Tolkien's Unfinished Sequel to The Lord of the Rings

j.r.r tolkien started writing a sequel to the lord of the rings he obviously never finished it but he did tell us what it was going to be about and why he never finished it let's see what he started writing and what we can learn from it about the wider world of the lord of the rings hi everyone this is robert welcome to in deep geek this video is brought to you by my wonderful patreon community from now on i'll bring you regular jrr tolkien and lord of the rings content on this channel as well as the best of other great fantasy and science fiction like a song of ice and fire and the witcher if you're interested in seeing more of that please click the subscribe button in the bottom right of your screen and the bell icon famously j.r.r tolkien started writing the hobbit after scribbling the opening line in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit on a blank page of an exam paper he was marking then proceeded to write the first draft in relatively swift time the lord of the rings was a more detailed lengthy and iterative process over many years he began thinking about the possibility of a sequel it seems sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s by just starting to write it imagining what the world would be like sometime after the end of the books and once all of the characters we know have departed in fact he started writing the story three times never getting beyond a few pages in before abandoning it the version we have which amounts to about 13 pages of prose can be found in a book called the peoples of middle earth one of christopher tolkien's wonderful collations of his father's previously unpublished works the story itself to which tolkien gave a working title of the new shadow was set 220 years after the events of the lord of the rings middle earth was then a very different world to what we saw in the lord of the rings sauron had fallen the rings of power had lost to all their power the elves had left the continent dwarves were delving deeper underground and vanishing from society humans ruled this is the dominion of man aragorn ruled the reunited kingdoms of gondor and arnold for 122 years he was wise and true to the last and was succeeded by his and aarwin's son eldarion elderion's reign was also a long one and he was also wise and good though perhaps a notch or so down on his father the story we have here happens right at the very end of his reign perhaps even causing his death we never got to that point in the plot so we'll never know 13 pages may not be a lot to go on but thankfully it does include a lot of exposition allowing us to see the outline of what the story would have been about the story is told from the point of view of borlass who was the youngest son of beragond you may not remember berrygonde but he was an important if minor character in the lord of the rings he was a soldier of gondor during the climactic battles of the return of the king he befriended pippin and it was he who prevented denathor's guards from burning faramir alive then stopped denathor from killing faramir himself before fighting side by side with pippin at the decisive battle of the in short he's quite the unheralded hero in this story bolas his son is living as an old man on the banks of the river and doing he is one of the few left in gondor who retain even a distant memory of the real evil and threat posed by sauron all around him people have forgotten growing up not knowing the reality of evil orcs are figures of fun and mockery and the century-long reign of aragorn's son has brought peace prosperity and apathy the bulk of the story of the new shadow is actually a conversation between bolas and ceylon a younger man many years earlier borlas had caught ceylon stealing an apple from his garden and told him he was doing orcs work a jibe that clearly stuck with ceylon the conversation they have as the story opens is quite meandering but bolas talks of the dark tree a sort of abstract analogy for evil saying that its roots can never be truly destroyed so will rise once more if left unwatched and untended ceylon keeps going with this discussion about evil and mentions a character named herumor who appears to be the leader of some kind of cult of those discontent under the current rule of aldarion and perhaps even harking back to darker names and leaders people have been disappearing mysteriously and something is clearly not right with the realm neither ceylon nor bolas wish to admit what they know of all this but ceylon leaves bolas with an intriguing if rather sinister invitation he will pass by bolas's house at nightfall if ballas wants to know more he is to dress all in black and follow ceylon on a journey bolas is left alone will he take ceylon up on his invitation he decides that he will not because he wants to learn more about evil but in his own words perhaps i have been preserved so long for this purpose that one should still live hail in mind who remembers what went before the great peace scent has a long memory i think i could still smell the old evil and know it for what it is resolved he goes to his house and the last we read is that suddenly he smelt it or so it seemed though it came as it were from within outwards to the sense he smelt the old evil and knew it for what it was and there tolkien finished writing what was lurking in bolas's house what was ceylon up to what would bolas have discovered if he had followed salon that night and who was heremore that mysterious figure we never even meet we will never know eventually the good guys do win it seems for we are told elsewhere that aldarion's kingdom would endure for a hundred generations but it's probably not too much of a stretch to suggest that the plot of the new shadow would have seen the end of alderion's rule tolkien had originally planned on setting the story during aragorn's reign but then changed his mind it would take place at the very end of el darion's reign instead i think the most likely reason for this change is the very premise of the plot people had forgotten about the evil of sauron and morgoth aragorn would never have let that happen nor would aarwin their son an aged ruler born after sauron's demise never knowing the fear of the shadow of mordor would be a very different prospect indeed and perhaps the plot of the new shadow would have told us about the end of alderion's reign itself it seems likely so if tolkien had an idea and he started writing