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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 1312563" data-attributes="member: 2205">That's an interesting theory, but fails the test of looking at the chronology.  While I have no doubt that languages were the primarily inspiration of the work -- after all, Tolkien himself said as much several times, the Lost Tales were written when Tolkien was quite young and both the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings were not even a twinkle in his eye in the least.  The Creation mythology was really the "mythology for England" that Tolkien was working on all this time, as well as the setting for his languages, and they and the languages both evolved over the course of decades together.  The Hobbit was kind of an afterthought -- it initially wasn't even intended to be part of the "Middle-earth" canon, it was just a story he wrote to amuse his kids and he borrowed some names and concepts from his mythology that he was working on.  When it was eventually published and eventually was commercially successful was when he went to finally concieve of Lord of the Rings.  By this point, because the Hobbit already dipped heavily into his mythology, he decided to make the Lord of the Rings concept fit as well, so he advanced the timeline several thousand years, came up with the whole concept of the "third age" and tied it in many ways to both the first and second ages, -- the first being his mythology and the second being his Atlantis concept, which he had had in mind for a long time without truly developing.So...  the rest, as they say, was history.  But your neat divisions of children's story, adult story and creation myth are somewhat arbitrary -- really the creation myth was his life's work, and the Hobbit was the fluke; the idle story that kicked off the Lord of the Rings, which is his true masterpiece.  Even so, the Silmarillion was what he most loved, which is why it was never published in his lifetime, because he was so concerned with getting it right (plus he never figured it would be commercially successful.)  His son Christopher later put together the book we now call the Silmarillion, partly from late writings, partly from early writings, and in some very small parts, from stuff he wrote himself.  The Silmarillion that was published is most definately not the Silmarillion Tolkien himself would have published had he lived long enough to do so.  Likely he never would have finished or published it at all, even if he lived twenty years longer than he did, so it's a moot point anyway.</blockquote>

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