Reading Lovecraft's fear of the other into his works is trivial, but has been done to death online, and in documentaries about his works. I was a backer, for this one, when they finally got the rights back from an unscrupulous distributor and expanded upon their original work.
You are completely wrong here. Tolkien intended to publish the Silmarillion, but never managed to finish it. The material did not come from the wastepaper basket, it came from the unfinished manuscript. The History of Middle Earth series is closer to what you are accusing Christopher Tolkien of here.
Yeah. The racism in H. P. Lovecraft isn’t even subtle. It’s the lowest of low hanging fruit to try to pretend it’s hard to see and offer an analysis of it. Far more interesting, I think, is the fear of nihilism and sci-fi horror elements of his work.Reading Lovecraft's fear of the other into his works is trivial, but has been done to death online, and in documentaries about his works. I was a backer, for this one, when they finally got the rights back from an unscrupulous distributor and expanded upon their original work.
Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Have you had a chance to read The Nature of Middle-Earth? It's literally a collection of every piece of scrap paper on which Tolkien ever scribbled anything about his setting.
There's also the less than subtle classism. He was afraid of fishermen and people who lived in small towns.
No I haven't, but I don't really see the relevance. The charge was that The Silmarrilion was such a document, which it absolutely was not.
I suspect this one might actually be a popular opinion. It's at least popular with me!
Mmm, that is a highly debatable contention at best, honestly. Certainly Tolkien wanted to publish some version of the Simarillion at various times - the first as early as 1937, before even the Lord of the Rings - but it was rejected twice and he shelved it and worked on LotR instead. He then changed his views on the backstory of Middle Earth significantly through the 40s and 50s and didn’t really have a final publishable version available before he died. The 1977 version, which is mostly what we have now, is half him and half his son Chris and Guy Gabriel Kay working on his later notes. Chris Tolkien admits that he wrote much of it from scratch and would probably have written a different version at a different time. It’s necromancy.
He worked on it until he died, always intending to get it to a state the publisher would accept. "Necromancy" or note, it absolutely did not come from the wastebin. That's nonsense, mean revisionism.
