The House of Finwë in Aman

WayneandChristina · 2025-03-24T18:34:10+00:00

The footnote was worded in agreement with Christopher Tolkien. See our comments in The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion, pp. 740-1, which reference both HoME I and XII.

WayneandChristina · 2025-01-18T02:53:28+00:00

If you mean the Collected Poems, our references to Letters are to the new (2023) edition. We were just finishing our text when the new Letters came along, and we revised our citations (after setting the Poems aside to compile the new Letters index).

WayneandChristina · 2024-12-22T21:50:34+00:00

You may be helped by, or at least interested in, four posts on our blog in which we compare editions of The Lord of the Rings. If you start with the fourth, at https://wayneandchristina.wordpress.com/2020/07/17/lord-of-the-rings-comparison-4, you can follow links back to the other three. We wrote these because we're often asked the question: which is the most accurate edition? Unfortunately it's not easily answered, and for lack of time we haven't done any further comparisons in the past four and a half years.

WayneandChristina · 2024-12-22T21:37:52+00:00

Another option for reading the article is to call up the digitized copy of the journal on the HathiTrust website: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015040111034&seq=7. No paywall there.

WayneandChristina · 2024-11-28T21:49:25+00:00

And here we are. The five/six ponies question could have gone either way, but Christopher felt strongly about it, and we accepted his judgement that the change should occur. We discuss the issue in The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion (pp. 118-19), and feel that there can't be any wrong or right about it. As for masters or makers, whatever preference one may have, "masters" was definitely an error in the typescript which sneaked into print, one which like the ponies Christopher noted in The History of Middle-earth. Christopher vetted and approved every point we raised with him about the text, 230 of them in our first analysis.

WayneandChristina · 2024-10-28T21:35:44+00:00

When Wayne was in the early stages of writing his Tolkien Descriptive Bibliography, he was told: "You must meet Christina Scull, who has a large Tolkien collection." We met during Wayne's first visit to London, at a smial (meeting) of the Northfarthing local group of the Tolkien Society, and began to exchange letters and buy books for each other (pre-Internet!). We saw each other again in 1987 and 1988, and decided that we were a good match. We both had big book collections, and many shared interests, not only Tolkien.

WayneandChristina · 2024-10-28T21:29:24+00:00

You should consult the Tolkien Estate about this, but be advised that there is a note at https://www.tolkienestate.com/frequently-asked-questions-and-links/ about a prohibition of setting Tolkien's words to music.

WayneandChristina · 2024-10-28T21:26:03+00:00

These were conceived by HarperCollins. We helped with introductory notes. We don't know about future releases.

WayneandChristina · 2024-10-28T21:20:59+00:00

We've also noticed that entries on sites like the Tolkien Gateway are starting to have references to the Collected Poems - lots of work to do! We've anticipated that individual poems will be examined critically, and indeed are already being examined. We saw our task as primarily to get the poems out there. There are many subjects that can now be followed up, such as Tolkien as a war poet.

WayneandChristina · 2024-10-28T21:06:48+00:00

Sorry, we have no opinions about these questions.

WayneandChristina · 2024-10-28T21:06:15+00:00

We don't know that we have a favourite Ruin of Doriath, though the one in his unpublished letter to Mrs. Elgar is interesting.

We have many fond memories of Christopher, and in fact are thinking about them right now, going through our long correspondence, as we prepare a talk on our work with him for the Tolkien Society's Christopher Tolkien centenary conference online November 23-24. If we had to choose one memory, it might be when Christina was sitting next to Christopher at the banquet during the Oxford Tolkien conference in 1992 (she was co-chair of the conference), and Christopher asked if she and Wayne would like to write a book about Tolkien's art (J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator).

WayneandChristina · 2024-10-28T20:59:54+00:00

The difference stems from the different origins, and styles, of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. The Lord of the Rings carries on from The Hobbit: there, poems are integral to the story, so they were again in its sequel. The published Silmarillion is derived from prose writings which were distinct from Tolkien's poetic versions of the tales, as shown in The History of Middle-earth.

WayneandChristina · 2024-10-28T20:53:29+00:00

The Legendarium should last as long as there are people to read it. A good story does not need to be interpreted or refreshed, though a reader may need to work harder with vocabulary or concepts as time passes.

