Comments on The Silmarillion: Who Speaks?

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To this person for whom numbers generally have very little "colour" this is surprisingly interesting! 

 Because of the double effect of Tolkien not finalising anything and Christopher inserting his bias/preferences, I'm often wondering how a JRRT-published work might have finally appeared.. (Although even if he lived as long as Elros I'm sure he would have still been changing his mind throughout and would still not have finished!)

That is truly a wonderful compliment if I managed to make dry old dusty numbers come even a little bit alive for you!

I wonder about that a lot too and tend to end up with JRRT never being able to finish a "Silmarillion." His purpose changed so much between the Lost Tales and some of his late writings where he was completely reconsidering the cosmogony and historical transmission. I also wonder if the constant rewrites weren't part of the purpose. Intended or not, he did create a historical tradition right in the drafts of his work ...

Thank you for reading and  commenting! <3

 

It's your extrapolations that make this so interesting. I mean, the way I read, I originally read the whole Silm as an omniscient view, and never even noticed that Turin's chapter might be a different narrator. Just learning about JRRT's narrators and their likely biases changed the Silm dramatically for me. So extending that view by delving into this dialogue aspect is opening my eyes even further. 

I agree that, with the published Silm being cobbled together from various (often incomplete) writings spanning decades of mind-changes, we end up with quite a jumble. And yet I'm also really glad we do, because I love the magic and whimsy of his early ideas as much as his later writing, and I think the Legendarium would be far less rich and engaging without either. 

I'm also wondering how much of the Ainur's dialogue is Aulë and Yavanna having their domestic?

To be fair, I didn't realize that Turin's chapter was a different narrator until REALLY recently given how long I've been working on stuff with the narrators. XD And that's my least favorite chapter so I'm still not 100% sure how it is constructed from its extremely complex textual history. Right now, my slightly informed stance is that Dirhaval wrote the verse version and our good ol' pal Pengolodh put it into prose in the book we call The Silmarillion. But this is probably 75% headcanon at this point.

Because you, like I, enjoy maps, you might enjoy this atrocity that I made for my "Death, Grief, and the Other" presentation at Oxonmoot in August:

map of narrators

(Why didn't I color in the ocean? The mind boggles!)

(And Sirion is spelled wrong!!!!)

I absolutely LOVE that the Silm is a posthumously published textual jumble. (That is the perfect word for it!) It feels like real history, where you have to wade through sources and debate their various merits. This is why, while I have to stop short of saying "Tolkien intended," I do wonder if someone who worked with medieval texts in all their various and contradictory forms wasn't maybe a little bit intentional about creating a similar tradition. I don't think he wanted to leave it unpublished, but there would have been this whole iceberg of texts under the surface ... and of course the doubt that a fallible narrator creates.

I'm also wondering how much of the Ainur's dialogue is Aulë and Yavanna having their domestic?

Yes, as I'm working with the data, I'm realizing that this is coming up again and again as a complicating factor. I probably need to dig into the provenance of the various instances of dialogue that I've collected sooner rather than later, then see how the data changes (or doesn't) once Christopher's additions are filtered out.

....I am usually wanting more about the lives and motivations of his sons (and any adjacent/non-adjacent females, or other genders*), rather than the father who disappears from the scene leaving the Oath in his wake. As for Thingol talking more than everyone else, while he was making his bad and/or potentially bad decisions, fanfiction to the rescue again....

*actions/pronouncements/events of January 2025 related

....statistics* from your report (which has overall been a great read). I love the possible permutations of Námo's journey to expressing himself at length.

*Statistics was my one and only grade below B at University.... Calculus made sense; Engineering, Literature, Architecture, History all made sense; Statistics just wouldn't go in.