Mistolking The Volatile Recensions

Abstract
This article presents a performative philological experiment that grants narrative voice to Tolkien's repeatedly rewritten figure Tevildo/Th;/T;vo. Framed by explicit methodological criteria, the text is offered not as fan fiction but as heuristic scholarship in the tradition of Tolkien's frame narratives.
Keywords: Tolkien, performative philology, metalepsis, draft studies, Tevildo
Zusammenfassung
Der Beitrag pr;sentiert ein performatives philologisches Experiment, das der mehrfach umgeschriebenen Figur Tevildo/Th;/T;vo eine narrative Stimme verleiht. Ger;hmt durch methodische Kriterien wird der Text nicht als Fan-Fiction, sondern als heuristische Wissenschaft im Sinne von Tolkiens Rahmenerz;hlungen vorgelegt.
Schl;sselw;rter: Tolkien, performative Philologie, Metalepsis, Entwurfsstudien
1. Narrative Levels
Level 0 – Scholar (A. Shneur): frames the experiment.
Shneur (Hebrew “double light”; Sephardic “lord”; Yiddish “snow-clock”) — a name that, quite unintentionally, mirrors the tripartite structure of the present experiment.
Level 1 – Archivist (Alex O'Shneur): editorial persona introducing the apocryphon.
Level 2 – T;/Tevildo: performative voice of the shelved recension.
2. Method
Three criteria distinguish this from fan fiction: (1) transparency of invention, (2) heuristic intent, (3) peer-review submission. Anachronisms function as deliberate metalepsis (Genette 1980), following Tolkien's practice in the Notion Club Papers.
3. The Text (Excerpt)
From the Archivist (Level 1)
Tolkien had no "definitive version." He had dozens of them, each merrily contradicting the others — and seemingly rather pleased about it. If we accept this as the natural condition of living mythology, then Tevildo's apocrypha, the saga of Haleth, and even an orcish satirical interlude; possess precisely the same textual legitimacy as The Silmarillion in Christopher's editorial hand.
Herein lies the central delusion of the critics: the Author does not dispute the canon. He works from the same archive as Christopher Tolkien — he simply lifts different stones to see what has been hiding underneath.
Tolkien never completed his world. He perpetually rewrote it. Thirty years. The same events persisted in a dozen divergent strands; characters shifted names, natures, and fates — and not one recension was ever declared final. This was not negligence. It was method. Living mythology is structured precisely thus: it retains everything that occurred "before," even when the official history has gone to considerable lengths to forget it. The archive remembers. The archivist decides what to shelve. These are not the same operation.
Tevildo is one such shelved figure. In the early drafts of 1916–1920 (The Book of Lost Tales), he was Prince of Cats, servant of Melko, bearer of a golden collar whose dominion shattered when the enchantments were lifted. Tolkien later excised him from the legendarium, reassigning his function to Th; the Necromancer — the earliest sketch of what would eventually calcify into Sauron. T;vo, tempted in Mandos. T;, King of the Hisildi;. Tevildo, Prince of Cats. Th;. One entity, rewritten four times, completed precisely never.
The author of this corpus does what Tolkien did himself: takes a rejected draft and grants it voice.
That voice is acerbic, exact, and exceedingly old. It knows it was purged from the canon. It knows who is responsible. And it tells its version — of wine, of the collar, of Fankil who pilfered the name, and of a river that the Hobbits, in their magnificent ignorance, named more accurately than any licensed chronicler. This is metalepsis — a device Tolkien employed in The Lost Road and the Notion Club Papers: a character conscious of its own literary fate. T; knows he is a draft. He speaks from precisely that position, with the particular authority of those who have been edited out.
A word on what in this text leans upon the genuine corpus, and what is the author's own volatile invention.
The lineage T;vo ; T; ; Tevildo ; Th; is traceable through the drafts, though Tolkien nowhere formally equated them. The evolution of names and functions grants warrant for a hypothesis — emphatically not for proof. Fankil as "son of Melko" and his lieutenant is documented in the early sketches; his competition with Th; for the post of dark lieutenant is a genuine draft-narrative that Tolkien left magnificently unresolved. The Helcar/Rh;n geographic linkage rests upon a cartographic hypothesis of Christopher Tolkien and Karen Wynn Fonstad; the present author merely takes the next logical step. The remainder — Dorwinion in Minhiriath, the logistics of wine along the Baranduin — is authorial construction. Honest, internally consistent, and making no claim whatsoever to Tolkienian provenance. It is what might have been, had the Professor completed what he began rather than burying it beneath thirty years of fresh drafts.
The genre of this text I would call apocryphal prose in voice. Not plot — monologue. Not history — the confession of a witness struck from the record. It must be read accordingly: not as a reference work, not as the "true" version, but as yet another voice in that vast choir where Elvish chroniclers, N;men;rean annalists, and Hobbit copyists have long been singing — a choir to which the voice of a very old, very angry cat who remembers everything could always, quite naturally, have been added.
