Tolkien as the Unreliable Narrator

A video called “Why Lord of the Rings LIES to You” on the Hello Future Me YouTube channel got me thinking. It reminded me that J.R.R. Tolkien was using the trope of the Unreliable Narrator for his Legendarium. Tolkien was a philologist, an expert on languages and their history, who created Middle Earth as a vehicle for his constructed languages. His conceit was that he translated the Red Book of Westmarch, an account of the War of the Ring as written by Bilbo and Frodo. We even see that in the Lord of the Rings movies when Bilbo is seen writing his account while narrating the nature of the Hobbits.

I won’t recount here all the differences between the Peter Jackson version of Middle Earth and Tolkien’s original, other than to say that they did not have the full rights to all of the background material, made adjustments for the medium they were working in, and significantly extended the Hobbit (a single children’s story) into three full films. That isn’t even including the additional Battle for Middle Earth computer games and whatnot around the edges.

Given that Tolkien was an unreliable narrator and Jackson made changes, how do we regard Jackson’s relationship to the Red Book of Westmarch? Can we add to the Book’s own “history”

Professor Tolkien’s popular translation of the Red Book of Westmarch forces us to examine the history of that text in modern times. His working text, referred to in philologist circles as the Oxford Manuscript, has a rather storied origin that has been recounted at some length by Tolkien himself. In short, a version of the Red Book came into the collection of the Bodleian Libary, Oxford in the early 19th century, part of behest of books from the estate of extant West Country landowner. It languished there, miss-indexed, until the early-20th century when it was discovered by Professor Tolkien who then made it his life’s work to translate its hitherto unrecorded ancient languages.

Nevertheless, the Oxford Manuscript is not the only known manuscript of the Red Book. At least three other copies are known to exist. By far the most infamous of these is the Colonial Folio. British academic opinion holds that the Colonial Folio began as an abridged copy of the Oxford Manuscript which was translated into English by an unnamed scholar sometime prior to the 17th century (even Dee has been invoked as a possible scribe). It resurfaced in private hands in the late-19th century passing through the collections of several prominent American business tycoons before arriving into the bands of a reclusive Californian theme-park entrepreneur in the 1960s.

The original Oxford Manuscript is no longer believed to exist; it being destroyed during WWII in a fire started by Nazi bombing. The only records we have of it are Professor Tolkien’s own notes and translation. The Colonial Folio has not been seen publically since the early 1970s, although the adaptations produced by Peter Jackson and his circle are believed to based upon it.

Of intense interest to philologists are the other two known copies of the original text and of these, the Helena Manuscript is by far the most interesting. This text is believed to have been acquired by Helena, mother of Constantine the Great in the 3rd century AD. Copied were made in Constantinople and at least one made it into Cairo under the Abbasid Caliphate’s Translation Movement, c1000 AD. A copy, in Arabic, was made at that time. What is especially interesting is that the Helena Manuscript is believed to have contained an extensive genealogy of the Kings of the Haradrim, a discussion of their languages, and their own origins. A copy was reputed to have been seen in 17th century Syria.