http://www.forodrim.org/daeron/md_hm.html

Are you sure you won't be buying them?

They're very good dip-into books.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

I'm reading City of Light and Shadow by Ian Whates. I just started it last night, but so far it's very good.

 

[Extollager]

It must be the New Year already where you are, Gollum!

As I finish the last 13.25 hours of 2011, my reading includes Verlyn Flieger's Tolkien study Interrupted Music and Ursula Le Guin's The Word for World Is Forest.


Verlyn Flieger, Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology. Kent, OH, and London: Kent State University Press, 2005. Xv, 172 pp, $18.00 (trade paperback) ISBN 0873388240.
Reviewed by Douglas C. Kane, in Mythprint: The Monthly Bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, June 2010 (Volume 47:6, #335)
❧
Verlyn Flieger is widely considered one of the most insightful commentators on J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings. It was, therefore, quite a surprise to me to discover that no review about her most recent book, Interrupted Music: The Making of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Mythology, which was published in 2005 has appeared either here in Mythprint, or in Mythlore. I was also surprised to see that there also does not appear to have been any reviews in either publication of the revised and expanded edition of Flieger’s classic book, Splintered Light: Logos and Light in Tolkien’s World, which was published in 2002, and is unquestionably one of the most important books about Tolkien’s work in existence. I hope to remedy that lack in the near future, but first, Interrupted Music, which itself stands at a critical junction in Tolkien scholarship.
Previous books on Tolkien have tended to focus on aspects of the main individual works, primarily The Lord of the Rings, but also to some extent The Hobbit and the published version of The Silmarillion. There have been, of course, a few earlier books that have addressed aspects of The History of Middle-earth (HoMe) series. In fact, Flieger herself did so quite successfully in her previous books. A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien's Road to Faerie focuses in large part on Tolkien’s two unfinished time-travel novels, The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers, both of which are printed in volumes of HoMe, and the revised edition of Splintered Light is also enhanced by details taken from HoMe (as are other works, including the revised and expanded third edition of Tom Shippey’s seminal Road to Middle-earth). Another book, Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, edited by Flieger and linguist Carl Hostetter, brought together a series of unrelated essays that each address different aspects of HoMe. However, Interrupted Music is perhaps the first book-length attempt to look at Tolkien’s legendarium as a whole, as written (incompletely) by Tolkien himself, and as presented (to a great extent) posthumously through the herculean efforts of Christopher Tolkien, particularly in the twelve volumes of HoMe.
Ironically, the material in Interrupted Music did not start out as a coherent whole. Much of the disparate parts of the book had previously appeared in “slightly different forms” in previous publications, as individual papers or essays. Flieger notes in her preface that in rereading them she realized in hindsight “that they formed a coherent and revealing picture. Taken together they showed the motives, the methods and the narrative strategies that went into the making of Tolkien’s ongoing, frequently interrupted yet stubbornly persistent creation, conventionally referred to as his mythology for England.” (ix). It is therefore all the more remarkable that the book hangs together so well. There is little sense in reading through Interrupted Music that it largely is comprised of separate stand-alone essays cobbled together. In fact, it is perhaps the most accessible of Flieger’s three books about Tolkien (I do not, of course, count the “extended editions” of Tolkien’s works that she edited or co-edited, or the collection of essays that she edited, in that count). Like Splintered Light and A Question of Time, Interrupted Music is certainly full of insightful ideas that probe deeper beneath the surface than most Tolkien scholars are able to achieve, but it as not as densely challenging (though also perhaps not quite as deeply insightful) as the other two books.
Flieger uses the creation story of the Ainulindalë, in which the music of the Ainur is interrupted several times and never ultimately completed, as a metaphor for Tolkien’s creation of his “mythology”. She notes in her introduction that “The result has been that, over the course of time, the entire structure came to resemble real world mythologies in the cumulative process and temporal span of its composition, as well as in the scope of its subject matter.” (xiv.) And she concludes that “The fact that Tolkien never completed his mythology is its flaw and its virtue, its greatest weakness that is also its greatest strength. The general outline (especially if we discount the never concluded time-travel stories) is secure, but the elements, as with most real-world mythologies are within their own parameters, dynamic and changeable.” (143.) In between this introduction and conclusion she probes the motives, methods and narrative strategies referred to above to paint a compelling portrait of how one remarkable and complex man created a body of work that (without conscious intention) so closely mimicked real-world mythologies.
While Tom Shippey is justly renown among Tolkienists for his scholarship rooted in a background in philology that so closely paralleled Tolkien’s own, I would argue that no one does more to open new avenues of thought in examining Tolkien’s work than Verlyn Flieger. She is not afraid to look at things from challenging and different angles to see where they lead (see, for instance, her provocative and controversial essay in Tolkien Studies VI called “Music and the Task: Fate and Free Will”). Flieger certainly does not attempt in Interrupted Music to say everything there is to say about Tolkien’s mythology or the material in HoMe; far from it. But perhaps her greatest contribution with Interrupted Music is that it has helped broaden the scope of Tolkien scholarship by encouraging looking at the legendarium as a whole, rather than focusing on its individual pieces. For instance, it is clear that Elizabeth Whittingham was inspired by Interrupted Music in writing her book The Evolution of Tolkien’s Mythology: A Study of the History of Middle-earth, which looks at a similar subject matter, but from a different angle. I hope that others continue to follow this lead.
_________

Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World. 2d Ed. Kent, OH, and London: Kent State University Press, 2002. Xxii, 196 pp, $19.00 (trade paperback) ISBN 0873387449.
Reviewed by Douglas C. Kane, in Mythprint: The Monthly Bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, September 2010(Volume 47:9, #338)
❧
Sometimes an author is able to provide the best description of her own work. In the Preface to the Second Edition of Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World, Verlyn Flieger states “Tolkien’s great essay ‘On Fairy-stories’ is the best and deepest consideration I have encountered of the nature, origin and value of myth and fantasy.” (ix) I concur with that statement, but I would also apply it to Flieger’s own book: her great book Splintered Light is the best and deepest consideration I have encountered of the nature, origin and value of Tolkien’s myth and fantasy. In that Preface to the Second Edition, Flieger gives an updated answer to the question of why anyone should read Tolkien: “For refreshment and entertainment and, even more important for a deeper understanding of the ambiguities of good and evil and of ethical and moral dilemmas of a world constantly embroiled in wars with itself.” (viii.) Quite so. Flieger demonstrates quite convincingly that “Tolkien’s work is more relevant to the world today than it appeared to be when The Lord of the Rings was published in the mid-1950s.” (Ibid.) She does so by examining aspects of The Lord of the Rings itself, but in the context of the vast legendarium that has been revealed over the course of the posthumous publication of The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales and The History of Middle-earth, as well as Tolkien two most important scholarly essays, “On Fairy-stories” and “The Monsters and the Critics.” Equally importantly, Flieger demonstrates the crucial influence that the work of the “other Inkling” – Owen Barfield – had on Tolkien’s ideas and his literary output. As Flieger states, “Saving the Beowulf poet, Barfield’s theory of the interdependence of myth and language is the primary influence on Tolkien’s mythos. It is very much present in Tolkien’s fictive assumption, the very foundation and basis of his invented world, that language creates the reality it describes and that myth and language work reciprocally on each other. Moreover, Barfield’s theory is central to the theme of The Silmarillion, that the polarities of light and dark, perceived through, expressed in, and configuring language, define one another and the realities of Tolkien’s world.” (xxi-xxii.)
Before turning to examination of Tolkien’s work, Flieger observes an aspect of Tolkien’s personality that she identifies as being crucial to the development of that work. Borrowing a phrase from Humphrey Carpenter’s biography, she calls Tolkien “A Man of Antitheses.” She correctly recognizes that Tolkien extreme oscillation between hope and despair is broadly reflected in his work, particularly in the theme of the polarities of light and dark mentioned above. This concept is further explored in Flieger’s discussion about the two great scholarly essays mentioned above, “On Fairy-stories” and “The Monsters and the Critics.” In discussing the influence and importance of these two essays, she notes “[a]though one speaks movingly of man’s defeat by ‘the offspring of the dark’ and the other celebrates ‘the job of deliverance,’ each essay acknowledges that both light and dark are elements held in interdependent tension. ... The change from one essay to the other resides in the emphasis. The balance shifts. In the Beowulf essay dark heavily outweighs light; heroes go from the circle of light into the surrounding dark and down to final defeat. In the fairy-story essay, light is victorious and joy triumphs over sorrow.” (12-13.)
Flieger then goes on to briefly describe Barfield’s theories of poetic diction, which Tolkien told C.S. Lewis “modified his whole outlook.” (39.) One illustration that she points to (and from which the title of her book is taken) is the poem Mythopoeia that Tolkien wrote for Lewis. In this poem, Tolkien emphasizes Man’s right of sub-creation. As Flieger states “the poem contains the vivid image of Light splintered from the original White ‘to many hues’ as it is refracted through the prism of the sub-creative human mind.” (43.) She notes that his use of words and light as “agents of perception” show Tolkien to be both accepting of and invoking Barfield’s theories.
Having thus set the stage, Flieger moves on to discussing the practical application of these theories to Tolkien’s work, particularly ‘The Silmarillion’. She pays particular attention to the role that Tolkien’s languages play in his fiction. She also examines how the motifs of light and dark are used throughout “the Silmarillion” in the context of different characters, including Melian and Thingol, and their daughter, Lúthien,, and her mortal lover, Beren, Fëanor, the creator of the Silmarils, Eol the dark Elf, and his son, Maeglin whose “function in the story is to be darkness hidden with in light, a darkness that eventually (albeit only in part) overcomes the light.” (123.) She also begins to explore the paradox of the interplay of fate and free will in Tolkien’s legendarium, a subject that she had others have continued to explore in the intervening years. Finally, she turns back to The Lord of the Rings and explores how “[v]iewed in the context of the Silmarillion, what happens in Frodo’s story of separation and dissolution is a logical part of the progression.” (149.) I will leave it to the reader to experience Flieger’s description of how Frodo journeys from light to dark and back again. Suffice it to say that she does as fine a job of contextualizing The Lord of the Rings within the broader themes of Tolkien’s legendarium as I have seen.
This bare summary hardly scratches the surface of depth and value of Splintered Light. Flieger has a gift of examining Tolkien’s writings and getting beneath the surface in a way that is unexceeded. And nowhere is that gift in greater evidence than in this book. It is, simply put, essential reading for anyone interested in understanding Tolkien’s work. Nor is one reading sufficient. Splintered Light is a rare scholarly work that reveals as much if not more in a second reading as it does in the first, and yet more in the third. I can think of no greater praise than that.

