The Miller's Tale. HGS V.II, OOC

[Chrysophylax Dives]

And so it was later
As the miller told her tale
That his face at first just ghostly
Turned a whiter shade of pale

Welcome to the OOC thread for Weathertop! Volume II of the Guide to Stairs. The thread is a place for blether so long as volume two is not a prospect because absent proper permissions.

I welcome posts on any Guide related matter from Hobbits and other readers up for the climb.

Volume I of the Guide to Stairs was published on the plaza last year, and to it was added a foreword: the tale of the mock-Elf-tower built by Albusbalbus Chubb where a great tree had once grown over Bag-end. The original Guide was the response of the Hobbits of Undertowers, ritualists who made much of their own Window on the West and basically failed to consider the staircase of the Dark Tower in Mordor.

Volume II of the Guide is titled The Miller's Tale. Stepping east from Undertowers back to Hobbiton, we discover an agent of the Shadow in the Mill at the bottom of the Hill, the Mill by the Water that was the only tower in Hobbiton, before the Folly on the top of the Hill.

Her Almageste and books grete and smale,
Her astrelabie longynge for her art,
Her augrym stones layen faire apart
On shelves couched at her beddes heed

Tolemais Sandyman is the Miller. As a child she had served an apprenticeship with the scribes of Undertowers. She could never return, but it mattered not a jot to Tolemais, who had used her time make her own copies of the ghost stories of Bingo Bolger-Baggins and the other forgotten Hobbits. Tolemais is a rare, dark Hobbit, who has fathomed the secret of Elvish stairs. She is building a spiral-staircase, hidden inside the walls of her Mill. The original mss. from which we derive Volume II of the Guide is in her hand, but the drawings were made by her friend Fairbairn the Fat, reprobate founder of Mushroom Modernism.



This is the plaza and we must follow house rules. The very first thing to do is talk to the admins.

@Pele Alarion, @Arnyn, @Rivvy Elf would it be possible to sticky this thread, just for a couple of months? I don't have any justification other than it would make me feel that the Guide was important and that would make my heart swell with pride.

[Periantar]

A curious hobbit wonders in, having heard, well, frankly uncomfortable talk of... stairs; sits down, brandishes a long, slender pipe and begins to puff away, trying to figure out what exactly, all this stair talk is about and feeling quite certain that he's already missed out on much essential lore here...

"I do wonder if there might not be someone hereabouts who could explain to a simple hobbit such as myself, with an even simpler pate, what is going on here. I do recall hearing of stairs once before. Believe it was a bedtime story me Grand-pappy used to tell us wee ones years back. Of course that was only until Ma' told him to stop a'cause the notion was giving us all nightmares.
Hmm, stairs. Don't know 'em, don't understand 'em. Definitiely can't abide 'em. Mind you, I'll not be called unduly prejudiced now!"

[Chrysophylax Dives]

So @Periantar, thank you for biting. I reply OOC.

It is like this. One year ago I was posting each Wednesday on the plaza one new post in a thread named 'A Hobbit's Guide to Stairs', which was essentially a very close reading of the Hobbit walk in the Marish on the way to Farmer Maggot as it was told back in 1938 in the first draft of the story (the three Hobbits are named Bingo Bolger-Baggins, Odo Took and Frodo Took). The Guide was better received than anything I ever wrote before, but also puzzled people - I showed that stairs are a real thing in Tolkien's conception of Hobbits, running throughout LotR but hidden. This was why I did a whole series on this 1938 draft - it was only on writing it that Tolkien decided to hide the stairs, so here we actually glimpse what the real deal is.

What is the real deal? One year ago nobody else had a clue, and I had only an intuition. The reason that I was doing the Guide in the first place was because it was the next step in my research into the famous allegory of Beowulf as a tower. That allegory was told in late 1936. What the Guide revealed to me was that the image of this metaphorical tower was transplanted into the LotR via the western Elf-tower.

But I could not see further because one year ago I did not understand about the staircase of the metaphorical tower of 1936. Now I have worked that out I return to the Guide to Stairs, only this second time around with the aim of showing people the whole picture.

That is the idea. The Miller's Tale seemed to naturally flow from the space-time dialectic observable on the map as I read it.

[Periantar]

Ooh, deep; as deep dare I say, as the many stairs no doubt decending the depths of Khazad Dum itself. I look forward to reading more.

[Arnyn]

@Pele Alarion, @Arnyn, @Rivvy Elf would it be possible to sticky this thread, just for a couple of months? I don't have any justification other than it would make me feel that the Guide was important and that would make my heart swell with pride.

We like the honesty. Your request has been granted!

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Arnyn, I am obliged to the three of you. To all readers of this thread - welcome! You are few, and why you are reading this I have no idea. This thread concerns the secret of stairs.

Around June 2023, and running for a couple of months, 'A Hobbit's Guide to Stairs' amused and puzzled and finally profoundly offended the members and administration of the plaza. In retrospect, as author, I was coy. But only because I did not see everything; and when I tried to explain what I did see it was met with blank incomprehension. Now I understand better the seminal significance of 'A Hobbit's Guide to Stairs'.

Read from start to finish with a careful eye (no eyes here are so careful) the Guide reveals the following fact:

From the start of the new Hobbit story, before Tolkien knew that the magic ring was the One Ring, he knew that the hidden stairs of this new story were not Dwarvish but Elvish, and that deep down Hobbits absolutely do not get stairs - not even Bingo Bolger-Baggins.

This in itself is kind of curious, maybe. And plaza readers were bedazzled by the revelation of the appearance of stairs within the narrative, which is clearly evidence of something as it were behind the scenes in the design of the author. But what?

For my part, I already knew back then that the stairs in question were the stairs of the Anglo-Saxon tower that is an image of the Old English poem Beowulf in an allegory that Tolkien told in a lecture delivered to the British Academy in November 1936, 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics'.

Unfortunately, just as I was on the point of working out what was what a war broke out in my backyard. Yesterday I went to another funeral - it is not stopping. And this threw a spanner in the works of my mind and soul. But by now I have, so to speak, caught up with my own shadow, and it is time to advance to the whole picture.

Here is the key that I could not supply a year ago to curious readers:

The staircase of the Anglo-Saxon tower that is Beowulf is conceived by J.R.R. Tolkien already in 1936 as an Elvish design.

This in itself is no doubt meaningless - until you start to get your head around the design.

The key to the whole thing is that this staircase is a spiral and the foundation of the tower is located at the top of the staircase.

