the Sil. or The Silmarillion?

[Gothmog]

I came across this passage while reading H. C’s biography. This was at the time when Tolkien was thinking of publishing LotR and the Sil through Collins instead of Allen & Unwin.

from J.R.R.Tolkien: a biography by Humphrey Carpenter
Waldman in his turn was taken aback to learn that in Tolkien’s estimate The Silmarillion would, when completed, be almost as long as The Lord of the Rings; taken aback because the manuscript that he had read was nothing like so lengthy.
Tolkien’s estimate was in fact wildly inaccurate. The total length of The Silmarillion as then planned for publication would perhaps have been as much as one hundred and twenty-five thousand words, maybe less, but certainly nothing like as long as the half-million or so words of The Lord of the Rings. But Tolkien, who considered that The Silmarillion was as important as the later book, had come to believe that in consequence it was as long.

Now, Humphrey Carpenter reckons Tolkien’s estimate to be inaccurate due to the length of the Sil as then planned was one hundred and twenty-five thousand words or less. However, The Sil as published by Christopher from some of his father’s notes is one hundred and twenty-five thousand words or more and, as can be seen from HoME, there was much that was left out either through not being known of at the time or not sufficiently complete for inclusion.

So was Tolkien’s estimate “in fact wildly inaccurate” or had Tolkien correctly revised upward his estimate due to the work he had been doing on the Sil? Is the shortening of the name of the Published Silmarillion to the “Sil” even more accurate as we only have a quarter of Tolkien’s intended book?

[Nóm]

Wow I just now discovered this thread.

I have one major question though. When did JRRT make this estimate?

But even without knowing when, I do Not think his estimation was off. I think he probably made it after he began work on the more lengthy versions of the tales in the 50s, and had an idea of what other texts he would like to include as appendices.

As CT says in HoME X "In these substantially rewritten chapters of the 'second phase' he was moving strongly into a new conception of the work, a new and much fuller mode of narrative - envisaging, as it appears, a thoroughgoing 're-expansion' from the still fairly condensed form (despite a good deal of enlargement in the 1951 revision) that went back through QS and Q to the 'Sketch of the Mythology' of 1926, which had made a brief summary from the amplitude of The Book of Lost Tales (on this evolution see IV.76)."

Some areas of 'The Silmarillion' are pretty full as CT put them, but compare the whole Tuor/Gondolin story in the Sil with that of UT to see how big a difference the size could have been.

And we can see in HoME 10 and 11 how much he was expanding on things like Miriel/Finwe, and the section on Dwarves. Expanding on almost everything. And that is just the Quenta Silmarillion or Silmarillion proper. We also have Ainulindale, Valaquenta, Akallabeth, and The Rings of Power. And there are other texts such as Laws and Customs which might have got a place as an appendix. Anthrabeth Finrod ah Andreth was going to be an appendix (though it may not have been written when he made the estimate?), and I suspect the following might have also been included:

Dangweth Pengolodh/ Of Lembas

Quendi and Eldar, or if that text (which has several sections) was not in his mind yet then and/or a new version of Lhammas... certainly something lengthy about the languages... I can imagine a few different appendices regarding them.

Annals

And more.

I can easily see these adding up to the size of LotR.

But even more, I doubt that JRRT could have been so badly mistaken about the length that he had planned for The Silmarillion - why should he be?

On the other hand, that author knows a lot more about it all than me, unless maybe he made that statement when much of the HoME information had not been published yet and since changed his opinion?

[Gothmog]

In 1949 Tolkien gave Milton Waldman, from the publishing house of Collins, the manuscript as it then stood for The Silmarillion. Tolkien had already started to work on it again while he was finishing The Lord of the Rings. It was in May 1950 that Tolkien made his estimate as to the length of The Silmarillion while talking to Waldman. However, Collins view of the planed length for publishing would have been based on the incomplete manuscript Waldman had read.

Tolkien had started re-writing the Sil before Waldman had read the manuscript that he based his estimate of book length on. Waldman was aware that the Silmarillion was incomplete and there would be more work needed on it. Obviously he felt that this would involve a 'Tidying up and triming down' and that the overall length would remain about the same. Tolkien did not work this way and he had already started his 'Tidying up' by expanding on the existing stories. So by 1950 when he talked to Waldman again, it would seem that he was envisioning a book that was indeed of a length to match The Lord of the Rings.

Concidering the diference in time-scale covered and the stories he was working on for the Silmarillion, I do not think that his view at that time (1950) was 'Wildly inaccurate' but more realistic than one based on the incomplete manuscript then available for viewing.