BoLT vs. Published Silmarillion - Which is closer to mythology?

Lhunithiliel · Oct 9, 2003

In the Introduction to BoLT1, Christopher Tolkien states:

The Book of Lost Tales ...was the first substantial work of imaginative literature by J. R. R. Tolkien, and the first emergence in narrative of the Valar, of the Children of Ilúvatar, Elves and Men, of the Dwarves and the Orcs, and of the lands in which their history is set, Valinor beyond the western ocean, and Middle-earth, the 'Great Lands' between the seas of east and west.

Some fifty-seven years after my father ceased to work on the Lost Tales, The Silmarillion, profoundly transformed from its distant forerunner, was published, ...

The Silmarillion is commonly said to be a 'difficult' book, needing explanation and guidance on how to 'approach' it; ....In Chapter 7 of his book The Road to Middle-earth Professor T. A. Shippey accepts that this is so ('The Silmarillion could never be anything but hard to read', p. 201),....

But there is also another aspect:
IMO, the BoLT-books contain much more fantasy than the Silmarillion, the latter being somehow "drier" and more "facts-providing" than keeping the beauty of true fantasy.

To my understanding, mythology (any) is a delightful "mixture" of facts taken from the surrounding reality well stirred with imagination - the unique product of the human mind.
The more the share of imagination is in this "mixture", the more fascinating the myth is! Therefore - closer to what mythology is to be understood!

As we see this "mixture" with a much denser content of imagination in the BoLT-books and this "substance" - being quite strongly "diluted" in the Silmarillion.... I wonder....

Where does one find true mythology - in the BoLT-books or in the Published Silmarillion?

Confusticated · Oct 9, 2003

I'd say they are both mythology, but BoLT is more fantastical and graphic... it can not be denied, I think.

Christopher Tolkien says in Kementari oops Commentary to the Sun and Moon Tale in BoLT:

In comparison with the last part of the tale, concerning the last fruit of Laurelin and the last flower of Silpion, the making from them of the Sun and Moon, and the launching of their vessels, Chapter XI of The Silmarillion (constituted from two later versions not greatly dissimilar the one from the other) is extremely breif. Despite many differences the later versions read in places almost as summaries of te earlier story, but it is often hard to say whether theshortening depends rather on my father's feeling (certainly present, see p.194) that the description was too long, was taking too large a place in the total structure, pr an actual rejection of some of the idea it contains, and desire to diminish the extreme 'concreteness' of its images. Certainly there is here a revelling in materials of 'magic' property, gold, silver, crystal, glass, and above all light concieved as a liquid element, or as dew, as honey, an element that can be bathed in and gathered into vessels, that has quite largely disappeared from The Silmarillion (although, of course, the idea of light as liquid, dripping down, poured and hoarded, sucked up by Ungoliant, remained essential to the conception of the Trees, this idea becomes in the later writing less palpable and the divine operations am given less 'physical' explaination and justification).
As a result of thus fullness and intensity of the description, the origin of the Sun and Moon in the last fruit and last flower os the Trees has less mysrtery than in the succinct and beautiful language of The Silmarillion...

(If you are an uneducated goof like me or just don't know what 'succinct' means... like me... it means something like 'terse'... I looked it up!)

Later in that commentery, he says:

To whatever extent the great differences between the versions in this part of the Mythology may be due to later compression, there remain a good many actual contradictions, of which I note here only some of the more important, in addition to that concerning the markings on the Moon already metnioned.

In reference to the Tale of the Sun and Moon as it apears in The Silmarillion, in comparison with BoLT version, he says...

The grave and tranquil words cannot entirely suppress a sense that there emerges here an outcropping, as it were, uneroded, from an older level, more fantastic, more bizarre. As indeed it does: such was the nature of the work, evolved over so many years.

That is found in Myth's Tranformed, HoME X.

I think this area of the Mythology is the best example to look at considering the drastic changes to it. A lot of points can be made from this, but my intention is to show how I think they are both equaly mythical, it is just that one is a lot more brief and vague in the telling... which I actually prefer with this Sun and Moon tale. But to be honest, this tale is one bit of the Quenta Silmarillion that never really grabbed by interest. So both are myth, one is just more... umm... CT finds better words than I can: 'palpable' and 'concrete'. But this is all according to my understanding of the word myth... which I would not even come close to using synonymously with 'fantasy'.

