Thread by @mytholder

All right, here's thread #3, as we go through THE WAR OF THE RING, the next volume of the HISTORY OF MIDDLE-EARTH

The War of the Ring, by the way, was a potential title for the third volume of Lord of the Rings, which Tolkien preferred to Return of the King, as it wasn't a spoiler.

The Lord of the Rings was never intended to be a trilogy, either - Tolkien assumed it'd be published as one big volume.

At one point, in fact, he was agitating for it to be published as one big volume WITH THE SILMARILLION included. Paper shortages after the war put an end to that idea.

But it's amusing that the whole tradition of epic fantasy coming in trilogies is mostly a result of budget crunch at Unwin & Co.

Anyway, by this point, Tolkien could be justified in feeling at least somewhat confident. He's got his main plot ("get the Ring to the fire"). He's got his cast sorted out - no more chopping and changing, no more unexpected Hobbits. He's got his backstory sorted.

He's even got an outline that'll prove somewhat accurate.

East: Frodo and Sam travel to Mordor, guided by Gollum. There'll be a big tower full of spiders called Cirith Ungol, where Gollum will betray them. Sam will save the Ring and rescue Frodo. Mount Doom kaboom, eagles.

West: Aragorn and company meet up with ents, stop Saruman. Ents - er, Rohan - breaks the siege of Minas Tirith. Head east. Oh no! Mouth of Sauron shows up with Frodo's mail-coat and other tokens - is it all over? Last desperate stand - then in the distance, kaboom.

Then it's just a question of running through that to-do list of mostly ponies. Done.

I might even be so confident as to send a letter to my publisher saying "I've reached chapter XXXI ("Flotsam and Jetsam") and will require at least six more to finish - these are already sketched"

So, here we are at Edoras, and as usual, Tolkien's facility with prose (and the fact that he knows his medieval lit and can pastiche it smoothly) means we get a lot of the matter of Helm's Deep and so forth very quickly.

(As an aside, I used to think that the stylistic changes of Lord of the Rings - from the Hobbitish whimsy of the opening to the more serious material post-Bree to the heroic epic of Rohan and Gondor to the downright Biblical ("and the people sang in all the ways of the city")...

... was a deliberate choice by Tolkien - that his first draft would always be in the same style throughout, and he went back and changed the language later. But no - he wrote whatever felt right at the time. It's inconsistent, but so good you overlook it.)

Anyway, he runs right into timeline issues - he's got to line up (a) Merry and Pippin's adventures and the march of the ents (b) Aragorn's chase across Rohan, Gandalf's return, Edoras, freeing Theoden, and the battle of Helm's Deep

So, there's a lot of redrafting as he adds in or takes out days. As he puts it elsewhere, in Middle-earth miles are miles and days are days, so there's a lot of fiddling with distances.

The quest is a really simple narrative structure - your heroes travel along and have a bunch of mostly self-contained adventures. They may gain or lose stuff along the way, but your timeline is dictated entirely by the primary action of the journey.

But as soon as you've got different moving parts to track, everything becomes vastly more complex. It takes Tolkien a lot of time - and a lot of chapters - to untangle everything.

The Huorns arise, at least partially, because Tolkien needs to the Ents to be in two places at once. He needs the Ents to both trash Isengard *and* save the day at Helm's Deep at roughly the same time.

We've another example of Tolkien writing something, and then changing his mind for the great improvement of the story now. It's not quite as dramatic as the 'the sniffing rider is Gandalf - no, it's a Black Rider', but it's still fascinating.

In the first draft of the meeting with Saruman, Wormtongue throws a crystal ball at Gandalf - and it shatters on the steps!

Tolkien immediately changes it, and describes the ball surviving intact.