[Drífa]

She strokes her beard in a dwarvish fashion, looks the dragon and hobbit up and down, and suddenly wonders if this is some adventure like the old ones. If a wizard shows up—and more dwarves, perhaps. There is a fat chance of that happening, but one can hope.

There appear to be many landings (links) on this here staircase. Where would you recommend one begin ascending or descending (reading)?

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Thank you, Dwarf!

The links embedded in the OP are a review of last year's work - The Old Guide to Stairs, and the various appendages added to it over the months. A veteran such as yourself should skip these links. The only link to external matter that I will put on this thread is my Spiral Staircase post, coming out in a few days. That explains the design of the staircase in one go, while in this thread I'll explain the same design from different points of view, and spell out (as the external post does not) how this staircase of 1936 becomes Elostirion, and what that means.

I was thinking about you just now @Drifa. What we have here is essentially Tolkien's great riddle, the riddle at the heart of The Lord of the Rings. In a way, the challenge is to pose the riddle - because by now I have the answer, if not the question. The answer is found hidden in the 1936 short allegory - a spiral staircase hidden inside the metaphorical tower. This spiral staircase is a key that unlocks The Lord of the Rings.

Give me a few days to get the Spiral Staircase posted and linked.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Over the weekend I hope to link to 'Spiral Staircase', which reveals what I reckon is the hidden design of Lord of the Rings. Just how a spiral staircase hidden in an allegory told in an academic lecture of 1936 is the design of LotR will at first glance not be obvious, and after the weekend I'll begin to point out what I hope - once you see it - comes to appear obvious.

As a teaser, here is my abstract for my post back in February, which was titled 'In the House of the Fairbairns' and takes us into Undertowers.

Both Anglo-Saxon tower and Elf-tower are enigmatic, but careful reading unearths more on the Elf-tower. This post proposes a solution to a literary riddle, posed in the long ago by my friend Tom Hillman: How is the sight of Valinor beheld by Frodo Baggins recorded in the Red Book of Westmarch? To spell out the situation: At the end of his story, Frodo gives the Red Book to Sam to complete, and read out from in the age to come, and then boards the last fairy-ship to take the Straight-road into the West. So how is what he sees on arriving on the further shore recorded in the Red Book? Two of Frodo Baggins’ far-seeing visions early in his adventure point to an answer - the secret of the Stone in the Tower; an answer guessed by Sam Gamgee, and passed down by his descendants, generating a distinctive Undertowers reading of the Red Book.

In other words, Tolkien wrote into his story the suggestion that the Hobbits of Undertowers had a special understanding of the Red Book because they were custodians not only of the Red Book but also of the secret of Elostirion - the tower under which they now lived - guessed by Samwise Gamgee and passed down the generations by the descendants of his daughter, Elanor the Fair.

You too are about to be initiated into the secret Undertowers reading of the Red Book of Westmarch!

Watch this space.

[Drífa]

Drifa blinks twice and regards the dragon.

A veteran, yes. Do those steps (links) in the OP, lead to the 'Spiral Staircase'?

[Chrysophylax Dives]

No. They describe the spiral staircase. But I never back then got a clear sight of it. I saw the winding stair and what have you, but I did not see that the spiral was the key.

All that I was doing when I wrote the posts of 'A Guide to Stairs' was reading (a) early drafts of Marish conversation and (b) whole of LotR with an eye for stairs. I was doing this because I had seen that the deal with the tower that is a metaphor of the poem Beowulf in Tolkien's 1936 lecture was all about the hidden stairs of the tower, which in the short story about a tower told in 1936 serve as a time machine. I knew then that climbing the stairs of Beowulf = travelling back in time. And I saw that in the Marish conversation penned in the first months of composition of LotR, stairs were a big deal.

The reason that my own mind got blown one year ago when I put the Guide on the plaza was that other people immediately spotted all sorts of stairways and stair-connections that I had not thought of before. And actually, what was presented to me looked like the key that I was missing. But it has taken me one year to work out how to use the key, and this is not only about the external situation here - this is not easy stuff to see to the bottom of!

What you and the Goose and others gave me a year ago was, naturally, a key to The Lord of the Rings, not the 1936 allegory about Beowulf. So what I did on my 'Seeing Stones' SWG posts was, from the New Year, use the key on LotR.

--> That generated an image of Elostirion with its Stone of Elendil (absented at the end of the 3rd Age) as a hidden connection with Valinor, with the meeting in Woody End introducing a thread out of Elostirion that leads to Galadriel's reconcilation with Varda after passing her test as the keystone of the whole story - the real turning of the tide.

With this reading under my belt, the summer has been a return to the allegory of the Anglo-Saxon tower told in 1936. Because the secret of the secret is here.

--> If the Stone of Elendil hidden in Elostirion on the western margin of the story of Frodo Baggins is the key to this story, then the spiral staircase hidden inside the Anglo-Saxon tower is the key to the key.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Spiral Staircase

[Drífa]

She jumps back as the dragon's eyes roll around in his head. 'What next,' she wonders. Then, out of nowhere, without introduction, as if by magic or trickery - the Spiral Staircase appears. Drifa takes a tentative first step. Who knows if the Spiral Staircase may suddenly disappear? When she feels her foot solidly on the first step, she delves into a hidden design with a cup of tea on a small table and a comfy chair beside it. She begins to read.


-->I must depart for the mines but will read when the day is done. I look forward to it. Well done!

[Drífa]

So, my first reading of the Spiral Staircase left me somewhat sad. I can only compare this sadness to Stephen King's ending of The Dark Tower. I understand from it that elves have been caught on the stairs their whole lives.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Well, that was unexpected but well taken. Thank you.



I never read The Dark Tower - I will buy it for my kindle and see what you are saying...

We are also caught on this staircase our whole lives, and we only get to do one flight.

I had not expected you to talk of sadness, but it does seem right. The Anglo-Saxons seem to have been big on melancholy, and my fundamental insight into what Tolkien was saying about Beowulf arose only once I was sitting in a hospital room, looking in the face a despair hitherto beyond my imagination.

It begins with the hero. Tolkien was quite right that heroism is real, and though a war may help you to see this clearly, a fairly obvious fact about human life is that everyone is given the opportunity to be a hero, sooner or later, and hopefully more than once. Nevertheless, heroism is a one-way street. All Tolkien fans have by now some notion of the famous 'Northern theory of courage', which is indeed at the heart of Lord of the Rings, and is captured wonderfully in the movies when Theoden is told that the army of Mordor cannot be beaten and the King of Rohan replies: 'Yet we will ride out to meet them nonetheless.' That gives modern expression to the famous words recorded in the Battle of Maldon, which Tolkien reads as a formula recited only once in a warrior's life - at the end:

Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessens.

