In a few places, such as the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien provides brief translated citatons from the imaginary older texts. One example occurs in the section on Arnor, where the chieftains of the Dunedain are discussed:

    There were fourteen Chieftains, before the fifteenth and last was born, Aragorn II, who became again King of born Gondor and Arnor. Our King, we call him; and when he comes north to his house in Ann minas restored and stays for a while by Lake Evendim, then everyone in the Shire is glad. But he does not enter this land and binds himself by the law that he has made, that none of the Big People shall pass its borders. But he rides often with many fair people to the Great Bridge, and there he welcomes his friends, and any others who wish to see him; and some ride away with him and stay in his house as long as they have a mind. Thain Peregrin has been there many times; and so has Master Samwise the Mayor. His daughter Elanor the Fair is one of the maids of Queen Evenstar.

Everything within the single-quoted material is supposed to be a translation from the Red Book of Westmarch. The Lord of the Rings is therefore a modern retelling of an ancient (forgotten) story, and not strictly a translation, as many have characterized it. Tolkien tells it in his own words and style, so he is not so much acting as a translator as merely a story-teller.

In presenting the legends this way, Tolkien frees the reader's imagination to devise ancient texts of virtually any style and length. But he also irrevocably denies us the most complete look through his mind's eye at what became Middle-earth. It's a bit silly to argue over who "actually" wrote a certain text. We don't really have enough texts to evaluate the styles and voices.

And yet, I feel as though I can almost tell who wrote what. The above citation, for example, is written from a Hobbit's perspective, and I feel as though it was Merry's "voice". Why? Perhaps because both Thain Peregrin and Master Samwise are mentioned in the third person. Merry might write about his companions but not himself. On the other hand, it might just as well be a Took's voice. The apparent respect in the brief mention of both, and the distance the writer places between himself (herself?) and the King's friends the writer felt some reverence for Pippin and Samwise (and possibly Merry).

The passage can be reasonably dated to sometime between Shire Year 1436 and S.Y. 1442. Elanor became one of the queen's handmaids in 1436, and in 1442 her family rode to Gondor on a visit. She was probably not in Arwen's service for more than a year or two. Sam was Mayor in these years, and Merry had become Master of Buckland in 1432. Pippin became Thain in 1434.

Another citation, much longer than that given above, occurs in the section on Gondor's kings. It begins in the midst of the summary of the career of Romendacil II with "For the high men of Gondor already looked askance at the Northmen among them; and it was a thing unheard of before that the heir to the corwn, or any son of the King, should wed one of lesser and alien race...."

This just does not sound like something a Hobbit, even Master Meriadoc of the Buckland, would write. Furthermore, the citation concludes with "...Umbar remained at war with Gondor for many lives of men, a threat to its coastlands and to all traffic on the sea. It was never again completely subdued until the days of Elessar; and the region of South Gondor became a debatable land between the Corsairs and the Kings."

Another citation follows immediately upon this one, but the closing sentence implies that this particular citation was written after Elessar's (Aragorn's) death. We know that the last Gondorian to have written any of the Red Book's material was Findegil, the King's Writer in Fourth Age 172, more than 50 years after Aragorn died. The language is formal and stylized, as a royal writer's should be.

But not all the late citations are derived strictly from Gondor (if any). "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen", for example, is offered completely as a citation, but it concludes with "Here ends this tale, as it has come to us from the South; and with the passing of Evenstar no more is said in this book of the days of old."

One must ask if the entire story, up to but not including this final sentence, represents a Gondorian style, or if some Hobbit write of the late Second Century (Fourth Age) rewrote the story, which Tolkien then translated for his readers.

"The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen" may be the longest citation Tolkien included in his Middle-earth works. Of course, some people might argue that "Aldarion and Erendis: The Mariner's Wife" is another translated story, but the presentation is wholly different. And Tolkien never finished the tale, so we have no obvious clues about whose voice the narration conveys, Tolkien's or some imaginary ancient writer's. Even "The Disaster of the Gladden Fields" fails that test because it is accompanied by Author's Notes which clearly show that Tolkien was interweaving texts to fill out the history provided in The Lord of the Rings (including "Cirion and Eorl").

Tolkien's fiction isn't about forgotten stories so much as it is pretending to be forgotten stories. He is acting not so much as a translator as a revivalist, resurrecting the old campfire tradition Aragorn practices when he tells Frodo and the boys a story about Beren and Luthien. The stories in Middle-earth's history were told and retold, seldom written down, and the Red Book of Westmarch preserves those stories in a state which conveys and artificiality. That is, we are led to believe (or to assume) that the stories must have been told only a certain way.

In fact, the trail of translation and retelling is quite lengthy. The Red Book which Tolkien claims to have possessed is not the original book which Bilbo and Frodo wrote. It is a copy, "written in Gondor, probably at the request of the great-grandson of Peregrin, and completed in S.R. 1592 (F.A. 172). Its southern scribe appended this note: Findegil, King's Writer, finished this work in IV 172. It is an exact copy in all details of the Thain's Book in Minas Tirith. That book was a copy, made at the request of King Elessar, of the Red Book of the Perriannath, and was brought to him by the Thain Peregrin when he retired to Gondor in IV 64."