From a letter to WH Auden: "I knew nothing of the Palantiri, though the moment the Orthanc-stone was cast from the window, I recognised it, and knew the meaning of the rhyme of lore that had been running through my mind: 7 stars and 7 stones and one white tree"

The existence of the Palantir neatly solves a lot of narrative problems. It explains Saruman's fall. It gives our heroes a way to contend with Sauron. (At first, it's Gandalf who struggles with Sauron; in later drafts, the stone and that role are given to Aragorn)

The Palatir also gives Pippin some spotlight time. When you've got a large cast of characters, you need to find ways for them to show their worth (otherwise, why are they even in the story? Cut or combine pointless characters).

For most of the latter half of FELLOWSHIP, we've got Frodo and Aragorn in the centre of the action, and Gandalf being cryptic and wizardly. Everyone else fades a little into the background, but Tolkien gives us episodes where they come to the fore and we learn a bit about them.

So, Moria is Gimli time. Legolas gets his spotlight in Moria. Boromir, obviously, when he tries to take the Ring. Merry & Pippin have been pretty much joined at the hip since the start, but Merry got to do a bit more in the Fangorn chapters.

It's Pippin (and Sam) who need more of a role. Sam gets the whole journey to Mordor, of course, but it's the episode of the Palantir that solidifies Pippin's role in the narrative. Up until now, he's been dead weight.

Tolkien writes a little more after this point - he sketches out the beginning of the Minas Tirith chapters and the muster of Rohan - but then he stalls.

He won't write any more of the Lord of the Rings for more than a year.

And when he does start again, it's with the adventures of Frodo and Sam, which he sends chapter-by-chapter in letters to Christopher Tolkien, who's posted overseas.

A few things to note about getting stuck while writing:

First: I've written a *lot*. Two published original novels, one tie-in novel, a few more novels mostly-done, and a giant pile of roleplaying books, some of which were of equal length and complexity to a novel; some much shorter.

Virtually all those projects have gone through the same emotional cycle:
1) WOO! New Thing! Not sure what I'm doing here, but let's go!
2) Wow! So many ideas! I wonder if I'll be able to fit them all in.
3) Getting a little bit hard, but it'll all be fine
4) ...

5) This sucks. I suck. It's awful. It's unreadable. I don't know how to fix it. It can't be fixed. I can't be fixed. I've ruined everything. I want to hide from the world. I've written 50 words and it's dark outside and I've sat here all day writing nothing. I fail. I fail.

6) Rrgh. Words. How make words? I type. Words bad. But fuck it. Keep going even though it's awful, because deadline.

7. It's still awful, but maybe I can fix it. It's coming together a bit.
8. Oh, hey, that thing I wrote 300 pages ago - *that's* why I included it. It's still awful, but there are some clever bits.
9. GONNA STAY UP ALL NIGHT TO GET TO THE END BECAUSE WHEN THIS IS DONE I'M FREE

10. It's a draft. It's a thing. I can walk away for a while.

Tolkien, in this period, does the classic writer thing of starting something new (THE NOTION CLUB PAPERS) because NEW SHINY IDEA is way more fun than pushing the corpse of the behemoth of his Hobbit sequel up a hill.

I suspect, as well, that he's got two other problems. As we've seen, he's pantsing his way through a lot of this - and pantsing is FUN. Early on, when you're not sure what you're writing or who the characters are or what's going to happen next, there's a thrill of discovery.

Now, he's chained to his outline. He knows (or thinks he knows) everything that's going to happen. There's no discovery left, no surprises. It's just work.

(Even when outlining, it can be fun to leave gaps. It's perfectly fine to have ??? THEN A MIRACLE OCCURS ??? in an outline. You can build bridges when you get there.)

Another issue, which may be weighing on him, is that he thinks he's writing five books of roughly equal length. Book 1 - Hobbiton to Rivendell. 2 - Rivendell to the Breaking of the Fellowship

3 - (west) Breaking to meeting the Mouth of Sauron - oh, no, Frodo's dead!
4 - (east) Breaking to Cirith Ungol. Oh no, Frodo's dead!
5 - Sam saves the day, last stand, destruction of the Ring, victory, ponies.