How will you die? How will your loved ones die before your eyes? Moving and difficult and yet common to us all. LotR shows us Hobbits as heroes, with Sam and Frodo embodying the northern theory of courage - a lesson for us all.

Yes, yes, yes - that is all central in LotR to be sure, but this personal encounter with doom is Tolkien's starting-point. What comes after heroism is - sooner or later - death or permanent injury, mental as well as physical, and the mourning of the survivors - these concerns about the other side of heroism are what Tolkien finds in the Old English poem Beowulf, and surely spoke to him deeply as a survivor of the Battle of the Somme, and must have echoed in his soul as he wrote LotR through the dark years of World War II. The heroism is indeed the foundation - but the art of Tolkien, following that of the Anglo-Saxon author all those centuries before him, draws out the sorrow, the grief of the survivor, consoling those who despair in the face of a past now forever lost, albeit only with the glimmer of a fairy-story.

Tolkien says that Beowulf is elegy. This is the first and fundamental thing he says about the poem. The poet has used mythical monsters to show us something about what it means that the reward of heroism is death. He remarks on a critic who called Beowulf 'small beer' that it is a funeral beer, dark and bitter.

And this funeral beer is what makes The Lord of the Rings the work that it is, framed by Frodo's sea-funeral and Sam's return to Bag-end, finally to become a family Hobbit hole, never again to be stepped in and out of by a Baggins.

So all of these rambling words are me going -

YES!

I caught a Dwarvish reader. Or less abrasively, a Dwarf has caught the meaning of the spiral of a half-Elven staircase.

Thank you Drifa!

[Chrysophylax Dives]

On a second reading, this post was too long and tedious.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

same

[VelvetineZone]

As the plaza doesn't have the option of the "like" emoji to indicate having read and absorbed things, I'm replying to indicate I have. Not in long answers as my head is full of topics relating to story writing, home ed topics, and so on. I need to finish a retelling of the Shaherazade story I'm reading and then intend to reread LOTR.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

As the plaza doesn't have the option of the "like" emoji to indicate having read and absorbed things, I'm replying to indicate I have. Not in long answers as my head is full of topics relating to story writing, home ed topics, and so on. I need to finish a retelling of the Shaherazade story I'm reading and then intend to reread LOTR.

Thank you for that courtesy, VelvetineZone. The one thing I have truly learned posting on the plaza is that people have their own timetables. The stuff is here, as am I. If and when you or anyone is interested I am happy to blurble about it. As long as I have a sense that what I write is of some interest to someone and that one day down the line there might be a conversation or two, I am content. (It is when I feel I am talking only into the void that I am unhappy posting here.)

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Just an update on where things are going. I have now revised my website , which presents two series: (a) Seeing Stones, and (b) the Guide.

Seeing Stones. The October post will be the final post in this series, which will conclude with an overview of what Tolkien actually argues in 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics'. The result will be 14 posts, 4 of them a reading of LotR, but all serving to illuminate the allegory of the tower that introduces the argument of this famous lecture. This is hard core scholarship, not interesting unless you like this sort of thing, but the absolutely necessary foundation for the Guide. It is because the academics failed to understand this lecture that everyone has got everything wrong. So this series does the hard work in putting things right.

A Hobbit's Guide to Stairs. I have removed all content from this page, bar Drifa's cover image and the three header quotes. The old content (still on the plaza) was my research of a year ago and now that I have the design of the spiral staircase in the tower the same material should be restated while I am now in a position to move through all the early drafts of LotR showing how the spiral staircase is the hidden design of the whole story.

So from October I will put aside Seeing Stones and down to the New Year will be using this thread to plan out a revamped Guide to Stairs - now intended as an account of how Tolkien made LotR out of the spiral staircase. The idea is to start publishing the revamped Guide in the New Year.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Drifa, reflecting on the sadness that you discerned I recalled a famous passage in the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (731). King Edwin of Northumbria is debating whether to convert to Christianity. He consults his advisors, one of whom says:

The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant. (Book 2, Chapter 13)

This flight of the sparrow is, in our human terms, one turn of the staircase.

[Drífa]

Yes, our lives are brief compared to living for hundreds of centuries.

[Saranna]

@Chrysophylax Dives

Hello everyone in this thread, I hope you've not entirely forgotten me while I have been spending much of my time this year battling viruses from Mordeor and anaemia from who knows where. Hoping now to keep up with this research and the many writings it's generating. Will start by reading this thread next time I visit. Beginning to feel my brain may at last be defogging. Good wishes to you all.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

From the start of the new Hobbit story, before Tolkien knew that the magic ring was the One Ring, he knew that the hidden stairs of this new story were not Dwarvish but Elvish, and that deep down Hobbits absolutely do not get stairs - not even Bingo Bolger-Baggins.

Time as spiral and the circle as magical intervention is what the second staircase of the Guide to Stairs is all about, or will be when it is composed. Quite why in order to draw the encounter on Weathertop we need to be sitting in the Mill of the Sandymans at the bottom of the Hobbiton Hill, I as yet have no idea.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Dear @Saranna, my SWG 'Seeing Stones' posts ran from around June 2023 through to October 2024, and as a completed work are as yet missing the final circuit (a return to the Home early drafts of LotR = Hobbit's Guide to Stairs). But I refocused in January of 2024, and the posts of 2024 make two complete circuits, each of which I am happy with. Now I have to work out how to approach a second time the material of the Guide to Stairs; but that concerns future posts unwritten.

Looking back, the 2023 posts now require rewriting. They do not frame the three circuits that the project became in January.

This introductory material includes both the allegories of Beowulf and the secondary literature set in stone among 'Tolkien scholars' by Chance (1979) and Shippey (1982). One year ago, I posted in October 'Fawlty Towers', which laughed at Shippey, and then 'First Brick in the Wall', a November post on Chance. I should have begun with Chance - who actually introduces the only original ideas (Shippey does a smash and grab). This has become clear to me over the months since, and I've taken note in this or that passage or footnote along the way. Moreover, Tolkien scholars fighting like schoolboys on the lawn below the tower may appear a curious spectacle, for a while, but this story purports to be an allegory, and as such has a moral, and surely we are supposed to walk on by this egotistical babel... walk up the green grass all the way to the door of the tower, step through the doorway, and so begin to climb the staircase ourselves. My first four or five posts, while each seems to me individually valuable, do not as a whole do anything like make an introduction to what follows.

