Editors’ Introduction

This is a supplement to the 19th issue of Tolkien Studies, the first refereed journal solely devoted to the scholarly study of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. As editors, our goal is to publish excellent scholarship on Tolkien as well as to gather useful research information, reviews, notes, documents, and bibliographical material.

This special issue, published between our regular annual volumes, is entirely devoted to a single scholarly work: William Cloud Hicklin’s textual edition and commentary of “The Chronology of The Lord of the Rings.” The sheer size, as well as the importance, of this work suggested this special treatment of it. Our grateful thanks go to Mr. Hicklin for giving us the opportunity to add to the mosaic of Middle-earth this essential and heretofore missing piece. It is a look behind the scenes at the painstaking planning that went into one of the most salient features of Tolkien’s great work: that back-and-forth switching among interconnecting narratives which Richard C. West called its “interlace” structure. The word describes a medieval narrative device meant to mirror “the flux of events . . . where everything is happening at once” (West 79). Such attention to detail gives reality to a world, especially a fantastical sub-created one that has to command belief instead of relying on it.

Here each of the three editors of Tolkien Studies offers some thoughts on the significance and scholarly value of the Chronology.

David Bratman

Richard C. West, in his pioneering study of Tolkien’s literary technique, “The Interlace Structure of The Lord of the Rings,” describes a story with an interlace structure as one that is “digressive and cluttered, dividing our attention among an indefinite number of events, characters, and themes, any one of which may dominate at any given time” (79). In applying this definition to Tolkien’s narrative, West notes what Verlyn Flieger elaborates on below: that the story “creates an infinite series of echoes and anticipations by which the work gains coherence” (84).

But that is not the only literary effect of interlace structure. West also describes how what may seem like “entertaining digressions” nevertheless allow “the people and events of the imaginary world [to] take on depth and solidity because of their detail and mutual interaction” (80). And he quotes George H. Thomson as writing that this produces “a detailed yet panoramic view of a whole world in movement and turmoil” (qtd. at 78).

All of this description focuses attention on narrative, on plot and story. Tolkien’s friend C. S. Lewis, referring to himself and Tolkien and their other literary-minded friends, writes that “the problems of narrative as such—seldom heard of in modern critical writings—were constantly before our minds” (v). What this principle meant to Tolkien may be seen in his essay in the collection which Lewis is introducing, “On Fairy-stories.” Here Tolkien famously writes of “the story-maker [who] proves a successful ‘sub-creator’. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter . . . . You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside” (OFS 52). But he adds that “to make a Secondary World . . . commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft” (61).

That “elvish craft” of creating the illusion of reality was something Tolkien excelled at. Ensuring that the Secondary World remained credible was his concern, to prevent the occurrence of “the moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed” (OFS 52). To the ends of consistency of plot and believability of action, he was prepared to do any amount of supporting background work behind the scenes of his story. In the process he discovered what has become well-known among science fiction writers, or any novelists who employ complex invented settings for their stories: that what they invent may exceed by several times the extent of the story itself. The excess may never appear in the story, but its existence is essential for making the story live and function. It is the extensive work that Tolkien put into what does not appear...