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My Father's "Eviscerated" Work - Son Of Hobbit Scribe J.R.R. Tolkien Finally Spe

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Argonath
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« on: September 02, 2016, 02:56:33 am »

Little by little, starting in the late 1930s, The Lord of the Rings took shape. Enlisted in the Royal Air Force, Christopher left for a South African air base in 1943, where every week he received a long letter from his father, as well as the episodes of the novel that was under way. "I was a fighter pilot. When I landed, I would read a chapter," he says, amused, showing a letter in which his father asks his advice on the formation of a proper noun.

The first thing he remembers feeling after his father's death was a sense of heavy responsibility. In the last years of his life, Tolkien had started working again on The Silmarillion, trying in vain to bring some order to the narrative, as the writing of Lord of the Rings, which borrowed elements from the earlier mythology, had caused some anachronisms and discrepancies in The Silmarillion.

"Tolkien could not do it," Baillie notes. For a time she had worked as the writer's assistant, and later edited one of his collections, called The Father Christmas Letters. "He was bogged down in chronological details, he rewrote everything, it became more and more complicated." Between father and son, it was understood that Christopher would take up the task if the writer died without having finished.

A hidden treasure

He also received his father's papers after the death: 70 boxes of archives, each stuffed with thousands of unpublished pages. Narratives, tales, lectures, poems of 4,000 lines more or less complete, letters and more letters, all in a frightening disorder. Almost nothing was dated or numbered, just stuffed higgledy-piggledy into the boxes.

"He had the habit of traveling between Oxford and Bournemouth, where he often stayed," Baillie Tolkien recounts. "When he left, he would put armfuls of papers into a suitcase which he always kept with him. When he arrived, he would sometimes pull out any sheet at random and start with that one!" On top of all this, the handwritten manuscripts were almost indecipherable because his handwriting was so cramped.

However, in this unlikely jumble, there was a treasure, not only The Silmarillion, but very complete versions of all sorts of legends only just glimpsed in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings -- an almost submerged archipelago, of whose existence Christopher had been partly unaware. It was then that the work began a second life... and so did Christopher. He resigned from New College at Oxford, where he had also become professor of Old English, and threw himself into editing his father's work. He left the university with no regrets, going so far (at the memory, his eyes sparkle) as to throw into the bushes the key each professor received, which was supposed to be exhibited at the end of the year in a ritual ceremony.

First in England, then in France, he reassembled the parts of The Silmarillion, making it more coherent, added padding here and there, and published the book in 1977, with some remorse. "Right away I thought that the book was good, but a little false, in the sense that I had had to invent some passages," he explains. At the time, he even had a worrying dream. "I was in my father's office at Oxford. He came in and started looking for something with great anxiety. Then I realized in horror that it was The Silmarillion, and I was terrified at the thought that he would discover what I had done."

Meanwhile, most of the manuscripts that he had brought to France, piled in the back of his car, had to go back to Oxford. At the request of the rest of the family, nervous at this migration, the papers went back the way they had arrived, to the Bodleian Library, where they are currently kept and are now being digitized. Therefore, Christopher had to undertake his work with photocopies, which was a great deal of trouble. It was impossible, for example, to go by the ink color or the texture of the paper when trying to date the documents. "But I had his voice in my ear," says Christopher Tolkien. This time, he would become, he says, "the historian of the work, its interpreter."


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