 

[Lord Soth]

As per usual i have an audiobook and standard book (albeit on my kindle) on the go, here is where i am at:

Kindle: Finished K. J. Parker's The Hammer. Not terribly impressed to be honest, the writing was fine and the characters where somewhat interesting but really, through the whole book, nothing really happens. It may be because I was listening to another book at the same time and it gave me a little unfavourable perspective, but pretty much the whole story was so tedious. I'll hope for better next time from her. 5/10. Now onto Richard Morgan's The Cold Commands, it's been a while since I read the first in the series but I recall liking it so here's hoping...

Audiobook: Finished Mindstar Rising by Peter F Hamilton, read a long while ago so it was pretty much all forgotten by the time I got to this. A good solid story, good characters and well read. Hamilton is a solid favourite of mine and the stories seem to translate well into audio format too. 8/10. Now listening to a Pratchett, cannot remember which one but they are all entertaining!

Oh, and for everyone out there (if its not already too late!) Happy New Year! Hope your 2012 is a good one.

 

[GOLLUM]

It must be the New Year already where you are, Gollum!

You rang?....

I've been a tad busy locating cooler climes during our current heat wave. Now that I'm firmly ensconced in more pleasant surrounds, I've posted the January reading thread.

Usually I like to wait an extra day each month to allow everyone to 'catch up' before posting.

Cheers.