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

in the upper end, the Akallabeth or Atalantie' he undoubtedly
meant that
he had not been inspired to write the 'intervening' parts, in
which the
father and son were to appear and reappear in older and older
phases of
Germanic legend; and indeed The Lost Road stops after the
introductory
chapters and only takes up again with the Numenorean story that
was to
come at the end. Very little was written of what was planned
to lie
between. But what is the meaning of 'so I brought all the stuff
I had
written on the originally unrelated legends of Numenor into
relation with
the main mythology'? My father seems to be saying that, having
found
that he only wanted to write about Numenor, he therefore and
only then
 (abandoning The Last Road) appended the Numenorean material to
'the
main mythology', thus inaugurating the Second Age of the
World. But
what was this material? He cannot have meant the Numenorean
matter
contained in The Lost Road itself, since that was already fully
related to
'the main mythology'. It must therefore have been something else,
already
existing when The last Road was begun, as Humphrey Carpenter
assumes
in his Biography (p. 170): 'Tolkien's legend of Numenor... was
prohably
composed some time before the writing of "The Lost Road",
perhaps in
the late nineteen-twenties or early thirties.' But, in fact, the
conclusion
seems to me inescapable that my father erred when he said this.
The original rough workings for The Lost Road are extant, but
they are
very rough, and do not form a continuous text. There is one
complete
manuscript, itself fairly rough and heavily emended in different
stages;
and a professional typescript that was done when virtually all
changes
had been made to the manuscript. f The typescript breaks off well
before