The Adapted Text: The Lost Poetry of Beleriand

The Silmarillion is perhaps the linguistically most refined work of J.R.R. Tolkien. Polished for a lifetime, it is not surprising that it is written in a most remarkable and memorable of styles. In fact it has more than one style (as it is more than one text). Several distinct styles can be found in the variants of the Silmarillion tradition (now available in the volumes of The History of Middle-earth), which David Bratman distinguishes as the Annalistic, Antique, and the Appendical (71-75). But in the published Silmarillion, one has the feeling the categorization which Bratman suggests for the contents of the History volumes does not fit perfectly: styles change within units of the text, and the three categories seem somewhat loose and vague anyway. The movements of style and the resulting disunity in the 1977 text produce a fitting effect: Tolkien succeeds in implying, merely by the stylistic differences, that the Silmarillion is indeed a compendious volume, "made long afterwards from sources of great diversity" (S 8). Taking into account that it is in fact an editorial text, selected and made consistent from the numerous versions, according to (with some remarkable exceptions, I believe to its advantage) ¹ the latest intentions, by Christopher Tolkien, its style definitely signals how truly compendious it is—it suggests a history for the text, an evolution, in which the cryptic and compressed narrative of the 1926 "Sketch of the Mythology" or the Quenta Noldorinwa (written in the 1930s) became expanded to the majestic story (and language) in the Silmarillion.

Part of the fiction (and the point) of the Silmarillion is, however, that inside the textual world it is not a unified text either, but a compendium, a collection of texts. As such, it surely has a history there too; the different versions of the presentation frame (from the Lost Tales to the "latest intentions") hint that Tolkien imagined it to be a sort of comprehensive manuscript of a (narrative or historical) tradition.² There are a number of conclusions to be drawn from viewing the Silmarillion text so (of which I hope to make a more extensive study in the future); in this paper I will examine one of the aspects which bears closely on both the stylistic refinement and its implications, and on the history of the texts. It is clear that we are meant to view the Silmarillion thus, and in the manuscript analogue its being an editorial text diminishes in problematic value.

The text of the 1977 Silmarillion as we now have it includes and preserves many traditions—that is what its compendious nature means. But the curious duplication of the text (the supposition that it is, just as it stands, a text inside the textual world too) makes this actually a double claim. The text has a history in "primary philology" (= Tolkien philology, as texts by J. R. R. Tolkien), and another one within, for "secondary philology" (as I elsewhere called this level).³ The two provenances may partly be parallel; but the differences in style in the 1977 Silmarillion text do more than suggest history and leave it at that. They also suggest different things for primary and secondary philology; and the difference is significant and critically meaningful.

Doubtless many readers have noticed that amidst the surges of style in the Silmarillion (from the elevated "mythological prose" of the Ainulindalë to the drier "descriptive prose" of, say, "On Beleriand and Its Realms") there are passages, short strings of sentences, individual sentences, or even single clauses which read as if they were poetry adapted to prose. In primary philology, this feeling is sometimes justified when we look up the variants and sources in the history of the text—but only in the stories which Tolkien wrote in verse, and the "adapted passages" are found much more widely than that. In secondary philology, however (up to a certain level parallel to this, since the verse works are also "duplicated...