Anghraine

My icon has grey eyes and black hair just for Tolkien :P

So. I generally dislike Tolkien fandom's "canonicity discourse" (yes, I'm doing it anyway) and the idea of imposing a specific ranking of texts. That said, it's occurred to me that one of the reasons I feel deeply out of step with Tolkien fandom is that The Silmarillion (as in, the published book, not the in-story accounts) is on a drastically different level of canonicity for me than basically everything else with JRR Tolkien's name on it.

I don't dislike The Silmarillion or anything. I quite enjoy it! But for me, it shows its age—not in ~a man of his time~ sense, but in an editorial sense. Christopher Tolkien did an enormous amount of spectacular editorial work over the course of his life and we are deeply indebted to him. But I think he did pretty clearly get better at it over time, and particularly at presenting his father's mass of notes and documents and so on in a way that makes the texts as accessible as possible. At the same time, in later texts, he clearly differentiates between actual words JRRT wrote (whether in the main body or in notes) and his (CT's) own understanding and explanations as JRRT's confidant and literary heir. I do give a lot of credence to Christopher Tolkien's understanding of his father's work, actually, and I deeply respect (and am grateful for) CT's efforts to carefully and clearly explain things like dates of composition (and how this can be determined), direct context, how a given point relates to his father's broader work, etc, throughout these texts.

(Tangent: Facebook keeps recommending defensive Jackson stans griping about how Christopher Tolkien just didn't get his father's work like Jackson did and was so horribly ungrateful to the filmmakers and such an inferior scholar blahblah for the crime of disliking the films. FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE!! I am not uncritical of Christopher Tolkien, and neither was Christopher Tolkien, but I think we owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude to him. Also, even to me, his response to the films seemed harsh at the time, but at this point, I think he was pretty much right, anyway, and correctly judged the films' impact and reflection of pop culture understanding of JRRT's work.)

So what is my issue with the published Silmarillion?

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I’ve been babbling about it on Twitter, but I think there’s an unnamed, unknown character who really deserves more credit than he gets: the Dúnadan who crafted the Barrow-dagger that Merry uses to stab the Witch-king.

Think about it for a second. The Witch-king is a sorcerer using a Ring of Power. He is nigh invulnerable!

Meanwhile, some completely unknown Dúnadan is like … you know what? Hell with him and hell with his Ring. I’m going to craft weapons that are specifically designed to break the spells holding him together. And then he just up and does it, and one of them actually works in disenchanting the King of the Nazgûl. Tolkien says that “no other blade” could have done it.

People are like Elves this and Ainur that, and they do lots of amazing things, but let’s not forget to pour one out for Unknown Dúnadan.

Tagged: #people are also like ... dúnedain don't have special powers they're just big and long-lived #random dúnadan: okay time to enchant this with lvl 9 dispel magic #(necromancy) #jkasdfjk; i just love the whole concept of enchanting an item with 'fuck that guy in particular' #but also how much dúnadan specialness is tied to /craftsmanship/ #also other things but it forms a big (sometimes literally big) part of it #regardless kudos to this dude #and maybe there were other ones like him and they were just That Good #either way that's work to make aulë proud