Q: Was Kortirion Supposed to be Part of the Middle-earth Mythology?
ANSWER: No, Kortirion was not supposed to be part of the Middle-earth mythology. By “Middle-earth mythology” we are referring to those stories that J.R.R. Tolkien composed from about 1936 onward and published in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and The Road Goes Ever On — as the books Christopher Tolkien published posthumously on behalf of his father: The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth.
Kortirion had a place in the original conception of Tol Eressëa but that conception was eventually dropped for an entirely new island and the city of Avallonë became the only city on Tol Eressëa. Various Tolkien fan sites that assert Kortirion was the chief city of Tol Eressëa are either in error or are only referring to the Tol Eressëa of The Book of Lost Tales, which was Tolkien’s earliest mythology in the sequence of mythological works that led up to Christopher Tolkien’s interpretation of “The Silmarillion”.
Christopher Tolkien went to great pains to distinguish between The Book of Lost Tales and The Silmarillion, such as in his opening remarks for The Book of Lost Tales:
The Book of Lost Tales, written between sixty and seventy years ago, was the first substantial work of imaginitive literature by J.R.R. Tolkien, and the first emergence in narrative of the Valar, of the Children of Iluvatar, 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; and sixh years have passed since then.”
Despite these words of caution, many readers leaped to the erroneous conclusion that The Book of Lost Tales was simply an early version of The Silmarillion, which was not the case at all. Perhaps recognizing this confusion, some years later Christopher wrote in The War of the Jewels:
…I use the term ‘Silmarillion’, of course, in a very wide sense: this though potentially confusing is imposed by the extremely complex relationship of the different ‘works’ — especially but not only that of the Quenta Silmarillion and the Annals; and my father himself employed the name in this way….
One cannot simply pluck elements from The Book of Lost Tales and inject them into later works. In his essay “Elvish as She Is Spoke” Carl Hostetter wrote:
First and foremost, due to its homogenizing and standardizing tendencies, “Neo-Elvish” is characterized by conflation of materials and evidence from often widely separated conceptual phases, and by consequent circularity in reasoning about this evidence.
Although Carl was addressing a tendency by some to merge different sources of information on Tolkien’s invented languages into a homogenous (and completely artificial) “canon”, he has firmly identified and explained the principle of faux scholarship that has plagued Tolkien fandom for years. People look at all these texts and see all these ideas printed in continuous sequence, book-to-book, and they assume it is perfectly legitimate to paste these names and ideas together as if all these things were conceived of together or as part of the same stage in development. In fact, the different “phases”, “stages”, “levels”, “versions”, “variations”, whatever of the mythologies arose from retellings, new tellings, backtellings, and detellings.
J.R.R. Tolkien used some ideas almost all the way to the end of his life and then simply stopped using them. Some ideas he stopped used very early in his life. Christopher Tolkien refers to these cessations of use in various ways: abandonment, falling away, omission, changing, etc. In other words, he was able to reconcile his frame of reference to the multiple frames of reference his father left behind — however, such intellectual differentiation is unquestionably both wearying and confusing.
People are to be forgiven for making mistakes, but some of the Tolkien fansites have established and reinforced absolute nonsense that is now being passed around as if it is clear and established fact in direct contradiction to the information that Christopher handed to his readership. There is absolutely no textual basis for suggesting that Kortirion was intended to be part of the Middle-earth mythology that was loosely (and not entirely coherently or cohesively) defined by the books I listed above. Tolkien never established the boundaries of the mythology, but Christopher has done a pretty good job of documenting the path of evolutionary steps in his father’s development of these ideas.
And the simple truth is that Kortirion was left behind. Regrettably, some people will probably never accept the facts as established by Christopher Tolkien.
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