Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth

This article is about a scholarly book. For the legendarium itself, see Tolkien's legendarium.

Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth is a collection of scholarly essays edited by Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter on the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth, relating to J. R. R. Tolkien's fiction and compiled and edited by his son, Christopher. It was published by Greenwood Press in 2000. That series comprises a substantial part of "Tolkien's legendarium", the body of Tolkien's mythopoeic writing that forms the background to his The Lord of the Rings and which Christopher Tolkien summarized in his construction of The Silmarillion.

Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth

Book cover
Author	Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter, editors
Language	English
Subject	History of Middle-earth
Genre	Tolkien studies
Publisher	Greenwood Press
Publication date	2000
Publication place	United States
Media type	Hardcover
ISBN	978-0-313-30530-6
OCLC	41315400
Dewey Decimal	823/.912 21
LC Class	PR6039.O32 H5727 2000

It includes a bibliography of works by Christopher Tolkien compiled by Douglas A. Anderson.

Tolkien's Legendarium won the 2002 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies.

Contents

The history

• Rayner Unwin — Early Days of Elder Days
• Christina Scull — The Development of Tolkien's Legendarium: Some Threads in the Tapestry of Middle-earth
• Wayne G. Hammond — 'A Continuing and Evolving Creation': Distractions in the Later History of Middle-earth
• Charles Noad — On the Construction of The Silmarillion
• David Bratman — The Literary Value of The History of Middle-earth

The languages

• Christopher Gilson — Gnomish is Sindarin: The Conceptual Evolution of an Elvish Language
• Arden R. Smith — Certhas, Skirditaila, Futhark: A Feigned History of Runic Origins
• Patrick Wynne and Carl F. Hostetter — Three Elvish Verse Modes: Ann-thennath, Minlamad thent / estent, and Linnod

The cauldron and the cook

• Joe R. Christopher — Tolkien's Lyric Poetry
• Paul Edmund Thomas — Some of Tolkien's Narrators
• Verlyn Flieger — The Footsteps of Ælfwine
• John D. Rateliff — The Lost Road, The Dark Tower, and The Notion Club Papers: Tolkien and Lewis's Time Travel Triad
• Marjorie Burns — Gandalf and Odin
• Richard C. West — Túrin's Ofermod: An Old English Theme in the Development of the Story of Túrin

Appendix

• Douglas A. Anderson — Christopher Tolkien: A Bibliography

Reception

John S. Ryan, reviewing the book for VII, called it a "luminous companion" to the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth, and "clearly indispensable". Ryan stated that it "pays a much merited tribute" to Christopher Tolkien's six decades or more of work on his father's writings, indeed from his childhood as one of the original audience for The Hobbit. Ryan describes the 14 essays as "carefully argued", noting among other things Bratman's description of the 4 styles Tolkien used in the Legendarium as "Annalistic, Antique, Appendical, and Philosophical".

The Tolkien scholar Douglas C. Kane, while welcoming the 2021 book The Nature of Middle-earth, writes that Hostetter "appears to overstep his role as editor" by presenting the materials according to his personal point of view. In particular, Kane states that Hostetter wrongly applies Tolkien's remark that The Lord of the Rings was fundamentally religious and Catholic to the whole of the legendarium. Kane calls this contrary to Christopher Tolkien's editorial practice, and "a blatant statement of intent". Kane quotes Verlyn Flieger's remark that Tolkien's work reflects the two sides of his nature; the work can be seen both "as Catholic [and] not Christian."

The Tolkien Society called Charles Noad's essay "a critically important document" on the interpretation of The Silmarillion.

External links

• Tolkien's Legendarium