At this point, for his chapter-by-chapter breakdown to work, he should be at the end of Book 3 - but he's only at Gondor. Which means, for everything to line up, Book 4 will have to be a lot longer than foreseen.

So, faced with a lot of narrative tangles and uncertainty, he stalls.

There's no easy answer when you're stuck. You do whatever works to get out of the slump. I wouldn't necessarily recommend Tolkien's first solution of starting a new project, as that way lies a tangle of half-written books. The new shiny always looks like it'll be THE project.

You know, the one that'll be effortlessly brilliant and sell a million copies and be fun to write all the way through.

At the same time, it's better to write something than nothing, and it can help to come back to your unfinished work with fresh eyes. The trick, I guess, is making sure you come back to it, and don't abandon it.

A better technique, if you've got the stomach for it, is what Tolkien did - he sent Book 4 out, chapter by chapter, to his son. Deadlines, external readers: the pressure to produce *something* can help.

Of course, that means letting people see rough work, which can be unpleasant.

Also, later on Tolkien had to reconcile the timing of Frodo's journey with the action back west, which was another huge headache. Spreadsheets, man! Start with a spreadsheet!

Project management is the unsung hero of successful long-form writing.

(Pausing here to do some actual work)

An amusing bit of editing magic that slipped. When Frodo first encounters Gollum, he flashes back to his conversation with Gandalf at Bag End ("what a pity Bilbo did not stab him when he had the chance?/Pity? it was Pity that stayed his hand!").

Only Tolkien wants to really drive home the point, so he writes some more dialogue for Gandalf, and slips it in here and in Chapter II, the Shadow of the Past.

Only when he later edits Shadow of the Past, he changes it there, but forgets to change its echo here.

So Frodo remembers a very slightly different speech that never actually happened.

Another writing tip: it's easy, when trying to solve problems for your characters, to forget that you're in charge of the problem as well as the solution.

Here, Frodo and Sam spend ages trying to work out how to get down a cliff without leaving the rope behind, and Tolkien describes this elaborate and tiresome regime where they use a series of ledges to get down step by step.

Then he goes "oh, it could be a magic rope that you just pull and it unknots." Job done.

And he moves their debate about how to get down without leaving the rope for Gollum to use to the bottom of the cliff instead of the top, so it's a funny moment instead of an obstacle.

Gollum. It's striking how little character conflict there is in the book. Everyone's pretty much on the same side throughout; there are arguments over how to achieve a particular goal, or characters may quarrel gently, but there are few real struggles between characters.

Most of the conflict is with obstacles in the world, or wholly internal (with the Ring). The only two real conflicts are with Denethor, and with Gollum.

Thinking about it - the Lord of the Rings is too sprawling and varied a story to be _about_ any one thing. But if you had to boil it down to a core theme, it'd be "hope", I think.

The Quest of the Ring is a desperate gamble, one last forlorn hope.

Evil's too great and power to be defeated through any force of arms, through any alliance. But you keep hope alive, and go into doomed, _hopeless_ battles - like marching to the Black Gate - because maybe, just maybe, there's still a chance far away beyond the mountains.

Denethor fails because his hope has been systematically stripped away, by the palantir and Boromir's death.

Frodo has the hope that Gollum (and, by extension, he himself) can be healed, and after that fails (partly due to Sam's clumsiness, which is very sad), he can't resist the Ring at the last.

Aragorn's childhood name, by the way, is Estel - Elvish for "Hope".

And Galadriel's line has always haunted me: "through the ages of the world, we have fought the Long Defeat."

When writing a book, you may not know what it's about for a long time, if at all. If ever. Some things are only visible in retrospect.

Anyway, Tolkien had terrible handwriting (and yes, this is very much the pot calling the kettle an indecipherable scribble).

Also, turns out he _did_ use a spreadsheet. Good man, JRRT. Let's all call it a tímatál from now on.

