Ferretnibbles 5 – Wrecking Elven Cities and Drawing Elf Porn

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Note: Ferretnibbles 4 is not conserved here since it was not my own work.

The Fall of Gondolin by J.R.R. Tolkien (ed. Christopher Tolkien)

The Fall of Gondolin is the third of Christopher Tolkien’s standalone presentations of major narratives from Middle Earth’s First Age, following on from The Children of Húrin and Beren and Lúthien. Since he’d hit his early 90s by the time the latter volume was done, Christopher had played down the hopes of his being able to complete this one, but thankfully he has been able to; this time around, he’s much more emphatic that this is well and truly the end of the line as far as his delvings into his father’s Middle Earth manuscripts go.

The three stories in this trilogy constitute the three stories which J.R.R. Tolkien himself thought could sustain an entire novel by themselves, and in each case he made multiple concerted attempts to set down and revise the narrative to a point he was happy with, but all were unfinished to a greater or lesser extent. As I’ve previously detailed, The Children of Húrin is presented mostly as a single, continuous narrative, Christopher Tolkien taking the most complete version of the narrative available and then drawing on other texts to patch over the gaps here and there. On the other hand, in the case of Beren and Lúthien no one version of that narrative was developed and polished to the point where that was possible, so Christopher instead presents the different versions of the texts in order of composition so readers can trace how the story developed from its early, Lord Dunsany-esque prototype into more distinctly Tolkien-ish later forms.

Ferretnibbles 2 – Beren and Lúthien, Shin Megami Tensei on the 3DS, and Sithrak Tracts

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Sometimes you want to jabber about something on Ferretbrain to an extent which would be unwieldy for a Playpen post, but not necessarily make for a full-blooded article. To encourage contributors to offer up shorter pieces when the mood strikes them, here’s another set of Ferretnibbles – pocket-sized articles about all and sundry.

This time around, they’re all penned by me, but nibbles from others are always welcome at the usual editorial address. Today’s nibbles concern the latest and greatest in posthumous Tolkien releases, demon-summoning JRPGs, and fantasy porn comic spin-offs.

Beren and Lúthien

Christopher Tolkien is over 90 years old, and he states in his commentary in Beren and Lúthien that he suspects it will be the last book he releases of his father’s Middle-Earth material. If this is so, then he is leaving us on a strong note, because the approach taken here is extremely interesting and makes a virtue out of the fragmentary material he has to work with.

As explained by Christopher in The Children of Húrin, his previous book focusing on a particular legend of Middle-Earth’s First Age, J.R.R. Tolkien thought that there were three stories of that era that were substantial enough to conceivably stand as distinct tales in their own right as opposed to incidents in a wider story. One was the tale of how the hidden elven citadel of Gondolin fell to the forces of Morgoth, one was the doom of the children of Húrin, one was the story told here of how Beren (a human in most tellings, though a rival strand of the elven peoples in the story’s earliest version) ended up falling in love with the elven princess Lúthien, and how her father Thingol challenged Beren to go steal a Simaril from the crown of Morgoth if he wanted her hand in marriage. This was meant to be an insult, since the task was held to be impossible – and yet it was done, though at great price, with Beren losing his hand and even his life and Lúthien only winning him back from the clutches of death at the cost of giving up her elven immortality to share in the fate of mortal men (thus setting a model for Arwen’s similar sacrifice for Aragorn in later aeons).

As with The Children of Húrin, the presentation here is the result of a bit of literary archaeology by Christopher Tolkien – but whereas in the case of Húrin the extant writings were substantial enough that Christopher could massage them into what amounted to a new novel, the various writings on Beren and Lúthien were a much more diverse bunch, with several takes on the story being provided over the years, and written in a mixture of prose and poetry at that. Thus, rather than trying to reconcile them into a single continuous novel, Christopher instead gives us a book that tracks the development of the story, from its first incarnation to its more developed version.