It is an interesting question why JRR Tolkien did not finish and publish The Silmarillion; despite that The Lord of the Rings was published in late 1955 and Tolkien did not die until mid-1973; and despite that all through these seventeen-plus years he was insistent that making The Silmarillion publishable was his number one priority.
Much has been written, and truly enough, about the many technical difficulties facing Tolkien in this work, and about his habits of making matters harder for himself by writing new material (and radically changing old material) rather than focusing on the core task of making The Silmarillion both internally consist, and consistent with the published Lord of the Rings.
I would like to take a different approach altogether. This recognizes that JRR Tolkien was a genius, The Lord of the Rings was a work of genius, and Tolkien wanted The Silmarillion also to be a work of genius.
By my understanding of the nature of genius; to do work of genius requires both exceptionally high ability, and also exceptionally strong motivation.
This exceptional motivation comes from within (i.e. is "endogenous" - inner-generated) - and can only come from within. The motivation is focused to accomplish the particular task a genius feel inwardly compelled to accomplish.
Such a powerful and sustained inner motivation is something present... or not.
Because of the difficulty of accomplishing a work of genius, only a genuine and inner motivation will suffice to provide the sustained and directed energies and concentration that is necessary.
Self-exhortation, external pressures, the sense of duty, potential financial or other benefits... these things can be no substitute for a genius's special capacity for inner motivation, directed to do what he "must".
The Letters of JRR Tolkien document the power and resilience of his motivation to write the Lord of the Rings (LotR), extending over more than a decade - and persisting despite many obstacles such as multiple urgent and competing duties at home and in work, World War Two, physical and psychological illness; and his innate reluctance to finish any piece of work, but instead to "niggle" at it.
Tolkien wrote and published Lord of the Rings; despite several longish hiatuses and interruptions - some self-inflicted; but always he would return to the job, again and again, pushing forward over-and-over with the massive task - even as its difficulties continued to expand.
We need to recognize the colossal expenditure of directed and sustained effort that this required - Tolkien often emphasized this himself in later writings, including the Foreword to Lord of the Rings.
My point is that genius-level writing is not only a product of genius-level ability; but also genius-level motivation.
It was primarily a decline of motivation that failed Tolkien in his intention to complete and publish The Silmarillion - at a level of attainment commensurate with the earlier published book.
Such a decline in motivation was, of course, not Tolkien's "fault". Indeed, it is more accurate to put things the other way around...
More accurate to say that Tolkien was temporarily blessed with a tremendous power of self-motivation during the years of his late middle-age; carrying him through from the beginnings of LotR in 1937, at least to submission of its final volume in 1955 - by which time Tolkien was sixty-three years old.
The (apparent) fact that this extraordinary motivation was not sustained over the entire remainder of his life and through into extreme old-age; is simply that such things depend on our mortal and vulnerable bodies and minds; therefore they don't usually last very long.
I think his ability as a writer remained largely intact; in that some of his very best pieces of writing came after the publication of Lord of the Rings and up to the late 1960s. these including Silmarillion themed pieces; posthumously published in Unfinished Tales and The History of Middle earth.
So I believe it was diminished motivation rather diminished ability that was the problem with The Silmarillion.
Tolkien was to some extent unable, and also to some extent unwilling, to focus his motivation on The Silmarillion. This is evident in the memoir from Clyde Kilby, about assisting Tolkien in the middle 1960s - ostensibly to help him complete The Silmarillion.
Kilby reports that (on a day by day basis) Tolkien went to considerable lengths to do almost-anything-else, other than work on The Silmarillion!
But a particularly telling example is documented in the published Letters.
Immediately after the publication of LotR; Tolkien claimed, in many letters, to be unable to focus upon The Silmarillion because he needed to complete several philological publishing commitments, as well as continue the duties related to his position as a Professor of English at Oxford.
However he was due to retire in just a couple of years...
But in 1957 Tolkien arranged to stay on as Professor for an extra two years. This he stated to be due to money worries, related to a modest pension. In the event (as Tolkien realized by 1958) there was no reason to be concerned about his income, because income from royalties on LotR soon proved to be very substantial indeed.
In correspondence; Tolkien said he wished he had known this before taking on the extra two years as Professor - which was not, after all, proving to be financially helpful (due to the effect on taxation of his royalty income). Tolkien said that if he had known about the extra LotR income, he would have retired earlier, at the statutory age.
Tolkien finally retired in 1959, aged 67 - this was now four years post-LotR.
However, in a letter dated 21st July 1962; Tolkien announced that from October 10th "I have to stand in for the outgoing Professor of Anglo Saxon" until the new Professor took up his post in Easter 1963.
Of course; Tolkien did not "have to" do anything of the sort! It was Tolkien's choice - a matter of his priorities, not his duties; and there was no financial necessity.
Tolkien was by 1962 now seventy one years old, and had been fully retired for three years; and was five years post his official retirement - and it was now fully seven years since the Lord of the Rings had been published. Seven years since he was supposed to be concentrating his best energies on completing and publishing The Silmarillion...
Yet, here was Tolkien voluntarily returning to university duties that had stood in the way of his writing for decades, the onerous nature of which he had very frequently complained in his earlier letters!
What I infer from this is that, in his later life - approximately the final eighteen years, Tolkien lacked the colossal drive necessary to making The Silmarillion his priority, setting aside other claims on his time and energies, and pushing through to its completion.
It was this inner lack of motivation, presumably due to increasing age and diminishing vitality - rather than anything else; that was critical in Tolkien's failure to finish The Silmarillion.
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In addition to his age, Tolkien also may have lost motivation because of the scope and nature of the project.
