Rindis.com

The third part of The History of Middle Earth is much rougher going for me, as it mostly a couple of very long poems, which I never do so well with.

It does gain interest for a couple bits of real-world activities that intrude on the book.

The main attraction here is part three, the “Lay of Leithian”, which is a poetic rework of “The Tale of Tinúviel” from book two. This made it to over four thousand lines before dissolving into a mass of unfinished notes and plans for continuing the tale. However, this is also when Tolkien was getting more interested  in a wider audience for his writings, and part was presented to the Inklings. C.S. Lewis did an extensive commentary on the existing part of the poem, which is also included here.

Since this is still a fictional older myth, Lewis continued the fiction in his commentary, acting like there were several slightly different versions surviving from antiquity, and doing textual analysis on them. This let him couch a bunch of suggestions for revisions as alternative versions of the text, with various fictional modern commentators giving their impressions as to the ‘truest’ version. This was certainly to help take some of the sting out of Lewis’ criticisms, and also an interesting writing project while critiquing. Tolkien certainly took some of the advice to heart.

The very end of the book looks ahead by about a decade (the materials here were generally written in the 1920s) to the initial submission of the Silmarillion in 1937 for publication. This gets mentioned in a couple places, including Tolkien’s foreword to The Lord of the Rings, but Christopher Tolkien here teases out some further details. The handed the publisher of The Hobbit a pile of material without properly outlining what it all was. By Allen & Unwin’s accounting the fourth item was “The Gnomes Material”, which would itself be a number of different items, including well known parts of the Silmarillion (such as “Ainulindalë”). It seems only a couple parts were turned over to their prose reader, including the “Lay of Leithian” (described as “The Geste of Beren and Lúthien” retold in verse). Not having any background in what had been handed him, didn’t know who it was by, and that was only fictionally historic in origin.

This leads to the rejection of the Silmarillion, and that project never being finished, but leads to the writing of a proper sequel to The Hobbit.