The Evolution of Tolkien's Mythology: A Study of the History of Middle-earth (review)

There has been no dearth of critical studies of J.R.R. Tolkien's works during the last few years, and yet relatively little attention has been focused on the twelve volumes of The History of Middle-earth. Elizabeth Whittingham, author of this current study, cites important exceptions to this lacuna in Tolkien scholarship: A Question of Time and Interrupted Music by Verlyn Flieger; The Road to Middle-earth and J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century by Tom Shippey; Tolkien's Legendarium, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Carl Hostetter; and J.R.R. Tolkien and his Literary Resonances, edited by George Clark and Daniel Timmons. Whittingham acknowledges her debt to Flieger in the preface and introduction to her book, noting that Flieger's Interrupted Music comes closest to achieving what she sets out to do, that is to undertake "a comparison of the texts for the purpose of discovering patterns or movement in any direction" (2). Whittingham's approach is to trace Tolkien's many revisions to his legendarium over time, and through meticulous comparison and analysis of the variations, determine whether his handling of elements of myth such as cosmogony, theogony, cosmology, thanatology and eschatology evolved in a significant way.

The Evolution of Tolkien's Mythology is aimed both at an audience of specialists who are already familiar with The History of Middle-earth and for whom this book can serve as a very useful teaching and reference tool—the author provides a synthesis of themes as treated in each work, accompanied by insightful exegetical commentary—and at an audience of readers whose knowledge of Tolkien's mythology is limited to their familiarity with The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and perhaps The Silmarillion. Having taught a large lecture course on the subject of "Myth and Legend in the work of J.R.R. Tolkien" to undergraduate students whose prior contact with Tolkien's mythology ranged from the superficial (those students who had only seen Peter Jackson's films) to the arcane (those students who knew by heart the complete genealogies presented in the Appendices of The Silmarillion), I wish I could have had Whittingham's study as a ready reference to satisfy the needs of both groups.

In order to facilitate her discussion of a complex body of work spanning nearly sixty years and to track more efficiently changes which Tolkien made to both the physical and the metaphysical aspects of his vast sub-creation, Whittingham breaks down Tolkien's writing into six chronological stages: 1914-1920; 1920-1935; 1937-1938; 1938-1948; 1948-1959; and 1960-1973. With the exception of Chapter 1, "Influences in Tolkien's Life," the chapters are grouped according to types of myth. Chapter 2, "Tolkien's Mythology of Creation," offers an analysis of "The Music of the Ainur" (1918-1920), and both the early (late 1930s) and the later (late 1940s) version of the "Ainulindalë." In this chapter, the author stresses the disappearance of a narrative framework in Tolkien's creation myth, which has the overall effect of presenting the reader with a text that may be less accessible, because of the absence of a mediating character, but which is more "primal" and "stark" in that it "describes the solitary presence of Eru, the One" (56-57). This evolution in Tolkien's cosmogony brings it closer to Book of Genesis than to the works containing creation myths from which he also drew inspiration, such as Hesiod's Theogony, Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Poetic Edda and the Kalevala. In Chapter 3, "Tolkien's Mythology of Divine Beings," Whittingham traces the various incarnations of the Ainur, the Maia and the Valar from "The Coming of the Valar and the Building of Valinor" (1918-1920) to the "Valaquenta" (late 1950s), noting that ". . . Tolkien's initial description of these divine...