Q: How Reliable are the Etymologies as an Authoritative Tolkien Source?
ANSWER: This kind of question is what the fictional Doctor Daniel Jackson might have equated with his archetypal “meaning of life stuff”. That is, when you look at any specific Tolkien text and ask how authoritative it is you are really asking a much more complex question, one which is easier to recognize as complex than it is to explain the complexity thereof.
“The Etymologies”, published in The Lost Road and Other Writings, represents a couple of overlapping phases of J.R.R. Tolkien’s linguistic sub-creation with respect to his evolving mythologies. Some people place great value in “The Etymologies”, perhaps to the point of raising them above all other sources of linguistic information as an authority for studying Quenya, Sindarin, and other Elvish languages mentioned by Tolkien.
In his essay “Elvish as She is Spoke”, Carl Hostetter wrote:
…in fact, most of what is claimed to be true of “mature Quenya” and “mature Sindarin” is actually silently asserted on the basis of evidence for the Qenya and Noldorin of the Etymologies, which Tolkien began some years before he started writing The Lord of the Rings and which he all but abandoned some years before its completion, and before the fundamental conceptual change by which Noldorin was replaced with Sindarin, a language having a radically different history and by the nature of Tolkien’s own process of invention a necessarily different grammar in detail than Noldorin….
Hostetter is one of a small group of people to whom Christopher Tolkien has entrusted much of his father’s previously unpublished linguistic compositions and notes, to be used for the study of J.R.R. Tolkien’s languages and incidental topics. In other words, it’s difficult to challenge the authority of someone like Carl Hostetter on a topic like Tolkien’s elvish. Nonetheless, there are people in the Tolkien linguistic community who do not see eye-to-eye with Mr. Hostetter and his associates on every detail.
In the matter of “who is right?”, should such a question be decided on the basis of where the chain of authority lies or on the best logical argument? Most scholars would (I think) argue that a sound logical argument shall be largely persuasive, thus negating such a question. But even among the world’s top Tolkien scholars that is not always the case.
But the issue of authority usually arises in less learned circles, or when such people interact with those who have achieved much in linguistic or other research among Tolkien’s literary works. People are opinionated and they rarely care about facts that inconveniently contradict their opinions. In the case of the most argumentative and opinionated Tolkien fans I should say it’s not opinion which demands a final authority so much as wishful thinking.
For example, in the very complex world of Elvish linguistics there is some agreement that the published “Etymologies” contain editorial and/or transcriptional errors. Christopher Tolkien, it is argued by some (including the aforementioned Mr. Hostetter and others), may have made some errors in preparing (essentially organizing and typing out) his father’s “Etymologies” for publication.
These putative errors do not — cannot — invalidate either “The Etymologies” or Christopher’s work in bringing them to publication. “The Etymologies” are, first and foremost, a posthumous collaboration between father and son of a most peculiar nature. “The Etymologies” are a work of fiction, and an extremely complicated work of fiction at that. They represent a multi-decade path of learning and experimentation in linguistic analysis, development, and fictive creation. As such, “The Etymologies” are authoritative unto themselves despite whatever typographical or transcriptional errors may have crept into the published work. These errors may conceivably be rectified some day (although the various attempts to produce final, completely correct versions of The Lord of the Rings have — according to scholars like Wayne Hammond and Douglas Anderson — proven to be incalculably difficult).
In the greater context “The Etymologies” falls into a zone of work where J.R.R. Tolkien was reshaping much of his constituent mythologies for use in a greater, more cohesive work. Most people now habitually refer to this work as Tolkien’s Legendarium. However, what most people don’t realize is that there are in fact three primary legendaria and innumerable secondary ones.
The primary legendaria are the work that Tolkien saw in his mind, the work that he attempted to physically transcribe and keep assembled or associated together (dropping texts from this corpus and adding texts to it, sometime reincorporating older texts with annotations or changes), and finally the work that was published in all the various books or journals that Christopher Tolkien or designated researchers (including John Rateliff, Wayne Hammond & Christina Scull, Carl Hostetter, and a select few others) have produced.
These primary legendaria are largely inaccessible to the general audience, for only the published one can be used for research and that one is divided and sub-divided into multiple phases and generations, dead ends, and highly detailed tangents. The published legendarium does not accurately reflect the story that was in Tolkien’s heart as it must have appeared to him (in his thought) at any given time in his life.
