For several years now I have been working on a project with the aim of combining all (or at least most) of Tolkien’s writings set in and/or pertaining to the Legendarium of Arda.

Before I had acquired HoME and knew just how deep Tolkien’s revisions of the early mythology went, I had foolishly already merged the texts of The Silmarillion, The Children of Húrin, Unifnished Tales, and the Appendices to LotR.

You can check out this old version of the project here. (Click)
[It’s riddled with editorial errors and poor editorial choices, so take it only as a rough idea of what I intend. It’s also got a fair number of my own embellishments (green text), which will (mostly) not appear in the new version. Blue texts represents additions or alterations to the content of the texts that don’t introduce ideas alien to the greater body of work (as the green text does). Grey text is simple rephrasing (often to connect passages, or to make tense consistent).]

But now I’m going by compiling this project in a totally different way, In four stages:

Phase 1 – Catalogue of Sources

The first stage is to gather and isolate every individual source of Arda material produced by Tolkien (as they are presented in the published works), meaning individual chapters, essays, letters, poems, etc..

Each such isolated source then gets tagged with a reference code, as the text of the final form of this project should have references for all it contains.

At this point all of the official Tolkien publications (set in or pertaining to the Legendarium) have been sorted and edited into this catalogue, with the exception of the writings from The Nature of Middle-Earth , which I’m still busy processing.


Phase 2 – Chronological Arrangement

The second stage is to organize all the writings and sections of writings according to in-universe chronology. Simple enough, it would seem. As with the previous stage, I have organised almost everything this way already, excluding many of the non-narrative essays, and the material from Nature of ME.


Phase 3 – Chapter Compilation

The next stage is to compile and merge all the sources for each chunk of the greater narrative into fully unified chapters. This step includes deciding which contradictory elements to keep and which to discard. Though there will be strong preference for Tolkien’s latest thoughts, I intend to also incorporate most elements from his earlier writings (to as far back as they go) that were never explicitly rejected. Occasionally, there will be some rejected elements I prefer over Tolkien’s later thoughts (such as the Valarindi, and Gil-galad being the son of Fingon), but much consideration (and discussion, if I can get others to join in this undertaking) would have to go into those. In some cases, I’d even include contradictory elements with the technique of “it is thought that (X), yet some say that (Y)”.

Non-narrative expositions/essays that cannot be comfortably worked into the narrative texts will be compiled similarly in appendices to the relevant chapters/parts of the narrative.

All elements incorporated into these texts will be marked with reference codes to their sources.


Phase 4 – Final Composition

The final stage is to edit the text for consistency of names/spelling, and to get the sentences and paragraphs to flow nicely. This would also include making the style moreorless consistent, and fluff like making the use of “thou”/”you” consistent.


You can check out the project as it currently stands here. (Click)


So yeah, this project is huge. I also realise that other Tolkien fans have attempted similar projects, but none have I found that does is quite the way I envision the work.

If anyone would be willing to help me out with this gargantuan undertaking, I would be so happy. I have mentioned my autism-related information processing difficulties in my previous post, so it should be clear why I’m struggling to do this alone.