what if silmarillion will be the sequel of the hobbit

[archeloferebor]

after the success of j.r.r tolkien's the hobbit. it is mentioned that they want the sequel of it. so tolkien made an early draft of silmarillion. But George Allen & Unwin, tolkien's publisher, rejected it. so he remade the sequel and thus the result is lotr.

what if they didn't reject the draft and the silmarillion is made. what if the sequel of the hobbit is "the silmarillion" what would you think? what do you think of its story? what do you think it will be?

 

[Erestor Arcamen]

Well I think the Silmarillion is more of a Prequel. Have you read the Silmarillion? It gives the history of Middle Earth from before it was created, through creation, the ancient times through to the end of the Third Age.

And I'm not an expert, but I'd assume that Tolkien would still have released The Lord of the Rings to followup from The Hobbit as a sequel concerning the Ring and what happened to Bilbo and Gandalf.

 

[Starbrow]

I think some of the stories in the Silmarillion could be made into a movie, but not the whole book. I'm sure some producer would have fun with special effects in the story of Luthien and Beren.

 

[Matthew Bailey01]

I have my own Middle-earth related project in development (a Documentary on the depictions of Tolkien's work in Popular Media vs Tolkien's own image of Middle-earth and its occupants).

As such, I have been in contact with the Tolkien Estate.

After the last movie of "The Hobbit" came out, the Tolkien Estate issued a statement saying that Peter Jackson would be having nothing more to do with Middle-earth (and I cannot blame them).

Christopher Tolkien even gave an interview (which he rarely does) due to how upset he was over the treatment of "The Hobbit."

Full Disclosure: I imagine he is even more upset than I over Jackson's treatment of Tolkien's works. I was willing to overlook many of the changes in LotR, as they were mostly changes of ommision, rather than changes of commission (adding egregious alterations to Tolkien's canon of work). But I, and my fellow producer (of the documentary) walked out of the First Movie of "The Hobbit," and we only finished watching the "series" of movies for due diligence for our documentary.

But Christopher Tolkien has instructed the Tolkien Estate to use any means available to recover the licenses held by Saul Zaentz (that were used by Jackson to make both "trilogies"), and that no further licenses were to be granted to anyone having anything to do with Jackson's productions.

So... There will not likely be a movie made of anything in "The Silmarillion" until the 20's, when Christopher's children become executors of the Tolkien Estate.

If you have read Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Tolkien, or that of Tom Shippey, or Shippey's other Middle-earth related work (as well as having read HoMe) then it becomes plainly obvious why Christopher was so upset.

Peter Jackson, although with the best of intentions, and producing an awesome movie (that just happened to only tangentially be related to Tolkien's books) made a product that was incredibly insulting to Tolkien.

MRB


I obviously take Middle-earth too seriously!

 

[Erestor Arcamen]

I apologize for misunderstanding your original post archeloferebor. I assumed you meant the book being released as a sequel to the Hobbit not a Silmarillion movie being the sequel to The Hobbit.

I have to say, the first Hobbit started out ok and was good until about when they left Bag End, then it went downhill. The second movie got worse and I really hated it. The third movie was mediocre and I'll purchase the extended edition just to say I own it and to see what was left out (it can't be much worse than it already is, can it?) . Over in the New Line Cinema forum there are a few reviews of the movies (including mine) and you can see the disdain that true Tolkien fans have for these movies.

I can definitely understand, as Matthew Bailey01 stated, where some things were left out of LOTR, at least nothing was insultingly added like The Hobbit. I'll be glad if PJ is never allowed to bastardize Tolkiens works ever again.

 

[Elthir]

I think the thread does refer to the books, and if so, I think the history is that Tolkien's publishers asked him for more about Hobbits, but JRRT wanted to get back to his earlier writing and his invention of languages and so on, and at first he could not think of anything more to say about Hobbits...

... at this point (when asked for more) the Silmarillion was already in existence in some form. The Qenta Noldorinwa of 1930 was written before The Hobbit was published, and a newer version called Quenta Silmarillion existed at the time, but it wasn't fully updated and completed (Qenta Noldorinwa remains the only finished version of the "Silmarillion" that Tolkien ever made, although again it was completed well before The Lord of the Rings was even begun, and so includes nothing about Galadriel for example, as she had not yet been "discovered" by Tolkien).

According to Tolkien scholars Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull, when Tolkien was asked by his publishers to hear more from him about Hobbits, Tolkien was "... flattered but 'a little perturbed. I cannot think of anything more to say about hobbits... but I have only too much to say, and much already written, about the world into which the hobbit intruded" (Letter to Stanley Unwin, 15 October 1937).

After more encouragement, Tolkien promised to start something soon and submit it to Rayner Unwin: "But he did not do so at once. On 15 November he met Stanley Unwin in London, handed over for consideration by Allen & Unwin parts of "The Silmarillion" and other stories, including the brief Farmer Giles of Ham, and then continued to work on his mythology."

Skipping over the details with respect to the rejection of the Silmarillion material at this time...

"(...) What Allen & Unwin needed, he felt, was another Hobbit, or failing that, a volume of stories like Farmer Giles of Ham. On 16 December Tolkien replied that it was now clear to him that a "a sequel or succesor to The Hobbit" was called for, to which he promised to give thought and attention (...) on 19 December he informed C. A. Furth at Allen and Unwin that he had "written the first chapter of a new story about Hobbits -- "A long expected party."

Much of this information is taken from A Brief History of The Lord of the Rings by Hammond and Scull, from their Reader's Companion to The Lord of the Rings.

 

[Matthew Bailey01]

If we are talking Literary works, The Silmarillion was originally not intended to have much to do with The Hobbit and the references to Gondolin were originally a sort of nod only to Tolkien's greater Cosmology.

But when he was explicitly asked for a sequel to The Hobbit and his earlier works were rejected as being too cerebral and abstract (which I always find puzzling, as I am as captivated by The Silmarillion as I am by any other of Tolkien's works), then as he began The Lord of the Rings he discovered the connection to the pre-History of the Elves through its writing and creation; a serendipitous event that has contributed to, and enriched, the lives of many from that time forth.

Tom Shippey's claim, in his Tolkien Biography title: The Author of the Century was no boast. Tolkien, along with other greats from the early Days of SciFi and Fantasy, stood out from the crowd as having created something so original that it would create its own genre, of which it remains the sole work of note.

What is sad is that in the days of his leisure, after having become very comfortable from sales of the book, he became fearful of adding anything of real substance to the mythology, cosmology, and history of Middle-earth.

Much of the minutia he produced during this time is itself remarkably interesting (genealogies, heraldry, paintings, . . .), but he balked at the hard work of unifying and correcting aspects of the early history (such as expanding the First Age several thousand years to account for the tale of the Fall of Men in the Athrabeth Finrod a Andreth.

When I was at the Bodleian Library in the 1980's, I did see one product of this period that he kept coming back to (and which I notice is conspicuously absent from The History of Middle-earth regarding the problem he had regarding the cosmological, theological, and philosophical problem of the Orcs. That he HAD considered having them bred in the ground like worms, but rejected the idea as "to hideous to contemplate" in a fashion similar to his rejection of the beer stein he was given with the inscription from The Ruling Ring inscribed around it.

Tolkien so believed in the reality of evil, and that even in fiction the Dark Lords were a real manifestation of Luciferian forces that he never used the mug for anything other than an Ash-Tray.

Tom Shippey points this same problem out, in that Tolkien was hampered by his own beliefs in the manifestation of Good and Evil in his own works to be able to progress on them as another author might.

MB


I obviously take Middle-earth too seriously!