"J.R.R. Tolkien - The History of Middle-Earth - 07" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tolkien J.R.R)

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FOREWORD.

In 'The History of Middle-earth' I have tried to make each book
as much an independent entity as possible, and not merely a
section cut off when the book had reached a certain size; but in
the history of the writing of The Lord of the Rings this has
proved difficult. In The Return of the Shadow I was able to
bring the story to the point where my father, as he said, 'halted
for a long while' while the Company of the Ring stood before
the tomb of Balin in the mines of Khazad-dum; but this meant
leaving till later the further complex restructurings of earlier
parts of The Fellowship of the Ring that belong to that period.
In this volume my hope and intention was to reach the second
major halt in the writing of The Lord of the Rings. In the
Foreword to the Second Edition my father said that in 1942 he
'wrote the first drafts of the matter that now stands as Book III
[the story from 'The Departure of Boromir' to 'The Palantir'],
and the beginnings of Chapters 1 and 3 of Book V ['Minas
Tirith' and 'The Muster of Rohan']; and there as the beacons
flared in Anorien and Theoden came to Harrowdale I stopped.
Foresight had failed and there was no time for thought.' It seems
to have been around the end of 1942 that he stopped, and he
began again ('I forced myself to tackle the journey of Frodo to
Mordor') at the beginning of April 1944, after an interval of
well over a year.
For this reason I chose as a title for this book The Treason of
Isengard, that being a title my father had proposed for Book III
(the first Book of The Two Towers) in a letter to Rayner Unwin
of March 1953 (The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien no. 136). But I
have found repeatedly that a history of the writing of The Lord
of the Kings tends to set its own pace and scale, and that there
comes a sort of critical point beyond which condensation of the
intricacies of the evolving structure is not possible, without
changing the nature of the enterprise. Finding that the story was
not moving rapidly enough to reach the great ride of Gandalf
with Pippin on Shadowfax before I ran out of space, I rewrote a
great part of the book in an attempt to shorten it; but I found

that if I rejected material as being less essential or of less interest
I was always confronted at a later point with the need for
explanations that destroyed my gains. Finally I decided that
'The King of the Golden Hall' does in fact provide a very

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