We also find other places in the BoLT Commentary where CT reminds that it is not always clear that things later omitted had been rejected in JRRT's mind, rather than being left out because he didn't write it down. But all of this demonstrates that the same tale can be told twice, very differently, but both would still be myth. I'd say Tolkien was making the fantasy less fantastic... but this means no less of imaginaton I think.... the imaginatation doesn't necessarly have to come up with fantastical things to be at work. I could imagine in great depth a story of me winning a car tomorrow, or I could imagine for a second that my computer sprouted an arm and shook my hand. I don't think either is more imaginative than the other necessarily.

One might argue the Sun and Moon tale of the Silmarillion leaves more room for imagination, but the BoLT version is more food for imagination - one can hardly read it without envisioning it. But I think the same amount of imagination was involved in the writing of the two later versions as the early one.

Walter · Oct 9, 2003

Actually I wanted to go on ranting in the News & Announcements about political and religious hardliners who think they are part of the solution rather than realizing they are part of the problem, but giving this a second thought, I didn't. Instead I thought I'd rather bore or annoy you guys with anotherone of those posts from the "high road" to Tolkien...

There goes:

The answers to Lhun's question will very much depend on the definition of true mythology you want to apply, which appears a rather difficult task to me...

Aside from those mentioned above, there have been quite a few attempts to define "myths", here are but a few:

(or you can skip the next few paragraphs and jump directly to the one marked "My Conclusion")

Euhemerism, the stories of originally quite mundane heroes, exaggerated to the point when they became supernatural beings (interesting, regarding the Germanic myths but also Tolkien's Lost Tales, is also Euhemerus' travel tale, recounting an imaginary trip to an island where the traveller discovered his key to mythology: the deities worshipped there, were originally not deities, but rather humans).

The Theological approach: Myths are stories of - usually pagan - gods. (Maybe Strauss's "Life of Jesus" and Gunkel's "Creation and Chaos" could demonstrate to you, why it has become so important for theologists to distinguish between pagan "myth" and biblical "truth", especially since Israel's religion is in many ways continuous with the religions of it's neighbours)

Frazer: Attempted numerous different definitions in his best known work "The Golden Bough".

Some more:

Myths are...

... a pragmatic charter of primitive faith and moral wisdom... (Malinowski)

... a story presented as having actually occurred in a previous age, explaining the cosmological and supernatural traditions of a people, their gods, heroes, cultural traits, religious beliefs, etc... (Voegelin in "Funk & Wagnall's standard dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend")

... ways to objectify and symbolize the entire world-view of any culture... (Bultmann)

... a way of thinking and imagining about the divine... (Davies)

... narratives of the remote past, which are considered to be truthful accounts by the society in which they are told... (Bascom)

... the traditional tales of the deeds of daimones: gods, spirits, and all sorts of supernatural or superhuman beings... (Fontenrose)

Myth and science are the result of the human need to find explanations for phenomena, especially those that seem baffling at first... (Tyler)

... a "disease of language", a result of misinterpretations, ignorance and confusion. (Max Müller; he was a philologist and preceded Tolkien as a professor at Oxford University)

Müller's theories were heavily criticised and refuted not only by biologists and ethnographers, but also by philosophers and philologists. Among those were many supporters of the idea of what could be called a "Mythopoeic Mind", the German Ernst Cassirer ("Language and Myth"), the "Inkling" Owen Barfield ("Poetic Diction"), but also Tolkien himself ("Mythopoeia", "On Fairy-Stories" and "A Secret Vice"). Cassirer and Barfield had - independently from each other, it seems - come to the conclusion, that in ancient times there must have been a semantic unity of language and myth. Tolkien put it somewhat differently, but still in the same vein, when he said: ...language construction will breed a mythology.

My Conclusion

As you might - or might not if you skipped the part above, or ... nevermind - understand by now, I of course cannot say which one of those two sets is "true mythology", I wouldn't even dare trying such a judgement. But in the Lost Tales there are a lot more explicit connections to other existing mythologies as well as to actual history, whereas in the published Silmarillion they have almost vanished entirely. Another major difference is, that the former has a mediator who leads or accompanies the reader through the tales whereas the latter is only a collection of such tales (even though Christopher in the foreword of the Lost Tales seems no longer so sure that abandoning Eriol was the best possible solution). So - to me - they are quite different mythologies, but none "truer" than the other...

