"J.R.R. Tolkien - The History of Middle-Earth - 01" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tolkien J.R.R)

OF
LOST
TALES
Part I
J. R. R. Tolkien
Edited by Christopher Tolkien
85
A Del Rey Book
BALLANTINE BOOKS ' NEW YORK
FOREWORD.
The Book of Lost Tales, written between sixty and seventy
years ago, was the first substantial work of imaginative lit-
erature by J. R. R. Tolkien, and the first emergence in nar-
rative of the Valar, of the Children of Iluvatar, Elves and
Men, of the Dwarves and the Orcs, and of the lands in which
their history is set, Valinor beyond the western ocean, and
Middle-earth, the 'Great Lands' between the seas of east and
west. Some fifty-seven years after my father ceased to work
on the Lost Tales, The Silmarillion,* profoundly transformed
from its distant forerunner, was published; and six years have
passed since then. This Foreword seems a suitable opportu-
nity to remark on some aspects of both works.
The Silmarillion is commonly said to be a 'difficult' book,
needing explanation and guidance on how to 'approach' it;
and in this it is contrasted' to The Lord of the Rings. In Chap-
ter 7 of his book The Road to Middle-earth Professor T. A.
Shippey accepts that this is so ('The Silmarillion could never
be anything but hard to read', p. 201), and expounds his view
of why it should be. A complex discussion is not treated
justly when it is extracted, but in his view the reasons an:
essentially two (p. 185). In the first place, them is in The
Silmarillion no 'mediation' of the kind provided by the hob-
bits (so, in The Hobbit, 'Bilbo acts as the link between mod-
ern times and the archaic world of dwarves and dragons').
* When the name is printed in italics, I refer to the work as published;
when in inverted commas, to the work in a mom general way, in any
or all of its forms.

My father was himself well aware that the absence of hobbits
would be felt as a lack, were 'The Silmarillion' to be pub-
lished -- and not only by readers with a particular liking for
them. In a letter written in 1956 (The Letters of J. R. R.
Tolkien, p. 238), soon after the publication of The Lord of
the Rings, he said:
I do not think it would have the appeal of the L.R. -- no
hobbits! Full of mythology, and elvishness, and all that 'heigh
stile' (as Chaucer might say), which has been so little to the
taste of many reviewers.
In 'The Silmarillion' the draught is pure and unmixed; and
the reader is worlds away from such 'mediation', such a