All great tales evolve, and it is something more than magical to watch a seed of an idea blossom into a full tale, something that I can, to a small degree, relate to.
But one of the bits that really stuck with me is this:
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I had little hope that other people would be interested in this work [of the Elder Days, ect]...When those whose advice and opinion I sought corrected little hope to no hope, I went back to the sequel...
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This struck me ironic, for the obvious reason that here we are, on this lovely web site, doing the best we can to enshrine his works into history.
What if, although the anwer will of course never be known, the Professor had neglected writing the Lord of the Rings and chose instead to finish the histories of Middle-Earth, what he truly desired to accomplish all his life?
Although it was the Silmarilion and the History of Middle Earth that gave him cause and basis to write, it was his seemingly secondary work that drew people by the thousands to in turn come to love his tales of the Elder Days.
What I admire most about Tolkien as a man was his unflagging perseverence, even at the times that things seemed most dreary and pointless.
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In spite of the darkness of the next five years, I found that the tale could not be wholly abandoned, and I plodded on, mostly by darkness, till I stood by Balin's tomb in Moria...
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He goes on to say that he stopped there for about a year before coming back, and I must say, that a year is an awfully long time for writer's block, or even writer's stagnation. I've gotten both (the latter term being my invention) but I usually abandon what I had been working on before too long.
Not Professor Tolkien. Not in the least. After that, he most likely had many more blocks than he mentioned in the foreward, but never once did he give up. Even, as
Estelyn said, when he had to type it all up by hand himself, a daunting prospect for anyone, especially in the days before spellcheck and the automatic 'delete' button.
I hope you all note that I did not mention anything about canonicity in my post, allegorical, topical, or otherwise. I try to leave that to the rest of you, who are unflaggingly better at it than me.
