When I originally wrote the set of ‘epic scenes’ based on the mythology of J R R Tolkien generally classed under the title of The Silmarillion, I never expected that there would be any further expansion necessary to a work that was already extended enough in its duration and its sheer scale. Indeed, in the introduction to the score of The Fall of Gondolin I quite specifically stated that the admittedly inconclusive ending of that work brought my labours in the field of The Silmarillion to an end, if only because Tolkien himself had failed to provide any usable material for the final segment of his legend. Much of the material he had written back in the early 1920s had related to wildly different versions of the mythology and bore little resemblance to the final shape of that mythology; and his ultimate work in that sphere, a brief and somewhat mysterious rewriting of the final pages made in the late 1930s, still showed evidence of earlier versions of the tales which had not yet been perfectly adumbrated into the work as a whole. Under the circumstances it seemed to me best to provide an admittedly artificial conclusion to The Fall of Gondolin which could be regarded as rounding out the cycle in a manner that for Tolkien enthusiasts would never be more than a stop-gap but which might hopefully be regarded as forgivable under the circumstances.

Some eight years later I did provide a sort of extension to that text in the form of my setting of Bilbo’s Lay of Eärendil as presented in The Fellowship of the Ring, which served in some ways to provide an oblique glance at the later development of the mythology in its final stages. This was partially written in order to provide a brief synthesis of some of the Silmarillion music which by that stage I was regarding as unlikely ever to be performed, and also because I had long been

attracted by the notion of making a setting of what is after all Tolkien’s longest continual piece of completed lyrical writing in the whole of his mythology. As such The Lay of Eärendil  lies somewhat outside the main body of my Tolkien Silmarillion cycle.

However at the time when the recording of the cycle of epic scenes was already drawing towards completion after four or five years of continual work, Simon Crosby Buttle suggested to me that there might indeed be a case to be made for providing a full fifth segment of ‘epic scenes’ which would bring the Silmarillion cycle to a conclusion in a manner closer to that which Tolkien had intended. I was initially sceptical. For reasons that I had explained in my introduction to the score of The Fall of Gondolin written twenty years earlier, I did not regard there as being sufficient material to provide a satisfactory musical framework to cover these episodes. Simon set out to try and prove otherwise, and produced a lengthy and in many ways most remarkable compendium of material which demonstrated to my mind with some conclusiveness that I might have been over-hasty in my reluctance to look at the existing material in a more constructive light. The result is perhaps dramatically

unbalanced, with the story of Eärendil in the centre overweighing the remainder; but at the same time this may have been something close to what Tolkien himself might have intended, and there was an additional consideration that could be brought into play here.

This arose from my treatment of the ‘love scene’ in Beren and Lúthien, where I had employed Aragorn’s much later song from The Fellowship of the Ring as a framework surrounding a series of brief vignettes drawn from Tolkien’s other dramatic writing on the same legend. These were then subsumed into a musical whole which in the case of the Beren and Lúthien scene took the form of a musical rondo. It occurred to me that Bilbo’s lengthy narrative poem could be similarly employed, although the sheer discursiveness of the music meant that it would be much more symphonically organised and that the narrative chorus surrounding the scenes would assume a greater degree of both musical and dramatic significance. This central section of the legend could then be surrounded by earlier material extending the plot of Fëanor to a point where the intervention of the Sons of Fëanor in the ‘matter of the Silmarils’ could be fully explored, but would also then provide a lead into material relating to the end of the First Age of Middle-Earth (which Bilbo’s song completely omits). It also seemed to me then that it might be legitimate to extend the story of the First Age further bringing it up to a point where it would actually make contact with the plot of The Lord of the Rings, which would of course already be familiar to most listeners.

