Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published Silmarillion (Book Review)

ARDA RECONSTRUCTED: THE CREATION OF THE PUBLISHED SILMARILLION. Douglas Charles Kane. Bethlehem (PA): Lehigh University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0980149630. Hardcover. 280pp. $65.00. W.H. AUDEN, TOLKIEN'S DEDICATED ADVOCATE and one-time student, once wrote that "The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living" (93). Auden was thinking of Yeats in these lines, not Tolkien, but they describe very well the situation Tolkien's readers face today: attempting to digest an enormous (and still growing) body of Tolkien's posthumous writings, with new works continuing to appear nearly forty years after the author's death. Douglas Kane's Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published Silmarillion is one particular attempt, in which the author seeks to digest a wide range of these texts, to sample the complex flavors of their interrelationship(s), and to chew on the role Tolkien's son, Christopher, played in making them more palatable to a larger audience. In Arda Reconstructed, then, Kane explores how Tolkien's words were "modified" in Christopher's "guts," and in the process reveals how they have been "modified" in his own as well.