The progression of ideas is rarely linear, and that's really illustrated by Faramir's introduction. Tolkien's outline for the next bit goes:
* Hobbits worry about food
* Gollum catches rabbits
* Fallen statue of king at crossroads
* Climb to Minas Morgul

So, he writes the stewed rabbit bit (nice bit of character work, making Gollum more sympathetic, echoes back to the earlier Hobbit-y chapters, bit of humour), and adds in at the end a bit of danger - they spy some Easterlings!

Which is also great pacing - we've got the false sense of comfort from the stewed rabbit sequence, we've relaxed a bit after lots of stress and peril - and boom, we're reminded that the Hobbits are deep in enemy territory and there are foes everywhere!

If you went from, say, the dead marshes straight to "oh no, more bad guys", it'd just be more of the same. You need upbeats to contrast the downbeats (obligatory plug for @RobinDLaws 's _Beating the Story_).

Then, to get the Hobbits out of danger, Tolkien introduces some Gondorian soldiers. Makes sense, good world-building; we're in a war, so there'd be skirmishers and scouts clashing.

And then he has Frodo meet the captain of these Rangers - Falborn the Ranger.

Pretty quickly, Falborn evolves into Faramir - blood ties are a really potent way to connect characters, and suddenly this new character has a ton of meaning and emotional baggage carried over from Boromir.

(and then he spends two chapter talking to Frodo about history and the various branches of the Elves, solidifying his claim on Tolkien's heart forever, but anyway...)

but look at that development.
PLAN: Hobbits eat a rabbit, go to crossroads.
EXECUTION: Hobbits eat a rabbit>meet Easterlings>rescue by Rangers>meet Boromir's brother>lengthy conversation>revelation of Ring>Forbidden Pool sequence>journey on to Crossroads

Tolkien's worldbuilding in general is very much bottom-up.

He doesn't start with a grand plan. He doesn't start by mapping the whole world on a large scale, by working out what the major kingdoms and powers are, by sketching out an epic history.

He starts out small. When he needs to add something - and only when needed - he creates it, and then works out how it fits into his existing material.

He's very good at elaborating afterwards, and making connections - but his approach is very much at odds to how it's perceived.

_Building_ implies intent, implies a planned structure. This is much more like Gimli's description of how the dwarves would treat the Glittering Caves

"we would tend those groves of glittering stone..."

All of Tolkien's legendarium, of course, sprang from him finding a reference to the name "Earandel" in some Old English text, and him going "huh, I wonder what that name means". Or so the story goes.

I'm skipping over a lot of the Cirith Ungol material in the History of Middle-earth book because it's mostly Tolkien moving the location of Cirith Ungol around, and changing the internal layout and the mechanics of the scene.

The Phial of Galadriel, though, is interesting from a plot point of view.

Tolkien's not above cheap narrative tricks. For example, Galadriel sends a bunch of prophecies/warnings with the resurrected Gandalf. Initially, Aragorn's prophecy is about Eowyn; Legolas is warned about the ents.

Later, he changes these prophecies - Aragorn to set up the Stone of Erech/Dead Men of Dunharrow sequence, and Legolas to warn of the beauty of the sea and how his heart will no longer rest in the forest.

It's easy to make a character seem wise and foresighted when you can rewrite their prophecies later on.

It's interesting, therefore, that he *doesn't* do that with Galadriel's gifts. He could, for example, have made Pippin's gift the leaf-shaped brooch that gets dropped when they're caught by orcs. As it is, only the Phial really matters. (Well, the Phial and Sam's box of earth.)

(After working on Dracula-related stuff for years, I can't type "box of earth" without thinking "vampire", and now I can't get the idea that Sam brought a tiny Elvish vampire back to the Shire.

Tinywentil. I'll stop now.)

Another example of Tolkien tripping over inspiration: his initial plan is "Aragorn leads a force of Rangers from the north in a flanking attack while Theoden rides for Gondor", and so inspires the people that they think a great king has come out of his tomb to save them.

