Review of Tolkien and the Silmarillion by Clyde Kilby

Tolkien and The Silmarillion by Clyde Kilby. Lion Publishing, Berkhamsted, Kent, UK. 1977 pp 89. (US edition, 1976.)

This is a hardly-known, slim, minor, but fascinating contribution to the writings about Tolkien. Its centre is an account of the summer of 1966 which the author spent meeting with the seventy-four year old Tolkien a few times per week, ostensibly to provide him with informed and enthusiastic secretarial assistance to get The Silmarillion ready for publication.

Clive Kilby was extremely well suited to the job - being a scholar of English literature, and the man who ultimately established the Marion Wade centre at Wheaton College, Illinois (a mecca for Inklings scholars).

As he candidly admits, Kilby's mission failed completely and he was unable to move Tolkien even an inch towards completing his task; indeed it soon became apparent that Tolkien was not really even trying to make the Silmarillion ready for publication; devoting his attention and spending his time on almost anything else rather than this. The Silmarillion was finally prepared for publication by Christopher Tolkien and Guy Gavriel Kay in 1977; the same year as this book was published. 

Kilby's secondary task (given him by Rayner Unwin, Tolkien's publisher) was to get him to finish the introduction to the modern translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; which needed only a few more days work to be ready but had been stuck at this point for many years. Kirby also failed at this - and Tolkien announced ("almost triumphantly") at the end of the summer "Well, I didn't write it!" (The book was finally published posthumously by Christopher, in 1975.)

Kilby's book made no kind of impact - probably because it was from such a small publisher; and partly because its speculations about the Silmarillion seemed to be rendered obsolete by the long trailed publication of The Silmarillion itself, in 1977. Similarly, the memoir snippets about Tolkien which Kilby provides, were also swept away by Humphrey Carpenter's official biography, also in 1977.

The special value of Kilby's book, and why it still remains well worth reading (if you can get hold of a modestly priced copy) is the 28 page chapter Summer with Tolkien. This I would rate as the best concentrated account I have ever read of what Tolkien was like as a person - in his old age. Kilby had (and Warnie Lewis confirms this, in his diaries) a very sweet and direct nature, with that nice kind of (as it seems to English people) boyish naivete characteristic of some grown-up American men.

So, there are some really good descriptions of Tolkien's appearance, behaviour, manners, mode of speech - and the conversational topics that interested him. Kilby provides a specimen day where he lists, in order, the subjects into-which Tolkien led the conversation:

1. Fan letters, and how T replies to them; 2. Annoyance at an article on T in the Saturday Evening Post; 3. Declaring the birch outside to be his totem tree; 4. How he and Mrs T were annoyed with WH Auden for reportedly making the remark that T's home was 'hideous' in a meeting of the T Society in the US; 5. His dislike of the covers on the Ballantyne paperbacks - and (on publishers more generally) that he was both annoyed and gratified by the Ace paperbacks pirate edition of Lord of the Rings; 6. That he was pleased with the Japanese edition of The Hobbit; 7. Discussing Mrs T's chronic illness; 8. K asks if anyone has asked to write a biography, T says yes and discusses his worries at inner motives being misrepresented; 9. His intention to write a book on the Second Age of Middle Earth, especially Numenor; 10. T showed K some old manuscripts of his work, with evidence of much re-working.

In general; Kilby commented (what the above list confirms) that Tolkien did not seem much interested in working on The Silmarillion, had lost track of much written material among a chaos of manuscripts, and seemed to have forgotten some things he had written (often some decades earlier).

In sum, this little book contains plenty to enjoy, and contributes an unique perspective to understanding the delightful, frustrating, complex and contradictory character of JRR Tolkien.