In the January beginning, when I saw what I wanted to do on the first two turns of the staircase, I had not yet written any of the posts that I dimly had in mind and did not see the organized material anything like as clearly as I do now. The February post on Undertowers still contains a tangle (and should look to the badger-setts of Scary). But the January post, 'The Peaks of Taniquetil', requires a fundamental overhaul. It is actually on this January post that I am really stuck when it comes to putting this material together - why I cannot atm bring myself even to put the 2024 material into one file.

'The Peaks of Taniquetil' is really two posts, main text and footnote 4. The main text circled the line in version 2 of 'The Fall of Númenor' when the exiles in the days of Elendil are said to have built high towers from which they could see, or half see, the peaks of Taniquetil.

What I suggested is that, as a method of inquiry, rather than analyze the allegory of the tower, as does Shippey, and which results in a mechanical allegory that does not work, we compare Anglo-Saxon and Númenórean towers. With this, I pointed to the road from the November allegory of the Anglo-Saxon tower to the Númenórean tower described earlier in 1936, and this road was traversed in the 4 summer posts that concluded with the October 'Doom and Ascent'.

The earlier (October 2023) 'Fawlty Towers' had laughed at Shippey's general reading of 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' so in January I made a long footnote to address Shippey's solution to the equations of the allegory of the tower. I pointed out that the 'descendants' vanish from his solutions and that his treatment of the view on the sea has almost no meaning whatsoever. But I chase his blethering into a footnote in which he observes that this tower with sea-view is like the Elf-towers from which the Hobbits of the prologue say one can see the sea.

What I suggested in this footnote is that, as a method of inquiry, rather than analyze the allegory of the tower, as does Shippey, and which results in a mechanical allegory that does not work, we compare Anglo-Saxon and Elf-towers. And this I went on to do in February to early summer, from Undertowers to the vision of the sea in Galadriel's Mirror ('Thálatta! Thálatta!')

In other words, my dear Elf-Librarian, with this January glimpse of the peaks of Taniquetil I pointed the way to two distinct roads of comparison, placing the Anglo-Saxon tower side-by-side with (a) Númenórean towers and (b) Elf-towers.

In the event, I turned first (with the footnote) to Elostirion of The Lord of the Rings and only through Galadriel's Mirror did I arrive at the Númenórean version of this tower, as I charted the Straight Road to Doom, the drawing of which by Tolkien in early 1936 tied up his Beowulf criticism.

'The Peaks of Taniquetil', as well as the introductory material, needs reframing and rewriting.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Saranna, I give you titles of the 2024 posts + markers for unwritten Introduction and final circuit. The 2024 posts made two circuits, and while the commencement stumbles a little, they are complete.

Introduction: Rock Garden, Deranged Friends, Flowers; a new view on the sea and an absolute reimagination of my January post, 'Peaks of Taniquetil': Númenórean towers, Anglo-Saxon tower, and Elf-towers = three tales wherein is a tower offers a view over the sea.

A. Elostirion in The Lord of the Rings
1. Frodo's Dreams [now 'Undertowers'; requires some tweaks]
2. Seeing Stones in Dark Towers
3. Crossroads
4. Thálatta! Thálatta!

B. Beowulf as Númenórean Tower
5. Passing Ships
6. Straight Road
7. Spiral Staircase
8. Doom and Ascent: the argument of 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics'

C. Hobbit Sequel [unwritten return to the Guide to Stairs]
9. There and Back Again: Elegy and Fairy-story
10. Rings, Stones, and the Spiral Staircase
11. Fairy-tale Turn
12. Sea-road: Flat and Round World Endings

I'd counsel looking at the picture that I posted here. For me, this is a picture of the whole book - a drawing of both Beowulf and The Lord of the Rings. But whether this image helps depends on how your mind works, whether maps (of this kind) are a help or a hindrance. People are different. I wish @Drifa would look at that picture for longer. I wonder if @Silky Gooseness saw anything at all? I see in the picture the whole stairway inside the walls of the white tower, all three circuits, stepping out of a true beginning.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Composed and online are two turns of the stair, the ground awaits reorganization of the oldest posts, and the third and final turn is yet to be written. My thought today is it will remain unwritten until some people catch up with the two turns of the stair that are online: my reading of Elostirion into The Lord of the Rings and my reading of the Straight Road of Elendil into the design of 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics'. On and out of the plaza, the critical response since January (when I got serious) has been thunder like silence. So I may wait a while. Meanwhile, I use this thread to think about the third and final turn, which is a Hobbit's guide to stairs.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Hobbit's Guide II should not (as hitherto imagined) step on from where the earlier reading of Return of the Shadow left off, viz. Bree, and so on to Weathertop to discover the One Ring. Discovery of the One in relation to the spiral staircase comes as we near the end. Better to begin with 'The Palantír', the last chapter that Tolkien pens (late 1942?) before putting the story aside for one year; and that summer of 1943 takes out his 1939 St Andrews lecture on fairy-stories and writes out the essay 'On Fairy-stories'.

We begin with a dark crystal orb falling into the story, wherein a Hobbit discovers the eyes of Sauron, and from here we look ahead in time to Tolkien's second great essay, the incomparable and impossible essay that he penned in the middle of World War II and composition of The Lord of the Rings.

From the perspective of composition, Weathertop is now very distant. Isengard's defeat closes the first and main part of the story of Rohan, and concludes that of the Ents, gathering along the way Gandalf the White. The Fellowship of the Ring had set out from Rivendell. Stepping on from Rivendell, the heir of Bilbo Baggins steps into the Mines of Moria, and the world changes around us: After Moria we enter the Golden Wood. But Weathertop is way west of Rivendell, still in the lands of The Hobbit.

Stepping into the story with Pippin and the Orthanc Stone in the Gap of Rohan situates us adjacent to 'On Fairy-stories', and a very long way from discovery of the One Ring on Weathertop. We are not so far away. however, from the resolution of the 'Elvish magic' of the Rings of Power hammered out into mythological clarity only as the story stepped through the realm of the Lady Galadriel.

The story, from Lothlórien to the appearance of the Seeing Stone, was most of it I think composed in 1942. These chapters are the 'hard core of the story', composed deep in World War II and key narrative context of the essay of 1943, 'On Fairy-stories'.

