Untold Tales: Solving a Literary Dilemma

"Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude."

—Ernest Hemingway, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (39)

In January 1945, near the end of World War II and about midway through the long gestation period of The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher describing a literary quandary in relation to two different emotions:

one that moves me supremely and I find small difficulty in evoking: the heart-racking sense of the vanished past (best expressed by Gandalf's words about the Palantir); and the other the more 'ordinary' emotion, triumph, pathos, tragedy of the characters. That I am learning to do, as I get to know my people, but it is not really so near my heart, and is forced on me by the fundamental literary dilemma. A story must be told or there'll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving. I think you are moved by Celebrimbor because it conveys a sudden sense of endless untold stories: mountains seen far away, never to be climbed, distant trees (like Niggle's) never to be approached—or if so only to become 'near trees' (unless in Paradise or N's Parish).

(Letters 110)

The paradox of the untold story, and Tolkien's efforts to resolve it, play a pivotal role not just in The Lord of the Rings, but throughout his entire legendarium. Vladimir Brljak has recently championed the importance of this letter, asserting that "how to tell the untold ... was Tolkien's fundamental literary dilemma," and arguing that Tolkien's solution is found in the "metafictional 'machinery'" of his stories—the mediating conceit that the tales are derived from layered translations and redactions of wholly vanished source texts—which allows for their "telling and untelling...in the same breath" (19). In spite of the importance of this framework, the heart of Tolkien's solution is found in the stories themselves, in the narrative device which grants what Tolkien called "unexplained vistas."

With a nod to the letter, I would call this device the "untold tale," and count among its ranks the gaps, enigmas, allusions, ellipses, and loose ends that pepper Tolkien's narratives. In his analysis of the centrality of this correspondence, Brljak overlooks the two examples given to help illustrate the "heart-racking sense" of untold stories—"Gandalf's words about the Palantir" and the name "Celebrimbor." These references offer a clue to Tolkien's solution; indeed they are themselves instances of it. In spite of his attention to minutiae, Tolkien understood when to check his pen and create space for untold tales. In this paper, I hope to clarify how he exploits his paradox of the untold story by developing a system of narrative withholding into a core element of his prose.

The study of Tolkien's creation of narrative depth is not, of course, new; other scholars have contributed substantially to our understanding of both its roots and function. In his two book-length studies of Tolkien's work, Tom Shippey explores the author's creation of Middle-earth from a philological perspective, as the reconstruction of an "asterisk-reality" largely derived from the legends of Northern Europe.¹ According to Shippey, Tolkien "took fragments of ancient literature, expanded on their intensely suggestive hints of further meaning, and made them into coherent and consistent narrative (all the things which the old poems had failed, or never bothered, to do)" (Author 35). But, as the letter to his son suggests, of equal weight was a different kind of impulse, one which above all sought to preserve the sense of untold stories, for Tolkien understood that reconstructing coherent and consistent narratives out of such fragments risked destroying the very appeal of these nebulous legends in the first place.

Though he treats the romance of untold stories primarily as the inspirational spark to reconstruct lost narratives, Shippey acknowledges the opposing force at work, at times touching on it to great effect: as in his discussion of "peripheral...