update on Tolkien writing

re yesterday's post on the impending publication of a full version of Tolkien's "The Children of Húrin".

Some discussion of this with other Tolkienists has led to the guess that this will consist of the Narn, which is the version of the story from Unfinished Tales, with the gaps filled in with material from other compatible versions of the story - J.R.R. Tolkien's own writing when this is stylistically suitable or adaptable, and otherwise new material composed by Christopher Tolkien based closely on the events in it. Parts of The Silmarillion were put together this way.

A good background post on the subject has been provided by Michael Drout. Drout contrasts the story-oriented presentation we expect in a novel with the documentary-text presentation of The History of Middle-earth. Drout says that reading any of this "is a very difficult exercise for people who do not have a lot of experience with these sorts of editions (i.e., nearly anyone who is not a medievalist)," which is a little extreme - I'm not a medievalist - but I have been willing to stuff my head with the various textual niggly bits, which is the other qualifying path.

One thing this has enabled me to do is to point to the parts of Tolkien's posthumiana which are readable as stories, which I did in an article in a book titled Tolkien's Legendarium.

The Narn is more novelistic than The Silmarillion in the sense that it's less a broad history and more a series of conversations and closely-described events, though it covers many years. But there are other versions of the story with more bite, and the dialogue in the Narn is reminiscent of the more formal passages in The Lord of the Rings, the ones that get sneered at by people who think that Aragorn is a cardboard cutout. Can't be helped.

Talk like a Shostakovich

I'm working from home today, still indexing, so I have no-one to talk like a pirate to, but I can report that my editors liked my article on Shostakovich enough that, rather than cutting it to fit their length standards, they divided it into two parts. Part one, on the fall and rise of the composer's reputation, is out today, and part two comes next week.

Shostakovich is sufficiently well-regarded today that I put a lot of emphasis on how little was thought of his work in the midst of his career. I had great fun collecting nastygrams from famous names about his "Leningrad" Symphony, which to be fair was rather overhyped at the time of its release. But there was much more. I was sorry not be able to include record producer Charles O'Connell's complaint about "the same trivialities, the same bombast, the same mockeries, the same cold, mechanical, self-conscious tricks with which previous works have familiarized us and with which subsequent works have nauseated some of us." In the 1950s a British writer providing potted one-sentence summaries of noted composers described him as "a bolshevist composer, who believes music must have a political basis." See wha he was up against? As late as 1979, the year Volkov's Testimony was published, an admiring writer on Shostakovich could complain that he "is little appreciated and little heralded in the West ... Interest in his music grows among a limited following." Well, at least that's changed.

I came across his work in 1971 or 1972 and liked it immediately. I liked it when everyone thought he was a Soviet lackey and I liked it when everyone thought he was a secret rebel. It's the same music.