Lhunithiliel · Oct 10, 2003

Originally posted by Walter
Actually I wanted to go on ranting in the News & Announcements about political and religious hardliners who think they are part of the solution rather than realizing they are part of the problem, but giving this a second thought, I didn't. Instead I thought I'd rather bore or annoy you guys with anotherone of those posts from the "high road" to Tolkien...

I'm glad you have decided so!

The answers to Lhun's question will very much depend on the definition of true mythology you want to apply, which appears a rather difficult task to me...

I have read all of those definitions and quotes you were so kind as to provide but I haven't changed a bit my own understanding of what myth - resp. - mythology is. Yes... all these "wise heads" are worth all my respect and appreciation, but their definitions I accept as their personal perception. In my opening post I dared to express my personal views on what myth-myhthology is and whether it is true or not, whether it is applicable or not .... who could judge!
When it comes to perceptions and understanding of the world that surrounds us - aren't we too much subjective?

Besides, in our days "myth" has come to have an explanation and understanding which seems to have very little to do with "legends" and "tales". The "Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English" edition year 2000, focuses on the following meaning of the words:

1. myth: sth. that many people believe but that does not exist or is false.
2. mythical - that is not true or does not exist
3. mythology - ideas or facts that many people think are true but that do not exist or are false.

I have to, of course, admit that all these above quoteed explanations come in the dictionary always as "p.2", yet... for me it was curious to realize how much we nowadays perceive myth as sth. that is a product of somebody's "sick mind" and that in fact "such things do not exist!" (as the mojority of contemporary people would say).

Anyway..... No matter what definition of myth - mythology we accept, I think we all would agree that......You take out the fantastic aspect out from a myth and it will turn into a "dry" historical account.

Therefore I think that BoLT-books are much more "mythical" than the Silmarillion.
And even though there is an opinion that the less said - the more "food" for our imagination (if I'm not mistaken this is Nom's opinion too ) - I still think that chosing to include in the Published Sil. the shorter versions of the tales was a mistake and whatever the comentaries of Chr.Tolkien might be on this issue, I wouldn't count on them too much! After all, it was he who decided what to include in the final published version!

I also think that parts of the story, as given in the Silm., would've been much more interesting and not that heavy and difficult to read if the tales were kept in the form as in BoLT.
And of course! I do admit that some of the tales (esp. those from BoLT2) have received a better solution in the Silm.
This is why I mostly refer to the unlimited fantastic and very detailed character of the tales that is to be witnessed in the myths about the creation of the world as given in BoLT1.

Nom has commented more on the Tale of the Sun and Moon. But I'd say that although we find a beautiful fantasy there, it can be traced everywhere else! The making of the Rainbow, the making of the stars, the description of the Gods themselves, and their dwellings and actions (I was so deeply impressed by what was said about the dark realms of the dead souls - both Elvish and human), Meril-i-Turinqui.... Magnificent stories!
The silm. lacks this ... which IMHO makes it a lot drier as a story and perhaps a bit further from "mythology"

Finally I would mention what I have read somewhere (I can't remember where or who exactly said it ) - the story about the creation of the world as given in BoLT1 is much closer to the ancient myths and legends in English folklore - hence, much closer to mythology. Walter's studies and conclusions also prove it!

And wasn't that Tolkien's intentions? To create a mythology for his country?
Therefore.... would it be wrong to say that the Published Silmarillion has a "thinner" thread to "mythology" as the BoLT?

Walter · Oct 10, 2003

Of course, as we have seen in the posts above, there are many possible definitions of myths, but Tolkien himself - as well as Barfield & Cassirer - would have heavily opposed any definition of myths which says that they were "not true" or "lies" (even if "breathed through silver" as Lewis had called it).

After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth', and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.

Letters #131

Tolkien, when he wrote his tales, "...had the sense of recording what was already 'there', somewhere: not of 'inventing'.". Often he was researching the ancient history of words, forgotten meanings that might contain - and hopefully reveal to him - hidden stories (e.g. Sigelwara Land).