We begin, then, at the conclusion of this intense phase of narrative composition, as a mythical Elvish Stone crashes into the external staircase of the Númenórean tower of Orthanc, to be picked up by a Hobbit, who that night steals a look into it.

Actually, this is to step out of the original Guide to Stairs Wednesday 6: Stairless Hobbits - Peregrin Took.

[Saranna]

@Chrysophylax Dives many thanks for your posts explicating more about the origins and future development of your Opus re stairs, hobbits, and almost everything else in Tolkien's works!

@Drifa Thanks for re-emphasising the links between that other Tower being climbed in The Dark Tower, and Tolkien-related Towers. I'm a King fan anyway, but Roland's tale is exceptional even for King.

Every time get back into the Plaza I find all this excellent stuff that I need to read and reread; will be doing my best to keep up. Meanwhile back to my draft novel. Be well friends :)

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Hello @Saranna, thank you. I hope you are out the other side of your computer woes and enjoy the read!

I have gone back to the 'Silmarillion' material - reading atm the version in The Lost Road, which is the material (I think) sent to Unwin between publication of The Hobbit and starting its sequel at the close of 1937. So this is the 'Silmarillion' as it stood as Tolkien composed the most part of The Lord of the Rings (the final stages of this work are also a reworking of 'The Silmarillion'). All sorts of moments are catching my attention and prompting me to scratch my head.

Better perhaps to work in the garden. But there is no rain.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Hi Saranna, nice you seeing dropping by. I hope health is gentle on you and I am glad you enjoy being around, discovering interesting things to read. And no, don't worry I have not forgotten about you. How can I? Be well!

[Saranna]

@Aikári Salmarinian We are friends of old and I am sure we always will be. Though my health has been bad this year I have every hope that things will be much better for next year. Take care and we will both keep finding interesting ideas here, I am sure xxx

[Saranna]

@Chrysophylax Dives I understand the headscratching! However many times I read the Tales, finished and unfinished, the commentaries and helpful explanations of CT and others, the more I realise that it's a bit like falling into a vortex, possibly one with no exit at the bottom. One might swirl around in there forever. But you're doing a good job suggesting other ways into and through the works and the commentaries. And now even my computer is helpful again! 'Is everything sad going to come untrue?' If only :)

[Chrysophylax Dives]

However many times I read the Tales, finished and unfinished, the commentaries and helpful explanations of CT and others, the more I realise that it's a bit like falling into a vortex, possibly one with no exit at the bottom. One might swirl around in there forever. But you're doing a good job suggesting other ways into and through the works and the commentaries.

Thank you!

The 1937 Silmarillion is useful in that we see Tolkien drawing these stories as it were up to date just before he gets going on what will become The Lord of the Rings. I think the story of what happens next has confused everyone because as this new Hobbit story takes shape it not only is fitted to this 1937 version of the Silmarillion but starts to shape and bend it - at the surface level of e.g. introducing Galadriel, but at much deeper levels too, e.g. before concluding the tale of Frodo Baggins Tolkien pens a round world story of Númenor because (I think) he wants a certain ambiguity around the final scene of Frodo's 'sea funeral).

In fact, a curious feature of the ending of the 1937 Silmarillion is that, while evidently composed later, it makes no mention of Númenor, the 'final myth told by the Elves' penned (in relation to the unfinished Lost Road) in early 1936. This silence segs with the initial introduction of Gildor Inglorion and his Company of Elves in Return of the Shadow, and I am coming round to the idea that only in autumn 1938 did the new Hobbit story take definitive shape in relation to the Silmarillion. This happened on the way to Weathertop when the Ranger met in Bree exclaims that on Weathertop was once a fort and strong place from the days of Elendil and Gil-galad and the Last Alliance (told of in 'Fall of Númenor'). I think it is at this moment that the 3 Ages of Middle-earth become an idea in Tolkien's mind - and actually only then that the Númenor story becomes, so to speak, 'canon' in relation to the Silmarillion, which latter now comes into view as the stories of the First Age.

[Saranna]

I think it is at this moment that the 3 Ages of Middle-earth become an idea in Tolkien's mind - and actually only then that the Númenor story becomes, so to speak, 'canon' in relation to the Silmarillion, which latter now comes into view as the stories of the First Age.

Bold statement by @Chrysophylax Dives which I agree with. I don't seem to have the sort of mind that can work out these kinds of links. On my (long ago) first readings of the 'History of Middle-earth' volumes I seem to have read straight through and never looked in depth (or off to the side) at questions of internal evolution. Or at the hugely agonising effort Tolkien put in to create it all. I have learned better, I hope, thanks to the abundance of scholarship I've (selectively) read that has given me the impetus I needed. It's never too late to learn!

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Hi @Saranna, for myself there are different ways of reading those Home volumes. For a long while I enjoyed especially the early drafts of LotR simply because I had read the story itself too many times and the early drafts were like a revised edition that I could read fresh. But that holds really only for 'Return of the Shadow' were story and characters are very different. At the moment I am reading again 'The War of the Ring' which takes the story up to Frodo's capture by the Orcs in Cirith Ungol (1944). By this point the conception of the whole is basically finalized and the drafts reveal Tolkien's minute attention to details - a major theme of this volume is the synchronizing of the chronology so that, e.g. Frodo and Sam see a full moon on the same night that Merry and Pippin also see a full moon. I frequently find that I have read a page or so with my mind elsewhere and have no idea what I just read. In other words, it aint so exciting.

But the working out of the internal evolution is indeed an art. I suspect that nobody is born with a mind for this kind of thing, though I suppose some take to it more easily than others. Before I turned to Tolkien I did a PhD that became a book on a late-Victorian economist, which involved much archival work. In retrospect, that was training for these Home volumes.

All the other academics who researched this dead economist were practicing economists, with no historical training. Their procedure was to begin with the modern economics, which the dead economist was supposed to have invented, and then project these modern theories into the archival material. Elements that did not fit were either ignored or massaged. This is in fact just what I find with Tolkien fans/scholars reading the Home volumes. We know the final result so it seems obvious that this must have been what Tolkien was groping towards. The thought that Tolkien might have had a completely different story in mind does not enter the head of the scholar.

Basically, all my Tolkien studies arrive at the same conclusion: we have badly mangled our understanding of Tolkien because we have lost the sense of history that was a hallmark of British academia prior to World War II.