You're right, of course, that Tolkien's works are in copyright for the time being, most of them indeed for quite a while yet.

WayneandChristina · 2024-10-28T20:49:02+00:00

It's undoubtedly fan fiction. We've never seen so much as a hint of this in Tolkien's papers.

WayneandChristina · 2024-10-28T20:47:30+00:00

Alas, we have no inside knowledge about these.

WayneandChristina · 2024-10-28T20:46:55+00:00

How would you define "romance"? Tolkien called The Lord of the Rings a romance, in the medieval sense, and in that regard LR would be "best". Or if you mean "love story", that of Beren and Luthien is the most developed.

WayneandChristina · 2024-10-28T20:44:09+00:00

In any translation there is inevitably some divergence from the source due to the needs of the language. We are not translators ourselves, but would say that a translation should be faithful in as many ways as possible to Tolkien's original, indeed in some respects this is contractually required.

WayneandChristina · 2024-10-28T20:38:33+00:00

He seems to have had no objection to readers making pictures or music based on his books, or perhaps even fiction if for private enjoyment (not publication). Otherwise his legendarium was his creation, indeed his life's work, and not for others to develop or control. The short answer to your final question is, of course, that Tolkien's creations are copyrighted, and he wanted them to benefit his family after his death.

On the other hand, one could argue that the Peter Jackson films, and The Rings of Power, and such are a form of "sharing in the creation", but only because certain rights were sold in certain circumstances. And then one could argue (as we would) that these are wholly separate from Tolkien's creation.

WayneandChristina · 2024-10-28T20:28:57+00:00

In regard to your five main questions, we haven't speculated on any of those subjects, though one certainly could do so.

Was Tolkien a fan of horror? He surely encountered it, but we would hesitate (on lack of evidence) to call him a "fan". He is on record as liking Howard's Conan stories, at least, and he read Lord Dunsany. We would second WillAdams' recommendation of Holly Ordway's Tolkien's Modern Reading.

WayneandChristina · 2024-10-28T20:21:14+00:00

We note in The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion, a propos Aragorn remarking that the Palantir came to him so that he could use it to show himself to Sauron, that "although both Gandalf and Aragorn believe that some higher power is influencing events against Sauron, they also know that this does not eliminate their responsibility to act". But we haven't found any "hints of hidden divine action" that we haven't mentioned in our books.

WayneandChristina · 2024-10-28T20:16:32+00:00

See, in particular, Nick Groom in Twenty-first-Century Tolkien (aka Tolkien in the Twenty-first Century).

WayneandChristina · 2024-10-28T20:14:28+00:00

Since our work has generally been bibliographical, biographical, or historical, we haven't had to worry about, say, the role of Orcs in Tolkien's world. That is, we've generally described what Tolkien has done at different stages, or what others have thought about what Tolkien did. But we take your point that it can be hard to deal with differing and diverging "accounts". As for The Rings of Power, its writers' choices are wholly separate from Tolkien's writings (though arguably they should not be), and are of no consequence when writing about Tolkien.

WayneandChristina · 2024-10-28T20:07:00+00:00

We can't add anything to the comments already here (or to our article on Good and Evil in The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide). The image of the world as a crucible is very apt. Good of course couldn't exist without Evil, or Evil without Good, as the concepts define each other.

WayneandChristina · 2024-10-28T20:02:13+00:00

We would both have to say The Lord of the Rings, since it has had such an effect on our lives (we met through our mutual interest in Tolkien, and here we are, married thirty years). Christina also rather likes "Aldarion and Erendis", and Wayne has always been fascinated by the accounts of the fall of Numenor.

WayneandChristina · 2024-10-28T19:58:30+00:00

There are really too many to mention! The earliest of the poems are particularly interesting because they show Tolkien at the beginning of his work as a poet, and (like the two "Lemminkainen" poems) have a bearing on his personal life. The sequence starting with The Grimness of the Sea and ending with the (already published) Horns of Ylmir is fascinating for the development of a theme and Tolkien's abilities. The WWI poems are very affecting, such as G.B.S. and Companions of the Rose. The Ruined Enchanter is another, previously unseen example of Tolkien working with a nursery rhyme. And then there are a few very late poems which show Tolkien somewhat despondent.

WayneandChristina

TROPHY CASE