The interesting thing in all of this is that Tolkien himself may perhaps have had some similar notion. There has long been a mystery attached to the history of his treatment of the text of Bilbo’s Lay of Eärendil, where Christopher Tolkien suspects that he may have continued to revise and work on the poem even after the final version had been sent to the printers. But one of the peculiar things about this is that the version as initially published omits all references to the actions of the Sons of Fëanor in the raid of Eärendil and Elwing’s dwelling at the Mouths of Sirion, which leads to their exile and their mission to Valinor. It may well be that Tolkien, who had already excised Eärendil’s encounter with Ungoliant from earlier versions of his poem, was further abridging the legend and may have intended to reduce the role of the Sons of Fëanor to a greater degree. This in turn would have meant drastic alterations to the course of the plot regarding the final fate of the Silmarils, the relationship between Maedhros and Maglor, and (as we can see in late sketches) the abandonment altogether of one or another of Fëanor’s young twin sons, who in later versions meets a very different fate much earlier in the development of the mythology. It is unclear indeed how these matters might ever have been resolved, although some vague glimpses may be seen from the fact that references to “the Sons of Fëanor” are altogether omitted from the text of the first edition of The Lord of the Rings (they were introduced in the second edition ten years later).

Inevitably, given the fragmentary nature of the source material, the text for The War of Wrath lacks dramatic cohesion. The First Triptych is effectively a series of flashbacks relating events contemporaneous with the First Triptych of Fëanor (Scene One), preceding the events of Beren and Lúthien (Scene Two) or parallel to the Third Triptych of The Fall of Gondolin (Scene Three). This is however not inconsistent with procedures earlier in the cycle, where the whole of the First Triptych of The Fall of Gondolin relates events which in Tolkien’s history actually fall between the narratives of Fëanor and Beren and Lúthien. Similarly the dialogues in Scene Two of The War of Wrath serve to set the stage for the rivalry between the Sons of Fëanor and Thingol, which will lead in Scene Three to the ruin of Doriath and in Scene Five to their raid on the havens of Sirion.

The Second Triptych is more straightforward, since the narrative of Bilbo’s Lay of Eärendil forms a framework into which are inserted sections of dramatic dialogue drawn largely from Tolkien’s material for the end of The Silmarillion written in 1937 but with some interpolations from elsewhere such as Legolas’s song from The Lord of the Rings. The text for the Third Triptych draws on the same material, but leads into dialogue from Of the Rings of Power (included in the final section of The Silmarillion as published in 1977), and further references to The Lord of the Rings culminating in Sauron’s forging of the One Ring, echoed by the voice of Morgoth in the ‘Black Speech’.

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The Epilogue caused considerable problems, however. At one stage I contemplated the use of ‘Bilbo’s Last Song’, either in the form that Tolkien revised it in the late 1960s or in its earlier 1930s version as Vestr am haf, but eventually I concluded that the poem itself was too bound up with the events of The Lord of the Rings to be satisfactory in a Silmarillion context. I accordingly took up a suggestion by Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull that I should investigate the possibilities of using some of Tolkien’s early poems, and I discovered potential in the lengthy poem Kortirion which he had written in 1915 but had

subjected to later revision including a final overhaul in the 1960s when the verses were considered for inclusion in the published collection The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Tolkien himself rejected such an idea – “they would overbalance the boat” – but it seemed to me that some selection from the lengthy poem, celebrating the continuing presence of the ideals represented by the Elves in the modern world, would make a perfect conclusion to a cycle which sought to encapsulate The Silmarillion as a whole, and to The War of Wrath in particular where the Prologue had included a setting of The shores of Valinor, one of the very earliest of Tolkien’s verses on the subject of Middle-Earth. The parallels were underlined by the use of the original Anglo-Saxon verse couplet about Eärendel which had first inspired the author, given in the Elvish translation which he had contrived for use by Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, and which returns in the Epilogue to frame the later verses which set the drama in the context of a mortal existence.

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PAUL CORFIELD GODFREY

I wanted to just give a brief note on some of the decisions made during the compilation of the libretto for this work, in which I had a hand.  In trying to convince Paul that the “Silmarillion Cycle” needed a final part I started working my way through any references to Eärendil that could be found in the extended printed works of Tolkien, including the often contradictory or abandoned versions in The History of Middle-Earth.  Using these as a basis I put a sample libretto together for Paul that

focused primarily on The Voyage of Eärendil, a title this opera had for a brief while.  This version had some noticeable gaps and plot holes in it that I highlighted for Paul in the hope that he would either know of something that could work or be able to write something to fit in, a noticeable example here being no dialogue for when Eärendil and Elwing meet upon Vingelot.  The meeting with the Valar was similarly problematic as in the original texts all that exists is the judgement and not the plea.

