Originally posted by The Inkeeper
Lost tales are.....the sil, but in its....early stages? where everyone was named a lil differently etc etc?
Originally posted by DCLXVI
The Lost Tales of Elfinesse were the original forms of what would later become The Silmarillion, and the background for the LotR Trilogy.
Originally posted by rohan524
Lost Tales is more topical, dividing the stories according to eras and characters. LT complements Sil that way I think. Plus they have ifferent names for each of the Elven language so that may explain the differences.
Basically, yea, the Silmarillion is just one of the later stages of the stories begun in the Lost Tales.
Unlike the Sil, though, the LT aren't designed to present a homogenous, 'true' story and give clear information to the reader, but rather to describe the process of developping the mythology and the languages, later continued with the other parts of the History of Middle-earth that don't as directly focus on the chronological history from within the Sil though. Even in the LT themselves, there are often different version of each story, or at least commentaries on the changes between the numerous sketches and their relationships amongst each other.
Apart from the presentation of the texts, another imo significant difference is the way they're written - the LT more have the character of the lingophile fantasies of a brilliant language professor-to-be, they focus more on names and tongues than on facts; everything's more richly told, full of amazing details and overflowing with fantastic imagination, there are irrealistic saltations and absurd protagonists and the language used is so much more careless, airily jumping from unworried, paradisic, cheerful scenaries to inevitably cruel, tearful or sinister fates.
Compared to the Lost Tales, the Silmarillion often seems like a perfect, powerful dressage horse next to the untaimed, wild, maybe naive LT-foal to me, perfectly written, perfectly serious, perfectly precise, a work of perfect beauty and perfect accuracy, leaving the observer stunned, amazed and fascinated, maybe feeling somewhat inferior next to this materialization of utter perfection; it is never wrong, each step, each leap, each turn is inevitably true.
The LT (or HMEs in general), in contrary, are often unsure, taking steps backwards just to redo them a second later, leaping aside in sudden fear, then again standing unmoving for minutes, just to jump up in the most pulchritudinous, gracile yet unpredictable saltations the next moment, quickly angered, easily lost in dreams; to follow it, a skillfull guide is needed, lest one be completely lost in the wilderness;
But in the end, the more beautiful, more fulfilling one to observe is probably the young mustang.
Ok, stop talking so much nonsense, Exa 😐
Back to facts -
The Silmarillion is history, the Lost Tales the history of history.