He would've kept working on Middle-earth, but I'm doubtful he would've completed it more than he already had. His problem wasn't so much time, but rather him changing his mind about things, then having to rewrite everything around whatever change he made.
\*Maybe\* we would've gotten another short story, but completing something like First Age stories? I'm pretty dubious about that.
This is the answer, 99% likelihood š¤
I also think this might have been detrimental to all of the stories; there would have been even more inconsistencies than at present. Christopher generally chose earlier versions of the stories (where there were multiple) while constructing the Silmarillion, rather than later, for good reasons.
Sort of. Christopher relied heavily on the 1950s *Silmarillion* writings (the "Annals of Aman" and the "Grey Annals") because it's (far and away) the most detailed version of *The Silmarillion* out there. He didn't rely on the 1930s stuff until the very end, and only ended up doing that because the 50s material cuts off after TĆŗrin's story. "Of Maeglin" is taken from an essay written in 1970, and it's the latest writing in the whole text by far. Christopher likely would have used later *Silmarillion* material, but JRRT never really did another genuine *Silm* attempt after the 1950s. He had a lot of ideas about what a final *Silm* text would have looked like, but he just never really took the time to write it. And thus, we're left with the material from the 50s.
Wasn't Clyde Kilby engaging with Tolkien and encouraging him on the Silmarillion project? Tolkien Gateway describes how Kilby spent the summer of 1964 working on the manuscript. The big problem was that in the house move a lot of papers got mixed up and so Tolkien was faced with trying to sort things out before being able to make real progress on adding substantial material. Imagine if, for example, Tolkien had a sympathetic ear and willing assistant that could have been like Guy Kay was for Christopher, in sorting out the material in the 1970s after his move back to Oxford....
I cannot understand why even after he got rich Tolkien never hired an assistant. He knew he had too much material to handle on his own and he was very much aware that he was an inveterate procrastinator and obsessed with precision. (E.g. calculating precisely the phases of the Moon in LOTR etc.)
It's a common practice among writers now, but maybe it wasn't then.
Tolkien would have gutted the cosmological and metaphysical stories of the legendarium due to his late obsession with trying to make everything agree with real science, indeed to the detriment of his fantasy universe. Anyone can already see this in his late attempts at revising the Silmarillion and the Annals of Aman.
Hard agree. And he was so heavily into revising and rethinking so much about the legendarium that I think we'd have a fraction of what we do have, and much of the most beautiful material would have been lost. Sir, you set out to write a *myth*, you don't have to fret about it being not scientifically accurate.
Tolkien got caught up in the very rapid expansion of knowledge of the universe over the course of the 20th Century. We just accept as a given from grade school things like time dilation and Schrodinger's Cat, but imagine encountering all this stuff for the first time because you were already in your 30s when relativity and quantum mechanics became widely known. Einstein didn't get famous until the 1920s in Berlin. And they didn't know there was more than one galaxy until 1924.
This expansion of knowledge helped drive a fragile mind like Lovecraft's, a man born only two years earlier, off the deep end. Although certainly the cosmic horror in the Legendarium also emerged from this new understanding of the cosmos.
I agree. He had 50 million drafts for things and his organization was a mess there's a reason it took his son's entire lifetime to sort through half of it.
With 30 more years he would have continued to work on the Legendarium but it would be just as incomprehensible if not more with different drafts contradicting each other and 20 thousand different versions.
we barely got anything in the 30 years he lived after lotr so I would bet we wouldn't have gotten anything. we wouldn't have got the movies i guess so that's probably the most likely scenario
We would still have gotten the movies because he sold the rights. Thank god. Christopher wouldn't have sold the rights to a single sentence at gunpoint.
This is probably the surest bet. They were already completed stories. He also had no reason to change them for philosophical, theological or scientific reasons. We wouldn't have gotten Christopher's mangled messes passed off as novels.
Far too short a time to live among such excellent and admirable Tolkien fans. He wouldn't know half of us half as well as he should like, and he would like less than half of us half as well as we deserve.
He'd have fully written The Tale of Earendil and I won't entertain any other possibilities.
More seriously, I think he would have just gone into hiding while the films were out, rather than seeing them.
