rose-of-the-bright-sea:

An absurdly long explanation of why I’m very iffy on “narrative bias” discussions in The Silmarillion. (Mainly relating to ones surrounding “can we trust these facts?). I’d like to thank @grundyscribbling ​ for making me think waaaay more about this than I would’ve expected. 

Disclaimer: I went easy on quotes because I hate how Tumblr is formatting them on mobile now. Seriously, @staff, please explain why that changed. I also am having a weirdly hard time putting a lot of these thoughts in words, so if it stops making sense somewhere, just ask!

Is there an “in-world” Silmarillion [1977] author?

Before we can determine if there is narrative bias, we ought to address the challenging nature of The Silmarillion’s publication. Christopher Tolkien took on the daunting task of editing his father’s work into a cohesive, publishable text. He ultimately decided “to work out a single text, selecting and arranging in such a way as seemed to me to produce the most coherent and internally self-consistent narrative” (The Book of Lost Tales, Part One).

One of the choices Christopher Tolkien made was to erase all references to an in-world author (as I’ll explain later, it would have been incredibly complicated to include). So for those who argue ‘there is nothing but the text,’ is there an in-world author? After all, there is not one in this text. For those who say ‘well, I guess not,’ congratulations, you can stop reading. (I’m jealous).

Others will point to The History of Middle-Earth and say that since the Silmarillion draws from texts attributed to in-world authors, we should assume the Silmarillion has an in-world author, too. For the moment, let’s put aside the issue of who those authors were, and instead ask if the Silmarillion is a faithful rendition of what those authors actually said?

To an extent, the answer has to be no. Christopher Tolkien drew from multiple versions in order to give us a somewhat consistent narrative. Even if a certain chapter comes from the same in-world author, it might not all come from the same version of said author. An in-world author might have had a great deal more to say on any given topic, but Christopher Tolkien, in an attempt at consistency, may have cut them off.

From here on out, I will assume that there is an in-world author, but I want to make it painfully clear that said author’s perspective has been distorted by Christopher Tolkien. (I’m not blaming him. He had an impossible job and did better than anyone could’ve possibly asked for).

Who does the Quenta Silmarillion come from?

I’m going to call the text as it exists within Arda the Quenta Silmarillion, or Q.S., to distinguish it from the book published in 1977 by George Allen & Unwin (which will be referred to as just the Silmarillion).

If one wants to discuss the Silmarillion as the sole basis for the Quenta Silmarillion, then there is simply no information on who wrote the text. It may have been one person, it may have been several. It could have been oral histories that were eventually written down by a single editor.

But adding HoME to the mix gives us more to work with. Strictly speaking, the Q.S. we see is one written down by Ælfwine. The less intrusive version is that Ælfwine was an Anglo-Saxon who, after a shipwreck, found himself on Top Eressea. There, he was taken in by a group of elves (mainly Noldor) — one of whom was Pengolodh. Pengolodh told him various histories of Arda. Ælfwine memorized these stories and later translated them into English.

If we were going to treat Tolkien’s works like strict history texts, well… We would probably be compelled to dismiss them entirely. A guy returns after years of being lost at sea, claiming to have met elves  on an island no one’s ever seen (or seen since) who have him the real history of the word? But let’s skip past that obvious caveat and assume Ælfwine didn’t just have a saltwater-induced hallucination. He still isn’t a perfect translator.

First, he is doing this entirely by memory. Human memory is fallible and Ælfwine was working with a recently acquired second language. Second, it is likely that even if he was highly fluent and possessed an impeccable memory, it is possible he failed to fully understand certain terms that would’ve been necessary in a proper translation (or, if he understood them, failed to properly convey them to his human audience). What could one of those terms be? Perhaps the very concept of authorship.

Who told Ælfwine about the Quenta Silmarillion?

This one’s easy to answer! Pengolodh. Presumably, Ælfwine spoke with other elves, too, but he cites Pengolodh as his tutor in elven history and linguistics. For the sake of argument, we’ll assume no elves contradicted Pengolodh’s accounts while speaking with Ælfwine.

Did Pengolodh write the Quenta Silmarillion Ælfwine translated?

