In 1916, while recovering from Trench Fever, which he contracted during service in the British army in northern France, J.R.R. Tolkien began writing a collection of stories that he called The Book of Lost Tales. These stories were intended to be a mythology for England, a pseudo-Anglo-Saxon legend about how England came to be English. The stories were told in the form of dialogues, where imaginary characters related events for the reader. The style was very much intended to be like the dialogues of the ancient Greek philosophers, especially Plato, whose Atlantis legend has inspired many commentaries and stories.
Although he worked on the stories for nearly 10 years, Tolkien eventually abandoned his mythology for England. He seemed to lose interest in the project as he grew older, and it may be that his growing devotion to the Roman Catholic faith distracted him from his desire to create a "truly English cycle" of legends and myths. But though he no longer intended to create a mythology for England, Tolkien became fascinated with three themes or stories in the cycle.
The first theme was the struggle of the Noldoli to recover three stolen jewels, the Silmarils. This theme formed the basis for Tolkien's next mythology, The Silmarillion. The other two themes were the tales of "Beren and Luthien" and "the Children of Hurin".
Tolkien brought many characters and themes into the Silmarillion mythology besides the three major themes. He transformed his heroes into tall, noble Elf-warriors and queens, brave men of non-descript origin, and his landscape -- formerly that of England -- became an imaginary northern region similar to Europe.
From 1925 to 1937, Tolkien wrote and rewrote narratives and accompanying texts to create a believable cycle of stories for his Silmarillion mythology. Unlike the mythology for England, which attempted to confer a sense of depth by having characters relate the stories as traditional tales, for his Silmarillion mythology Tolkien adopted a motif of telling the main story through a summary narrative that was supposedly based upon older, much more detailed texts.
Tolkien wanted to position his "Silmarillion" narrative between the reader and the full stories, to make the narrative seem more realistic and engaging. Although he provided many details, his mode implied in numerous ways that yet more details were buried in unrevealed texts. This concept of layering narrative texts remained a feature of Tolkien's most effective mythological conceptions throughout the rest of his life.
Although Tolkien worked almost continuously on his Silmarillion mythology from about 1929 to 1937, he turned his attention to other projects, too. In one remarkable bargan he made with his friend C.S. Lewis, Tolkien agreed to compose a time-travel story. This story formed the seed of the Numenor legend, which became Tolkien's retelling of Plato's Atlantis story. Numenor was conceived of as a separate and distinct tale, given its own mythology. Tolkien wrote several narratives during the 1930s, refining and expanding the mythical world of Numenor/Atlantis each time.
Among his other pursuits and passtimes, Tolkien occasionally devised enteraining stories for his children. One of these stories was about a very unusual adventurer, Mr. Baggins, a little man who turned out to be a "hobbit". Tolkien had originally composed a single sentence, "In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit" on the back of a blank test page in 1925. He put the sentence aside for several years until it manifested itself in his imagination as the introduction to the story about Mr. Baggins.
Mr. Baggins the Hobbit lived in a fairy-tale land with forests, mountains, and villages, Dwarves, Elves, and dragons. While expanding the story, Tolkien decided to "borrow" elements from his Silmarillion mythology to make Mr. Baggins' world seem a little more interesting. He gave it a sense of depth by referring to other, very real stories that otherwise had nothing to do with Mr. Baggins and his imaginary world.
In 1937, after The Hobbit had been successfully published and wel received, Tolkien's publisher asked him to write a sequel. But Tolkien by this time was nurturing a glimmering hope that he might instead see his Silmarillion mythology brought to pubication. Tolkien reluctantly set about creating a new story about Hobbits while lobbying for The Silmarillion.
After it became obvious that The Silmarillion would not be published, inspiraton led Tolkien to incorporate more of that mythology into Mr. Baggins' imaginary world. And as the story unfolded, Tolkien found himself with a new character, Trotter (renamed Strider), who needed a history. The Numenor mythology presented itself as a logical backstory for Strider. By combining these three mythical worlds, Tolkien created what became Middle-earth.
Although Middle-earth is supposed to be our own world (by Tolkien's admission in numerous letters and interviews), and the stories he set in it are supposed to have occurred thousands of years ago in "an imaginary past time", it has a unique landscape unlike any real geography. And the races of fantastic creatures and monsters that populate Middle-earth never truly lived in our world. But Tolkien's narrative gift was so powerful that he told his story, The Lord of the Rings in a very compelling, realistic manner that created believability.
Although Tolkien wrote additional texts for his Middle-earth mythology (including The Road Goes Ever On and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil), he became increasingly frustrated by the chronological inconsistencies between his mythology and "real" natural history. In the late 1960s, Tolkien set about re-inventing the world of Middle-earth so that it would be more scientifically compatible with natural history. Much to the relief of his many fans, Tolkien never proceeded very far down that path.
Had he completed the proposed transformation of the Middle-earth mythology, Tolkien would ultimately have done away with themes that he had used and reused throughout most of his life. Instead, he left behind a disorderly collection of notes, stories, and story fragments that his son Christopher struggled to combine into a publishable format so that readers of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings could at least see some of the details and stories that lay behind intriguing references scattered through the first two books.
In publishing The Silmarillion and subsequent texts such as Unfinished tales of Numenor and Middle-earth and the twelve-volume History of Middle-earth, Christopher Tolkien has created a third, hybrid Middle-earth mythology that is part the work of his father, J.R.R. Tolkien, and part Christopher's work. Even during J.R.R. Tolkien's life time, however, some inconsistencies were introduced when Tolkien was forced in 1965 by the unauthorized publication of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in paperback form by Ace Books to revise those two works sufficiently to assert a proper copyright in America.
The 1965 revisions to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings reflect some of the transformational ideas that were to be part of the scientifically valid Middle-earth mythology, and they introduce inconsistencies with some of the other texts Tolkien wrote in the previous years -- texts which Christopher later published.
Tolkien was a prolific writer, however, and he reused many of his early ideas in stories that are clearly not drawn into the Middle-earth mythology. For example, in the story Roverandom -- which Tolkien wrote in 1925 -- Roverandom and his friends visit the Bay of Elvenhome in Fairie. In Smith of Wootton Major, Smith is granted special passage to the land of Fairie -- which looks remarkably like the Valinor of the Silmarillion and Middle-earth mythologies. And in one letter Tolkien suggests that the medieval English world of Farmer Giles of Ham may be a successor to the ancient world of Middle-earth, even though there are no direct connections.
For more information about Middle-earth, check out The World of Middle-earth or Michael Martinez's essays at MERP.com. Martinez has also published several books about Middle-earth. You can also find good Web sites to visit at the Tolkien Studies Web site.
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