When people argue about this or that “fact” in the Tolkien literature, their appeals to authority inevitably fall upon deaf ears. And “ears” is a perfect example of how this selective use of pseudo-authoritative citation works. As I have pointed out for many years, there is no story in which J.R.R. Tolkien ever mentions an elf who has pointed ears. Nonetheless, some people will argue until the heavens dry up and blow away that the Elves had pointed ears because of a single entry in “The Etymologies” — an entry which is not in any way supported by any other published text (insofar as anything is said of Elvish ears).
Nonetheless, those who appeal to “The Etymologies” cannot be persuaded to look at the stories: “The Etymologies” must be right, for there is no text that contradicts them.
In a hundred arguments, perhaps a thousand, that play themselves out over and over again among Tolkien fans around the world the absence of denial or contradiction is used to shore up faux authority that is assumed or presumed for the sake of winning a point that, frankly, will be argued again and again.
To understand what Tolkien’s Legendarium really is, you probably need to imagine playing a game of “Telephone” with yourself — say twelve versions of yourself. Your first (earliest) self whispers a very long and complicated story into the ear of your second self, who in turn whispers that story into the ear of your third self, and so on until the story is finally reshared (for all) by your twelfth (latest) self. It is a classic characteristic of this game that no final version of whatever the whisphered message is shall closely resemble the original message — especially if the message is long and complex.
Tolkien did not set out to write The Lord of the Rings in 1916. He had no Hobbits in mind and there was (to him) no Middle-earth in his fiction. He populated his collection of stories with pixies, fairies, metal dragons, Balrog cavalry, evil Dwarves, and many other things that — as Christopher Tolkien put it so succinctly — “fall away” through the years as Tolkien retells the stories, reinvents the characters, reuses words and names and themes.
The world of Middle-earth as Tolkien attempted to describe it in the final months of his life did not much resemble the world of The Book of Lost Tales. He wasn’t even sure he could retain the tale of the Two Trees, which many readers treat with almost devotional love.
So let us return to the original question: “How reliable are ‘The Etymologies’ as an authoritative Tolkien source?” In my opinion (which can only be expressed as such) they are not very reliable at all — and yet they are much relied upon simply because there is nothing else upon which to rely. Even the most highly respected and authoritative Elvish linguists use “The Etymologies” in their work; Christopher Tolkien himself often made reference to them in later books.
There is no inherent authority in “The Etymologies” over “all things Middle-earth”. That is, I would be very reluctant to use “The Etymologies” to settle any Tolkien fan arguments. You can certain pose all sorts of questions that can only be resolved by looking to “The Etymologies”, but it is misguided to use a disconnected older text to explain a more recent text.
By “disconnected” I mean that you can, actually, show a real connection between “The Fall of Gondolin” as published in The Book of Lost Tales and the account published in The Silmarillion because Christopher Tolkien explains how he used the former story to craft an important chapter in the latter book. The connection is well-documented, stipulated by the highest living authority of the day, and is therefore axiomatic (requiring no proof).
But the fact that Christopher used so much material (in highly compressed form) from one of the earliest stories his father wrote down for “the legendarium” does not mean that you can point to other stories from that time frame and use them to explain why, what, or how for other late works — including The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, except perhaps in an incidental way that is supported by exceptions whose uniqueness outweighs all contrary points of view. But one must meticulously detail the uniqueness for rest assured that any attempted logical argument fails at the first flaw, each and every time.
And even in the case of “The Fall of Gondolin”, Christopher was very careful to admonish readers not to confuse what they find in the published Silmarillion with whatever J.R.R. Tolkien might have intended at any time in his life.
If you are writing fan fiction or role-playing adventures you have to use the sources available to you and keep them as authoritative within the framework of the assumptions you make. Your choices cannot really be any more correct than mine or anyone else’s. We’re all bound to make mistakes of interpretation or to change our views over time. Hence, there really is no question about which texts are authoritative — none of them are, and all of them are, and it gets no simpler than that.
You have to practice sorting through the conflicting versions and learn to match like-to-like, similar-to-similar, and accept that more-than-likely someone, somewhere is going to disagree with your choices.
# # #
Have you read our other Tolkien and Middle-earth Questions and Answers articles?