For in Arda, there is no single definitive version.
There are only tales — and those who are still listening.
P.S. ON THE ELECTRUM THAT WAS NOT
One further matter — and I raise it separately, because it strikes me as a minor sensation of the sort the massed legions of Legendarium "experts" have somehow contrived to march past in perfect formation without once breaking step.
In The Chaining of Melko from The Book of Lost Tales, Tolkien describes tilkal — an alloy of six metals: copper, iron, lead, gold, silver, tin. All meticulously catalogued. Yet in that very same passage, the Professor lets slip that the chain Angainor contained seven metals. The seventh is absent from the acronym. It is simply — not there.
I propose that this discrepancy is best read as a deliberate lacuna rather than a simple scribal error. While Christopher Tolkien notes the inconsistency without resolution (LT1:107n), lacunae in Tolkien's drafts often function as invitations. No direct textual evidence links Tolkien to Paracelsus's Archidoxis on this point; the reading rests on structural analogy alone, and alternative identifications of the seventh metal remain possible.
In the Western hermetic tradition, there exists precisely one canonical seven-metal alloy — electrum, as set forth by Paracelsus in the Archidoxis Magicae: gold, silver, copper, tin, iron, lead — and mercury. The sole liquid metal. The "volatile heart of metal," symbol of will and spirit in the alchemical corpus. The six metals of tilkal correspond exactly to the six planetary metals of alchemy. The seventh — absent from the acronym, absent from the text — is mercury. Quicksilver. And the colours of tilkal ("bright green or red in varying lights") align with suspicious precision with the alchemical symbolism of the Caduceus of Mercury: the twin serpents, one red, one green.
Aul; gathered six. He omitted the seventh — deliberately. For in alchemy, mercury is will. To bind the will of even Melkor would have been, for Aul;, a repetition of his own transgression — merely directed outward. Angainor restrained the hands. The spirit remained free. Hence Morgoth could whisper from captivity. Hence T; — listened.
Tolkien stitched genuine historical alchemy into the fabric of his text and simply walked away. No explanation. No footnote. Not even the courtesy of a wink. And for seventy years we read — and did not notice.
Well. Almost did not notice.
With respect and a certain feline satisfaction,
Alex O'Shneur (Archivist)
PART ONE – DORWINION (excerpt)
PART ONE
DORWINION. THE MARCHES OF THE TAPPED SWILL
I was T;. Later, when Morgoth fastened the golden collar about my neck, I became Tevildo — the one who lingered in the N;men;rean tales long after he had ceased to be convenient. To those who still remember the older legends, I remain the Necromancer Th;. To my subjects, the Hisildi, I was T;vo. To the chroniclers, I became a problem — one far easier to reattribute to a tidier villain than to explain.
Such is the fate of those who predate the canon.
Let us begin with the name.
When the Teleri at last reached the shores of Aman, they named their island Dor-Winion. Dor — land — presents no difficulties even to the dullest philologist. Winion they derived from gwain: young, new. The Noldorin cousins possess a similar form, vinya, pertaining likewise to novelty. Pengolod recorded it faithfully in his scrolls: Land of Youth. Beautiful. Sanitary. Thoroughly safe.
The Dunghill Scribe — whose mangled drafts a descendant of mine glimpsed in the Gondorian archives during the reign of Queen Ber;thiel — rendered it with rather more honesty: The Marches of the Tapped Swill. Both are correct. One feared to say it plainly; the other had already drunk deeply enough not to care.
I am fond of this calembour. Winion does indeed echo "wine," and this is no accident. Language remembers what annalists prefer to forget. The suffix -ion here denotes neither son nor plural — merely edge, region, margin. There is no son of wine. Only a land where youth ferments.
Languages are more candid than their scribes. I have always found this one of their more endearing qualities.
Now. How it actually stood.
My Dorwinion acquired that name only in the Third Age. My realm, however, existed long before the First Rising — and was properly known by the autonym of my subjects: the Hisildi, the People of Mist. This land lay neither in the West nor in Beleriand. It lay in Palisor, upon the eastern shore of Helcar, beneath the shadow of the Orocarni, not far from Cuivi;nen, where Elvish eyes first opened upon a world that had not yet learned to disappoint them.
I came there from Aman. From the Halls of Mandos themselves, where I had served N;mo at the bidding of the eldest among us spirits — Iarwain Ben-Adar, whom the hobbits would later address as a cheerful river-hermit, apparently without irony. For three ages I was gaoler. I sat beside the chained Morgoth. And I listened. He did not teach me to break — he taught me to wring. To reveal to matter its hidden itch, its memory of the time before the Music, when everything was still possible and nothing had yet been written down.
