Given The Estate’s outrage and anger over the Amazon series (albeit, their silence on the issue is loud),
The Silmarilion will
NEVER be licensed.
AND.
The Silmarillion isn’t a single License.
The Silmarillion is a hastily assembled collection of other works, which The Estate is not likely to part with as a single property, as occurred with Saul Zaentz and the License used for
The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings.
You have an incompleted
Ainulindalë and
Valaquenta, along with an
Ambarkanta, and other works
Tolkien wrote concerning the earlier
Ages of
Middle-earth, prior to the
Quenta Silmarillion itself.
The
Quenta Silmarillion is the title of the
events from the
Oath of Fëanor to the
War of Wrath. But it also is not one work.
In the last three volumes of
The History of Middle-earth, and in the
Introduction to the entire series, Christopher Tolkien reveals he made an enormous error in publishing
The Silmarillion BOTH as it is, AND as a single Volume.
His suggestion was that it would likely have been three to six works of three to six volumes each, with the works published akin to those such as
The Children of Húrin,
Beren & Lúthien,
The Fall of Gondolin, and so on (combined with the respective portions of
Unfinished Tales that are pertinent to each).
And we have another problem:
The most recent work on Tolkien from a respected scholar of Middle-earth, Carl Hostetter’s
The Nature of Middle-earth reveals something only foreshadowed in those final three volumes of
HoM-e: That Tolkien in his old age took a sledge-hammer to the earlier Myths of Middle-earth, out of what appears to be spite over the changing world, and especially that of Catholicism that would be come to be known as “Vatican II” (one of the most controversial subjects within Catholicism).
Tolkien’s entire life grew-out of a kind of reactionary Catholicism of Pope Pius IX, who was hugely influential upon the Spanish-Irish Priest, Father Morgan, who was Tolkien’s guardian after his Mother’s death.
Pope Pius IX, just prior to becoming the Pontiff, had published the
Syllabus Errorum, which was a scathing indictment of The Enlightenment, Modernity, “Progress,” and
especially the Sciences.
Pius, like most Christians of the time, were furious and terrified that the Sciences did not produce finding-after-finding verifying the “Truth” of their Theological Claims. And instead produced finding-after-finding that contradicted and falsified those claims. Like most of those who hold such inflexible and absolutist beliefs, the Catholic Church didn’t take this too well, and Pius IX convened the
First Vatican Ecumenical Council (which would produce the eponymous
Vatican I to the 20th Century’s
Vatican II Encyclical).
But Pope Pius IX, and thus Father Morgan, and thus Tolkien in Kind, grew-up in that kind of Catholicism, and the events of Vatican II left them feeling “Betrayed” by the church, but unable to really do much but accept it given the forms of Catholicism at the time.
Vatican II basically overturned everything Vatican I established, which was the basis for Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
So Tolkien tore to shreds the earlier Mythology, calling it “Primitive Ignorance and Superstitions” among other things, saying it was just “Primitive Humanity’s stories to tell themselves about the
Elves and how the universe came to be.”
In this regard, Tolkien was attempting something he both condemned and rejected, yet now forced upon his world without an adequate understanding of the consequences. That thing being Subjective, Jungian/Campbellian Archetypal Mythology.
Such a thing is completely contrary to Tolkien’s Theological and Metaphysical Foundations for Middle-earth. Yet it is hardly alone in that respect, as Tolkien constantly painted himself into Theological and Metaphysical Corners in his attempts to expunge any outright Heresy from the Universe of Eä, and thus
Arda and Middle-earth, respectively.
So anything adapted from these earlier works faces some enormous challenges that The Estate REALLY NEEDS TO CONFRONT. Namely:
Creating a framework for selecting
authors to “fill-in-the-blank-spots” and “Complete” the Mythos in a manner that does not violate existing canon, or makes a ruling upon that canon in some manner.
But as far as any future Licenses… I am doubtful The Estate will ever agree to such a thing.
MB