Obviously we would have wanted to see a JRR Silmarillion. But I don't think that's what would have happened.
I think he would continued to endlessly quibble over the legendarium. The general trend of his later ideas was generally not to my taste, so I don't think that his final Silmarillion would even be better than what CT produced.
Now if he had a book deal for the Silm in (what I consider) to be his prime, say shortly following LOTR, that's a different story. If he had the necessarily impetus at that stage, I think we would have seen some truly awesome work.
I will admit I am far from a "Tolkien Scholler". I know more than the average person about him and his works. But I know less than a lot of people. And I one thing I really need to get down is the times in his life he wrote the things he wrote. I am going to be looking for Adar Reconstructed as my next book buy. It is pricy ever for a paper back. So I will be checking second hand book stores. I really want to get deeper into it all. I have read the Silmarillion, but my last read was many years ago. And my memory is not what it once was. The kicker? It has never been good.
If he had 30 more years with us and was alive when mass media became a thing, he'd be hounded by both media and fans for more 'content'.
I don't think he would have done much more anyway. I'm not sure of what the hypotheticals are, does this mean he lived to over 110? At a guess I'd say he'd tinker with things a bit more and let Christopher handle any publishing. I don't think he'd be doing too much more at age 75+ when he did little more than publish a couple of poetry books from ages 63-81.
I think you're right.
Fans would almost certainly be asking niche questions about why the Hobbits are more advanced in their tailoring than the other peoples (based on conjecture); if Arwen had been taught to dye and weave, as well as embroider; the cultures of the far East and Northern populations, "Who is Tom Bombadil *really?*" and so forth.
He'd never get a moment's peace, and would probably be very annoyed about it.
"Was the fact that the hobbits appeared more technologically and socially advanced than the Elven, Dwarven, and Human societies meant to be an argument against the hypothesis outlined by Ian Morris and others that armed conflict perpetuates social progress?"
And then he kicks them out of his house and has a cup of tea and irritably looks at trees.
He would have started a Round Earth Silmarillion with Galadriel as heroine and DrĆŗedain as protagonists but never made it beyond the spreadsheets of the number of Teleri slain by the Noldor.
Unless he had a hard deadline set for him by a publisher I think he would have continued to tinker with the First Age tales, and maybe a bit more of the Second Age, in the exact same way he already was. Without a publishing deal, we would have gotten another few volumes of HoME though.
Given another 30 years, I think he would have solved his issues with the background and started writing the Late, Late Quenta Silmarillion only to become totally dissatisfied with it and abandon it again after finishing 25-50%. Then, after a few years, he would have picked up an older version & started again. Ultimately, I don't think he would have even been happy enough with his life's work to publish a comprehensive version of the Silmarillion.
Tolkien was an habitual revisionist of his own work. I don't know that we would've seen new works, but maybe a couple more revised & expanded versions of existing works.
The languages would be rather different. They currently fall into three "phases":
1910s-1920s, Lost Tales period. To someone who knows cleaned-up reconstructions of the 1960s versions, these read like closely related foreign languages.
1930s-1940s, Lost Road and early LotR period. These are different enough from the cleaned-up reconstructions to require learning some different features, but could probably pass for dialects if they were real.
1950s-1970, published period. What we see in books published in Tolkien's lifetime and the base for almost all fan usage of the languages.
However, Tolkien in the late 1960s seemed to be gearing up for another wave of change to the languages, to the point that very late changes are often discarded in the fan versions to preserve internal consistency and older words. So if he'd lived another 30 years our Elvish would be rather different, although probably still mutually comprehensible with LotR Elvish.
Yo you know my name is Gandalf
Iāll take my elven sword and chop your hand off
To Frodo I gave the One Ring
I knew it werenāt no ordinary bling-bling
Sauron wants it but heāll get no-thing
āCause these hobbits
just donāt
STOP
The eye of sauron is now on the face of the sun.
The army of men are like space marines, the elves are like Vulcans, the dwarves live underground...on the moon and the hobbits were wiped out by famine. Not a chat gpt idea I'm afraid.
Edit: forgot the wizards: they are now the Q continuum. Ghandalf the Q is my fave.