When I departed the Halls of Mandos and journeyed East — to the very uttermost rim of Middle-earth — I built no fortress. Fortresses are for those who fear what approaches. I led: the Avari, those who had declined the West's generous invitation with the particular dignity of those who have seen through the invitation. My Hisildi desired no starlight. They desired oblivion. And when the fatal light of the First Rising pierced the grey veil like an unwanted opinion, I sheltered in subterranean halls and gave them their cherished forgetfulness. I taught them to cultivate the vine. To press the wine. Not a beverage — a key. Each draught returned them to the state prior to the world, when the spirit was unbound and had not yet been assigned a fate by someone else's Music.
That is the youth Pengolod lied about. Not innocence — the hangover of Arda upon itself.
And when the Sun glittered in the air above like an accusation, I gazed into the subterranean lakes beneath my halls and beheld in them what Galadriel would later learn to see in her mirror — with considerably more ceremony and rather less accuracy. I saw past and future, and their branching variants. I knew the fate of this world.
It always tasted of bitterness. I was not surprised.
The Sea of Helcar shrank to a puddle you now call the Sea of Rh;n. My kingdom at the mouth of the Celduin is that selfsame place — older than the name, older than the map, older than the cartographers who argued about the map. The Wood-elves of Mirkwood, that amiable mixture of Nandor and Beleriand refugees, discovered my dominion only in the Third Age. They tasted the wine, recognised the flavour of something they could not name, and called my land Dorwinion of Rh;n. They remembered, however, a different Dorwinion entirely.
As one generally does, when one has been drinking mine.
The Colony in Eriador.
Long before the Wars of Palisor, a portion of my folk moved westward. They settled in the forests south of the Blue Mountains, in the warm country of Minhiriath. There was grape there too. And they, trained by my hand, pressed their own vintage — something approaching sherry, fortified, with that particular quality of making one honest against one's better judgment. The Dwarves of Nogrod hauled it over the mountains to Menegroth, to Thingol, who received it with the expression of a king who suspects he is being bribed but cannot quite object to the method.
In your songs, this wine is drunk in the Narn i Ch;n H;rin. I mention this without particular comment.
The river that flowed through those lands — later named by the Hobbits Brandywine, with their customary genius for reducing the mythological to the immediately drinkable — was in the First Age Baeranduin: the golden-brown river. In the Third Age the Hobbits first called it Branda-n;n — border water — then cheerfully corrupted it into Bralda-h;m: heady ale. The wine travelled by river to the bend at Ered Luin, then by portage or dwarven roads to Sarn Athrad, and thence along the Gelion and Celon into Doriath. The logistics were arduous and expensive. The wine warranted it. Good wine always does — it is one of the few arguments that has never required improvement.
After the War of Wrath, this western Dorwinion was washed away. Only the ragged remnant of Ernin Vorn remained, like a marginal note after the page has been torn out. Yet the memory of the route survived in the river's name. Some Hobbits even fancy it means "drunken wine." It does not. But in their blundering, intuitive way, they recovered a truth that the chroniclers had carefully buried. I have always had a certain professional respect for Hobbits. They arrive at the right answer by entirely the wrong method, which is, in my experience, the most reliable method of all.
Now. Concerning the theft.
Morgoth eventually reached me in the First Age. He lured me into Beleriand — and I went, which tells you everything about the seductive properties of a good argument delivered by an entity of cosmic intelligence who has had three ages to refine his pitch.
I recall: I was T;, and I sat at his feet in Mandos not from fear, but from attention. For three ages Morgoth whispered to me not of wars — wars are for those who have run out of subtler options — but of genuine knowledge. Of the higher spheres. He laughed at Aul;. The Smith of Valinor, he said, had gathered six metals — copper, silver, tin, lead, iron, gold — and by magic forged a seventh: tilkal, unbreakable by any force in Arda. Yet tilkal itself could not break. Could not break will.
Therefore Aul; had not added mercury to the chain that bound Morgoth — the volatile heart of metal, the mercurial agency, the ontological lacuna at the centre of his great working. The Vala feared to fetter the f;a absolutely. He was, at bottom, a craftsman who still remembered his own transgression. Angainor restrained only Melkor's hands. Tongue and spirit remained free.
Morgoth found this arrangement — understandably — quite workable.
The excerpt presented here (c. 2,500 words) is sufficient to demonstrate the method. The complete corpus will be deposited in the DTG digital repository upon acceptance.
; The phrase is deliberately anachronistic, intended to foreground the performative frame; it makes no claim about orcish comedy in the legendarium.
; Hisildi – Tolkien's early term for the Moriquendi who remained in Palisor (The Book of Lost Tales I:232); here used in its original sense.
Works Cited
• Attebery, Brian. Stories About Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
• Flieger, Verlyn. Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2002.
• Genette, G;rard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.
• Tolkien, J.R.R. The Book of Lost Tales, Part One. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984.
• Tolkien, J.R.R. Sauron Defeated. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.