Paul, after a brief while, came back with a left-field solution to these problems…and that was to think bigger in scope for the story and focus on the fact that these are “Epic Scenes” and not necessarily a comprehensive dramatic version.  What was originally The Voyage of Eärendil became Scenes Four to Eight of the current work, with the choral narrative taking care of a lot of the missing dialogues, and telling the story at a much brisker pace.  All of the events occur as they did, but without the need for creation of non-Tolkien dialogue.

With the expansion of the scope of the story came a list of events that we could employ to fill out the narrative and close up the various loose threads of the story Paul began with Fëanor.  Círdan’s vision of Eärendil, although now being given to him by Ulmo rather than the Elder King, reminds us of how much Ulmo interferes with events, even centuries before Eärendil’s birth, to achieve his desired outcome. The other major addition to the beginnings of the story was for us to witness the ruin of Doriath; we have seen the fall of Nargothrond and Gondolin in the previous works, so it felt right that this should be there.  Paul gave me a list of sources for the two scenes in Doriath, the first a deliberate placing of Galadriel in his operatic world and a reminder about the treachery of the Sons of Fëanor (it has been two evenings since we’ve heard from them).  This was lifted almost straight out of the Grey Annals with only a few edits.  Scene Three was where we have deviated the most from the published Silmarillion in order to fit the events into the current narrative without the addition of a whole raft of characters just for one appearance.  In the version compiled by Christopher Tolkien for The Silmarillion, Thingol is murdered by dwarves in Doriath; Melian then removes her enchantments from the realm and leaves.  Their grandson Dior subsequently takes up residence until the Sons of Fëanor massacre the majority of the inhabitants with only a few escaping, including Elwing with the Silmaril.  The death of Thingol is treated very differently in the much earlier version in The Tale of the Nauglafring, where he is killed outside of the protections of Doriath (whilst out hunting) and his head is presented to Melian by the dwarves who lusted after his treasure.  This is a much more “operatic” scenario (that thankfully deals with the beheading offstage, as such things in full view of a live audience are more often than not a source of unwanted hilarity).  Still, this involved the addition of new characters and didn’t fulfil the need to get the Silmaril out of Doriath and into the hands of Elwing ready for the following narrative. 

The solution that we found for this came by combining this version of events with the ultimate end of the elven realm.  By replacing the dwarves with the already-seen sons of Fëanor, having them kill Thingol (rather than Dior) and be the ones to present his head to Melian we get to keep them as seen antagonists in this work and give them an arc to their ultimate downfall in Scene Eight.  We still had the issue of the Silmaril to deal with, though: the need to have Elwing as a refugee and be seen to have it in her possession is much neater than her suddenly having it without an explanation in Scene Five.  The answer came with a bit of sideways thinking, using the Nauglafring text again.  There Melian is having a conversation with a handmaiden just before the attack begins; by giving the handmaiden’s lines to Elwing, we get to see her in Doriath before she weds Eärendil.  The contrivance that did need to be manufactured, though, was the presence of Thingol’s Silmaril in the throne room rather than round his neck when he dies; otherwise the sons of Fëanor would have no reason to attack Doriath.  By having Melian bundle Elwing offstage with the gem in her possession, the plot hole was closed and we could witness the ultimate destruction of realm after Melian abandons it.

The Prologue was designed as a re-introduction of the Valar (who haven’t been seen since Fëanor) utilising poetry about Eärendil and Valinor that would serve as a prophecy.  Scene Nine came about as a connection from this story to the later Ages, so having the opportunity to see Sauron deceiving the Elves into creating the Rings of Power, and his forging of the “One Ring” fitted well.

The Epilogue, as previously mentioned by Paul, was problematic; but once he had settled on the poetry he wanted to use, we needed a way to visualise it on stage.  The wording of the poetry fitted well with the waning of the Elves and I mentioned to Paul that we currently have three of the Elven Ringbearers appearing in this work: Galadriel, Círdan and Elrond (although the latter has been seen only as a child).  By the time of the Epilogue though, after the Last Alliance, Elrond would be grown and bearing the ring.  So a show of solidarity between the three Ring-bearers, whilst contemplating the end of their time, seemed like a fitting end to this version of the “Silmarillion”. 

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SIMON CROSBY BUTTLE