J.R.R. Tolkien confusion?

Question

Can someone please help me get a wider picture of Tolkien's work? Something like a "tree of Tolkien" :) I have seen the Lord of the Rings, but I'm getting really confused with the movie "The Hobbit" and "The hunt for Gollum", and "The Silmarillion".. What goes first, how to watch them?? :)

Answer 1

OK....you need short answers. Brad has the book thing down. And if you're a newbie...I would only read LOTR (don't skip the appendices at the end of ROTK...LOTTA back story there)... and the Hobbit to start...if you get hooked like the rest of us did, you can then delve into the much more difficult Silmarillion/Lost Tales/Children of Hurin.....

The History of Middle-earth encyclopaedic set is a compilation only- by son Christopher of JRR's unfinished works and every cocktail napkin he wrote an idea on. If you're fascinated by how a story develops, then this is the end-all be-all. You'll learn how Strider started off as a Hobbit who wore boots named Stomper. I do recommend getting the volume entitled "The Lost Road" and reading the title story. This is a brilliantly written piece....Tolkien's answer to a pub bet between he and CS Lewis to see who could come up with the best time-travel tale. Tolkien's tied then modern day England in with ancient Numenor (I feel gut punched when it abruptly ends, and there is no more). Lewis's effort would eventually become the Narnia series.

Films....The Hunt for Gollum was an indie short film from 2009, derived from the appendices in the book(s). It's a pseudo-prequel...The LOTR Trilogy...and the upcoming Hobbit Trilogy.

If you want a chronologic list for the books....The Hobbit was published first, then LOTR. Everything else was put together and published by Christopher Tolkien posthumously after his father's death.

Story-wise, and you'll get several differing opinions on this.... you would start with the Silmarillion/Book of Lost Tales/Children of Hurin/The Hobbit/LOTR.....Everything else is reference matierial, not a story-line.

Answer 2

I think the "Hunt for Gollum" will be the next film in the Hobbit trilogy, due out next year sometime. I hope to see the first film tonight...but I'm apprehensive. How Jackson will milk three feature film out of that short book - without being really gratuitous- is beyond me. We'll see.



OK, the "Silmarillion" is, in the context of Middle Earth's fictional chronology, the first of the books, although it was the last to be published (after Tolkien's death, actually). I've heard the Silmarillion described by some as the "Elvish Bible," and that's not a bad description, I suppose. In this book, you'll find the mythology of Tolkien's fictional world- from its Creation through the events of the so-called "Third Age" - which is the period in which the LOTR account takes place. The scope of the Silmarillion spans thousands of years, describes the beginning of Elves and Men and other races, narrates various legendary deeds and conflicts... it is the cultural underpinning of Tolkien's Middle Earth. Tolkien's world seems so comprehensive and credible to the reader because Tolkien fleshed it out to such an astonishing degree- geographically, liguistically, culturally. Since he was, by training, an academic language scholar, he was able to actually invent several fictional languages for his characters, and these languages have genuine, consistent syntax, grammar, written forms, and vocabularies running up into hundreds of words. You could learn to speak and write several forms of Tolkien's Elvish, if you wanted. Some dedicated fans do.



I'm getting off track. Anyway, in the chronology of Tolkien's fictional world, the Silmarillion is the first book. It was not published during his lifetime, but compiled from his extensive notes and put into the published form by his son, Christopher. Making matters more complicated, there are also several additional, posthumous collections that draw upon the Silmarillion material: "Unfinished Tales", "History of Middle Earth", and others. We'll leave all that be.



Next in order is "The Hobbit." This is the first published work dealing with events in Middle Earth, and really, it is written for children. Of course it has become a classic-deservedly so. It stands on its own perfectly well; you needn't read the Silmarillion or anything else to follow and enjoy it.



Next in order are the three books of the Lord of the Rings: "The Fellowship of the Ring,' "The Two Towers," "The Return of the King." Tolkien really didn't think of these as a "trilogy",... it was just expedient for the publisher to release this gigantic work in three different volumes. It's impractical to produce one book that lengthy. The three volumes depend upon each other though- it has onecontinuous theme and plot... or set of interwoven plots. The narrative of the LOTR picks up a few decades after the events recounted in the Hobbit.



Anyway, you asked about the films, didn't you? Discounting some previous failures and two 1970s Rankin and Bass cartoons, there are only the three Peter Jackson LOTR films, in the same order as the published volumes above. Now there is the first Hobbit film, and evidently we can expect two more sequels. There is no Silmarillion film, and I doubt there are serious plans for one. That material would be really difficult to render as a feature film.

Answer 3

People wonder whether to read Tolkien in Middle-earth time or in the order published. People who know the works recommend reading in order of publication, as this reflects Tolkien's finished and partly-finished ideas in order.



The order is The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, [The Adventures of Tom Bombadil if you wish to read the poems], The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales (you can swap those two over if you want to read the longer Numenor tales before the whole history of The Silmarillion) and then the Histories.



There is no disgrace in giving up any time you've had enough. Tolkien only finished The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (and the Tom Bombadil poems) for publication. The stories of The Simarillion were largely written, but not completed as a single work. Christopher Tolkien edited the manuscripts for publication, in accordance with his father's wishes, after Tolkien's death.



The Histories, which comprise earlier drafts, working notes, items such as language essays and draft maps, and some complete excerpts or tales written in detail, are published in order of the original writing. The began around 1917 with the 'Books of Lost Tales', working through the genesis of The Silmarillion and LotR, to Tolkien's ideas in the 1970s at the end of his life. The Histories will be of great interest if you don't mind variant versions and pages of notes.