What unites Barfield, Cassirer and Tolkien was their conviction that myths contained truth, rather than lies, and they were destined to search for this ancient "truth" buried in the myths in spite of all the difficulties (i.e. the necessarily in part speculative nature of this research)

If I might elucidate what H. Breit has left of my letter: the remark about 'philology' was intended to allude to what is I think a primary 'fact' about my work, that it is all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration. The authorities of the university might well consider it an aberration of an elderly professor of philology to write and publish fairy stories and romances, and call it a 'hobby', pardonable because it has been (surprisingly to me as much as to anyone) successful. But it is not a 'hobby', in the sense of something quite different from one's work, taken up as a relief-outlet. The invention of languages is the foundation. The 'stones' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows.

Letters #265

Tolkien indeed had declared that he was "...grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own", but he dedicated it to - preferrably Anglo-Saxon - England, not Britain:

"had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story-the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country.

And if this would be the crucial point for a judgement, then I would agree that the Lost Tales would rather be able to represent such a mythology for Anglo-Saxon England, than the tales in the published Silmarillion...

Lhunithiliel · Oct 12, 2003

Originally posted by Walter

Tolkien, when he wrote his tales, "...had the sense of recording what was already 'there', somewhere: not of 'inventing'.". Often he was researching the ancient history of words, forgotten meanings that might contain - and hopefully reveal to him - hidden stories (e.g. Sigelwara Land).
What unites Barfield, Cassirer and Tolkien was their conviction that myths contained truth, rather than lies, and they were destined to search for this ancient "truth" buried in the myths in spite of all the difficulties (i.e. the necessarily in part speculative nature of this research).

I wonder whether you'd be willing to give some information on this. It sounds interesting!

I've read that Tolkien stated once that the mythical world he created came as a necessity to find a place for the people who spoke the languages he himself invented.
So... I wonder.... how much history and how much pure imagination is involved in the creation of that world we know as Arda/Ea. Or if seen from another p.o.v. - how much real and how much imagined were those languages of his?

In the light of this, I look at the Silmarillion and I look at BoLT and a bit further - the HoMe-Volume 3 - "Lays of Beleriand where one can find lots of wonderful poems and tales submitted in the form of tales sung rather than told... and I still think: "What a pity that Chr.Tolkien decided to form the final book out of some more prosaic and abbreviated versions of the tales.
And this IMHO drifted the published Silmarillion a bit (or more ) away from what myth should be.

Walter · Oct 12, 2003

Sigelwara land

Unfortunately I'm still awaiting the original essays, so I can only give two pieces of secondary information on the Sigelwara land in full quotes (in order not to obscur things any further):

Connections are exemplified in Tolkien's article 'Sigelwara land', published in two parts in Medium Aevum 1932 and 1934. Typically this considers a single Old English word, Sigelware, and typically corrects that briskly to Sigelhearwan. What were these? Literate Anglo-Saxons used the word to translate Æthiops, 'Ethiopian', but, Tolkien argued, the word must have been older than English knowledge of Latin, let alone Ethiopians, and must have had some other and earlier referent. Pursuing sigel and hearwa separately through many examples and analogues, he emerged with two thoughts and an image: (1) that sigel meant originally both 'sun' and 'jewel', (2) that hearwa was related to Latin carbo, 'soot', (3) that when an Anglo-Saxon of the preliterate Dark Age said sigelhearwan, what he had in mind was 'rather the sons of Múspell [the Norse fire-giant] than of Ham, the ancestors of the Silhearwan with red-hot eyes that emitted sparks, with faces black as soot'. What was the point of the speculation, admittedly 'guess-work', admittedly 'inconclusive'? It offers some glimpses of a lost mythology, suggested Tolkien with academic caution, something 'which has coloured the verse-treatment of Scripture and determined the diction of poems'.10 A good deal less boringly, one might say, it had helped to naturalise the 'Balrog' in the traditions of the North, and it had helped to create (or corroborate) the image of the silmaril, that fusion of 'sun' and 'jewel' in physical form. Tolkien was already thinking along these lines. His scholarly rigour was not 'put-on', but it was no longer only being directed to academic, uncreative ends.

T.A. Shippey in The Road to Middle-earth (p. 39)

Tolkien's fascination with language goes beyond region or psychology to focus on the meanings and resonances of specific words as they illuminate a particular culture and that culture's perception and world- view. His two-part article "Sigelwara Land" (in Medium Aevum, for Dec. 1932, 183-96; June 1934, 95-111) on the use of the Old English word Sigelwaran or Sigelhearwan for Æthiops in old English glosses of Latin texts and other Old English writings is itself an extended gloss. Here he combined philological knowledge with his own special imaginative sympathy for words to come up with a highly educated guess about Old English mythic perception.