So, Tolkien's Red Book was a copy of a copy. The original book was actually four volumes: the diary of Bilbo and Frodo, completed by Sam, and Bilbo's three volumes titled Translations from the Elvish. The Translations are presumably the sources for the Silmarillion material. And who wrote those stories? Elrond was born only 58 years before the end of the First Age. Most of the exciting stuff had already occurred. So even if he himself had written all of Bilbo's source material, it would have included many second-hand stories.

In fact, in The War of the Jewels, we are told that "Narn i Chin Hurin" was written by Dirhavel, an Adan who interviewed survivors in Arvenien and composed his Narn. Dirhavel's account must have been memorized or written down before the Feanorians destroyed Arvernien. Elrond might have been given a copy of it by Maglor, or it may be that he would have had to wait until he joined Gil-galad's kingdom in the Second Age to learn about the Narn. If it was until that time only preserved orally, then whomever wrote it down for Bilbo's research was providing him with a third-hand account.

With each retelling of the story, one must assume there would have been lost details, and new embellishments. In attempting to rationalize the obviously unscientific history of the Two Trees and the creation of the Sun and Moon as recounted in the Silmarillion legends, Tolkien at one point in his life concluded that the original stories had become confused and misunderstood through serial retellings.

As a linguist who knew the relationship between Indo-European *dyeu- and its descendants Tyr (a Norse god of war), Zeus (the king of the Greek gods), and Latin Deus, Tolkien understood very well how words and the traditions bound up with them could change through the centuries. Tyr, Zeus, Jove, and other derivatives were associated with the sky, but Tyr went on to become a warrior-god of secondary importance (his most notable adventure consisting of his sacrificing his right hand in the capture of the Fenris wolf, which undoubtedly inspired Beren's confrontation with Carcharoth).

Hence, Tolkien would have had no problem with all these stories-behind-stories. Somewhere in each he preserved enough of the true legend that the reader can understand Tolkien is sharing a memory of what really happened. But he is not sharing the literature which originally preserved that memory. To be faithful to the concept, Tolkien would have had to write fairly simple verses and narratives.

For example, "The Epic of Gilgamesh" is often cited as the first great adventure story, but modern English translations of it -- were they presented as original works -- would hardly win any readers because of sheer textual boredom:

    He who saw everything in the broad-boned earth, and knew what was to be known     Who had experienced what there was, and had become familiar with all things     He, to whom wisdom clung like cloak, and who dwelt together with Existence in Harmony     He knew the secret of things and laid them bare. And told of those times before the Flood     In his city, Uruk, he made the walls, which formed a rampart stretching on     And the temple called Eanna, which was the house of An, the Sky God     And also of Inanna, Goddes of Love and Battle     Source: http://www.angelfire.com/tx/gatestobabylon/temple1.html

Admittedly, a modern translation sinks or swims largely on the talent of the translator, but modern readers have the luxury of buying concise paperback books, whereas the original readers of the Gilgamesh epic had to handle clay tablets. The tale was preserved from a true oral tradition, too, and most audiences would not have been able to wallow in a story the way we can follow Hobbits from book to book, night after night, week after week. The really great stories were probably told at festivals, weddings, and on holidays celebrating special events.

The ancients loved to swap stories, and it has been suggested by more than one scholar that many classical mythologies borrow from older mythologies. All of Zeus' infidelities, for example, may represent attempts to merge various legends about an ancient sky god into a coherent mythology.

As the centuries passed by, story-tellers accumulated greater sophistication. Technology slowly caught up with the audience's ability to absorb more information, too. Eventually, Herodotus would be able to compose the first extended diary. His Histories record his thoughts about the traditions he had learned from several peoples with whom the Greeks had contact. He was not analyzing traditions so much as preserving them. But his writing was sophisticated even by modern standards, in that he was able to revisit themes many chapters (or books) after their introduction.

Some of the Roman writers attempted to write lengthy histories, too, but they also developed the art of writing encapsulated histories, a skill which was passed on to the Roman Catholic Church. History itself became less important as story-telling returned to prominence. Early medieval literature offers us Bede's Ecclessiastical History of England, which modern historians may both praise and curse. Bede mostly wanted to tell a few good stories and lecture some contemporary kings about their failings. In doing so, he alluded to things which have long since been forgotten. It would have been nice if he had offered a few footnotes explaining what the heck he was referring to.

Tolkien does provide footnotes...and end notes...and notes within notes, asides, anecdotes, essays, outlines, and everything else including scraps paper and scribbles on morning newspapers. He wanted to document as much as he could about Middle-earth, but he had too little time to devote to the project, and creating a literature to support the stories was not a priority. The stories were more important than the literature, just as Bede's stories were more important than his history, just as Herodotus' anecdotes were more important than simply relating the facts as they were then known.

Herodotus' anecdotes are often derided as amateurish mishmash which should not have been included in the first attempt to write a formal history. But if Herodotus had not told us about the Egyptian brothers who tried to rob a tomb, leading to the tragic sacrifice of one brother to save the other, would his histroy have been half as interesting to read as it is? There was so much Herodotus needed to preserve, and he had to choose between folktales and myths. He understood well enough was seemed incredible to even his contemporary audience. He also understood that subsequent generations might not believe everything he had to say.

