David Day is a controversial figure. I doubt the 76 year old has ever been compared to Evangeline Lily before, but she is arguably the only Tolkien-adjacent figure to suffer from the same level of visceral online abuse after her portrayal of Jackson-invented Elf Tauriel in The Hobbit trilogy. That is, untilThe Rings of Powerreleased, of course.
The reasons for Day’s controversies? The Tolkien Society alleges that his books, which offer everything from bestiaries to encyclopaedias of Tolkien’s world, veer into conjecture as Day’s own theories intertwine with canon to make an impure, albeit incredibly popular, Tolkien critique. A particular example of problematic fact-checking highlighted on fan wiki Tolkien Gateway is his long-worm entry, which doesn’t even appear in my edition of A Tolkien Bestiary.
I had the chance to chat with Day about everything Tolkien, his ties to The Rings of Power, and to get his side of the story about how the schism between him and the Tolkien Society first began.
“I was always interested in mythologies,” he explains. “There’s Native American mythologies here in British Columbia, but also Greek and Norse mythology was something I got into as a child.” Tolkien, of course, was the next logical step. Day liked the books, but The Silmarillion changed everything. Where he remembers the public rejecting the epic tale, it had the opposite effect on him.
“When The Silmarillion came out, it really wasn’t a big hit,” he explains. Day would have been about 30 at the time, and I defer to his memories of a period decades before I was born. “People were going, ‘what the heck is this?’ They were expecting anotherLord of the Rings, and they weren’t into it, but it fascinated me because it was like reading Norse texts or Greek myths.”
Day is a rambling man full of anecdotes and name drops, and he remembers vividly the weekend that his Tolkien Bestiary was first published – as anyone would. The Observer ran an eight-page supplement to promote it, full of vivid Ian Miller illustrations from the book. As it happened, most other newspapers were on strike that weekend, so Day saw unexpected success from the promotion, to the tune of 8,000 copies – an impressive figure in 1979 sales.
As time went on, Christopher Tolkien, J. R. R.’s son, began publishing the History of Middle-earth, a 12-volume series of dense tomes detailing his father’s notes and scribblings, ideas and tidbits for those ever so hungry fans who weren’t satisfied with The Silmarillion. Suddenly, the Bestiary was out of date. From the map of Arda to some entries themselves, Day needed subsequent editions to fix ‘errors’ that had been correct, or at least fair readings of the text, at the time of first printing. A similar thing happened with Glorfindel, who was only confirmed to have been the same Elf in the First and Third Age in the last year of Tolkien’s life, four years after Day’s Tolkien Dictionary had been published, which listed them as separate characters (as had been the assumption until then).
But Day doesn’t believe that these reprints or edits are why the prominent fan group The Tolkien Society disparages him online. That vitriol comes from a dispute between publishers in the 1990s.
The Tolkien Society Vs. David Day
“I’ve never had an in-print bad review but once the internet came along… Fortunately I didn’t actually use the internet until about 2008, so I missed about ten years of abuse from the Tolkien Society. All the criticism I’ve got from them is mostly that they know more than I do. That’s the argument. Even though the Bestiary was written before most of them were born, in ‘79. What they take issue with is their interpretation of what Tolkien wrote. And quite frankly, they’re wrong almost every time.”
Day was working on a book about Hobbits with illustrator Lidia Postma and publisher HarperCollins, which had produced numerous Tolkien books before. However, there was an issue this time around, which Day suggests is because The Tolkien Estate wanted veto rights on any Tolkien-adjacent work, which ended up with Christopher Tolkien suing his own publisher. Day was caught in the crossfire, took the book to Pavillion and published it there, and believes this was the point at which the Tolkien Society decided he was excommunicated.
“That was probably the turning point with the Tolkien Society,” he says. “They decided that obviously they want to support the Tolkien Estate. I didn’t realise that I was persona non grata because when I did the encyclopedia, I went to the Oxonmoot [a Tolkien Society-organised fan convention] and Priscilla Tolkien, his daughter, said, ’Oh, it’s just what we need is an encyclopaedia.’
“In 2002, I made the mistake of going to another one of these things. I’d been invited to two earlier ones, and they said ‘come any time’ and stuff like that, so I went more or less unannounced, and I thought people were a bit off with me. And then someone said, ‘well, Priscilla doesn’t want to talk to you.’ So I left. Evidently, they [the Tolkien Society] said that they sent a bunch of things demanding I pay for going to the Oxonmoot, and I didn’t get the messages. But years later I found that they banned me from ever attending again, not that I was intending to do it. I’m the only person ever banned from it.”
This ban has spiralled into a lot of online hate. People leave reviews on sites like Goodreads, openly admitting that they haven’t read Day’s work but hate it on principle. He noticed other David Days have bad reviews intended for him, including “some guy who wrote a book on Jesus, another one on helicopters – I’m sad for them because they only had one or two reviews.”
“None of them have been published by commercial publishers because they’re unreadable.” - David Day
Amid the hate, there’s a lot of positives. Day gets solid reviews in print, and thousands of positive online interactions that go some way to counteracting the hate. But it has affected him – a science fiction bookstore in Toronto told him it wouldn’t stock his books because of the Tolkien Society’s hardline stance on his work. He brushes off the comments, but it must get tiring.
Despite trying to rise above it all, he can’t help but take a dig at the Tolkien Society ringleaders as a final word on the topic. “[They all] hate each other and talk about how terrible everybody else is because they’re all fighting to be the ones who know everything about Tolkien,” Day says. “And none of them have been published by commercial publishers because they’re unreadable.”
Day has always positioned himself as a writer for the masses rather than for would-be scholars, and his latest book, The Illustrated World of Tolkien: The Second Age, is intended to give people who watch The Rings of Power a better understanding of the source material it comes from. While the Amazon TV show can’t use The Silmarillion, many of its events are set during that time period, and Day’s stunning tome is a far more approachable book than Tolkien’s historical text. Remember, this is for people who may not have even read The Lord of the Rings, let alone be aware of Tolkien’s wider adventures in Middle-earth.
“The main point was to get an illustrated book so that people could have a quick understanding of what [Tolkien’s] basis was,” he explains. “The TV series is obviously going to be something that would be mostly in their mind, so I wanted something to counterbalance that just to see people appreciate the difference.”
Day has “nothing against” Amazon’s interpretation of the Second Age, but wants to give readers an insight into how Tolkien imagined it, what influenced his writings, and how the events appeared on the page rather than the screen. His large, hardback series also wanted to showcase some of the best Tolkien illustrators. We’ve all seen John Howe and Alan Lee’s interpretations over the years (including in many Day books), but it also includes artists from industry stalwarts John Blanche and Ian Miller, to lesser-known artists like Sally Davies, Sarka Skorpikova, and Kip Rasmussen. The images bring the pages to life as Day explores Tolkien’s inspirations and the context around The Rings of Power.
Love him or hate him, Day’s books are incredibly popular and inarguably beautiful. If a couple of perceived mistakes from yesteryear are what’s holding them back from appeasing every scholar or fan club, then so be it. But Day clearly wants to bring the intricacies of Tolkien’s world, a world he is so passionate about, to the general public. In my mind, the more people who pick up a dictionary or illustrated hardback book and get their start with The Silmarillion, the better. I’m not going to be the one who gatekeeps that.