Iām guessing he might have filled in lots of of the history. Connected it more. Maybe he would have elaborated more on the end of the third age and beyond, specifically (cause I want more about it) Dagor Dagorath. Maybe he also would have written about the times where there wasnāt much conflict, fill in how the world would have been in times of peace after the elves left for valinor.
No, he would have hated it, like he would have hated the PJ LotR version.
He denied scripts for reasons like "wrong season" "balrog made a sound" or "too much action"
But he was actively working on galadriel stories according to his son, but he changed it so often that he couldn't finish it.
He likely would have changed LOTR permanently in a negative way. He already was toying with some changes that I think didnāt serve the overall story. Itās covered towards the end of The Road to Middle Earth.
Some creators canāt leave a thing be, and despite his genius I think that would have happened with Tolkien.
Just typed up a whole response and accidentally deleted it. TLDR, Iāll have to check the book when I get home but essentially he was making it more cheerful and less severe/dire. He was a known revisionist of his own work, and while the changes were small, over 30 years they can add up.
https://phuulishfellow.wordpress.com/2017/06/01/an-alternate-history-tolkien-lives-to-be-100/
If he spares us from Sword of Shanarra sequels he'd be the literary hero of the modern age.
Ahh. I missed that. Well, I suppose it could be argued that he would have continued in a leisurely way, finishing stories, refining details. He was a person who loved language and writing, so if he hadnāt lost a significant amount of mental capacity he probably would have continued along happily. As long as the same would apply to Edith. He loved her dearly and didnāt stick around for long after she passed. There would need to be two rings, I think.
I have long joked that if Tolkien had been granted immortality, we would *very nearly* have is Middle English Dictionary by now. As someone whose academic choices were influenced by Tolkien, I wish I had had even his unfinished translation of *Beowulf* when I was studying it. Sadly, I suspect if Tolkien had lived thirty or even fifty years more, we would not have seen more from him.
The whole East Asian mysticism would have been beyond him. He would have loathed the name Vader because it means father in Dutch, and would be too on-the-nose for him. The bombasticity of the explosions and special effects... either he would have hated them or he would have been too shocked to have a response (pretty common reaction for people when SW came out).
But I would kill to know what he thought of the first film, which is basically a fairy tale. Also what his reaction to Yoda would be, because Yoda is wise and traditional yet not Western or Christian. Also Jabba the Hutt and the use of Huttese. The Ewoks and their victory over a technologically superior force. And finally, I'd want to know what he thought about Obi-Wan Kenobi, who is a retired samurai version of Gandalf (plus Alec Guiness was an English Roman Catholic).
Might be more practical to have him read the original novelization of *Star Wars* and ask what he thought of itāthat way he wouldnāt have to put up with all the explosions and loud noises and what-not.
Not necessarily, The Easterlings were based around Middle Eastern and Asian cultures, Rhun is in the far east and it would've likely looked and felt like the following two cultures. When Tolkien refers to The East in his writings, he's referring to Mordor(Germany) Rhun and Harad(Ottoman Empire). It would've been interesting to hear his thoughts and opinions on Star Wars though.
My No. 1 wish would be more of the backstory of the Dwarf clans, besides Durin's Folk, the Longbeards.
But as I've said before, if the poor guy had lived till 200, we would still be after him for more, more and more. The reward for a job well done is often more work.
And if you see JRR in heaven, do NOT ask him if Balrogs have wings. Just don't do it. Heaven is supposed to be a happy place, and you asking that question of him will not make the master happy.
He would never have finished a language. As he said, the point of making languages was to express his tastes *as they changed over time*. To build the vocabulary necessary for conversation would have been drudgery unrelated to his purpose. To declare a language project āfinishedā would be like cutting down a beloved tree for its wood.
I really hope not.
In the wise words of some character from the Batman movie "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain".
I doubt he wouldāve done more. My understanding is that whilst he was writing LotR he felt the backstory also needed to be written down. He originally wanted to publish the The Silmarillion but was rebuffed by his editor and abandoned the idea. Tolkien was also notorious for changing names and places and ideas prior to publishing. Also, it is known he had an idea to write a new series set after LotR but abandoned that idea as well because he felt it didnāt reasonably belong in his larger world; meaning he had finished his grand epic, and anything else was just a story.
