So, The Fall of Númenor was published on Tuesday, and I stopped by the bookstore I used to work in so I could take a look. The first thing I did was admire all the Alan Lee color illustrations, which were nice (there are also dozens of pencil sketches), but as a big Second Age fangirl I was most interested in the text. And ... to put it lightly, I'm not a fan. The format is basically as indicated by the few previews that made their way out: editor Brian Sibley uses the timeline from LOTR Appendix B ("The Tale of Years") as his table of contents, and each chronologically arranged chapter consists of passages excerpted from various Tolkien works. These excerpts are of wildly varying length and style: the book continually switches between narratives, fairly dry worldbuilding description, and completely out-of-universe stuff like Tolkien's letters. The effect is not pleasant.
The "About This Book" introduction says this volume's purpose is to "provide extracts—with as few editorial interventions as possible—that illustrate in the author's own words the rich and tumultuous events of the Second Age as summarised [in] Appendix B." Sibley accomplishes that, but in focusing so strictly on fleshing out the Tale of Years, he jettisons much of the richness of the Second Age. It's also a classic example of something I've complained about before, treating the Second Age as mere fodder for backstory to LOTR rather than something with inherent worth as its own part of the legendarium. Chopping up the Second Age texts into little chunks destroys any sense of them as coherent works, and using the Tale of Years as a table of contents is pretty much the apotheosis of looking solely through the lens of LOTR.
Sibley's presentation of Aldarion and Erendis is, to me, the most egregious example. A&E is the closest thing to a Second Age novel Tolkien wrote, and while it's a crucial source of information about Númenor—I assume this is why Sibley included it despite it not appearing in the Tale of Years—it's also a psychologically astute depiction of a failing marriage, with some of Tolkien's most in-depth character writing and an unusually frank examination of the role of women in the legendarium. But presenting only excerpts, chopped up and separated by other material covering different events from the same time span, results in a lessened reading experience. This can be seen at the outset: Sibley removed the first several paragraphs of A&E, saving about a page worth of space at the cost of a naturally flowing introduction to the work. In the full story, one of our first examples of Aldarion's differences with his father is that he disliked and avoided "the north country" of Númenor, but Sibley's version fails to convey this, because he cut out the preceding statement that Aldarion's father spent much of his time in the Forostar (and, implicitly, brought his young son with him). This is a minor detail, but it exemplifies how trimming non-essential information creates something more akin to an "explainer" blog post than a work of narrative fiction.
Before the release of this volume, it seemed to me that the natural comparison was to the late 2010s editions of Beren and Lúthien and The Fall of Gondolin, which likewise gathered most if not all of the previously published material on a particular topic into a single volume for the first time. But those books, edited and with commentary by Christopher Tolkien, attempted to trace the evolution of those stories through different versions, whereas The Fall of Númenor seeks to present a more or less self-consistent picture of the Second Age that can be read and enjoyed in continuity with LOTR and the 1977 Silmarillion. I think that's a legitimate goal, but it's strange that more effort was not put into making it narratively coherent. Barring a massive amount of editorial intervention (and invention), I think this could most effectively have been done by presenting Tolkien's Second Age works more faithfully to their original forms.
Sibley is upfront in the introduction that "the definitive presentation of J.R.R. Tolkien's writings" is found in the Christopher-edited books, but surely the goal of gathering all this material in a single volume for ease of discovery need not preclude letting more or less complete texts remain intact. By comparison, I find Unfinished Tales more accessible, not less, for presenting the narrative and descriptive texts in separate chapters, and it means the reader isn't continuously jolted out of the actual stories by cutaways. Sibley did, in fact, include one major text outside this framework: "the Númenórean chapters" of The Lost Road, which appear in an appendix (sadly, The Drowning of Anadûnê did not make the cut). But this appears to be more because of that work's non-continuity with The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales than a desire to showcase Tolkien's storytelling abilities without interruption. Which is ironic, considering that non-interruption of the text is supposedly one of this book's main selling points.
I can't give a full assessment of Sibley's commentary since I only glanced through portions of the book, but I wasn't impressed by what I saw. Then again, I'm not the target audience: this is not a book for the sort of person who chafes against the description of "Tar-Calion" as Ar-Pharazôn's "Númenórean name." And that's fine! Despite the tone of this post, I'll be happy if this book brings more attention to the Second Age. I said the same thing about Beren and Lúthien and The Fall of Gondolin, which I also didn't buy, though it's not clear to me that they actually did bring more attention to those works. (Anecdotally, I have a lot of friends and fandom acquaintances who like LOTR but have never read any of Tolkien's posthumous works, or else only The Silmarillion, and I've never heard any of them mention reading the standalone editions of the Great Tales. I obviously can't say how common this truly is.) But I don't want to begrudge anyone their enjoyment of this volume if they do get something out of it.
Loremistress Emerita | she/her
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