"J.R.R. Tolkien - The History of Middle-Earth - 10" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tolkien J.R.R)

PART ONE.

AINULINDALE.

AINULINDALE.

The evidence is clear that when The Lord of the Rings was at last
completed my father returned with great energy to the legends of the
Elder Days. He was working on the new version of the Lay of Leithian
in 1950 (III.330); and he noted (V.294) that he had revised the Quenta
Silmarillion as far as the end of the tale of Beren and Luthien on
10 May 1951. The last page of the later Tale of Tuor, where the
manuscript is reduced to notes before finally breaking off (Unfinished
Tales p. 56), is written on a page from an engagement calendar
bearing the date September 1951, and the same calendar, with dates in
September, October, and November 1951, was used for riders to Tuor
and the Grey Annals (the last version of the Annals of Beleriand and a
close companion work to the Annals of Aman, the last version of the
Annals of Valinor). The account, some ten thousand words long, of
the 'cycles' of the legends, written to Milton Waldman of the London
publisher Collins and given in part in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien
(no.131), was very probably written towards the end of that year.
Until recently I had assumed without question that every element in
the new work on the Elder Days belonged to the years 1950 and 1951;
but I have now discovered unambiguous evidence that my father had
in fact turned again to the Ainulindale some years before he finished
The Lord of the Rings. As will be seen, this is no mere matter of
getting the textual history right, but is of great significance.
I had long been aware of extremely puzzling facts in the history of
the rewriting of the Ainulindale. The fine pre-Lord of the Rings
manuscript, lettered 'B', was described and printed in V.155 ff.; as I
noted there (p. 156) 'the manuscript became the vehicle of massive
rewriting many years later, when great changes in the cosmological
conception had entered.' So drastic was the revision (with a great deal
of new material written on the blank verso pages) that in the result
two distinct texts of the work, wholly divergent in essential respects,
exist physically in the same manuscript. This new text I shall
distinguish as 'C'.
But there is another text, a typescript made by my father, that was
also directly based on Ainulindale' B of the 1930s; and in this there
appears a much more radical - one might say a devastating - change
in the cosmology: for in this version the Sun is already in existence

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from the beginning of Arda. I shall refer to this typescript as 'C *'.
A peculiarity of C* is that for a long stretch it proceeds in very close
relationship to C, but yet constantly differs from it, though always in