It is one of the most studied books in modern history. The Silmarillion was to be J.R.R. Tolkien's magnum opus. Instead, it turned out to be the unfulfilled promise of his great writing career. A new article in the Wall Street Journal offers at least a partial explanation of why Tolkien could not finish the work that many scholars agree would have been the crowning achievement of his lifetime.

In a 1992 interview for the JRRT centennial video, Christopher Tolkien said: "[The Silmarillion] had simply become too big...he was too tired. Too old, too tired."

He was probably much closer to the truth than people realized, according to Johah Lehrer, who writes in Fleeting Youth, Fading Creativity that poets reach their peak creativity before novelists, and scientists often peak in their 20s and 30s.

Tolkien was a poet, scientist, and novelist all wrapped up into one man's mind. Drawing on research Dean Simonton and Adolphe Quetelet, the Lehrer article recaps how creative individuals often realize their greatest achievements relatively early in life. A few exceptions, such as Thomas Hardy, change course and peak in creativity a second time or later in life.

Tolkien first attempted to construct a coherent mythical cycle during his early 20s when he nearly completed The Book of Lost Tales, his mythology for England. For reasons we'll never fully be sure of, however, he lost steam and in fact switched modes. By the age of 26 Tolkien had written some epic-length poems ("Lay of Leithian" and "The Lay of the Children of Hurin"), the like of which he never composed again.

At this stage in his career Tolkien returned to writing prose fiction but his energies were divided between creating a literary epic he self-styled The Silmarillion and various children's fantasy stories. Roverandom, The Father Christmas Letters, and The Hobbit came out of these years, followed by Mr. Bliss, Smith of Wootton Major, and Farmer Giles of Ham.

Of course, Tolkien's passion for linguistic studies pervaded all of his fiction and poetry. The Silmarillion, enlightened by Tolkien's philological roots, invariably crept into every story he turned his thoughts to. The ancient forgotten world of Elves and heroic Men wanted to be heard and seen.

Very much like Einstein's pursuit of a unified theorem for physics, Tolkien spent almost his entire adult life trying to tell the stories of The Silmarillion. His attempts became sidetracked, diverted by necessity, other interests, and demands from his publishers. Had George Allen & Unwin not asked for a sequel to The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings most likely would never have been written.

Adolphe Quetelet's research into the creativity of French and English playwrights revealed that the writers were most productive between the ages of 25 and 50. Tolkien had finished the primary text for The Lord of the Rings by Autumn 1948, when he was 56. Over the next few years he tidied up the prose and added the appendices but the bulk of the work was completed by 1952, when he turned 60.

The energy of his youth was mostly spent, and though Tolkien worked on Middle-earth stories for the next 20 years he only published one more book, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. He might have been developing a companion volume for The Lord of the Rings during the late 1950s and through the middle 1960s, of which the surviving texts Christopher Tolkien published in Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth.

The Silmarillion itself languished despite numerous attempts to annotate outdated versions of the story in preparation for a new attempt to tell it. The old fires took a very long time to die but they were outshone by the sparks they cast across the literary world. In the last year of his life Tolkien had begun pondering tossing out the entire cycle and starting over, much to the dismay of many of his followers (when we learned as much from post-humous books).

I think that Tolkien's own predilection for introspective discovery played the largest role in undermining his efforts to produce a finished Silmarillion. But it could very well be that the core work, completed in the 1930s, was as good as it could ever get simply because -- like Fëanor, who could only make the Silmarils once -- he spent that part of his spirit already that was destined to produce The Silmarillion.

Maybe if he had not turned his thought to hobbits and the final departure of the Eldar from Middle-earth JRRT might have wound down his epic history. But would it have found a publisher at all? Would it have become anything more than a footnote in the history of fantasy literature?

It may be that only through the lens of The Lord of the Rings could we ever hope to see The Silmarillion as its author thought it should be seen: distant, far-off, compelling, and resounding with the echoes of lost ages.

What new research suggests, however, is that those ages are the lost ages of youth's creativity, and to those faintly remembered, enchanting shores the talented Mr. Tolkien was doomed never to sail again, despite his endless quests and voyages on the seas of imagination to catch one last glimpse of Valinor.