He established that the word in question, Sigelhearwa, must have existed as an independent term before the appearance in language and literature of the Greek Æthiops both as word and as concept. On the basis of this, he suggests that Sigelhearwa is the preservation of "at least a name, if no more, from the vanished native mythology or its borderland of half-mythical geography" (192). His conclusion is that the must "as a whole, have meant . . . something like 'black people living in a hot region'—whether as a rumour of the actual races of Africa, or as a memory of some mythical Muspells megir [in Norse myth the region of heat and fiery sparks] or realms of fire, or both" (193).

Tolkien's analysis of the separate meanings of the words two elements finds sigel, "sun," blended with the homonym sigel/sigle, "jewel," to convey a possible perception of the sun as a jewel and of jewels as sunlike. The one word might easily carry both meanings without necessarily being specific about either. Hearwa is connected to Gothic haúri, "coal," Old English hyr-r, "fire," and related Old English heorþ, and hierstan, "roast." This evidence suggests that the two elements combined would convey a concept something like sunjewel-burned" or "jewelsun-roasted" people. Tolkien proposes an Old English perception of black Africans as conflated with figures or concepts from Norse mythology and thus seen as "rather the sons of Muspel than of Ham, the ancestors of the Silhearwan with red-hot eyes that emitted sparks, with faces black as soot" (110).

Since the essay combines philology with a leap of imagination, he is honest enough to call his conclusions "guesswork" seeking to "probe a past probably faded even before the earliest documents . . . which now preserve mention of the Sigelhearwan were written." Yet he goes on to say in defense of his guesswork that "it may not be pointless to have probed. Glimpses are caught, if dim and confused, of the background of English and northern tradition and imagination" (111). Where "recover" and "recapture" were the words that caught the spirit of the Chaucer essay, the key word here is "imagination," showing plainly that for Tolkien the reward for such a painstaking and (it must be admitted) obscure piece of research is the penetration into a lost attitude of mind, the participation of his own imaginative faculty with that of a people long gone

In both essays Tolkien follows the word as far back as he can. back to an early use by an author or an early appearance in a text. It is a voyage to recover meaning and from that meaning to recapture the imagination and perception of those for whom the word was current. This careful exactitude joined with imaginative sympathy is the hallmark of his scholarship and is an important element in his creative work as well. In his own use of words he strives always for the same exactitude and richness of meaning that he seeks to recapture from earlier texts. It is no exaggeration to say that his scholarship combined with his imagination is the matrix of his fiction. Research into early forms and uses of words, the search after obscure meanings and the revealing of lost nuances - scientific study in the truest sense of the term - led him through science into art and through art into an almost spiritual realm wherein the word was the conveyer of primal truth, the magic vehicle not just of communication but of communion.

Verlyn Flieger in Splintered Light (2002 edition pp. 7-8)

Walter · Oct 12, 2003

Originally posted by Lhunithiliel
So... I wonder.... how much history and how much pure imagination is involved in the creation of that world we know as Arda/Ea. Or if seen from another p.o.v. - how much real and how much imagined were those languages of his?

I can say barely anything about his languages, due to my limited knowledge of linguistics and philology. It is widely known that Tolkien's development of Quenya and Sindarin were in a way based on Finnish and Welsh, respectively, also in Vinyar-Tengwar (IIRC) has been some discussion about the general influence of Indo-European roots in the devising of Tolkien's invented languages. But maybe you can "lure" one of the more learned members (e.g jallan, Cian) over here to get more information on this.

As for the mythological and historical "grains of truth" that can be found especially in the Lost Tales one needed to have about the same level of historical and mythological knowledge Tolkien himself had, in order to fully understand all the hints (e.g. "Longbeards") Tolkien gives. But a general impression can be easily gathered from the commentary in BoLT 1 & 2 (e.g. The History of Eriol...).

Helcaraxë · Dec 31, 2003

The main reason I found BoLT to be more "mythological" than the Silmarillion is because of its detail. Just take a look at the BoLT "Of the Sun and Moon" vs. the published Silmaillion. It is much more colorful and beatiful. I actually prefer BoLT to the Sil. Or some parts at least.

MB

Lhunithiliel · Apr 23, 2004

A true challenge to loremasters!

BoLT vs. Published Silmarillion - Which is closer to mythology?

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