At 9/4/09 08:58 AM, gumOnShoe wrote:
At 9/4/09 08:50 AM, WritersBlock wrote:
That time and dedication to his own fictional universe is something I deeply admire and something I'd love to aim for in my own writing.
According to the biography I read The Hobbit wasn't tied to middle earth initially. Tolkien's aim was always to write the Simirilion, not even Lord of the Rings so much. Which is kind of sad because LOTR was the better of the two works in the end, but thats probably because his son worked out the Simirilion in the end from all of the notes his father had left. But, when he sat down to think about what to write next after The Hobbit he started combining the idea of The Hobbit and the idea of the Simirilion and ended up writing Lord of the Rings.
From what I've read, Tolkien's objective was to create an entire mythology, and, I would say that The Hobbit, whilst originally a bedtime story, became the beginnings of that mythology. As far as Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion goes, they were intended to be two connected volumes, and the Lord of the Rings wasn't meant to be split into three. The idea of the Silmarillion was not to hone in on details and events such as the journey Frodo took to destroy the one ring, but rather to provide a larger, more universal understanding of the world of Middle Earth, such as with the "genesis" passage which opens the book and different ages of middle earth.
We could argue as to his original intentions of the books till the cows come home, but I think when he was finished with the books, they appeared very much as though they had always been planned with the 'bigger picture' in mind.
