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

mist. To go them is to destroy the magic, unless new un-
attainable vistas are again revealed. (Letters, p. 333)
To go there is to destroy the magic. As for the revealing of
'new unattainable vistas', the problem there -- as Tolkien
must have thought many times -- was that in The Lord of the
Rings Middle-earth was already old, with a vast weight of
history behind it. The Silmarillion, though, in its longer form,
was bound to begin at the beginning. How could 'depth' be
created when you had nothing to reach further back to?
The letter quoted here certainly shows that my father felt
this, or perhaps rather one should say, at times felt this, to
be a problem. Nor was it a new thought: while he was writing
The Lord of the Rings, in 1945, he said in a letter to me
(Letters, p. 110):
A story must be told or there'll be no story, yet it is the untold
stories that are most moving. I think you are moved by Ce-
lebrimbor because it conveys a sudden sense of endless untold
stories: mountains seen far away, never to be climbed, distant
trees (like Niggle's) never to be approached -- or if so only
to become 'near trees'...
This matter is perfectly illustrated for me by Gimli's song in
Moria, where great names out of the ancient world appear
utterly remote:
The world was fair, the mountains tall
In Elder Days before the fall
Of mighty kings in Nargothrond
And Gondolin, who now beyond
The Western Seas have passed away...
'I like that! ' said Sam. 'I should like to learn it. In Moria,
in Khazad-dum. But it makes the darkness seem heavier,
thinking of all those lamps.' By his enthusiastic 'I like that! '
Sam not only 'mediates' (and engagingly 'Gamgifies') the
'high', the mighty kings of Nargothrond and Gondolin, Durin
on his carven throne, but places them at once at an even
remoter distance, a magical distance that it might well seem
(at that moment) destructive to traverse.
Professor Shippey says that 'to tell [the stories that are only
alluded to in The Lord of the Rings] in their own right and
expect them to retain the charm they got from their larger
setting would be a terrible error'. The 'error' presumably
lies in the holding of such an expectation, if the stories were
told, not in the telling of the stories at all; and it is apparent
that Professor Shippey sees my father as wondering, in 1963,
whether he should or should not put pen to paper, for he
expands the words of the letter, 'I am doubtful myself about
the undertaking', to mean 'the undertaking to write The Sil-
marillion'. But when my father said this he was not -- most
emphatically not -- referring to the work itself, which was
in any case already written, and much of it many times over
(the allusions in The Lord of the Rings are not illusory): what