The ultimate question, isn’t it? The only honest answer is: “maybe kinda sorta?” See, various parts of the Q.S. have different attributed authors (and Tolkien wasn’t always consistent on who wrote what). For example, Rumil is often credited with writing the “first part” of what would show up in the Silmarillion, but exactly where he stopped writing is unclear. Sometimes it’s up to and including the creation of the Sun, sometimes it’s up to the Doom of the Noldor. Quennar also was involved, but again, not totally clear how. Certainly, these three Elven authors worked with each other, but the exact timeline and framework is lacking.

Children of Húrin is attributed to a human author, Dírhaval, who lived in Sirion and was killed in the Third Kinslaying. How he got his information is a bit unclear, since Tolkien attributes it to Mablung, but clearly that’s not possible in later drafts what with Mablung being dead. Other bits and pieces are still yet attributed to unnamed Sindarin scribes, others are not cited to anyone at all. None of this is to say Pengolodh wasn’t at all involved in writing: he definitely was, but how involved is a different question. But without a doubt, Pengolodh was heavily relying on other sources.

“It may be therefore that my father now regarded Pengolod as redactor or compiler rather than as author, at any rate in certain parts of the book, and in these Pengolod marked off his own contributions and named himself as authority for them” (The Lost Road and Other Writings).

When did Pengolodh write/compile the Quenta Silmarillion?

The short answer: over time. Much of his work started after the fall of Gondolin. It consistently sounds like he wrote his final drafts in Tol Eressa (where he arrived some time in the late Second Age). It seems safe to assume that the version Ælfwine saw was last edited in the Valinor. (He’s had thousands of years to check sources, rewrite, and clean things up. At some point between leaving ME and meeting Ælfwine, it makes sense that Pengolodh would have done so).

What is the Quenta Silmarillion supposed to be?

This is a question I think we don’t ask enough. The Q.S. was not supposed to be an all-encompassing history. It wasn’t even supposed to be an in-depth history of certain individuals within a certain subsection of society. It was supposed to be a brief summary, an abstract if you will, of other works, not all (or even most) of which we have access to.

“The title [‘This is the brief History of the Noldoli or Gnomes, drawn from the Book of Lost Tales’] makes it very plain that while Q was written in a finished manner, my father saw it as a compendium, a ‘brief history’ that was ‘drawn from’ a much longer work; and this aspect remained an important element in his conception of ‘The Silmarillion’ properly so called” (The War of the Jewels).

Another often-ignored question is what role history texts played in elven societies. The answer: not much.

“the lore of the Eldar did not depend on perishable records, being stored in the vast houses of their minds” (The Shibboleth of Fëanor).

General differences between elven historians and human historians:

Elves have significantly better memories (see quote above), their society is littered with telepaths and psychics, they are immortal and even those who die will presumably return one day, memories in tact. Humans die easily, permanently, and can’t remember why they walked into a room 80% of the time. These differences surely have some degree of relevance in how a historian’s bias shows up in their work.

General problems with narrative bias:

Bias is complex. Everyone has biases, but they rarely play out consistently. Often times, our biases conflict with each other. Sometimes people who might stereotypically hold a bias do not. Some people are better at pushing theirs aside (typically, this is done best by seeking out peer review). Bias is difficult to determine even if we know who the author is, and even then, it’s typically determined via post-hoc reasoning on why an author made an obvious error (or flat out lie).

Knowledge is systematic

Yeah. That. How can we determine the validity of supposed knowledge without comparing it to other knowledge? (In other words, how do we analyze the veracity of a text [i.e. Silmarillion] when there is literally nothing else to compare it to?)

Conclusion:

I am not trying to say narrative bias should be entirely thrown out in analyzing Tolkien. What I am saying is that there are so many caveats and complications in analyzing the Silmarillion that, to me, it makes very little sense to treat it the same way we would a real-world historical text, at least as it pertains to the facts contained within. If it were a real world text, we would simply not be treating it with much seriousness. Ælfwine himself presents too much of a challenge.

I don’t think we can really say who wrote the Quenta Silmarillion. We certainly don’t know how exactly they collected their information, who they spoke to, and how it’s changed since it’s original draft. I think narrative bias is best reserved for discussions about moral judgements, which, frankly, are something we should always rethinking anyhow.

In other words: 

(I am also certain that people are gonna disagree. But in the interest of keeping things from spiraling into incomprehension, maybe it’d be best to respond to a single point and work there until we find common ground before moving on? IDK – just a thought. Also feel free to respond in a different post, just send me a message or something with the link since @staff has decided notifications are for the weak).