Q: Is The Book of Lost Tales an Early Version of The Silmarillion?
ANSWER: No. Christopher Tolkien clearly and succinctly states that his father abandoned The Book of Lost Tales, and that many of the elements that were peculiar to and defining for that collection of stories “fall away” through the years as his father revisited old ideas and integrated them into new stories.
There are, I think, two reasons for the very complicated confusion among fans (and some scholars) over the relationship between The Book of Lost Tales and The Silmarillion.
The first reason is that many people wrongly identified The Lord of the Rings as Tolkien’s “mythology for England”. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien was published in 1981, and The Book of Lost Tales, Part One was published in 1983. During the approximately two years between these two books (the Letters was edited by Humphrey Carpenter, not Christopher Tolkien) many readers explored what were then new ideas for most of us; one of which was that, as Tolkien noted in Letter No, 131:
…once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I 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….
It is understandable that The Lord of the Rings, with so many clear references and connections to English language, culture, custom, idiom, etc. should seem to many like a “mythology for England” but despite its clear and obvious Englishness there is literally nothing of England in The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien’s classic mythology was composed piece-meal from maybe 1913 to 1918 (most sources say he began in 1916 but I’m not convinced — I think there was another layer of creativity that preceded his first composition, “The Fall of Gondolin”). Tolkien’s original idea was to create a series of stories about a proto-England, England before it was English, that was populated by fairies and elves and dwarves and pixies and other creatures.
This proto-England was not supposed to be the Celtic and Roman Britain we learned about in history — it was supposed to be a lost proto-England, a land where Celts and Romans had no more place than Anglo-Saxons. But the stories were an attempt to tell how England came to be English from an Old English (Anglo-Saxon) man’s point of view.
The mythology was really designed, intended to be an Anglo-Saxon mythology, not such as history and archaeology might support with declarative revelations but rather such as might fit “in-between the cracks” of our knowledge, explaining curious old words that have survived to this time.
The second reason for widespread confusion, I think, stems from an analysis by several notable writers of Tolkien’s motivations. As Tom Shippey and others have pointed out, J.R.R. Tolkien was disheartened to realize that the invasion of 1066 led not only to a political change that forever altered the Englishman’s way of life — it almost completely obliterated whatever previous mythologies the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, and other Germans had brought with them (and expanded) when they settled in Britain.
Of course, Britain had already lost another mythology. The Romans crushed Celtic culture in northern Italy, Iberia, Gaul, and Britain. Today most of what we know about early Celtic mythology is derived from Gaelic sources that survived beyond Roman cultural boundaries or from random glimpses provided by archaeology or the occasional Roman writer.
The Normans did to the Saxons what the Romans did to the Celts, but the Celts were able to squirrel away bits and pieces of ancient myths in places like Wales, Scotland, and Brittany; the Saxons had no such retreat. The Norman Conquest deprived England of what scholars today believe was a much larger body of literature, myth, and folklore than we know about.
And Tolkien himself was part of the generations that slowly rediscovered or recaptured most of what remains of the Old English literature. “Beowulf”, for example, had survived the purge in only one dusty old manuscript, partially burnt, and despite a lengthy history of changing hands from the mid-1500s onward was not published in the modern sense until 1815. And yet it would not be until Tolkien himself took a deeper look inside the poem that scholars began to think of what it preserved in terms of cultural ideas.
In my essay “Tolkien’s Time Machine: When Literary Worlds Collide” I posited that The Lord of the Rings might actually represent something Tolkien never had the courage to disclose to even his closest friends: an experimental form of fiction that might pretend to be the kind of English epic story that could have emerged from Old English literature and culture had it survived largely intact for the past 1,000 years.
My idea is hardly new. Jonathan Glenn proposed the kernel of the idea in a paper he published in 1991. And, of course, Tom Shippey immortalized Tolkien’s grief over the loss of ancient Anglo-Saxon literature and myths in The Road to Middle-earth.
