The Lord of the Rings stands alone atop the lofty summit of fantasy literature. But that book itself rests upon its own massive foundation of legends and mythology which J.R.R. Tolkien continued to expand, deepen, and refine throughout his life. And the simple fact is that the vast majority of that material never found its way into the major published works set in Middle-earth. The Unfinished Tales attempts to remedy that situation, at least in part.
For the unfamiliar, Tolkien essentially only wrote two finished novels in his lifetime, the aforementioned Lord of the Rings (originally conceived as a single volume) and its predecessor, The Hobbit. Posthumously, his son Christopher compiled and edited the major unpublished tales from Middle-earth into The Silmarillion. Though published after his death, it feels very much in tune with his other published works in terms of the prose. It is more episodic than his other novels, though, but and in some ways offers the same promise as Unfinished Tales: more lore.
But The Silmarillion comes across as a finished work, while Unfinished Tales reads much more like a collection of notes from Tolkien’s notebooks. The information presented here is often not in story form, or certainly not in a highly finished from even when it does present narrative material. The exceptions would be the stories of Turor, Turin, and Aldarion and Erendis. Tuor’s and Turin’s stories already exist in finished form in The Silmarillion as well as later works, yet there are fresh details presented here. Which begs the question as to why these were not incorporated into The Silmarillion?
Inquiring minds want to know
Though Christopher Tolkien provides a decent-sized introduction as to the thinking behind this volume, I don’t know that it’s exactly clear why these fragments were included. But whatever the reasoning behind his editorial decisions, essentially, what we get here amounts to a substantial collection of behind the scenes looks into the major stories of Middle-earth, along with one fresh and nearly complete story, that being the story of Aldarion and Erendis.
This book, then, is really for the super fans of Middle-earth who want to know all of the particulars about what went on off stage during some of the most pivotal scenes from The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion. In many ways, it’s an appendix expanded into book length form. So if you loved the appendices in The Lord of the Rings, but always wished there was more, this is the book for you
Familiar ground
Besides new details about the gates of Gondolin and Turin’s childhoood, and greater details about Numenor, most of the book covers familiar ground.
We get to read about Aragorn’s hunt for Gollum. The book delves into the origin of the wizards, as well as more insights into the inner working of the ringwraiths and the palantir stones. In particular, we get more of the background of Gandalf, specifically his struggles with convincing Thorin to seek out Bilbo’s help in the quest to The Lonely Mountain. We learn a little more about Galadriel, though all the individual bits do not always mesh with each other. The book gives more details on Isildur’s death. a brief background on the Druedain, and also the story of Eorl the Young and his friendship with Cirion the Steward, which brought about the long alliance between Rohan and Gondor.
There are wonderful passages sprinkled through all of these, but there is not much consistency in the way we would expect if these were finished pieces. The best written parts, though, are found in the passages about Tuor, which feel almost as if they reach the level of The Silmarillion.
Something fresh
As I said before, the one wholly new and unexpected part of the book comes in the tale of Aldarion and Erendis, king and queen of Numenor. This feels almost finished, though it ends too abruptly to achieve a true sense of completion.
The tale is quite compelling, but grows more and more bleak as it goes on. While in the beginning, Erendis elicits much sympathy for having to compete with Aldarion’s love of the sea, by the end of the tale, she descends into such bitterness and pride that she exhausts all the goodwill she has built up with the reader. Unexpectedly, the tale ends with Aldarion transitioning into more of the hero of the tale, but it is a bit of a hollow victory, for the price of his sacrifice is a broken and shattered family.
Some tales were not meant to be finished
In the end, despite the fascinating details and insights revealed, and despite the depth this collection of fragments adds to the mythology of Middle-earth, this book leaves much to be desired for all but the most ardent of Middl-earth fans. The stories are simply too incomplete to give true satisfaction. This very much has the feel of watching deleted scenes from a movie. They are interesting, but when you watch them, you usually see why the director left them out.
Am I grateful for the extra details and insights this book provides? Certainly. But my mistake was going into this hoping for more cohesive and completed narratives. This is not a book for the general public, unfortunately. It is more of a reference for Tolkien scholars and aficionados who are desperate for any scraps that might fall from the master’s table. As one who is a diehard fan of Middle-earth myself, I am glad that I read it, but it is not a work I will likely return to except to glean the occasional odd tidbit of information during some late night conversation about why Saruman was jealous of Gandalf’s taste for Longbottom leaf. And like Gandalf’s pipe, there is much smoke to be found here, yet it fades rather quickly soon after the telling.
