Thank you for the halfebay.com pointer, Beren. It's amazing what valuable info comes out while people are writing little asides speaking of different topics.
Show, now that you have a tiny one, it is a good time to take advantage of all of the wonderful audio versions of books that are available. You know how your attention is now constantly divided? Always being interrupted? Never able to concentrate as sharply or focusedly as you could before, but yet the baby tasks are not enough to keep your mind entertained enough? Now is as good a time as any for me to plug an audioversion of
The Farmer Giles of Ham and
Leaf by Niggle and the
Smith of Wooton Major. Derek Jacobi does a fabulous job.
Thank you, Beren, for explaining what
The Lost Road deals with. I didn't realize that this was the project that Tolkien was working on as a kind of co-writer exercise with C. S. Lewis. I got a book by Verlyn Flieger called
A Question of Time (which I quickly set aside for later because it refers so much to
The Lost Road, which I have not read). The reason why I got the
Question of Time book was because I so admired Flieger's book
Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World.
Splintered Light is regarded as Flieger's best book, and I recommend it to you, Beren, because you love the
Silmarillion, and because I'm guessing that you went on to read all of those History of the Ring books--enduring the tedium of reading rough drafts of Tolkien that you've already read when you might be reading other books on the sci fi shelves--because you recognize something special about Tolkien that you love and want more of and which you aren't finding in rich abundance elsewhere.
I liked
Splintered Light a lot first, because I thought that, reading this, for the first time, I might be able to get a toe-hold into
The Silmarillion. And...whoa...now that I'm flipping through my copy to better describe it to you, I see that THIS is the book that talks about Beowulf and Tolkien's sympathy with the pagan who has no assurance of a heaven or an afterlife (which I mentioned in another posting in the Fairy-Stories thread). Oooo....oooo....listen to this.
The effect of the poem...comes from an understanding of the inevitability of Beowulf's final defeat. The poet has taken care that there should be no suspense or uncertainty whatever about the outcome. Like all heroes, indeed like all humanity, Beowulf is going to die. "He is a man," says Tolkien, "and that for him and for many is sufficient tragedy." A stark statement, and he follows it with one even more bleak: "life is transitory: light and life together hasten away" ... Like humanity itself, light is perishable, finally to be overcome by the dark. The heroes, those "mighy men upon earth," with courage (not hope or faith) as their stay, must leave the precarius little circle of light to go out into the darkness, to battle with the embodiments of that darkness--the monsters--and ultimately to lose. Heroism in the face of inevitable defeat is the theme of the poem.
Ooo, wow. This book fits well with the discussion thread about Fairy-Stories. Must use it and share more there.
Anyway, Beren, Flieger talks a lot also about Owen Barfield's influence (another Inkling) on Tolkien's thinking--his ideas about language in creating one's reality. "Logos" meaning "Ideas" with a capital "I" and how they are carried by language. You notice how brilliant Tolkien is about creating feelings or flavors just by the way different characters talk? Gollum has his own weird way of speaking, and Sam has his, and Eomer sounds completely different, and Denethor is still different? And all are a different slice or splinter or facet of Illuvatar's light.
Sorry, I'm not being very helpful here. I want to recommend the book to you, Beren. Maybe best to go to Amazon and look it up and read some of the better reviews of the book to get an idea of what it is. Oh hey, I'll save you a trip...or persuade you further to take that trip:
The original 1983 edition, long hard to find, was one of the first books to discuss The Silmarillion in detail, and one of the most insightful: it showed Tolkien applying to his mythology Owen Barfield's principles of the deep relationship between language and the nature of reality, and using fragmented light as a metaphorical depiction of fragmented language.
Though I had always held the belief that God, myth, and language are interconnected ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God") I had never fully grasped the impact and full meaning of that until I read this book.
"C.S. Lewis's comment that Tolkien `had been inside langugae' was thus no figure of speech, but the literal truth. He had been inside the word, had experienced its power and seen with its perception. Others who knew Tolkien came to much the same conclusion. Simonne d'Ardenne, one of Tolkien's Oxford students and herself a philologist, found antoher way to put it...Mlle. d'Ardenne recalled saying to him once, apropos his work: `You broke the veil, didn't you, and passed through?' and she adds that he `readily admitted' having done so." [p. 9]
Logos - as living Word, in which one may get, may live and move and have one's being - connects Tolkien with Barfield as nothing else will. That, though, means one might need to read Barfield too. Flieger brings Tolkien's Silmarillion to life; she brings Tolkien to life; she points one to both Tolkien's and Barfield's philological and philosophical thought and work. Most of all, she gets one as near to being `inside language' - inside Logos - as one has reason to hope, at least by individual effort alone. In that regard, Splintered Light is worth far more than its price just for the above quoted passage alone.
Sorry, once again, so rude of me, putting up so much and not being very clear about it. (whispering: Really, Beren...no kidding...just trust me....get this book for yourself...like maybe from ebay half-price books.)
Anyways, thanks for the reference. I'm sure it'll someday end up on my Tolkien shelf 
.