The limits of human capability determined that it could not get any better than it is, because Tolkien had already given The Silmarillion all that he had to give it.

Washington College in Maryland has just bestowed tenure upon Dr. Corey Olson, the author of the esteemed (well, I never heard of it before today but now it's officially esteemed) Website The Tolkien Professor. In his own words, Dr. Olson tells visitors to his site:

I have become increasingly frustrated with the separation between academics and general readers, and I am determined to come out of the cloister and spend my own career sharing my scholarly work with the public.

The site includes a section with Tolkien Lectures and a discussion board (the forum is actually located on a third-party service -- I just like the layout of Dr. Olson's site).

Although discussion seems a bit sparse at the moment, this is one of the few Tolkien discussion groups led by a Tolkien academic. The others I am aware of are led by linguists, so Dr. Olson may be the first Tolkien academic to set up a general Tolkien discussion forum.

You can read more about the tenure announcements from Washington College here. Dr. Olson is one of a group of 25 professors to be granted tenure, the largest group in the university's history. You'll see one other interesting datum about the good doctor in the article.

Congratulations to Dr. Olson. I think this is a milestone in Tolkien Studies, although others may not agree with me.

Fans of Middle-earth Talk Radio will be pleased to know that episodes 18 and 19 are available for download.

Middle-earth Talk Radio Episode 18
This show was recorded back on October 26th.
Middle-earth Talk Radio Show 18
Duration: 30 minutes.
Filesize: 41.3 MB (48,287,464 bytes)
Download Here:
Middle-earth Talk Radio Episode 18

Contents
Opening Music:
Ad dios - The Old Forest
http://www.addios.se/
Topics Discussed:
The worst Middle-earth Talk Radio Show to date?
The Hobbit as produced by Théâtre Sans Fil: "Theater without strings"..
Hilary Tolkien, following in his brother's footsteps, posthumously
publishing "Wheelbarrows At Dawn - The Lost Box of Tolkien Memories"
(working title).
Hobbit Plays currently popular in various venues, schools, etc.
Festival in Wales
Secondary Art
The "Elven Light Foot" (Legolas walking on snow), subcreational
faculties.
Poll available to vote for your favorite songs for Middle-earth Talk
Radio Show Theme Songs

Middle-earth Radio episode 19
Hobbit inspired house
Middle-earth Radio Talk Show 19
(2009-12-20)
Duration: 48:37 minutes
Filesize: 66.8 MB (70,009,474 bytes)
Download:
Middle-earth Radio Episode 19

Hardly a month goes by where someone doesn't send me a Balrog Wings Debate email. A great deal of propaganda and misinformation has been passed around the Internet for years concerning Balrogs, fantasy creatures about which Tolkien wrote very little.

Some really bad analyses of Balrogs dip into stories from The Book of Lost Tales with virtually no regard for the fact that the Balrogs of those stories had absolutely nothing to do with with the Balrog of Moria in The Lord of the Rings. And it is the Balrog of Moria that causes all the fuss. I don't understand why but people just cannot seem to share the Balrog with opposing points of view.

There are, in my mind, three points of view on the matter of Balrog wings:

1. The Balrog had wings
2. The Balrog did not have wings
3. Tolkien used the word "wings" to refer to the darkness surrounding the Balrog that extended outward to the walls of the cavern in "The Bridge of Khazad-dum"

I'm firmly in the third camp, although the anti-wing propagandists have argued for years that I am a pro-wings apologist. You will find that myth in just about every major Tolkien fan site (and others) that attempts to concede there are two points of view on the matter.

I tried to set the record straight about Balrog wings (and me) in "Flying Away On A Wing And A Hair", an essay I wrote for MERP.com a few years ago. In that essay I pointed out that people who obsess over the (non)existence of Balrog wings don't seem bothered by the "shadow" surrounding the Balrog, even though Tolkien only says "it was like a great shadow" (emphasis is mine). "Like" is the word Tolkien uses to introduce a simile: shadow. Since we don't have a real shadow, what does it mean when Tolkien later refers to the shadow that "reached out like two vast wings"?

