"J.R.R. Tolkien - Silmarillion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tolkien J.R.R)

FOREWORD
The Silmarillion, now published four years after the death of its author, is an account of the Elder
Days, or the First Age of the World. In The Lord of the Rings were narrated the great events at the
end of the Third Age; but the tales of The Silmarillion are legends deriving from a much deeper
past, when Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, dwelt in Middle-earth, and the High Elves made war upon
him for the recovery of the Silmarils.
Not only, however, does The Silmarillion relate the events of a far earlier time than those of
The Lord of the Rings; it is also, in all the essentials of its conception, far the earlier work. Indeed,
although it was not then called The Silmarillion, it was already in being half a century ago; and in
battered notebooks extending back to 1917 can still be read the earliest versions, often hastily
pencilled, of the central stories of the mythology. But it was never published (though some
indication of its content could be gleaned from The Lord of the Rings), and throughout my father's
long life he never abandoned it, nor ceased even in his last years to work on it. In all that time The
Silmarillion, considered simply as a large narrative structure, underwent relatively little radical
change; it became long ago a fixed tradition, and background to later writings. But it was far indeed
from being a fixed text, and did not remain unchanged even in certain fundamental ideas
concerning the nature of the world it portrays; while the same legends came to be retold in longer
and shorter forms, and in different styles. As the years passed the changes and variants, both in
detail and in larger perspectives, became so complex, so pervasive, and so many-layered that a final
and definitive version seemed unattainable. Moreover the old legends ('old' now not only in their
derivation from the remote First Age, but also in terms of my father's life) became the vehicle and
depository of his profoundest reflections. In h is later writing mythology and poetry sank down
behind his theological and philosophical preoccupations: from which arose incompatibilities of
tone.
On my father's death it fell to me to try to bring the work into publishable form. It became
clear to me that to attempt to present, within the covers of a single book the diversity of the
materials тАУ to show The Silmarillion as in truth a continuing and evolving creation extending over
more than half a century тАУ would in fact lead only to confusion and the submerging of what is
essential I set myself therefore to work out a single text selecting and arranging in such a way as
seemed to me to produce the most coherent and internally self-consistent narrative. In this work the
concluding chapters (from the death of T├║rin Turambar) introduced peculiar difficulties, in that they
had remained unchanged for many years, and were in some respects in serious disharmony with
more developed conceptions in other parts of the book.
A complete consistency (either within the compass of The Silmarillion itself or between The
Silmarillion and other published writings of my father's) is not to be looked for, and could only be
achieved, if at all at heavy and needless cost. Moreover, my father came to conceive The
Silmarillion as a compilation, a compendious narrative, made long afterwards from sources of great
diversity (poems, and annals, and oral tales) that had survived in agelong tradition; and this
conception has indeed its parallel in the actual history of the book, for a great deal of earlier prose
and poetry does underlie it, and it is to some extent a compendium in fact and not only in theory. To
this may be ascribed the varying speed of the narrative and fullness of detail in different parts, the
contrast (for example) of the precise recollections of place and motive in the legend of T├║rin
Turambar beside the high and remote account of the end of the First Age, when Thangorodrim was
broken and Morgoth overthrown; and also some differences of tone and portrayal, some obscurities,
and, here and there, some lack of cohesion. In the case of the Valaquenta, for instance, we have to
assume that while it contains much that must go back to the earliest days of the Eldar in Valinor, it
was remodelled in later times; and thus explain its continual shifting of tense and viewpoint, so that
the divine powers seem now present and active in the world, now remote, a vanished order known
only to memory.
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