The allegory of the tower is precisely the same (as the 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' thread has just shown - see this post). In actuality, Tolkien is making a profoundly fascinating point about the interpenetration of historical and literary understanding, one that opens up his notions of enchantment and a secondary world in OFS. But the secondary literature reveals that the historical dimension of the allegory (and lecture) has been utterly missed, and the story/lecture is reduced to a silly parable about scholarship impeding appreciation of art.

[VelvetineZone]

This is interesting: "We know the final result so it seems obvious that this must have been what Tolkien was groping towards. The thought that Tolkien might have had a completely different story in mind does not enter the head of the scholar."

This is not the approach of a reader who writes stories, so I'm wondering how many of the scholars are story writers? Because as someone who writes stories, oh lord how to explain this, you know that story writing is a long convoluted process of bits you've planned, and bits which emerge unexpectedly, and bits you had to work hard to make work, and bits which astonishingly came together so well it looked like you planned it all along but it was sheer chance, and bits you hacked off in editing, and bits you added, and bits which changed massively several years later, and on and on forever tweaking.

Anyway I've lost my point as youngest wants a pancake.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Right. Verlyn Flieger is one of the great authorities, she does write the occasional story herself, and I think her scholarship is wonderful. But in general they do not.

All my recent Tolkien work has been published on the Silmarillion Writers Guild, which as the name suggests, is a community of writers, specifically Silmarillion fan-fic. Dawn Felagund, the site founder, writes both fan-fic and Tolkien scholarship and some years ago I looked at both and saw how they fitted together and was blown away. That was what prompted me to try my own hand at fan-fic and I found it an eye-opener and no mistake (as Sam would say).

The Tolkien fan-fic community, so far as I understand these things, feels that the Tolkien scholars look down on them. They are surely correct. Back in the old days when this site was active, there was a great division between Lore and the rest, and certainly the Lorists regarded themselves as superior beings.

After taking a few years out from the whole online Tolkien world, when I returned about 18 months ago with the intention of starting to put out my own scholarship, I turned to Dawn and the SWG rather than any of the Tolkien scholar journals or other outlets. To me it was a no brainer. The fan-fic writers have perspectives on Tolkien that are fresh and interesting to me, the scholars by and large miss the point.

The issue goes to the very bottom of the reading of Tolkien and why the scholarship on Tolkien has hitherto been so lousy. Tolkien's 'Fall of Numenor', and ultimately also 'The Lord of the Rings' are his 'Beowulf' fan-fic. A scholar who does not see has missed what is going on in these works; but scholars who turn up their noses at Tolkien fan-fic, are unlikely to recognize what Tolkien was up to.

@VelvetineZone

[VelvetineZone]

Very interesting reply.

Just finished feeding kids and come back to this.

I've probably quoted it before on the board but this is my favourite Tolkien quote about LOTR.

"I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me. Tom Bombadil I knew already; but I had never been to Bree. Strider sitting in the corner at the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was than had Frodo. The Mines of Moria had been a mere name; and of Lothloriene no word had reached my mortal ears till I came there. Far away I knew there were the Horselords on the confines of an ancient Kingdom of Men, but Fanghorn Forest was an unforeseen adventure. I had never heard of the House of Eorl nor of the Stewards of Gondor. Most disquieting of all, Saruman had never been revealed to me, and I was as mystefied as Frodo at Gandalf's failure to appear on September 22."

J.R.R. Tolkien, in a letter to W.H. Auden, June 7, 1955

It's just totally relatable. I have one story where there's a character who would appear to have been intended to feature all along. In fact he exists because his name was mentioned by chance in a conversation, and I loved the name and he kind of immediately appeared in my subconscious, so he got written in.

Its often a problematic area of analysing literature without the author's input I think, in that completely random things the author threw in get assumed to have deep significance, and deeply significant meaningful things may get assumed to be random.

I don't think you can't analyse literature. Although I hated this area of English at school, I kind of had a breakthrough recently when I read about Charlotte Bronte's sisters who got ill at a hideous boarding school and had an epiphany moment re this element in Jane Eyre, and was then like oh right, I guess this whole thing of analysing the author's life and the themes and content of their work can actually be pretty relevant...

But things about an author's intention can quite easily just be an analysing writer's own interpretations and obsessions.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I guess it depends on the individual author, the particular story, and the concrete element in question. You know I never studied English Literature and would never be able to say anything of note about stories other than Tolkien's. On some of Tolkien's stories I feel confident in talking, and this for a few reasons. One is simply that I have read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings so many times and since such a young age that I somehow know the voice, if that makes sense. This is basically the reason I hang out on this site - because some people here (by no means everyone, but the Dwarf is certainly one) know these books at least as well as do I (and The Silmarillion a lot better). This feels like something related to the fan-fic point above, because these people actually know the stories far better than do most Tolkien scholars (and usually have not had their reading distorted by weird literary theories).

Oddly (or not) I have come to appreciate this side of things better living in Israel and discovering a religion the practice of which is all about reading the same book year after year. Each week of the year = another chapter of the Bible (from Genesis to the death of Moses), read aloud in the beit knesset and supposedly discussed by the family at the Friday night meal. The second half of the year is very tedious, because most of it is all these laws, archaic and obscure. But the first half is basically a rollercoaster of a story, or rather series of wild stories (and some of them are really wild!). When I occasionally hear someone with a brain discussing the weekly chapter I am reminded of the riddle experts of the plaza (haha).

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me. Tom Bombadil I knew already; but I had never been to Bree. Strider sitting in the corner at the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was than had Frodo.

Right, on to a second point. What might scholarship bring to the table? I take Strider, as he nicely suits my present research, but one could (ultimately should) do the same for each and every story-element that Tolkien mentions in his letter.

And a very first point is always to be wary of an old man reminiscing, certainly this one about composition of The Lord of the Rings. The quote you gave is benign but usually the recollections are in one way or another undermined by the posthumously published evidence. (The most glaring instance of this being the denial in the Foreword to the second edition that World War II had any impact - on one level this is true, but on another utter nonsense.)

What we know from the early drafts is that Tolkien never encountered Strider in the Prancing Pony; he encountered Trotter, who was a Hobbit. This is merely a quibble. Certainly, he was not sure who Trotter was, though he knew he was a Ranger and wore shoes, and also a friend of Gandalf. That was in 1938. The next year Trotter became Peregrin Boffin, a second cousin of Frodo who had run off into the blue after listening to Bilbo's stories. But in the second half of this year the country declared war on Nazi Germany, and something strange enters into the storywriting, the hint of something else. When Tolkien began writing again, in summer 1940, Trotter was a man named Aragorn and the heir of Elendil. And until about 1950, Aragorn remained Trotter. Only at the very end of composition was the name Trotter changed to Strider.