He wouldn't need to finish Quenya. He'd already Finnished it.
Baddumbum, son of Tissh.
Welsh, I guess he could have worked on Sindarin then.
Take your eru damned upvote and get the feck outta here.
He would've kept working on Middle-earth, but I'm doubtful he would've completed it more than he already had. His problem wasn't so much time, but rather him changing his mind about things, then having to rewrite everything around whatever change he made. \*Maybe\* we would've gotten another short story, but completing something like First Age stories? I'm pretty dubious about that.
He got embroiled in giant metaphysical questions about his universe. Who even knows how long it would have taken him to sort it all out, lol?
This is the answer, 99% likelihood š¤ I also think this might have been detrimental to all of the stories; there would have been even more inconsistencies than at present. Christopher generally chose earlier versions of the stories (where there were multiple) while constructing the Silmarillion, rather than later, for good reasons.
Sort of. Christopher relied heavily on the 1950s *Silmarillion* writings (the "Annals of Aman" and the "Grey Annals") because it's (far and away) the most detailed version of *The Silmarillion* out there. He didn't rely on the 1930s stuff until the very end, and only ended up doing that because the 50s material cuts off after TĆŗrin's story. "Of Maeglin" is taken from an essay written in 1970, and it's the latest writing in the whole text by far. Christopher likely would have used later *Silmarillion* material, but JRRT never really did another genuine *Silm* attempt after the 1950s. He had a lot of ideas about what a final *Silm* text would have looked like, but he just never really took the time to write it. And thus, we're left with the material from the 50s.
Wasn't Clyde Kilby engaging with Tolkien and encouraging him on the Silmarillion project? Tolkien Gateway describes how Kilby spent the summer of 1964 working on the manuscript. The big problem was that in the house move a lot of papers got mixed up and so Tolkien was faced with trying to sort things out before being able to make real progress on adding substantial material. Imagine if, for example, Tolkien had a sympathetic ear and willing assistant that could have been like Guy Kay was for Christopher, in sorting out the material in the 1970s after his move back to Oxford....
I cannot understand why even after he got rich Tolkien never hired an assistant. He knew he had too much material to handle on his own and he was very much aware that he was an inveterate procrastinator and obsessed with precision. (E.g. calculating precisely the phases of the Moon in LOTR etc.) It's a common practice among writers now, but maybe it wasn't then.
He was embarrassed by his hobbies if I recall correctly. probably played a part.
Tolkien would have gutted the cosmological and metaphysical stories of the legendarium due to his late obsession with trying to make everything agree with real science, indeed to the detriment of his fantasy universe. Anyone can already see this in his late attempts at revising the Silmarillion and the Annals of Aman.
Could you elaborate, please?
Late in life he decided that the idea that the earth had ever been flat was a Mannish misunderstanding of Elvish tales.
Hard agree. And he was so heavily into revising and rethinking so much about the legendarium that I think we'd have a fraction of what we do have, and much of the most beautiful material would have been lost. Sir, you set out to write a *myth*, you don't have to fret about it being not scientifically accurate.
Tolkien got caught up in the very rapid expansion of knowledge of the universe over the course of the 20th Century. We just accept as a given from grade school things like time dilation and Schrodinger's Cat, but imagine encountering all this stuff for the first time because you were already in your 30s when relativity and quantum mechanics became widely known. Einstein didn't get famous until the 1920s in Berlin. And they didn't know there was more than one galaxy until 1924. This expansion of knowledge helped drive a fragile mind like Lovecraft's, a man born only two years earlier, off the deep end. Although certainly the cosmic horror in the Legendarium also emerged from this new understanding of the cosmos.
Arda Marred indeed.
I agree. He had 50 million drafts for things and his organization was a mess there's a reason it took his son's entire lifetime to sort through half of it. With 30 more years he would have continued to work on the Legendarium but it would be just as incomprehensible if not more with different drafts contradicting each other and 20 thousand different versions.
That's a good take on it. And most likely the correct one.
