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

sure and fear of the immediate and unknown event. We do
not actually see the Silmarils as we see the Ring. The maker
of 'The Silmarillion', as he himself said of the author of
Beowulf, 'was telling of things already old and weighted with
regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch
upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant
and remote'.
As has now been fully recorded, my father greatly desired
to publish 'The Silmarillion' together with The Lord of the
Rings. I say nothing of its practicability at the time, nor do I
make any guesses at the subsequent fate of such a much
longer combined work, quadrilogy or tetralogy, or at the dif-
ferent courses that my father might then have taken -- for
the further development of 'The Silmarillion' itself, the his-
tory of the Elder Days, would have been arrested. But by its
posthumous publication nearly a quarter of a century later
the natural order of presentation of the whole 'Matter of
Middle-earth' was inverted; and it is certainly debatable
whether it was wise to publish in 1977 a version of the pri-
mary 'legendarium' standing on its own and claiming, as it
were, to be self-explanatory. The published work has no
'framework', no suggestion of what it is and how (within the
imagined world) it came to be. This I now think to have been
an error.
The letter of 1963 quoted above shows my father ponder-
ing the mode in which the legends of the Elder Days might
be presented. The original mode, that of The Book of Lost
Tales, in which a Man, Eriol, comes after a great voyage
over the ocean to the island where the Elves dwell and learns
their history from their own lips, had (by degrees) fallen
away. When my father died in 1973 'The Silmarillion' was
in a characteristic state of disarray: the earlier parts much
revised or largely rewritten, the concluding parts still as he
had left them some twenty years before; but in the latest
writing there is no trace or suggestion of any 'device' or
'framework' in which it was to be set. I think that in the end
he concluded that nothing would serve, and no more would
be said beyond an explanation of how (within the imagined
world) it came to be recorded.
In the original edition of The Lord of the Rings Bilbo gave
to Frodo at Rivendell as his parting gift 'some books of lore
that he had made at various times, written in his spidery
hand, and labelled on their red backs: Translations from the
Elvish, by B.B.' In the second edition (1966) 'some books'
was changed to 'three books', and in the Note on the Shire
Records added to the Prologue in that edition my father said
that the content of 'the three large volumes bound in red
leather' was preserved in that copy of the Red Book of West-
march which was made in Gondor by the King's Writer Fin-
degil in the year 172 of the Fourth Age; and also that