A Sense of Tales Untold: Exploring the Edges of Tolkien's Literary Canvas by Peter Grybauskas

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Sense of Tales Untold: Exploring the Edges of Tolkien's Literary Canvas by Peter Grybauskas Maria K. Alberto A Sense of Tales Untold: Exploring the Edges of Tolkien's Literary Canvas, by Peter Grybauskas. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2021. $68.58 (hardcover). xxi, 154 pp. ISBN 978-1-60635-430-8. Peter Grybauskas opens his new book with a brief sketch detailing Tolkien's earliest map of the lands that readers encounter in The Silmarillion: drawn on an exam booklet, heedless of the injunction not to write around the margins due to war-time paper rationing. While this fascinating little anecdote does prefigure the overall argument of A Sense of Tales Untold, it also exemplifies some of the best qualities that readers will find characterizing Grybauskas's work here: it is an intriguing peek into ancillary materials, it offers a new view on ground we might deem well-trod, and it switches seamlessly between a microscopic focus and the greater picture presented by Tolkien's legendarium. These strengths serve his project well, since with A Sense of Tales Untold, Grybauskas revisits "the margins of Tolkien's work" (xvii), maintaining that "untold tales" and deliberate lacunae form a central concern and preoccupation of the legendarium. As Grybauskas contends, these characteristics are "nothing short of a defining feature of his subcreation" (xx), bolstering its sense of scope as much as do Tolkien's maps, constructed languages, invented writing traditions, and other attributes of Middle-earth. Moreover, A Sense of Tales Untold [End Page 216] itself weaves together insightful close readings and deft engagement with other scholarship to offer specific means of identifying and characterizing these critical untold tales. Readers already familiar with Tolkien's oeuvre will be well aware of Middle-earth's depth and scope, as Grybauskas identifies them here; likewise, those versed in Tolkienian scholarship will know that critics from Michael Drout to John Rateliff and many more, have also focused on these topics. However, Grybauskas does a commendable job of acknowledging this previous work and explaining how his own project departs from such cornerstones: he is also careful to point out that this book is not a source study (14), an important and necessary distinction. As he maintains in his first chapter, though, "we have a foundation for what the impression of depth is—and what inspires and engenders it in Tolkien's work—[but] there is work to be done still to understand how this sense of depth colors and transforms our reading" (4). A Sense of Tales Untold initiates this work before inviting its own readers to continue it. Following the introduction where he lays out this project, Grybauskas offers five chapters, each focused on a different type of what he calls "untold tales": narratives whose events stretch to or take place beyond the edges of the main stories. (Throughout A Sense of Tales Untold, Grybauskas contextualizes this term by turning to Tolkien's defense of Beowulf and its poet, plus his "fierce belief that this [poem's] ancillary material mattered and made sense, even if that sense eludes us today" [12], which I found an apt and useful comparison.) Chapter 1 sets out to "explore the contexts in which untold tales develop, their theoretical foundations in Tolkien's scholarly work and other writings, and some significant models and contemporaries" (2)—a rather long list of objectives that Grybauskas nevertheless manages to achieve with aplomb. From here, Chapter 2 looks to the Last Alliance—the coalition of Elves and Men formed to try and defeat Sauron, at whose conclusion Isildur recovered the One Ring—and explores how its events form an "allusive web," or "a series of references dancing around the outer edges of a story that never fully comes into view" (22): characters from Gandalf to Boromir and even Gollum are each familiar with only a limited number of referents regarding the Last Alliance, and only some of these references are "verifiable" rather than fully mythologized. Next, Chapter 3 revisits the "faded tradition" of Túrin Turambar, noting that unlike the Great Tales of Beren and Lúthien or Gondolin, even allusions to Túrin's story are almost entirely absent from...