"Tolkien, J R R - Unfinished Tales" - читать интересную книгу автора (Complete Tolkien)

III THE QUEST OF EREBOR 335
Notes 341
Appendix (Note of the text, and extracts from the earlier version) page 341

IV THE HUNT FOR THE RING 352
(i) Of the Journey of the Black Riders according to the account that Gandalf gave to Frodo 352
(ii) Other Versions of the Story 357
(iii) Concerning Gandalf, Saruman and the Shire 364
Notes 368

V THE BATTLES OF THE FORDS OF ISEN 371
Notes 380
Appendix 383

PART FOUR

I THE DR┌EDAIN 393
Notes 401

II THE ISTARI 405
Notes 418

III THE PALANT═RI 421
Notes 430

INDEX 434






NOTE


It has been necessary to distinguish author and editor in different ways in different parts of this book, since the incidence of commentary is very various. The author appears in larger type in the primary texts throughout; if the editor intrudes into one of these texts he is in smaller type intended from the margin (e.g. p. 307) In The History of Galadriel and Celeborn, however, where editorial text is predominant, the reverse indentation is employed. In the Appendixes (and also in The Further Course of the Narrative of 'Aldarion and Erendis', pp. 215 ff.) both author and editor are in the smaller type, with citations from the author indented (e.g. p. 161).
Notes to texts in the Appendixes are given as footnotes rather than as numbered references; and the author's own annotation of a text at a particular point is indicated throughout by the words '[Author's Note]'.


INTRODUCTION

The problems that confront one given responsibility for the writings of a dead author are hard to resolve. Some persons in this position may elect to make to material whatsoever available for publication, save perhaps for work that was in a virtually finished state at the time of the author's death. In the case of the unpublished writings of J. R. R. Tolkien this might seem at first sight the proper course; since he himself, peculiarly critical and exacting of his own work, would not have dreamt of allowнing even the more completed narratives in this book to appear without much further refinement.
On the other hand, the nature and scope of his invention seems to me to place even his abandoned stories in a peculiar position. That The Silmarillion should remain unknown was for me out of the question, despite its disordered state, and despite my father's known if very largely unfulfilled intentions for its transformation; and in that case I presumed, after long hesitation, to present the work not in the form of an historical study, a complex of divergent texts interlinked by commenнtary, but as a completed and cohesive entity. The narratives in this book are indeed on an altogether different footing: taken together they conнstitute no whole, and the book is no more than a collection of writings, disparate in form, intent, finish, and date of composition (and in my own treatment of them), concerned with N·menor and Middle-earth. But the argument for their publication is not different in its nature, though it is of lesser force, from that which I held to justify the publicaнtion of The Silmarillion. Those who would not have forgone the images of Melkor with Ungoliant looking down from the summit of Hyarmentir upon "the fields and pastures of Yavanna, gold beneath the tall wheat of the gods"; of the shadows of Fingolfin's host cast by the first moonrise in the West; of Beren lurking in wolf's shape beneath the throne of Morgoth; or of the light of the Silmaril suddenly revealed in the darkнness of the Forest of Neldoreth Ц they will find, I believe, that imperнfections of form in these tales are much outweighed by the voice (heard now for the last time) of Gandalf, teasing the lordly Saruman at the meeting of the White Council in the year 2851, or describing in Minas Tirith after the end of the War of the Ring how it was that he came to send the Dwarves to the celebrated party at Bag-End; by the arising of Ulmo Lord of Waters out of the sea at Vinyamar; by Mablung of Doriath hiding "like a vole" beneath the ruins of the bridge at Nargothrond; or by the death of Isildur as he floundered up out of the mud of Anduin.
Many of the pieces in this collection are elaborations of matters told more briefly, or at least referred to, elsewhere; and it must be said at once that much in the book will be found unrewarding by readers of The Lord of the Rings who, holding that the historical structure of Middle-earth is a means and not an end, the mode of the narrative and not its purpose, feel small desire of further exploration for its own sake, do not wish to know how the Riders of the Mark of Rohan were organised, and would leave the Wild Men of the Dr·adan Forest firmly where they found them. My father would certainly not have thought them wrong. He said in a letter written in March 1955, before the publication of the third volume of The Lord of the Rings:

I now wish that no appendices had been promised! For I think their appearance in truncated and compressed form will satisfy nobody; certainly not me; clearly from the (appalling mass of) letters I reнceive not those people who like that kind of thing Ц astonishingly many; while those who enjoy the book as an "heroic romance" only, and find "unexplained vistas" part of the literary effect, will neglect the appendices, very properly.
I am not now at all sure that the tendency to treat the whole thing as a kind of vast game is really good Ц certainly not for me who find that kind of thing only too fatally attractive. It is, I supнpose, a tribute to the curious effect that a story has, when based on very elaborate and detailed workings, of geography, chronology, and language, that so many should clamour for sheer "information," or "lore."

In a letter of the following year he wrote: