"J.R.R. Tolkien - The History of Middle-Earth - 05" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tolkien J.R.R)

enormously increases the known vocabularies of the Elvish
tongues - as they were at that time, for like everything else the
languages continued to evolve as the years passed. Also hitherto
unknown except by allusion is my father's abandoned 'time-travel'
story The Lost Road, which leads primarily to Numenor, but also
into the history and legend of northern and western Europe, with
the associated poems The Song of AElfwine (in the stanza of Pearl)
and King Sheave (in alliterative verse). Closely connected with
The Lost Road were the earliest forms of the legend of the




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Drowning of Numenor, which are also included in the book, and
the first glimpses of the story of the Last Alliance of Elves and
Men.
In the inevitable Appendix I have placed three works which are
not given complete: the Genealogies, the List of Names, and the
second 'Silmarillion' Map, all of which belong in their original
forms to the earlier 193Os. The Genealogies only came to light
recently, but they add in fact little to what is known from the
narrative texts. The List of Names might have been better
included in Vol. IV, but this was again a work of reference which
provides very little new matter, and it was more convenient to
postpone it and then to give just those few entries which offer new
detail. The second Map is a different case. This was my father's
sole 'Silmarillion' map for some forty years, and here I have
redrawn it to show it as it was when first made, leaving out all the
layer upon layer of later accretion and alteration. The Tale of
Years and the Tale of Battles, listed in title-pages to The Sil-
marillion as elements in that work (see p. 202), are not included,
since they were contemporary with the later Annals and add
nothing to the material found in them; subsequent alteration of
names and dates was also carried out in a precisely similar way.
In places the detailed discussion of dating may seem excessive,
but since the chronology of my father's writings, both 'internal'
and 'external', is extremely difficult to determine and the evidence
full of traps, and since the history can be very easily and very
seriously falsified by mistaken deductions on this score, I have
wished to make as plain as I can the reasons for my assertions.
In some of the texts I have introduced paragraph-numbering.
This is done in the belief that it will provide a more precise and
therefore quicker method of reference in a book where the dis-
cussion of its nature moves constantly back and forth.
As in previous volumes I have to some degree standardized
usage in respect of certain names: thus for example I print Gods,
Elves, Orcs, Middle-earth, etc. with initial capitals, and Kor,