It starts out as a metaphor, or a wild rumour. Then Tolkien takes that idea and makes into an actual plot element - a great king is *actually* going to come out of his tomb.

Then he goes back and adds textual support for that. Narrative scaffolding.

If he wants a dead king to come out of the mountains, then he needs to put a dead king in the mountains - hence he comes up with the tale of the Oathbreakers who didn't come to help Isildur in the last war.

And he needs Aragorn to think of going to rouse the dead, so he changes the prophecies and adds some more epic lines. And suddenly, we've got the whole Dunharrow sequence.

There's an excellent example of a development note when Faramir returns to Denethor. In the first draft, their reunion is very courtly and formal, and not very interesting. It needs rewriting.

Tolkien doesn't just sit down and start fiddling with the text, though. First, he works out what the desired _effect_ of the changes will be: Denethor needs to be harsher, to set up his regret when he believes Faramir to be dying.
Then he starts rewriting with a goal in mind.

Sometimes, you'll know a scene is wrong, but you get caught up making sentence-level tweaks when you should take a step back and think about the scene in its totality and in context.

An alternate Lord of the Rings we could have had:
Theoden survives the Battle of the Pelennor. Eowyn doesn't.

Sauron trying to assassinate Aragorn by blowing up the palantirs.

ENT PONTOONS.

The Witch King survives, and shows up as the Mouth of Sauron.

Let's briefly talk about Arwen - she's a very late addition to the book. Tolkien comes up with Eowyn at the same time he conceives of the Riders of Rohan, and she's integrated into the plot throughout.

It's only at the end, when he decides that Aragorn needs to marry someone other than Eowyn, that Arwen gets added in. He goes back through the book, weaving in references - primarily in Rivendell, but also bits like her having woven Aragorn's banner and so forth.

Arwen gets a lot of narrative weight by association; she's compared to her ancestor Lúthien, and Lúthien is a big deal in Tolkien's writing.

But I hadn't realised how much of a late addition Arwen was. I suppose I should have realised, given there's a whole Appendix that's basically an apologetic for her.

Now, under normal circumstances, a reader has no idea how or when a character became part of a book. You don't know if they were there from the start of the process, or added in at the last minute.

Arwen does get one paragraph in the Appendix that's always stuck with me. After Aragorn's death, she leaves Minas Tirith and returns to Lorien, and it's empty. Galadriel has gone, and Celeborn's gone, and it's just a fading wood.

Other interesting abandoned ideas: Aragorn's proclaimed the Lord of the Rings by the heralds of Gondor to make Sauron think Aragorn has the One Ring.

Galadriel gives Aragorn her Ring to augment him for the last battle.

Again, it's interesting to look back and see how the story's changed from Tolkien's earlier plans. (It's now 1947 or so; the Story Foreseen From Lorien was writing in 1940).

ORIGINAL PLAN: Minas Tirith's under siege by Sauron and Saruman. Heroes befriend Ents, Ents break siege, ride onto Mordor.

FINAL TEXT: Minas Tirith is under siege by Sauron. The king of Rohan, the key ally of Minas Tirith, is bewitched by Saruman, who communicates with Sauron using a magical seeing stone. The heroes aid Rohan befriend the Ents, who besiege Saruman. Rohan rides to Gondor.

In Minas Tirith, there's Denethor (also bewitched by a seeing-stone) and Boromir's brother Faramir. The Ents play no part in the siege, but we've got armies of the dead, wild men of the woods, and lots more complexity and intrigue.

The outline and the final text are definitely the same shape of story, but he's integrated stuff he added along the way *and* deepened existing material by linking back to it.

Pantser, plotter, panther, call him what you will.

Damn it, he could turn out a few stirring heroic lines, though.

That's the end of Book 3. Tomorrow, Book 4, SAURON DEFEATED, and a *much* shorter thread.

Here it is!

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