Timeline for Did Tolkien give his son explicit permission to publish all that unfinished material?
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14 events
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| Jul 11 at 4:57 | comment | added | David Roberts | @JanusBahsJacquet you'd have to consult legal norms around how wills were punctuated in late 1960s/early 1970s Britain to see if this was usual practice. Given the links supplied by tchrist, I'm not at all surprised. Personally I think Tolkien was knowledgeable enough to know that how lawyers write legal documents was not his business as a (retired) Professor of Anglo-Saxon/English Language and Literature. | |
| Jul 10 at 12:54 | history | edited | Mithical | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 3 at 16:21 | comment | added | tchrist | @JanusBahsJacquet You'd think so, but see here, here, and here. | |
| Jul 3 at 14:35 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @Yakk No, legalese generally uses punctuation roughly the same way normal English does. “All my manuscripts, typescripts, notes(,) and all other articles connected with my work” and “full power to publish, edit, alter, rewrite(,) or complete any work of mine” would both be perfectly fine in legalese. | |
| Jul 3 at 14:29 | comment | added | Yakk | @JanusBahsJacquet That is legalese for you. | |
| Jul 3 at 12:24 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | I’m rather surprised that Tolkien – of all people – would allow his final will and testament to go through in such a poorly punctuated (or rather, completely un-punctuated) state. Seems most out of character for him. | |
| Jul 2 at 0:09 | comment | added | David Roberts | By the end of Tolkien's life, his papers were incredibly disordered, not least from moving house twice. It's not clear he knew where everything was. And also, he did die rather suddenly, it wasn't like he knew he was declining and had to pass on final instructions. Regarding "my father was of the opinion...", cf scifi.stackexchange.com/a/276436/424 and the Book of Lost Tales paragraph about not having an explicit directive on the specific framing device. | |
| Jul 1 at 23:47 | comment | added | Chris Bouchard | @m4r35n357 I don't know the details of the Tolkiens' discussions, but from my experience it's not uncommon for people who are dying to put off concrete plans for their death. It was one thing to put it in his will—wills are a someday document—but it would have been quite another to plan out how to wind down and give up control of his life's work. If JRRT was anything like my own dad, he convinced himself that he would finish the work right up until it was too late to do anything about it, and I doubt his son was going to push him on it. | |
| Jul 1 at 14:13 | comment | added | ibid | @m4r35n357 - My understanding is that the discussions were more focused on what would have been needed for JRRT to finish it via continuing to write new material. Christopher had a completely different task, which was how to assemble a complete book without writing new material (or at least with keeping the new material to a minimum). I don't think that JRRT ever had a discussion or expectation about assembling a Frankenstein silmarillion from his various older drafts. | |
| Jul 1 at 12:05 | comment | added | m4r35n357 | @suchiuomizu whatever the answer says, it is clear from reading HoME that CT had to reconstruct the whole thing from scratch. The published Silmarillion is a chimera comprising the 1937 Silmarillion "B", unevenly updated with more recent Annals, and the two big post-LOTR rewrites of the main text, plus other snippets, plus some stuff from an external author. There is also a great deal of debate around the War of Wrath. In none of these cases does CT say anything like "my father was of the opinion . . .). | |
| Jul 1 at 11:54 | comment | added | suchiuomizu | @m4r35n357 But the answer says they DID discuss it. | |
| Jul 1 at 9:08 | comment | added | m4r35n357 | I am greatly puzzled that JRRT expected Christopher to publish the Silmarillion in some form after his death, but apparently never discussed it with him! | |
| Jul 1 at 0:16 | comment | added | David Roberts | I really hope the drafts of those first two chapters of Christopher's "proto-Silmarillion" survived. It would be fascinating to see his original motive, and also compare it to how his analytic approach developed through the UT and HoMe projects (and of course, I really hope his History of the Silmarillion has likewise been preserved). Also, GGK's mockup proposal of what became "Of the Coming of the Elves and the Captivity of Melkor" would be interesting to compare to the final version... | |
| Jun 30 at 23:53 | history | answered | ibid | CC BY-SA 4.0 |