Nonetheless, Herodotus' hand is quite evident in Tolkien's Middle-earth stories. Tolkien, like Herodotus, was trying to preserve something. Like St. John viewing the apocalypse, Tolkien was granted a vision and he hastened to write down whatever he saw. But Tolkien saw so much he couldn't describe it all, he couldn't record it all. He became sidetracked time and time again. For Tolkien, history only became interesting when it was tied to a word. A word is such a simple thing, and yet it has a long history. Words seldom just appear, although we seem to coin them all the time. They mostly come down to us from other people, and often the subtle changes we make in the uses and meanings of words compress volumes of history which will be forgotten.

Tolkien often stopped to explain where a word came from, and that of course entailed relating the history of the thing the word described, which in turn led to other words. As a formal historian, Tolkien was worse than Herodotus. Herodotus at least followed some plan. Tolkien would start a book and leave it unfinished, abandoning the work near the end, halfway through, or near the beginning, as whimsy or real life led him. Maybe somewhere in all the never-realized plans, Tolkien did indeed intend to create a literature for Middle-earth.

He certainly didn't lack for basic plots: the children of Hurin, Beren and Luthien, Aldarion and Erendis, Feanor, and at least a half dozen other stories actually made it through the process in coherent enough shape that Christopher Tolkien really did not need to do much work on them.

One such experiment may have been the "Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth". Tolkien says the purpose of the "Athrabeth" is "dramatic: to exhibit the generosity of Finrod's mind, his love and pity for Andreth, and the tragic situations which must arise in the meeting of Elves and Men". Tolkien's commentary on the "Athrabeth" makes it clear the narrative is simply a modernist perspective on the cultural differences between Eldar and Edain. But it would not have taken much work, since the narrative consists mostly of dialogue, to present the "Athrabeth" as a translation of an ancient text. However, Tolkien seems to have abandoned the motif of feigned translation for most of his post-LoTR writing.

The only significant corpus of feigned translations was published in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, but that collection of poems is unsatisfactory, as most of them were written independently of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, and they do not reflect much of Tolkien's thought about the styles and voices of the ancient narrators whose traditions he was passing on.

For legitimacy, one must fall back upon the Quenya and Sindarin texts, which are insufficient to represent a "literature". Galadriel's lament does not tell a story. It relates no history. Rather, it implies much which has passed, and some things which may yet be. Like Bede's allusions to contemporary kings, Galadriel's lament really requires that the reader possess a considerable knowledge about Galadriel's life and history in order to understand what she is talking about. Otherwise, her song is just a pretty poem with a distinct sadness attached to it.

But though archaeology may one day prevail and give us insight into Bede's obscurities, we are left staring at Tolkien's world through his distant, half-closed eyes as he wanders across a mindscape of confused priorities. Our knowledge of Middle-earth's history and literature are as filtered as would be that of the students of Shakespeare, were his words the only source we had for traditions concerning Hamlet, Richard III, King John, Henry V, and Julius Caesar.

Shakespeare wrote about real people and imaginary people, and his most famous lines have been quoted time and time again. "Et tu, Brute" may be one of the most oft-quoted lines from Shakespeare, and some people say he may only have borrowed those words from tradition. If so, Tolkien (who disliked Shakespeare) appointed himself the task of playing Shakespeare to Middle-earth. He rewrote the stories which were never written, retold the untold tales, and invented traditions which he passed on to be cherished for generations.

The pretense Tolkien made, of lifting these stories from an older literature, was not really original. Some people claim Plato's account of Atlantis is nothing more than a fabrication, a pseudo-history he never took seriously. The Atlantis story has excited the imagination for over 2,000 years. And, in fact, it found a place in Middle-earth, for Tolkien admitted more than once that the tale of Numenor was derived from the story of Atlantis.

Even Faramir's dream, of the overpowering wave welling up in the ocean, owes something to a real experience. Tolkien himself confessed to having had the dream. Like every writer before him, and every writer since, Tolkien put something of himself into his creation. And, of course, Tolkien did borrow from ancient traditions to contrive his own imaginary traditions. From Beren's sacrificing a hand to the wolf, to Faramir's dream of the oncoming wave, Tolkien felt no compunction abouting making the real traditions of literature the sources for his lost literature.

The new stories are certainly interesting enough on their own terms. They are not merely the same old stories. Tolkien explored a new angle in the theme of death and the search for deathlessness. We'll be unravelling his anecdotes for generations to come, and arguing about which of his heroes had the most impact on their imaginary world. And only Time will tell if Tolkien has given us the equivalent of "et tu, Faramir".

    Michael Martinez is the author of Visualizing Middle-earth, which may be purchased directly from Xlibris Corp. or through any online bookstore. You may also special order it from your local bookstore. The ISBN is 0-7388-3408-4.

    And be sure to download your free copy of Parma Endorion: Essays on Middle-earth, 3rd edition at Free-eBooks.Net!