The evolution of Tolkien’s synthesized mythology of Middle Earth is well documented by his son Christopher Tolkien, who eventually published J.R.R. Tolkien’s notes and various drafts, some of which eventually became incorporated into The Silmarillion

Eventually he broke the explicit linkage between modern history and his newly-wrought mythology, but originally, he had a character of known mythology—Ottor Waefre (also identified with Wihtgils, the father of Hengest and Horsa, the two legendary brothers who led the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England)—enter the realm of faerie, meeting with the Elves of Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Island. In The Book of Lost Tales, he is named Eriol by the Elves, and they tell him about the history of Middle Earth from the Creation of the Universe to the War of Wrath against Melkor.

When I was younger, after I had flown through The Hobbit, devoured The Lord of the Rings, and even struggled through The Silmarillion, I found myself longing for more Tolkienesque fantasy. I tried Terry Brooks, and David Eddings, and eventually jumped into Tad Williams and Robert Jordan, but I found the first two quite woeful (despite reading through their various works), and while the last two are definitely interesting and entertaining, they still end up being pale copies of the master. (Memory, Thorn, and Sorrow is a straight-up homage to J.R.R. Tolkien¹, with a Middle-Earth-like world and uncanny similarities between the Sithi and the Sindar, the Norns and the Noldor, and the Storm King Ineluki and the King of the Noldor Feänor. And, sure, only The Eye of the World had outright Tolkien allusions, and Robert Jordan eventually moved beyond the master’s shadow, but, frankly, the Old Speech and the various mythologies that he explicates aren’t very deep and imaginative—I will extend this particular critique later.)

I did also partake of the works of Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis—namely The Dragonlance Saga and The Death Gate Cycle. These definitely stray from the Tolkienesque framework, although, nonetheless, Dragonlance is tied closely to Dungeons & Dragons, which is itself derivative of Tolkien. (I never did like the idea of the balance of Good and Evil. It does not feel as natural as the balance of Order and Chaos, nor does it really fit the Taoist dualisms and multiplicities that I dig in Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle. However, I do find myself haunted by the idea of the Cataclysm, and found it intriguing that The War of the Souls trilogy contains similar ideas to the last book of the Earthsea Cycle.) And while The Death Gate Cycle has much that is (sometimes nauseatingly) derivative, there are enough imaginative ideas in it that kept me reading through all seven books. The magic system was one of the most inventive I remember that didn’t seem overtly mechanistic and scientified.

But ultimately, I longed to read more Tolkien, and I randomly read Farmer Giles of Ham and (eventually) Roverandom. But in the meantime, there was the whole History of Middle Earth—Christopher Tolkien’s painstaking chronicles of his father’s notes about the creation of an entire mythology, starting with the stories that became The Silmarillion and going through all the multiple drafts and false starts that eventually culminated in the final version of The Lord of the Rings.

When I was younger, I definitely did not have the patience to wade through this vast, sometimes dry, and always exceedingly detailed work of scholarship. I grasped at the few snippets here and there (for example, there is a chapter from an aborted sequel to The Lord of the Rings, and I found myself entertained by the abandoned drafts where, instead of meeting Strider in Bree, they meet a hobbit named Trotter) but really couldn’t handle reading it from cover to cover.

But for some reason, the idea of slogging through the several thousands of pages of Tolkien’s rough drafts, with his son’s editorial comments interspersed throughout, doesn’t seem like a bad way to spend my free time.

Yes, I know it sounds pathetic.