Aragorn is from the very first the heir of Elendil. And from this we can infer much about the story that Tolkien now saw that he was writing.

Against the background of a second great war with Germany, the sequel to The Hobbit became also the sequel to 'The Fall of Númenor', the story of Elendil. The days of Elendil are the distant past of the new Hobbit story. Hence, from 1940 we can trace Tolkien working out the detailed history of Middle-earth from the days of Elendil all the way down to Aragorn (see the appendices - and more). This imagination of a great history is slowly written into the narrative over the next decade, and is key to the magic of the geography (most notably, that walked between Bag-end and Rivendell).

'The Fall of Númenor' was composed in early 1936 and the story of Elendil draws out the mythical framework that Tolkien discovered in Beowulf. The Anglo-Saxon story opens with the coming of the mythical king from out of the sea and suggests that with his passing the light of ancient myth has been extinguished. The gods have vanished, but the mythical monsters remain; and Beowulf is situated in a world in which the mortal hero fights the mythical monsters alone. But the opening of the poem intimates that once this was not so (or at least it does so when read in conjunction with the later Icelandic myth of Ragnarök), and 'The Fall of Númenor' is an imagination of how it was not so in the days of the king who came out of the sea. (You may recall Elrond recalling how he marched with Gil-galad and Elendil to Mordor in the days of the Last Alliance of Elves and Men.)

And so, the moment in 1940 that Trotter became Aragorn the new Hobbit story was situated at a very particular moment in a mythical notion of History as progressive disenchantment. Elendil marks the supposedly last moment of good (Elvish) mythical presence in the historical world, and his death was originally conceived by Tolkien as marking the final extinguishing of the light of the old gods in our world, as the Anglo-Saxon poet had suggested was the case with the death of Scyld Scefing.

Now it turns out that the light did not quite go out with the death of Elendil/Scyld Scefing. Because there were these three Rings, which allowed three islands of Elvish myth to endure in the world of history. And so there is an heir of Elendil, and his job is to tie up the ending properly. This is the last act, spelled out at length. The story of how the last of the light of the Valar vanished from our world, the final disenchantment.

After this, long after the destruction of the Ring and the death of King Aragorn, the other side of a very long age later, is the world of Beowulf.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Most disquieting of all, Saruman had never been revealed to me, and I was as mystefied as Frodo at Gandalf's failure to appear on September 22.

That is on the mark. For the first two years our author is scratching his head over what happened to Gandalf. Tolkien is turning The Hobbit inside out, and wants to have adventure immediately without the wizard (rather than wait till Mirkwood when Bilbo already has the magic ring in his pocket). But how can the wizard not have known about the Ringwraiths in the Shire?

At one point, Gandalf in Rivendell tells Frodo that he was a prisoner in Fangorn of the giant Treebeard. Another sees the wizard in Elostirion besieged by Ringwraiths. Pages and pages of early drafts tell of the wizard's late arrival at Crickhollow and ride to Rivendell with Fatty Bolger, who somewhere along the way is taken prisoner! All of this vanished in 1940 when Saruman the traitor wizard appeared in the tower of Orthanc.

[VelvetineZone]

Such an interesting discussion. Absolutely, as hope I made clear, wasn't trying to reply that you can't analyse stories if you don't write stories, only that... cat is meowing, forgot my point, just that... pause to let cat out... there may well always be elements in stories / writing that subsequent analysis draws conclusions about which are different to the author's actual process and intent.

But then I completely agree that the things you've mentioned are really important to understanding and analysing texts and authors and all, and do shed much light on process and intent:
1. Extensive familiarity with the text
2. Access to various drafts
3. Knowledge of the context and times the author was writing in, their life experiences, interests, etc.

As I say, over time, I've come to a much greater appreciation of this kind of archaeological excavation of writings. And actually this kind of careful historiography and scholarship can also dismantle assumptions: so, for example, there's that whole life imitates art vs art imitates life thing. In writing, sometimes things get written in which are clearly influenced by things you've experienced. Other times, you invent things, and later in your life, similar things come to pass. So a reader who knew your life stories but not necessarily the timing, might sometimes make incorrect assumptions about influences.

The war point is really interesting. And yes, I do think it can be the case that outside eyes can see themes and influences that the writer themselves hasn't acknowledged or hasn't spotted.

[VelvetineZone]

This is a good point too.
"The quote you gave is benign but usually the recollections are in one way or another undermined by the posthumously published evidence."

I have some very occasional snippets of old diaries and the odd old calendar with outings etc marked on them. It's been quite fascinating when I look at these to see that events I have vague memories of often happened slightly differently, or at different times, to the blurry memories I have. Memories most definitely are not reliable!

[VelvetineZone]

And p.s. I've learnt loads from things like your writings over the years about things like Scyld Scefing and so on and so forth. Bit groggy from usual lack of sufficient hours of sleep to express it clearly. I obviously think scholarship is hugely important and fascinating for illuminating texts. I wouldn't be still hovering on this forum otherwise.

It's also interesting how scholars' own knowledge and interest areas throws light on all sorts of different elements of texts, much as this is an obvious point. I'll stop rambling now. Morning light is arriving here.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Of course, I do not assert that the poet, if questioned, would have replied in the Anglo-Saxon equivalents of these terms. Had the matter been so explicit to him, his poem would certainly have been the worse. ('Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics')

The issue of authorial intensions is double sided. Tolkien was considering the same kind of issue in his own scholarship. As the quote above indicates, he believed that not only was it possible (sometimes) for a critic to grasp the intention of an author but even to express the thought of that author more lucidly than the author could have done. So his reading of Beowulf seeks to draw (render explicit) not only the intention of the Anglo-Saxon poet but even the poet's hidden thought - hidden even to the poet.

How and why Tolkien believed it was possible to perceive the hidden thought of another, even one who died more than one thousand years ago, is worth asking. The answer relates to his notion of the relationship between an idea and its expression, such that only by expression (e.g. speaking or writing) is the idea seen in the mind by the one who expresses it. And it relates also to his idea of what a story is, as something independent of the mind that imagines it. I will not go into all this here and now.

