Tapping into Unfinished Tales

[BeruthielsWhiteKitty]

A few lectures ago, you mentioned strongly disagreeing with passages in Unfinished Tales that hinted that Gandalf suspected Saruman before answering his summons to Orthanc since it would make Gandalf's decisions look pretty problematic. This made me aware of my own ambivalent feelings about the material Christopher Tolkien published after The Silmarillion. Since this course is as much about careful reading as anything else, I wanted to get your take on this. The additional material is a fantastic window into the writing process, but it seems very risky, at best, to draw conclusions from material that Tolkien had not finalized. For example, for all we know, if Tolkien had lived long enough to publish material on the Istari, the two missing wizards would have been beige and mauve and would have been pronounced to be successful. What internal guidelines do you use with draft material? Or do you strictly stay away from it?

 

[Jim Deutch]

I like your question. I doubt the good Professor will have any single answer to it, though! "It depends..."

for all we know, if Tolkien had lived long enough to publish material on the . . .

One thing we do know is that he had decided to abandon the "changing of the world" at the fall of Numenor, and make Arda round from the beginning, because he came to believe that the change was "astronomically absurd" (pun presumably intended). And that would have been a shame.
It's way too much Augustinian thinking for me. I have no problem with Eru not only turning flat Arda into a ball, but doing it retroactively, so that it has always been a ball, and the only remnant of the original flat world is in the memories of the Elves and the tales they've passed down. That is just so cool.
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"Not only is the act of modifying pi beyond our power, not only is it beyond our understanding, but the very idea of its possibility is beyond our understanding. That kind of transcendent superiority is, to me, very much part of the idea of a deity." -- Wim Lewis