it and i'm sure it would have been excellently written and well received when he finished it why didn't he finish it indeed why didn't he even ever get past the opening scene instead of speculating let's look at what he said himself in full from a letter he sent in 1964. i did begin a story placed about a hundred years after the downfall but it proved both sinister and depressing since we are dealing with men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature their quick satiety with good so that the people of gondor in times of peace justice and prosperity would become discontented and restless while the dinests descended from aragorn would become just kings and governors like denethor or worse i found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots about a center of secret satanistic religion while gondorian boys were playing at being orcs and going around doing damage i could have written a thriller about the plot and its discovery and overthrow but it would have been just that not worth doing so tolkien felt that this idea would have turned into a straightforward and rather dark thriller rather than the all-encompassing mythological history that once drove his creative art whatever you may think of that reason we have to admire his commitment to maintaining the standards and feel of his creation but what can we learn from this clearly whatever tolkien did write was what we might consider canon or semi-canon at least as he never published it it was based on and in the world he had created and adds to the meta story we have in middle earth first up we can see the geopolitical implications of what had happened in the war of the ring and afterwards with the diminishing of the non-human races and the dominion of man it took just one or two generations for the world to feel completely different for people to grow up not just not knowing about what happened during the time of the lord of the rings but not caring not thinking it was relevant to them humanity does forget quickly there's also a clear implication that this would have been a low fantasy story much in contrast to the quintessential high fantasy of the hobbit and the lord of the rings there are no elves or dragons or monstrous magical enemies just humans with legends of the past that are viewed as just that legends and in the past the story would have been less removed from our own existence and i suspect feel less universal in its mythological appeal also there's perhaps a bit of tolkien's personal philosophy coming through here the reason he abandoned this project was because he felt it irreparably too focused on humanity's satiety with good perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that a staunch catholic should hold the view that human beings are fundamentally flawed and tend to move away from good and be tempted by evil we see it in the lord of the rings as well through the device of the one ring corrupting people even isildur and bolomir if evil is not faced up to and confronted it will spread as we saw one of the key concepts in the new shadow is dark tree the concept of growing evil in middle earth a dark tree whose roots can never be fully destroyed so that evil will once again arise if the tree is left untended or unwatched when we do not actively keep watch for evil it will return tolkien would seem to suggest like when gondor slowly abandoned its duties to watch over mordor back in the third age and sometimes in order to preserve the good in the world we need to step out of the shire with hope in our hearts and journey to the darkest places whatever the cost dark tree is very clearly being placed here as an opposite to the white tree of gondor which stands for renewal and hope and goodness but conceptually it is perhaps also an embodiment of the quote attributed to edmund burke that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing tolkien went to great pains to ensure his work was not close to being an allegory with one clear interpretation but applicable to many people in many situations and although we shouldn't assume that this early draft would have stayed unchanged perhaps this was at the heart of his decision not to proceed with the new shadow it would have been very obvious what the point was that tolkien was trying to make through his story the new shadow was focused on the flawed nature of humanity the entire plot appears to be based on this premise and that's not what tolkien wanted from his creation he may have believed the fallibility of humanity personally but he was constantly wary of projecting his own views onto his creation just read his forward to the lord of the rings he recognized that he couldn't ever truly eliminate his personal biases and upbringing none of us ever can but he didn't want his fiction to be just him telling us what he thought it was supposed to be for everyone a story not a sermon making his sequel to the lord of the rings about humanity's tendency to grow bored of good made it feel very straightforward to his nuanced mind when he talks of not wanting to write a thriller it wasn't him thinking of it as a genre he disliked so much as a set of walls boxing in his creation it would have been a self-contained story relying on suspense excitement plot twists and so on which might have been fun to read but it wouldn't have been a broad sprawling epic like the lord of the rings tolkien had no interest in just writing a good fun story his aim was always much much higher than that and that is why he never could finish that sequel to the lord of the rings if you'd like to see more videos on the world of jrr tolkien and the lord of the rings please click on the link to the playlist on the left of your screen or if you'd like to support this channel or get access to some content i produced just for my patrons please click on the link to my patreon page on the right of the screen thanks for watching that's all for this time and i'll see you again soon

Channel: In Deep Geek

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Keywords: in deep geek, deep geek, lord of the rings, the lord of the rings, lotr, tolkien, jrr tolkien, the new shadow, lord of the rings sequel, new shadow, after lord of the rings and hobbit, after lord of the rings, after the lord of the rings, sequel, silmarillion, jrr tolkien the new shadow, tolkien the new shadow text, tolkien the new shadow

Id: QNId0pPkX28

Length: 14min 24sec (864 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 27 2020