To integrate the Histories in the order of Middle-earth time, roughly, read HoME 1-5 (omitting HoME 3 if you are not keen on epic blank verse), then 10-12, then 6-8 and the first half of 9, then The Lord of the Rings and then the second half of HoME 9. This will take a long time and a good memory. You should insert The Silmarillion after books 1-5, Unfinished Tales before books 6-8 and The Hobbit somewhere in the middle of Unfinished Tales. Complicated! This is why people recommend reading Tolkien's books in order of publication.



There have been some queries about which "versions" of the stories are "most authoriative". This is odd, as there are no textual variants (other than the occasional typo) of any of the stories other than The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Further, the textual variants of these two books, marked by the Second Editions, were made in 1951 and 1966 respectively and are long out of print. So, unless you are an antiquarian book collector, there is no purchasing decision to be made. The updates to The Lord of the Rings were very minor. The alterations to The Hobbit were more substatial, mainly adaprting Bilbo's relationship with Gollum to dovetail better with the plot of LotR. These are listed in The Annotated Hobbit by Douglas A. Anderson (updated and reprinted in the USA in 2002 and UK in 2003). (And Bilbo apologises for them at the Council of Elrond.)



The text of LotR has periodically been re-set for size reformatting and typo correction (usually managing to introduce some new typos at the typesetting stage, as is traditional). The text carefully corrected by Douglas A. Anderson, which is in most recent editions, is currently held to be authorative. Please note that this text does not alter the story in any way - it just fixes minor type errors.



Sadly, despite some good new cover variations, nearly all the standard format paperbacks seem to be inferior in paper quality, print clarity and in some cases spine stability to the equivalent larger format ("trade paperback") issues, and nearly all the newer printings are inferior to older ones, except in spine stability, which has improved somewhat over the years. Same for the hardbacks (although spine strength has never been a problem as far as I know). It has now been many years since the clearly printed fold-out map of Middle-earth has been issued with the standard hardback editions, although the illustrated editions may have a clear version on the endpaper.

Answer 4

The Silmarillion goes first and then Lost Tales and then Lord of the Rings then The hobbit Also an interesting fact about J.R.R. Tolkien is that He was born in south Africa and He got the idea for the character gandalf from a postcard he got during a trip to switzerland

Answer 5

"Creating a fantasy world in a minute" is exactly what Tolkien didn't do. He started by inventing the languages (he was a philologist), and built upward from there. The universe he created was accreted and revised over many years. That feeling you get that it's old, solid, and multi-layered? It was earned. Tolkien also went out and had real-life experiences, like fighting in the trenches during WWI. That helps a lot. I'm an editor. I see a lot of epic fantasy manuscripts. After I've weeded out the books whose authors simply can't write very well -- that's about 80% of them -- the ones that are left tend to have some assortment of the following problems: 1. They're too bleeping long. People don't read Tolkien's books because they're long; they read them because they're Tolkien. The same goes for J. K. Rowling, Robert Jordan, George Martin, Brandon Sanderson, and all the rest. 2. The story takes forever to get going. 3. The universe, the quest, the magic, the people, and all the rest of the worldbuilding feels arbitrary. This is the single biggest difference between good and bad fantasy. In Tolkien, everything's there for a reason, and the reasons are all connected. You couldn't toss in an extra race of elves without rewriting thousands of years of history, starting with when and why they were created, and continuing on from there. Way too many epic fantasies feature an Arbitrary Magic Dingus which has to be found, or hidden, or assembled, or remagicked, or ... excuse me, I momentarily nodded off there. Where was I? Oh, right: the questing party has to trudge all over The Land to collect Plot Coupons they can trade for a denouement. This gets unbelievably dull. 4. Way too much pointless made-up exotic-sounding language. A slow, steady sprinkling of new words can be understood from context. Throw in too many of them and the context breaks. I swear, some of these manuscripts have so many unfamiliar words in the first chapter that it's like trying to read wallpaper. 5. They misuse archaic language. You'd be surprised at how many genre editors have medieval studies lurking in their educational background. 6. Mary Sue must die. 7. Their universes make no sense. If your heroine always has her nose in a book, she doesn't live in a Late Iron Age village. Vast, secret temple compounds staffed with hundreds of acolytes aren't found in arid desert wastes. Picking up a sword for the first time is not like picking up a gun. If the land has all-powerful kings, who the prince marries is not a private and personal decision. Riding a horse through a trackless forest at night is Right Out. And so forth. 8. Enough with the endless journeying, already. Know why bad epic fantasy always has a map? It's to reassure despairing readers that the story will eventually get somewhere. 9. We're vaguely promised that the plot will do something interesting six books from now. If the first book doesn't pay off, readers won't buy the second, and we won't buy the third. Good epic fantasy is hard to write.

Answer 6

The hobbit went first then The Lord of the rings then supposedly after all that the children of hurin

Answer 7

well, the order depends. i read lotr, the hobbit, the silmarrillion and unfinished tales unfinished tales, but if in order of which was written first, i think it's silm, tales, hobbit and then lotr. i would probably recommend reading hobbit, lotr, silm and then tales. in terms of movies, the hobbit is made as a prequel to lotr, and the hunt for gollum is fan made and not in any of tolkien's works, but it was made after lotr so in movies, i would see lotr, gollum then hobbit