[IMG alt="jallan"]https://thetolkien.forum/data/avatars/m/3/3985.jpg?1424886592[/IMG]
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Joined Jan 9, 2003 Messages 630
Lindil posted:
It could be that [and how ironic and 'modern' it would be] the starting point of the entire Legendarium, the Earendel line from the poem Crist never opened itself fully to his mind's eye as did so much else.
Considering that the original story of Earendel was supposed to taken five nights to tell in full, it would appear that the rest of
Tolkien’s Lost
Tales material was originally inspired by the wish to provide the necessary background to it.
From letter 137:
... for of course in such a story one cannot make a
map for the narrative, but must first make a map and make the narrative agree.
I imagine Tolkien knowing approximately what he wanted to tell about Earendel, but deciding that before writing it in full he would produce a first complete
mapping of the background for the story, starting with the tale of Earendel’s father and the
Fall of Gondolin and the lineage of Earendel’s mother and then her ancestry, and tales of the gods and demons of his legendarium, and so forth, working back from Earendel on one side and forward from creation on the other.
The map failed to cohere and the result was that the main story was never written at all (for the sketchy material we have about Earendel is hardly a story).
If in his younger days Tokien had also starting speculating about whether
Orcs have immortal souls and the philosphical problem of how
evil beings could themselve work against Melko and the physics of
Aman, Tolkien would perhaps never have written the Lost Tales material either.
Making “maps” of the historical background and metaphysical background, and cosmological background, and religious background, creating an aware metaphysics, after the story is already conceived, is just as problematical as making geographical maps after one has first written the story.
Things don’t fit.
It seems that Tolkien found it equally difficult to change the stories to fit the necessities of his increasingly detailed and changed “maps”, yet he couldn’t bend “maps” to fit the stories either.
Tolkien became locked in a world-building puzzle, concerned more with the continuity for the tales rather than the tales themselves.
This perhaps seemed reasonable, as the stories were largely written, many in long form, and all Tolkien had to do, in theory, was make this already written cycle of tales self-consistant.
One may see something similar in the later works of science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, where often the main point of a novel would be continuity explanations of the Asimov world, a methodological but not inspired filling in of a map.
So Tolkien changed Inglor’s name to
Finrod and Finrod’s name to
Finarfin niggling around with details, like someone working at a block puzzle with no clear strategy other than the hope that the puzzle does have a solution and that if you move things around enough the solution will emege.
I certainly exagerate here ... but I think
in part that was what happened.
And Tolkien knew that if he did start writing new versions of the his tales, that the background map would change again, and his world had become so interlaced that almost any change in a part of it necessitated changes throughout it.
Explaining the legendarium as garbled legend within a supposed mostly untold truer history was an ingenious attempt to transcend the problem by saying that the map was not accurate.
But it would have been difficult to present aesthetically, and it gave Tolkien two continuities and two metaphysics to establish in place of one.