Rather, I want to point out what happens in the secondary literature. I don't go on and on about how bad the secondary literature is for the sake of it. Tolkien's allegory of the tower and the foolish critics has taught me how illuminating is the history of reception, especially faulty reception.

Tolkien's way of doing literary criticism has long been abandoned by literary theorists. When I have talked with those Tolkien scholars who have studied English Literature I have been told about 'the intentional fallacy' and how 'the author is dead'. This means that Tolkien scholars with literary training bring to his texts a method of reading and criticism quite different to his own. That in itself need be no problem. But a problem emerges because they cannot or will not take Tolkien's methodology seriously.

So Tom Shippey (with whom I clashed a year ago), the great authority on Tolkien and Beowulf, dismisses the scholarly credentials of 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' because - so far as he can see - the whole argument is based on mind-reading. Tolkien, says Shippey, claims to know what the dead poet was thinking. But nobody can know what another person is thinking, especially not one who died so long ago and whose proper name is not even known. Therefore, concludes Shippey, Tolkien's essay is founded on mysticism. As scholarship it is to be rejected, and all it can offer us is an indication of the nature of this mysticism - Shippey suggests that Tolkien believed himself the reincarnation of the old poet, or at the least that his own Anglo-Saxon blood descent gave him privileged access to the poet's intentions.

Shippey first argued this back in 1982. Four decades later it remains the orthodox consensus as to Tolkien and Beowulf.

So on the one hand, we have no appreciation by any of these scholars for what Tolkien's own scholarly methodology might have been. Nobody has ever asked what that method might have been - they just accept Shippey's claim that it is irrational mysticism. But where I am going with this is the other hand, where we find a palantír.

Obviously, Tolkien did not believe that he could directly read the mind of a dead poet. Certainly, he wished that he could. Naturally, he was aware that good as his efforts might be a gap inevitably remained. And he wished that he could overcome that gap. But we are talking about Tolkien, who understood Faerie as the realm where desire might be immediately realized, and so he pictured as a fairy-element in a fairy-story just the thing that he longed to have in his hands as a scholar.

In this passage from The Two Towers in which Gandalf is speaking to Pippin of the Orthanc Stone, substitute Tolkien for Gandalf and the Beowulf poet for Fëanor, and you see immediately what a palantír is.

And how it draws one to itself! Have I not felt it? Even now my heart desires to test my will upon it, to see if I could not wrench it from him and turn it where I would – to look across the wide seas of water and of time to Tirion the Fair, and perceive the unimaginable hand and mind of Fëanor at their work, while both the White Tree and the Golden were in flower!’ He sighed and fell silent.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

... as someone who writes stories, oh lord how to explain this, you know that story writing is a long convoluted process of bits you've planned, and bits which emerge unexpectedly, and bits you had to work hard to make work, and bits which astonishingly came together so well it looked like you planned it all along but it was sheer chance, and bits you hacked off in editing, and bits you added, and bits which changed massively several years later, and on and on forever tweaking.

Basically, this is as good an overview as I could hope to give of what one finds in the 4 volumes of early drafts of The Lord of the Rings. The only thing left is to illustrate each part of your passage with examples.

[VelvetineZone]

Aargh just lost my reply. In a hurry to get up, v interested by Shippey, Faerie, dead poets and all. Will re read later.

My reply also said that even the author excavates their own writing and only becomes aware of some of the themes and meanings in later re readings, having scribbled some of it deep in creative flow, some themes are intentional, some are entirely unanticipated and reflective of inner preoccupations, and fascinating even for the writer to discover.

Examples... by Tolkien? By me? By writers generally?

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Aargh just lost my reply. In a hurry to get up, v interested by Shippey, Faerie, dead poets and all. Will re read later.

My reply also said that even the author excavates their own writing and only becomes aware of some of the themes and meanings in later re readings, having scribbled some of it deep in creative flow, some themes are intentional, some are entirely unanticipated and reflective of inner preoccupations, and fascinating even for the writer to discover.

Examples... by Tolkien? By me? By writers generally?

Examples - I was thinking of the masses of details in those 4 volumes of the 'History of Middle-earth' series (of which there are 12, edited by Christopher Tolkien who works through a great part of the archive of his father's writings, so that we read the Silmarillion stories as they once were in 1918 all the way down to the obsessive theological speculations of J.R.R. Tolkien's final decades, on the other side of The Lord of the Rings).

I got into the habit of (usually) pressing Cnrl + A + C so I have a copy of my reply just before pressing SEND.

What you write about the process of story-writing gives a sense of just what is found in the HoMe volumes with the early drafts of LotR. But I believe that in this case, at least, it is correct and to the point to speak also of a design. What reading these early drafts reveals (imo) is that whatever might have been the design of the story prior to 1940, a new design appeared in 1940 - the design of the story that we know. Henceforth, much of what we read is a working out of that design as the general process that you describe continues to unfold.

It seems to me - but would love to hear what you as recent reader have to say - that this historical fact of a change in the nature of composition in 1940, two years into the writing, translates into the story to Rivendell being of a much richer quality with hidden elements sparkling everywhere, while from Rivendell it becomes epic, movie-trilogy material - Mines of Moria and Lothlórien where Galadriel dwells, and onto Mount Doom via a mead hall, a walking Forest, and lots of towers. The story prior to Rivendell has been worked up into that same epic while (and this I think is part of the genius of this particular work) whatever the author had in mind for his story in 1938 remains, never removed, but equally never explained.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Also, Tolkien has a modus operandi, which is found just on the spot where scholar and story-teller are the same. Professionally, he is employed to think - and lecture, even write - on old stories, written down centuries ago. One of his primary ways of thinking about a story is to turn it inside-out and upside-down into other versions, to see where and how it retains the same qualities, and he has ways of doings this. One sees them put to work in the whole of the first stages of composition of a sequel to The Hobbit. On inspection and reflection, some seemingly new element of the new story is seen a careful turning inside-out or redrawing in a mirror of something in the earlier story.

Moria is where the mirror breaks, and beyond he has stepped free into a new world of story. The Mines is where he makes the transformation. The world stepped before that is bound up in a return to the story of The Hobbit (composed 1930-1933; published 1937). By bound up, I don't think I mean anything more than just another version of what you are talking about in terms of an endless process of writing; except that Tolkien has a method of memory, so to speak, whereby even his own older stories he inspects by turning inside-out and redrawing in a mirror. It is just his way of understanding what a story is - telling it again, but as differently as he can make it, or with some new twist that turns it upside-down.