Through the years I have asked people to accept that there was no shadow. It was a darkness, not a real shadow. People seem okay with that. But when you then ask people to believe that this darkness extended outward from the Balrog in two directions and that Tolkien labeled the extensions of the darkness as "wings" with no more intention than to refer to them by that word, people get upset.

Why? Do you feel that saying these two regions of dark-whatever-it-is cannot be called "wings"? People don't have a problem with referring to the wings of a house, the wings of an airplane, or the wings a pilot wears. None of these "wings" enable any living creatures to fly, except airplane wings and they don't have blood flowing through them nor skin nor feathers. So are any of them "real wings" or, as someone recently put it to me, "actual wings"?

We don't have to call the extensions of the darkness "wings" if we don't want to but Tolkien did. So what's the problem? It doesn't mean the Balrog is a winged creature or that the Balrog flapped its wings in the wind. It just means that Tolkien (as on so many other occasions throughout the book) took a perfectly good word which lent itself to many uses and used it in a new way.

If you want to fuss over what constitutes simile and metaphor, do so, but that has nothing to do with the truth about "Balrog wings". Most people cannot accurately describe how simile and metaphor are used. But you don't need to win any arguments one way or the other concerning how English idiom works in order to get through this one passage in the book.

Surveys indicate that about 75% of all people believe the Balrog has wings. They form that impression from nothing more than what is written in the book. The remaining 25% or so believe something else (I would argue that most of them believe there are no wings).

There are wings, they're just not what most people would accept as "body parts" of the Balrog -- at least, not if you accept that the wings are simply the two extensions of darkness that reach outward from the Balrog. Tolkien's armies have wings (an Adrahil was "Captain of the Left Wing" of the Northern Army of Gondor in one story, for example) but that doesn't mean the armies fly, flap, or reach out from wall to wall anywhere.

You don't need to write long-winded nonsense essays that dredge up every published Tolkien passage in which the word "balrog" occurs in order to show how J.R.R. Tolkien intended the reader to follow the story in "The Bridge of Khazad-dum".

You don't have to get out your tattered copy of Internet Lies, Slurs, and Insults for the Easily Offended and warm up the old flame machine in order to disagree with people, either.

For that matter, you don't need to prove anything about whether Balrogs do or do not have wings because, frankly, most people don't care and of those who do care it seems that fewer than 1% change their minds on the basis of what they read on the Internet.

So while I do appreciate hearing from other Tolkien fans from time to time, I really, really have tried to put the Balrog Wings War behind me. I haven't changed my mind on the matter in a long time because there is no need for me to do so.

If you find some Website that says I've written a pro-wings essay, don't believe it. I've written more than one essay that supports the third point of view. I hope this time I've finally presented it in a way that leads people to realize that I'm really, really, really not interested in picking and choosing between pro-wings and anti-wings arguments.

Both sides lost my support years and years ago. And please don't take that personally -- that's just how I read the book. There's no need for any of you to be upset -- at least not with me, particularly not about Balrog wings.

The truth about Balrog wings is that I like the book the way it is, without all the rewriting and propaganda.

I posted the following announcement on the SF Fandom Forums' General Discussion forum. I don't have the time and energy to rewrite it.

Yesterday, Friday, December 5, 2009 Google announced that all users of its service will now be automatically opted in to its Personalized Search feature.

Personalized Search, previously available only to people who were logged in, tracks your queries and clicks on search results. As you click on Web sites repeatedly over time they will move up toward the top of your queries. You will no longer see "natural" search results if you click on the same sites many times.

Although this is often a helpful feature, it does make it difficult for users to find new content they have not previously clicked on.

You can opt out of feature by clicking on "Web History" in the upper right-hand corner of your Google page. You must PAUSE Web History (in the lower left-hand margin) and CLEAR RESULTS to remove your Web history.

Google promises to remove your Web history after 180 days (but that means they will maintain a constantly scrolling 180-day window).

Google is using a "secret cookie" to maintain this functionality for people who are not logged in. It is not tied to the Google.com domain.

If you do not want Google to track your search history, you MUST opt out of the Web History/Personalized Search feature even though you are not logged in.

Search Engine Land has a lengthy article explaining what Google has done and showing you with screen captures how to disable your Web History.