The Great Tales Never End

Lots to talk about with this one.
The short version; a thoughtful, insightful collection of essays ranging from the personal to the academic based around the life and career of Christopher Tolkien, with contributions from his family, friends and the A-list of Tolkien scholars.

For those who don't know, anything you read from Tolkien's legendarium outside of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit was essentially pieced together and made publishable from Tolkien's notes and manuscripts through the tireless work of his son Christopher Tolkien, an endeavour which took over forty years from the publication of The Silmarillion in 1977 to The Fall of Gondolin in 2018. It was clearly a labour of love, and breathtaking in scope. Christopher Tolkien passed away in January of 2020 aged ninety-five.

There's a lot to love in this collection though I'm unsure as to how a casual fan, as it were, would respond to this. While the earlier parts can be appreciated by anyone who recognises the importance of Christopher in cementing his father's legacy (including a small memoir written by Priscilla Tolkien about her brother) the bulk of this volume, and the parts focusing on Middle-earth, is largely academic. Attention is not just given to The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, but also to more obscure stories in the twelve volume History of Middle-Earth series.

I particularly enjoyed ‘The Son Behind the Father' by Vincent Ferré which analysed Christopher's contributions and writing style, comparing passages from HoME and the published Silmarillion to draw attention to Christopher's critical contributions and how he was clearly an accomplished writer in his own right (I'd love to read a longer essay on this!). Furthermore, Brian Sibley's essay on portal images in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings tickled me in exploring an aspect of Tolkien's writings I've always found curious (where where you when I was writing my dissertation and had a piece on threshhold imagery in Moria! Kidding). The essays range in topic from maps to the forgotten BBC radio drama of LOTR to the creation of the mythology, and includes essays by Tom Shippey and John Garth. Carl F. Hostetter providing examples and analysis of Tolkienian manuscripts, detailing what a herculean task editing such papers was for Christopher, is also a highlight.

Maps, paintings, letters and photographs of the Tolkien family are also on display here in high quality.

I'm glad I read this collection and it will certainly hold a special place on my Tolkien shelf. Christopher Tolkien's impact on the field of Tolkien studies and the greater understanding of his father's mythology cannot be understated. Thankfully, that's being recognised by the experts in the field and thus relayed to those who may not have realised. We would not have much, if any, of the quantities and quality of Tolkien's work available to us now if it were not for Christopher Tolkien's time, effort and care.

And to top it all off, the name of this volume comes from a much loved LOTR quote:

“‘Don't the great tales never end?'
‘No, they never end as tales,' said Frodo. ‘But the people in them come, and go when their part's ended.'”