The Lord of the Rings was a single story, so Tolkien could see his way to the end. Whereas the Silmarillion was a cycle of different stories, so the Silmarillion could potentially grow without limit. I've never worked on a project as large as the Silmarillion, but it's definitely more daunting to work on a project that seems to expand as it is being worked on versus a discrete (though perhaps large) task.
Also, Tolkien may have built up the Silmarillion to such a level in his mind that nothing would have satisfied his standards. He said something in a letter about how the romance of a background (like mountains in the distance) diminishes when you get there. And something else like that in Leaf, by Niggle where in Niggle's Parish, you could go to a distance without it being mere surroundings.
Within the world of the Lord of the Rings, the Silmarillion were legends told by the Elves about the nearly mythical days gone by. But if written by Tolkien the Silmarillion would have been (even if a work of genius) simply a work by a mortal man.
If Tolkien had given up writing the entire Silmarillion and just decided to work on those stories which most motivated him, whether from any era of Middle Earth or even apart from Middle Earth such as Smith of Wotton Major, then he probably would have accomplished more. By putting a daunting task to rest, he would have had more motivation to work on whatever motivated him at the time. But that would also have been hard because he would have been giving up something.
@NLR - Yes. These factors were indeed a huge difficulty. But analogous (although different) huge difficulties lay in the path of writing LotR - and, of course, nobody else could have completed that job.
What I'm suggesting here is that Tolkien believed that the Silmarillion could be done, could be finished, in a way that he could (however dimly) foresee as possible.
I think that if his motivation had held, then he would have found a way.
Maybe you are perhaps suggesting also that Tolkien had lost his original motivation to finish The Silmarillion - but would not give up on the project; and instead tried (and failed) to force himself to finish the job he had started so many decades before. And that he would have been better advised to give up altogether on The Silmarillion, and focus instead - fully - on other projects.
I would agree with that - except that this kind of commonsense consideration is not how geniuses work. If Tolkien could have reached this conclusion, I suppose he would have done.
Maybe there was no other project which could replace Silmarillion in his heart? Maybe, for him, it was Silmarillion or "nothing"?
As I said - geniuses don't choose their "thing" - they "discover it", and then decide whether or not to go ahead with it.(A potential genius could "refuse the call".)
But the idea of the thing must come from very deep (or, be met by a deep response), if it is to mobilize energies and abilities for a sufficiently long period.
In HoME, Christopher notes he never finished Silmarrilion due to his focus on the story of the Children of Huron in his later years.
@RossRN - I don't remember reading that - but if you're right about Christopher saying that; I think you are probably inflating One reason into The reason. He didn't work on the Hurin stories for very much of those 18 years.
How did his vision/dream experience change over time? Did he continue to have them or was he getting farther and farther away from the experience as he aged?
@Lucas - I don't know. Tolkien only wrote about this stuff in a few places like (indirectly) in the Notion Club papers, and some wartime letters to Christopher. There may be unpublished later letters that shed some light. I would guess that he continued to have dream/visionary experiences until at least the middle sixties with Smith of Wootton Major - which seems to contain fresh inspirations.
I think there is much truth in thinking that Tolkien avoided the (at least at times, and mentally) overwhelming task of "completing" "The Silmarillion" (whatever that might have looked like to him) by busying himself with other matters — that's a strategy probably everyone employs at times to avoid large and strenuous tasks. But I think you are discounting (certainly in the case of his 1962-63 Oxford stint) the very real sense of duty that Tolkien appears to have felt towards his profession and the institution that had supported him and his family for so long, and in which position he had, failed to deliver much in terms of publication (less tangible academic legacies notwithstanding). One may well feel obligated in such matters quite apart from any financial need or benefit, and beyond contractural necessity.
@Carl - I agree that Tolkien will have felt such an obligation, and maybe a guilty sense of being in debt, too.
But my point is that when JRRT was younger, during the writing of LotR, such feelings of obligation were usually overcome by the powerful and sustained motivation to *work on his book*.
A genius is not immune to a sense of other obligations and responsibilities (whether real or imagined); but the motivation to do "his work" is so strong that he will make space for the work - if at all possible.
One of the reasons why non-genius people of very high ability do Not (usually) make such major achievements as do genius-type personalities; is that non-geniuses lack this kind of focused motivation to *make* time and space for "the work" over a sufficiently long haul.
There are, for almost everybody, many *good* reasons *not* to give concentrated and continued attention to one's own special project - but an active genius (like Tolkien while writing the LotR) will push back against these good reasons.
In other words; I think that IF Tolkien had been motivated to finish The Silmarillion as strongly as he had been to finish LotR, then he would have refused the request to return to Oxford in 1962 and help-out with teaching.
This refusal would probably have made him feel guilty, but he would have refused anyway: he would not have wanted to sacrifice time and energy that he needed for The Silmarillion.
Tolkien didn't finish the Silmarillion because he didn't manage to discover the correct solution. It is not, essentially, a work of fiction, but a mythic-theological-philosophic system. He lacked several necessary elements, and therefore his attempt was impossible. Compare the Silmarillion with the work of Greg Stafford, who discovered/created a somewhat similar system, published in the form of a series of games. Stafford's system is pagan - a more developed version of Enuma Elish, He managed to discover all essential elements of the pagan system, so he could finish it. Tolkien's system was a version of Neoplatonism, but Neoplatonism is not enough, and it cannot be reconciled neither with Christianity, nor with the mythical world-view. Silmarillion includes very important discoveries eg that the world consist of intellectual beings, but as it is, it cannot satisfy Tolkien's starting design requirements.
@Baduin - All we can say is that JRRT didn't finish The Silmarillion - we cannot say that it was impossible to finish. You and I may not be able to conceive of a "solution" to the writing of it; but then *we* could not have finished LotR either.
If The Silmarillion could be finished in the way Tolkien wanted it, only Tolkien could have done it. Because he didn't - we will never know how it might have been done!
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