"J.R.R. Tolkien - The History of Middle-Earth - 12" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tolkien J.R.R)

would always remain in a somewhat fluid state so long as they
were not fixed in published work; and he certainly did not have
all the relevant manuscripts clearly arranged and set out before
him. But it remains in any case an open question, whether (to
give a single example) in the essay Of Dwarves and Men he had
definitively rejected the greatly elaborated account of the houses
of the Edain that had entered the Quenta Silmarillion in about
1958, or whether it had passed from his mind.



The book concludes with two pieces further illustrating the

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instruction that AElfwine of England received from Pengolod
the Wise in Tol Eressea, and the abandoned beginnings of two
remarkable stories, The New Shadow and Tal-elmar.

With the picture of such clarity in the tale of Tal-elmar of the
great ships of the Numenoreans drawing into the coast, and the
- fear among men of Middle-earth of the terrible 'Go-hilleg', this
'History' ends. It is a long time since I began the work of order-
ing and elucidating the vast collection of papers in which my
father's conception of Arda, Aman, and Middle-earth was con-
tained, making, not long after his death, some first transcrip-
tions from The Book of Lost Tales, of which I knew virtually
nothing, as a step towards the understanding of the origins of
'The Silmarillion'. I had little notion then of what lay before me,
of all the unknown works crammed in disorder in that formi-
dable array of battered box-files. Nearly a quarter of a century
later the story, as I have been able to tell it, is at last concluded.
This is not to say that I have given an account of everything
that my father wrote, even leaving aside the great body of his
work on the languages of the Elves. My father's very late writ-
ings have been selectively presented, and much further detail,
especially concerning names and the etymology of names, can
be found in texts such as those that I excerpted in Unfinished
Tales, notably in the part of that book entitled 'The History of
Galadriel and Celeborn'. Other omissions have arisen almost
one might say from inadvertence as the work and its publication
proceeded.
It began indeed as an entirely 'private' study, without thought
or purpose of publication: an exhaustive investigation and
analysis of all the materials concerned with what came to be
called the Elder Days, from the earliest beginnings, omitting no
detail of name-form or textual variation. From that original
work derives the respect for the precise wording of the texts,
and the insistence that no stone (especially stones bearing