And so it is reasonable to ask, if The Lord of the Rings was experimental literature, would not The Silmarillion also have been experimental? And the answer should be obvious. In Tolkien’s hands all story-telling was experimental. He wasn’t simply interested in telling stories; he wanted to tell the kinds of stories he thought should have been told, by someone, preferably an English someone, if only because he felt there was a dearth of Englishness in English literature.
Hence, Farmer Giles of Ham is really set in an imaginary part of middle England before it was “all England”; and Smith of Wootton Major is clearly set in the English landscape, somewhere in the middle ages of English history. It is probably no coincidence that Tolkien’s “medieval” stories feel like the stories of the 1100s, 1200s, and even 1300s (for Middle English was one of his specialties). Middle English represents the re-emergence of the Old English language, transformed and “normalized” by decades, even centuries of common, everyday use in a world dominated by Norman French. Middle English was the cultural triumph of the Anglo-Saxons over their Norman conquerors, for the descendants of the conquerors ultimately abandoned the French language that their ancestors had spoken (who, ironically, had abandoned the Norse language whom their ancestors had spoken).
English noble familes descended from Norman barons are, in fact, descended from Norwegian warriors who settled in northern France to serve as a bulwark against other Viking groups who were harassing France. The Norse tradition died out quickly after Viking chieftain Rollo adopted French and became a Christian (as Robert I, Duke of Normandy). Rollo’s descendants eventually abandoned “Norman French” and adopted Middle English and helped to carve out Modern English.
Somewhere in these ironies of history Tolkien was not amused enough to say, “Well, we won after all”. He was dissatisfied with the ironies themselves. He wanted to know the unknowable: what the English might have accomplished had they been allowed to continue their own intellectual and literary development. So everything he wrote, from The Book of Lost Tales onward, was an experiment in constructing what might have been.
In this view we can say that The Silmarillion was a successor experiment, just as The Lord of the Rings was a successor experiment to The Silmarillion. But whereas the success of The Lord of the Rings ensured there would be demand for The Silmarillion — thus allowing Tolkien the freedom to revisit that work and take up the task of revising it, updating it — he never again turned back to The Book of Lost Tales. There are multiple versions of The Silmarillion but only one version of The Book of Lost Tales.
Tolkien had moved on from attempting to create “a mythology for England” to creating a mythology that was English but not set in England. It was an experiment that had taken on a life of its own for Tolkien never again had the luxury of thinking and creating and dreaming in private. Everything from 1950 on was about Middle-earth, an extension of The Lord of the Rings, and that includes The Silmarillion.
We can say that The Silmarillion is derived from the experience of writing The Book of Lost Tales but we cannot say (with accuracy) that The Silmarillion evolved from The Book of Lost Tales. The “Silmarillion” stories grew out of two poetic works Tolkien composed in the 1920s, after abandoning BOLT. He changed the landscape, the characters, the histories, the world of his stories and recast the stories in a way that resembled the old “lost tales” but which was nonetheless distinct.
Perhaps it is safest to say that the stories were always there but that Tolkien had to experiment with them in different forms until he found something satisfying, but he never reached the end of that road because he was sidetracked by something completely unforeseen, something unforeseeable. Middle-earth caught him up in its self-defined evolution, driven by the demand from readers for more stories, more details, more answers to questions.
And in that he succeeded without realizing he had, for there had until that time never been anything quite like The Lord of the Rings. Nor has there been anything quite like it since — not in the way it affected modern literature. Tolkien unwittingly implemented a course correction which, if it did not reset the trajectory of the evolution of English literature back to its original course, at least demonstrated that it was possible to set aside a thousand years of literary tradition and start over, not quite from scratch, but from a place that — in modern eyes — resembles that interrupted English imagination.
In that respect, The Silmarillion is a re-imagined Book of Lost Tales, a Book of Lost Tales that should have been but never was, except for Tolkien’s own ideas of what was lost that should be resurrected for use in a new way.
Thanks to Christopher Tolkien we’ll always have both The Book of Lost Tales and The Silmarillion. Unfortunately, we’ll never have finished versions of what Tolkien imagined in either case. But perhaps it is better that way, for a living mythology may be more interesting across the centuries than a dead one, and now we have Tolkien’s Mythos, which is a literary mythology that has yet to be fully explored and understood.
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