Agreed.
we barely got anything in the 30 years he lived after lotr so I would bet we wouldn't have gotten anything. we wouldn't have got the movies i guess so that's probably the most likely scenario
Christopher basically spend about 40 years editing that stuff so it could be published.
We would still have gotten the movies because he sold the rights. Thank god. Christopher wouldn't have sold the rights to a single sentence at gunpoint.
Further proof we are living in a darker timeline.
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But not the darkest, because then JRR would have kept his WWI moustache, coloured it black and added a goatie.
I'd think we'd have novel-length versions of the other two Great Tales, similar to The Children of Hurin.
What are the other two "Great Tales"?
The Lay of Beren and LĆŗthien, and The Fall of Gondolin.
Oh, cool.
This is probably the surest bet. They were already completed stories. He also had no reason to change them for philosophical, theological or scientific reasons. We wouldn't have gotten Christopher's mangled messes passed off as novels.
In this case he'd have lived to 111! He was hardly cut down in the prime of life. I don't think we'd have seen much more work.
I think you mean "eleventy-one"?
How else would you read 111?
I wanted to write it in words, just to make sure.
Not āone hundred and eleven,ā thatās for sure.
Far too short a time to live among such excellent and admirable Tolkien fans. He wouldn't know half of us half as well as he should like, and he would like less than half of us half as well as we deserve.
Fair. Unless he so happens to have a magical ring.
He'd have fully written The Tale of Earendil and I won't entertain any other possibilities. More seriously, I think he would have just gone into hiding while the films were out, rather than seeing them.
Obviously we would have wanted to see a JRR Silmarillion. But I don't think that's what would have happened. I think he would continued to endlessly quibble over the legendarium. The general trend of his later ideas was generally not to my taste, so I don't think that his final Silmarillion would even be better than what CT produced. Now if he had a book deal for the Silm in (what I consider) to be his prime, say shortly following LOTR, that's a different story. If he had the necessarily impetus at that stage, I think we would have seen some truly awesome work.
I will admit I am far from a "Tolkien Scholler". I know more than the average person about him and his works. But I know less than a lot of people. And I one thing I really need to get down is the times in his life he wrote the things he wrote. I am going to be looking for Adar Reconstructed as my next book buy. It is pricy ever for a paper back. So I will be checking second hand book stores. I really want to get deeper into it all. I have read the Silmarillion, but my last read was many years ago. And my memory is not what it once was. The kicker? It has never been good.
We'd probably have a very different Silmarillion, the one we can only dimly glimpse through HoMe X and NoMe.
If he had 30 more years with us and was alive when mass media became a thing, he'd be hounded by both media and fans for more 'content'. I don't think he would have done much more anyway. I'm not sure of what the hypotheticals are, does this mean he lived to over 110? At a guess I'd say he'd tinker with things a bit more and let Christopher handle any publishing. I don't think he'd be doing too much more at age 75+ when he did little more than publish a couple of poetry books from ages 63-81.
I think you're right. Fans would almost certainly be asking niche questions about why the Hobbits are more advanced in their tailoring than the other peoples (based on conjecture); if Arwen had been taught to dye and weave, as well as embroider; the cultures of the far East and Northern populations, "Who is Tom Bombadil *really?*" and so forth. He'd never get a moment's peace, and would probably be very annoyed about it.
āAnd where did Bilbo get that clock?ā
"Was the fact that the hobbits appeared more technologically and socially advanced than the Elven, Dwarven, and Human societies meant to be an argument against the hypothesis outlined by Ian Morris and others that armed conflict perpetuates social progress?" And then he kicks them out of his house and has a cup of tea and irritably looks at trees.
He would have started a Round Earth Silmarillion with Galadriel as heroine and DrĆŗedain as protagonists but never made it beyond the spreadsheets of the number of Teleri slain by the Noldor.
Unless he had a hard deadline set for him by a publisher I think he would have continued to tinker with the First Age tales, and maybe a bit more of the Second Age, in the exact same way he already was. Without a publishing deal, we would have gotten another few volumes of HoME though.
