Book Review: Unfinished Tales

Title: Unfinished Tales

Author: J.R.R. Tolkien with Christopher Tolkien

Date: 1980

Publisher: Allen & Unwin (U.K.), Ballantyne (U.S.)

ISBN: 0-345-35711-6

Length: 493 pages

Quote: “I now wish that no appendices had been promised...It is, I suppose, a tribute to the curious effect that a story has, when based on very elaborate and detailed workings, of geography, chronology, and langauge, that so many should clamour for sheer ‘information,’ or ‘lore.’”

In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Tolkien had worked out an unusually complete and complex fictional world, with its own history, literature, and languages. He had written some of these down, some in the form of short stories, some in syllabic verse like Beowulf. For some readers, he understood, the trilogy with its companion novel The Hobbit was quite enough. As his son warns in a foreword that includes the quote from one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s letters, above, many Rings fans “do not wish to know how the Riders of the Mark of Rohan were organized, and would leave the Wild Men of the Druadan Forest firmly where they found them.” But others did, and though he hadn’t polished these supplementary tidbits of the history of Middle-Earth for publication, Tolkien did intend to make them available, a job he left for Christopher Tolkien to finish.

That’s what you’ll like or not like about Unfinished Tales. The stories are “finished” enough to be readable, but not polished into the excellence Tolkien’s published fiction achieves. Sometimes blank lines and changes of font, such as Blogger likes to insert into anything uploaded as a Word document, are used to show where the last page of Tolkien’s draft ended and Christopher Tolkien could fill in where the story was meant to end from his father’s notes. Other stories seem to be complete but unpolished.

They’re not great stories. They are long historical and biographical footnotes on the Rings trilogy and The Silmarillion.

We learn that the Wild Men of the Druadan Forest are “a wholly different kind” of humans than either Dwarves or Hobbits, though, like them, smaller than he humanoid race most like ourselves. Though depicted with love and respect they seem based on a generic Edwardian British impression of “primitive people” (or “natives” in the colonies). Their language seems Celtic. Their culture seems a conscious rejection of the “civilizations” of Hobbits and Riders, recalling Native American cultural purists, or European Gypsies. The other humans of Middle-Earth are nicer to them than Tolkien’s generation of Englishmen were even to Irishmen, much less “natives” in the colonies. I read them as expressing an attitude of Tolkien’s that is not racism, although the young will probably assume from the inclusion of mere words that it is racism, but is simply Ignorance. 

For Tolkien all “primitive people” were evidently a source of numinous wonderment. He knew nothing about any culture more “primitive” than what mere poverty imposed on his Irish coevals. He respected “natives” enough not to go out to the colonies and annoy them with sentimental drivel about living among them. His Druedain, like the “Indians” in Peter Pan, have nothing to say about colonialism’s oppression of “primitive” people, though they express the consciousness of someone prepared to sympathize with “primitive” people when “primitive” people started talking in English about that oppression. The Druedain’s propensity for sitting on the ground in deep meditation for days is not a reaction to loss or to exotic diseases. They do it because, while being left in peace to remain “primitive” and having never built up the vulnerability that is the long-term product of full “herd immunity” to diseases, they feel like working out something in their minds and have no obligations to finish jobs first. They are the kind of semi-feral tribe Edwardian children had in mind when apparently almost all of them said, or thought, “I wish I was an ‘Indian,’ ancient Celt, Aborigine, etc., and didn’t have to wear shoes, go to school, be on time, etc.”

In the Rings books Galadriel, though still beautiful and in full command of the various powers, is white-haired and (Elves being longer-lived than humans) several centuries old. There are hints of past dramas in her youth. Tolkien had more than one try at writing those dramas and wrote them in different, conflicting ways, none of which apparently satisfied him.

Other dramatic legends of Middle-Earth’s past are at least fully sketched, though not in a fashion that would have satisfied Tolkien. There are cautionary legends, the tragic results of a quarrel and the short unhappy lives of a couple who inadvertently committed incest. There are lists of monarchs and court histories. There are battles and hero tales. There are maps, too, and etymological notes on words and names in the Elvish languages. If you like that sort of thing you must have Unfinished Tales and, if not, you’ve been warned.