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

was in question for him, as he said earlier in this same letter,
was its presentation, in a publication, after the appearance
of The Lord of the Rings, when, as he thought, the right time
to make it known was already gone.
I am afraid all the same that the presentation will need a lot
of work, and I work so slowly. The legends have to be worked
over (they were written at different times, some many years
ago) and made consistent; and they have to be integrated with
The L.R.; and they have to be given some progressive shape.
No simple device, like a journey and a quest, is available.
I am doubtful myself about the undertaking...
When after his death the question arose of publishing 'The
Silmarillion' in some form, I attached no importance to this
doubt. The effect that 'the glimpses of a large history in the
background' have in The Lord of the Rings is incontestable
and of the utmost importance, but I did not think that the
'glimpses' used there with such art should preclude all fur-
ther knowledge of the 'large history'.
The literary 'impression of depth... created by songs
and digressions' cannot be made a criterion by which a work
in a wholly different mode is measured: this would be to treat
the history of the Elder Days as of value primarily or even
solely in the artistic use made of it in The Lord of the Rings.
Nor should the device of a backward movement in imagined
time to dimly apprehended events, whose attraction lies in
their very dimness, be understood mechanically, as if a fuller
account of the mighty kings of Nargothrond and Gondolin
would imply a dangerously near approach to the bottom of
the well, while an account of the Creation would signify the
striking of the bottom and a definitive running-out of
'depth' -- 'nothing to reach further back to'.
This, surely, is not how things work, or at least not how
they need work. 'Depth' in this sense implies a relation be-
tween different temporal layers or levels within the same
world. Provided that the reader has a place, a point of van-
tage, in the imagined time from which to look back, the ex-
treme oldness of the extremely old can be made apparent and
made to be felt continuously. And the very fact that The Lord
of the Rings establishes such a powerful sense of areal time-
structure (far more powerful than can be done by mere
chronological assertion, tables of dates) provides this nec-
essary vantage-point. To read The Silmarillion one must place
oneself imaginatively at the time of the ending of the Third
Age -- within Middle-earth, looking back: at the temporal
point of Sam Gamgee's 'I like that! ' -- adding, 'I should like
to know more about it'. Moreover the compendious or epi-
tomising form and manner of The Silmarillion, with its sug-
gestion of ages of poetry and 'lore' behind it, strongly evokes
a sense of 'untold tales', even in the telling of them; 'dis-
tance' is never lost. There is no narrative urgency, the pres-