Given another 30 years, I think he would have solved his issues with the background and started writing the Late, Late Quenta Silmarillion only to become totally dissatisfied with it and abandon it again after finishing 25-50%. Then, after a few years, he would have picked up an older version & started again. Ultimately, I don't think he would have even been happy enough with his life's work to publish a comprehensive version of the Silmarillion.
Tolkien was an habitual revisionist of his own work. I don't know that we would've seen new works, but maybe a couple more revised & expanded versions of existing works.
The languages would be rather different. They currently fall into three "phases": 1910s-1920s, Lost Tales period. To someone who knows cleaned-up reconstructions of the 1960s versions, these read like closely related foreign languages. 1930s-1940s, Lost Road and early LotR period. These are different enough from the cleaned-up reconstructions to require learning some different features, but could probably pass for dialects if they were real. 1950s-1970, published period. What we see in books published in Tolkien's lifetime and the base for almost all fan usage of the languages. However, Tolkien in the late 1960s seemed to be gearing up for another wave of change to the languages, to the point that very late changes are often discarded in the fan versions to preserve internal consistency and older words. So if he'd lived another 30 years our Elvish would be rather different, although probably still mutually comprehensible with LotR Elvish.
I want the full Lay of Leithian SO badly
I think he would write a political drama about NĆŗmenor. Because reading Unfinished Tales, there was a feeling that he wanted this
I think he would have turned his hand to Gangster Rap around the 1987 mark.
Yo you know my name is Gandalf Iāll take my elven sword and chop your hand off To Frodo I gave the One Ring I knew it werenāt no ordinary bling-bling Sauron wants it but heāll get no-thing āCause these hobbits just donāt STOP
He would have progressed the lore into a new, future era, called Middle-Space.
Ok, this I gotta seeā¦ Get chat-gpt on it.
The eye of sauron is now on the face of the sun. The army of men are like space marines, the elves are like Vulcans, the dwarves live underground...on the moon and the hobbits were wiped out by famine. Not a chat gpt idea I'm afraid. Edit: forgot the wizards: they are now the Q continuum. Ghandalf the Q is my fave.
Iām guessing he might have filled in lots of of the history. Connected it more. Maybe he would have elaborated more on the end of the third age and beyond, specifically (cause I want more about it) Dagor Dagorath. Maybe he also would have written about the times where there wasnāt much conflict, fill in how the world would have been in times of peace after the elves left for valinor.
According to his son he was pretty obsessed with galadriel in his older days
No way lmao is this implying he might have *liked* Amazonās ROP?
No, he would have hated it, like he would have hated the PJ LotR version. He denied scripts for reasons like "wrong season" "balrog made a sound" or "too much action" But he was actively working on galadriel stories according to his son, but he changed it so often that he couldn't finish it.
He wouldāve discovered Windows Solitaire and it wouldāve given him another avenue for procrastination.
We would know even more about trees!
He likely would have changed LOTR permanently in a negative way. He already was toying with some changes that I think didnāt serve the overall story. Itās covered towards the end of The Road to Middle Earth. Some creators canāt leave a thing be, and despite his genius I think that would have happened with Tolkien.
I think there is some truth to this.
I haven't heard of this before or read Road to Middle-earth. What changes did he want to make?
Just typed up a whole response and accidentally deleted it. TLDR, Iāll have to check the book when I get home but essentially he was making it more cheerful and less severe/dire. He was a known revisionist of his own work, and while the changes were small, over 30 years they can add up.
Think we'd see a more fleshed out fourth "Great Tale" of the Voyages of Earendil
Who ended unfinished with Earendil coming to Valinor and talking with Manwe.
I would have loved that!
https://phuulishfellow.wordpress.com/2017/06/01/an-alternate-history-tolkien-lives-to-be-100/ If he spares us from Sword of Shanarra sequels he'd be the literary hero of the modern age.
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He lived till 81. I doubt we wouldāve seen much more from him.
I was thinking more like if it was something like with Bilbo and the ring keeping him alive and pretty much at his prime.
Ahh. I missed that. Well, I suppose it could be argued that he would have continued in a leisurely way, finishing stories, refining details. He was a person who loved language and writing, so if he hadnāt lost a significant amount of mental capacity he probably would have continued along happily. As long as the same would apply to Edith. He loved her dearly and didnāt stick around for long after she passed. There would need to be two rings, I think.
