Talk:Tolkien's legendarium

Unfinished Tales

I am surprised that Unfinished Tales is not even listed, let alone discussed. It is far more substantial than The Adventures of Tom Bombadil or Bilbo's Last Song, and I see no reason to exclude it, but I don't know Tolkien research particularly well, so I may be missing something?--Verbarson (talk) 21:55, 6 July 2021 (UTC)

We basically have to go by what scholars write; and no text article can (or should) be exhaustive, but I've managed to work in a brief mention. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:29, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

Addition of unused David Day sources

Ok, you put the header here. I'll ask straight out: What is your issue with David Day? - jc37 11:44, 16 April 2023 (UTC) (edit conflict)

Um, if you'll give me a minute...

There has been a sudden addition of wholly unused David Day book citations, across several articles in the past few minutes.

There are multiple good reasons why this is undesirable.

1) These articles are fully (and richly) cited already.

2) The existing sources are either to Tolkien himself (primary, for the facts about what he wrote) or to scholars and critics.

3) Much of Day's output just regurgitates Tolkien's statements in the narrative text, i.e. it adds nothing.

4) Other Day output includes his personal pet opinions, not substantiated by any of the (very large) amount of Tolkien scholarship. He is not and does not claim to be a scholar; but he is writing (when not just copying and illustrating Tolkien) on scholarly matters, that have been covered in great depth.

5) There is no value in adding unused books to these articles; they already contain a plentiful supply of better books and research articles which are used. In other words, these are not "sources" as nothing is sourced to them.

Therefore, it is undesirable to add such materials. Chiswick Chap (talk) 11:46, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

An author does not need to be a "scholar" (however we are to define that) to be used as a reference.

Everything else that you note is essentially WP:IDONTLIKEIT or WP:ITSNOTUSEFUL, so none of that holds any water outside of subjective opinion.

I'm not strongly tied to the additions, I just think the removal is more than a little heavy handed, and am really not as yet seeing a good reason for the removals. - jc37 11:56, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for discussing. Your summary of my list of reasons is however incorrect. We do not only use scholarly sources (those by academics with doctorates researching Tolkien Studies and related fields such as medievalism); we freely use newspaper reports, critics who are reviewing books, plays, films, and music, and indeed journalists writing on Tolkien issues. Day remarkably manages not to be any of these.

More to the reason, you have not noted that he is not cited in the articles, i.e. no fact or claim in the text is attributed to him or derived from him: that is a practical matter that anyone can confirm by observation. There are (literally) thousands of claims across the hundreds of Tolkien articles here on Wikipedia, and they are cited to hundreds of scholars, critics, and journalists. Usefulness is thus defined practically and operationally – the articles do not need his input. Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:01, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

To respond to the first part - If that were the case, where would you put works by Robert Foster or Ruth Noel? Or how about Humphrey Carpenter?

As for the second part, the references are there not just to support the text of the article, but also for the reader to go for further information. What's the issue? - jc37 12:12, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

If nothing is taken from a source, then it is not a source for anything. If, despite that, it could be beneficial for readers, then it would belong in a Further reading section.

I do not think that Day's Bestiary belongs anywhere other than, possibly, Works inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien. It certainly adds nothing useful to J. R. R. Tolkien, it is not part of Tolkien's legendarium, and does not make any original contribution worth noting to Middle-earth. If it has something to add to our understanding of Tolkien's writings, then someone should find out where that has been recognised, and write an article for it. -- Verbarson  ^talk_edits 12:38, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Indeed. Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:43, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Foster is usable with care, and some use has been made of his work. Carpenter is both the author of an authorised biography of Tolkien, and the editor of his letters, so he's an important source. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Chiswick Chap (talk • contribs) 12:44, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

My point was that neither of them fell under the definitions you laid out above... - jc37 13:15, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

(edit conflict) - That's a very good answer. Thank you  : )

If we were talking about Robert Foster, I might say that it's not a work"inspired by", but rather an attempt at a scholarly collation. And as such, is a reference work outside of the primary sources concerning the in-universe information.

There are plenty of fantasy works out there that are "inspired by". But in this case, we're (presumably) talking about a non-fiction attempt to collate fictional information.

The trouble with David Day's works is that (to be charitable), he apparently has added a bit of "creative license" when listing the collated information from the Professor's works.

So I'd agree that in the case of his works, at least, "Further reading" makes sense.

Thanks again : ) - 12:52, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a catalogue, and it is not our job to attempt to list all of the very large number of low-quality sources on Tolkien. The sources listed are precisely there to support the text, as the best materials available. That makes them the highest-quality materials for further study. As already stated, the citations are in fact of many kinds, from biography to journalism to critical review to scholarly analysis. In a well-developed article, it's generally not necessary to do much in the way of listing yet more sources, but that depends on the nature of the individual article. The book in question was rapidly spammed across several articles, which indicates (correctly, I think) that it had nothing special to do with any of them individually. To reiterate, the best proof that a source is practically relevant to an article is to add a clearly-helpful fact to the text, cited to a page of the new source. Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:42, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

I disagree. Especially when talking about works published prior to the explosion of interest since the Peter Jackson films.

A great example of this would be the Ruth Noel book, that I mentioned above. It was written in 1974, before we had the further information to glean from the Silmarillion, the Unfinished Tales, The Lost Takes series, etc. And so since then, it can be seen that in several of her guesses, which were based upon very limited info, she guessed (extrapolated) incorrectly. But in a lot of ways she guessed correctly. And - at the time - this book was a go-to reference for many in their journey to puzzle out the languages in Tolkien's middle-Earth. It's an important work.

We don't ignore the context of the past when trying to describe it in the present.

Remember that we are here for our readers, so David Day's material - though, it could be argued, far from being an exacting scholarly work - is still important, in that his writings are prolific and all over the place in pop culture, and may very well be a first stop for someone interested in Tolkien. So rather than ignore his works, we should note what has been discerned about them, and provide context.

All that said, I don't disagree that the well-meaning editor probably did not need to add a David Day reference to just any Tolkien-related article. Perhaps that could have been clearer. So to help guide the editor to being able to contribute, perhaps pointing them in a direction to positively contribute might have been more helpful, rather than a reversion without really explaining why. "Thanks but that's not a good source, basically a non-scholarly approach, and there are literally hundreds of better authors writing books, papers and articles on Tolkien" - was probably not the greatest way to handle that.

Anyway, thank you for the talk page discussion. Discussion is almost always the best answer. - jc37 13:12, 16 April 2023 (UTC)