"J.R.R. Tolkien - The Unfinished Tales Of Middle-Earth And Nu" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tolkien J.R.R)

in this position may elect to make to material whatsoever available for publication, save perhaps for work that was in a
virtually finished state at the time of the author's death. In the case of the unpublished writings of J. R. R. Tolkien this
might seem at first sight the proper course; since he himself, peculiarly critical and exacting of his own work, would not
have dreamt of allowing even the more completed narratives in this book to appear without much further refinement.
On the other hand, the nature and scope of his invention seems to me to place even his abandoned stories in a
peculiar position. That The Silmarillion should remain unknown was for me out of the question, despite its disordered
state, and despite my father's known if very largely unfulfilled intentions for its transformation; and in that case I
presumed, after long hesitation, to present the work not in the form of an historical study, a complex of divergent texts
interlinked by commentary, but as a completed and cohesive entity. The narratives in this book are indeed on an
altogether different footing: taken together they constitute no whole, and the book is no more than a collection of
writings, disparate in form, intent, finish, and date of composition (and in my own treatment of them), concerned with
N├║menor and Middle-earth. But the argument for their publication is not different in its nature, though it is of lesser
force, from that which I held to justify the publication of The Silmarillion. Those who would not have forgone the
images of Melkor with Ungoliant looking down from the summit of Hyarmentir upon "the fields and pastures of
Yavanna, gold beneath the tall wheat of the gods"; of the shadows of Fingolfin's host cast by the first moonrise in the
West; of Beren lurking in wolf's shape beneath the throne of Morgoth; or of the light of the Silmaril suddenly revealed
in the darkness of the Forest of Neldoreth тАУ they will find, I believe, that imperfections of form in these tales are much
outweighed by the voice (heard now for the last time) of Gandalf, teasing the lordly Saruman at the meeting of the
White Council in the year 2851, or describing in Minas Tirith after the end of the War of the Ring how it was that he
came to send the Dwarves to the celebrated party at Bag-End; by the arising of Ulmo Lord of Waters out of the sea at
Vinyamar; by Mablung of Doriath hiding "like a vole" beneath the ruins of the bridge at Nargothrond; or by the death
of Isildur as he floundered up out of the mud of Anduin.
Many of the pieces in this collection are elaborations of matters told more briefly, or at least referred to,
elsewhere; and it must be said at once that much in the book will be found unrewarding by readers of The Lord of the
Rings who, holding that the historical structure of Middle-earth is a means and not an end, the mode of the narrative
and not its purpose, feel small desire of further exploration for its own sake, do not wish to know how the Riders of the
Mark of Rohan were organised, and would leave the Wild Men of the Dr├║adan Forest firmly where they found them.
My father would certainly not have thought them wrong. He said in a letter written in March 1955, before the
publication of the third volume of The Lord of the Rings:

I now wish that no appendices had been promised! For I think their appearance in truncated and
compressed form will satisfy nobody; certainly not me; clearly from the (appalling mass of) letters I
receive not those people who like that kind of thing тАУ astonishingly many; while those who enjoy the
book as an "heroic romance" only, and find "unexplained vistas" part of the literary effect, will neglect
the appendices, very properly.
I am not now at all sure that the tendency to treat the whole thing as a kind of vast game is
really good тАУ certainly not for me who find that kind of thing only too fatally attractive. It is, I sup-
pose, a tribute to the curious effect that a story has, when based on very elaborate and detailed
workings, of geography, chronology, and language, that so many should clamour for sheer
"information," or "lore."

In a letter of the following year he wrote:

... while many like you demand maps, others wish for geological indications rather than places; many
want Elvish grammars, phonologies, and specimens; some want metrics and prosodies.... Musicians
want tunes, and musical notation; archaeologists want ceramics and metallurgy; botanists want a more
accurate description of the mallorn, of elanor, niphredil, alfirin, mallos, and symbelmyn├л, historians
want more details about the social and political structure of Gondor; general enquirers want
information about the Wainriders, the Harad, Dwarvish origins, the Dead Men, the Beornings, and the
missing two wizards (out of five).