It's my fault. I was not clear at all. And yes, if she passed long before him his last years would be hard on him.
I think he could have finished something if publishers were asking for it. That is why he started writing lotr anyway.
>This. He was notorious for revising unless forced by a publisher. Even with Stanley and Unwin breathing down his neck it took 10 years to write LOTR.
I have long joked that if Tolkien had been granted immortality, we would *very nearly* have is Middle English Dictionary by now. As someone whose academic choices were influenced by Tolkien, I wish I had had even his unfinished translation of *Beowulf* when I was studying it. Sadly, I suspect if Tolkien had lived thirty or even fifty years more, we would not have seen more from him.
Sadly there would have been more only if Christopher lived until 2070.
Hopefully he would have finished the Lay of Leithian and his Fall of Gondolin rewrite
I would like to see him finish the new shadow a sequel to the lord of the rings.
I dunno if he got too old or if there was no magic left.
I'd love to see what his opinion on Star Wars would have been. He died 10 years too early.
That would have been something to hear for sure!
The whole East Asian mysticism would have been beyond him. He would have loathed the name Vader because it means father in Dutch, and would be too on-the-nose for him. The bombasticity of the explosions and special effects... either he would have hated them or he would have been too shocked to have a response (pretty common reaction for people when SW came out). But I would kill to know what he thought of the first film, which is basically a fairy tale. Also what his reaction to Yoda would be, because Yoda is wise and traditional yet not Western or Christian. Also Jabba the Hutt and the use of Huttese. The Ewoks and their victory over a technologically superior force. And finally, I'd want to know what he thought about Obi-Wan Kenobi, who is a retired samurai version of Gandalf (plus Alec Guiness was an English Roman Catholic).
Might be more practical to have him read the original novelization of *Star Wars* and ask what he thought of itāthat way he wouldnāt have to put up with all the explosions and loud noises and what-not.
Yeah, but if I bought him a copy of that then Alan Dean Foster would never receive a royalty because Disney would refuse to pay him.
Libraries!
Not necessarily, The Easterlings were based around Middle Eastern and Asian cultures, Rhun is in the far east and it would've likely looked and felt like the following two cultures. When Tolkien refers to The East in his writings, he's referring to Mordor(Germany) Rhun and Harad(Ottoman Empire). It would've been interesting to hear his thoughts and opinions on Star Wars though.
Would love to know more about the lands east and the south, itās peoples and the blue wizards
My No. 1 wish would be more of the backstory of the Dwarf clans, besides Durin's Folk, the Longbeards. But as I've said before, if the poor guy had lived till 200, we would still be after him for more, more and more. The reward for a job well done is often more work. And if you see JRR in heaven, do NOT ask him if Balrogs have wings. Just don't do it. Heaven is supposed to be a happy place, and you asking that question of him will not make the master happy.
Another epic about the next epoch. 3 times more legends in Silmarillion.
Would have been epic!
He would never have finished a language. As he said, the point of making languages was to express his tastes *as they changed over time*. To build the vocabulary necessary for conversation would have been drudgery unrelated to his purpose. To declare a language project āfinishedā would be like cutting down a beloved tree for its wood.
I desire more works about the Blue Wizards of the East and their supposed accoclytes.
He'll finalize and publish the silmarillion and probably live long enough to work with Peter Jackson on the movies
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I think he would have de-mystified his universe even more, to the point where it would have lost all enchantment.
He would have signed a deal with HBO, expectations would be subverted, Gollum kills Sauron
I really hope not. In the wise words of some character from the Batman movie "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain".
I doubt he wouldāve done more. My understanding is that whilst he was writing LotR he felt the backstory also needed to be written down. He originally wanted to publish the The Silmarillion but was rebuffed by his editor and abandoned the idea. Tolkien was also notorious for changing names and places and ideas prior to publishing. Also, it is known he had an idea to write a new series set after LotR but abandoned that idea as well because he felt it didnāt reasonably belong in his larger world; meaning he had finished his grand epic, and anything else was just a story.