J.R.R. Tolkien&x27s Final Posthumous Book Is Published | Smart News| Smithsonian Magazine

Though J.R.R. Tolkien passed away in 1973, he has never really stopped publishing. For decades his son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien has painstakingly catalogued and edited his father’s papers, creating new books out of unfinished and unpublished manuscripts. Most of those tales delve deep into the history of Middle-earth, the fantasy realm where Tolkien’s best known works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings series take place. Now, it’s likely that work will come to an end with one last Tolkien book. Critic Andrew Ervin at The Washington Post reports that The Fall of Gondolin, which will be released tomorrow, is likely J.R.R. and Christopher Tolkien’s swan song.

While this story may be Tolkien’s last published book, it is actually an early story and central to the author’s entire concept of Middle-earth. It was first written in 1917 while Tolkien was recovering in a hospital from trench fever after the Battle of the Somme. “It’s a quest story with a reluctant hero who becomes a genuine hero; It’s a template for everything Tolkien wrote afterward,” John Garth, author of a book on Tolkien’s experience in World War I, tells Alison Flood in The Guardian. “he has a dark lord, our first encounter with orcs and balrogs; it’s really tolkien preparing for what he would do next.”

christian holub in entertainment weekly explains that the new book tells the story of tuor, a man who lives in a time when the world is dominated by the dark lord melko, known in other tolkien books as morgoth. Only one place, the hidden elven city of Gondolin, has withstood his reign, and Tuor is sent to find the place. he does, but so do the dark forces of melko. In Tolkien’s greatest battle scene outside of The Lord of the Rings, the author depicts a mechanized army, similar to the newly introduced mechanized warfare he had witnessed during the Great War, falling on the city.

However, the new book is not just a story. Instead, Holub explains that Tolkien rewrote the story multiple times, changing details and character attributes. in 1951, he attempted to write a more narrative version of the story as opposed to the mythological and epic versions he had produced earlier, but abandoned that work when his publisher showed little interest in it. the new volume collects all the versions, including historical notes and explanations by christopher tolkien.

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Last year, Tolkien the Younger, now 93, published Beren and Luthien, the second of what his father considered the three “great tales” of early Middle-earth. In the preface to that work, Christopher Tolkien suggested that it would be the last work he would edit, and possibly the last official work in his father’s oeuvre. That’s why fans and literary scholars were shocked when, earlier this year, Tolkien announced that he planned to publish The Fall of Gondolin, the third and last great tale.

While none of the tales is as compelling as the journey of bilbo or frodo baggins, they are notable for what they represent. Before Tolkien embarked his hobbits on his adventures, he spent decades creating an entire world, including an entire ancient history, to accommodate them. it’s a world-building feat that few, if any, other authors have accomplished with such success. “What makes The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings work as well as they do is that they are set in this cultural background with its own history and languages,” says Alan Lee, who created the color illustrations for the new book and the other great stories holub. “You get a lot more out of those stories in particular if you really dig in and enjoy the mythology of middle-earth. in that process of change and development of the myths, you get all these echoes of the previous stories going through the later ones. it makes everything richer, more satisfying, and denser.”

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It’s unclear if anyone else will step in and search Tolkien’s papers for other unpublished or unfinished works, though it’s hard to imagine much remains to be found. Since the 1970s, Christopher Tolkien has edited 24 books of Tolkien’s writing, including The Silmarillion, a History of the Elves, a 12-volume History of Middle-earth series, the more recent Great Tales, as well as books of his father’s academic writings.

last year, tolkien resigned as director of the tolkien estate. But there’s more Middle-earth content on the way, even if it didn’t originate from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Pen Shortly after Christopher Tolkien’s resignation, the estate sold the television rights to Amazon, which is in the process of creating a new television series, and possibly more, based on the fantasy world.

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