"Mithgar - 01 - Eye Of The Hunter" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKiernan Dennis L)

I am a tale-teller, perhaps guilty of embellishing tales beyond all recognition . . . but then again, perhaps not. Perhaps instead I am working on a primal level, unconsciously tapping the ancestral memory embedded in my Irish genes. Mayhap in the telling, or in the dead of the night, ancient fragments bubble up, knocking on my frontal lobes for admittance, or slipping over the walls of disbelief like heroes in the darkness coming to rescue a consciousness entrapped within humdrummery.

If it is ancestral memory, then mayhap there once were Elves, Dwarves, Wee Folk, others. Mayhap they did live on earth ... or under ... or in the air above or the ocean below. If so, where are. they now? Integrated? Separated? Hidden? Extinct? I would hope that they are merely hidden, at times seen flitting at the corner of the eye. Yet deep in my heart I fear they are gone. Where? I know not.

There have been times when surely I have glimpsed what my ancestral memory has safely locked away, visions which come in the depths of the darktide when the sleeper sleeps and the walls are less patrolled. Mayhap these are the fragments which help shape the tale in the telling, glances of the visions seen in the fathoms of the night.

Come, let us together explore the latest ancestral fragment, this midnight stormer of the bastion, for embedded within The Eye of the Hunter we may find answers to our questions, can we just riddle them free.


ЧDennis L. McKiernan August 1991


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Notes


1. The source of this tale is a tattered, faded copy of the Journal of the Lastborn Firstborn, an incredibly fortunate find dating from the time before The Separation. Printed by an unknown printer (the frontis page is missing), his claim is that he took it from Faeril's own journal.


2. There are many instances in this tale where, in the press of the moment, the Warrows, Elves, Humans, and others spoke in their own native tongues; yet to avoid the awkwardness of burdensome translations, where necessary I have rendered their words in Pellarion, the Common tongue of Mithgar. However, some words and phrases do not lend themselves to translation, and these I've left unchanged; yet other words may look to be in error, but are indeed correctЧe.g., BearLord is but a single word though a capital L nestles among its letters. Also note that waggon, traveller, and several other similar words are written in the Pendwyrian form of Pellarion and are not misspelled.


3. From my study of the Journal of the Lastborn Firstborn, the arcane tongue of magic is similar in construction to archaic Greek, but with a flavor of its own. With help, I have rendered the language into transliterated eld Greek, with uncommon twists thrown in here and there.


4. I have used transliterated Arabic to represent the tongues of the desert since no guide was given in the Journal.


5. The "Common tongue" speech of the Elves is extremely archaic. To retain a flavor of this dialect, in the objective and nominative cases of the pronoun "you," I respectively substituted "thee" and "thou." Also, in the possessive cases, I included "thy" and "thine" in the Elven speech, along with a few additional archaic terms such as hast, wilt, and so forth.


6. To avoid minor confusion, the reader is cautioned to pay heed to the dates denoting the time frame of each chapter. In the main, the tale is told in a straightforward manner, but occasionally I have jumped back to a previous time to fill in key parts of the story.


7. This tale is about the final pursuit of Baron Stoke. Yet the story is tightly entwined with three earlier accounts concerning the hunting of Stoke; these prior tales are recorded among others in the collection of stories known as Tales of Mithgar.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


"Auguries are oft subtle . . . and dangerousЧ
thou mayest deem they mean one thing when they mean something else altogether."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------