"GL1" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol03)

I.
THE LAY OF THE
CHILDREN OF HURIN.
There exists a substantial manuscript (28 pages long) entitled 'Sketch of
the Mythology with especial reference to "The Children of Hurin"', and
this 'Sketch' is the next complete narrative, in the prose tradition, after
the Lost Tales (though a few fragmentary writings are extant from the
intervening time). On the envelope containing this manuscript my father
wrote at some later time:
Original 'Silmarillion'. Form orig[inally] composed c. 1926 -- 30 for
R. W. Reynolds to explain background of 'alliterative version' of Turin
R the Dragon: then in progress (unfinished) (begun c. 1918).
He seems to have written first '1921' before correcting this to '1918'.
R. W. Reynolds taught my father at King Edward's School, Birming-
ham (see Humphrey Carpenter, Biography, p. 47). In a passage of his
diary written in August 1926 he wrote that 'at the end of last year' he had
heard again from R. W. Reynolds, that they had corresponded subse-
quently, and that he had sent Reynolds many of his poems, including
Tinuviel and Turin ('Tinueiel meets with qualified approval, it is too
prolix, but how could I ever cut it down, and the specimen I sent of Turin
with little or none'). This would date the 'Sketch' as originally written (it
was subsequently heavily revised) definitely in 1926, probably fairly
early in the year. It must have accompanied the specimen of Turin (the
alliterative poem), the background of which it was written to explain, to
Anacapri, where Reynolds was then living in retirement.
My father took up his appointment to the Professorship of Anglo-
Saxon at Oxford in the winter term (October -- December) of 1925,
though for that term he had to continue to teach at Leeds also, since the
appointments overlapped. There can be no doubt that at any rate the
great bulk of the alliterative Children of Hurin (or Turin) was completed
at Leeds, and I think it virtually certain that he had ceased to work on it
before he moved south: in fact there seems nothing to oppose to the
natural assumption that he left 'Turin' for 'Tinuviel' (the Lay of
Leithian), which he began according to his diary in the summer of 1925
(see p. 159 and footnote).
For the date of its commencement we have only my father's later (and
perhaps hesitant) statement that it was 'begun c. 1918'. A terminus a
quo is provided by a page of the earliest manuscript of the poem, which is

written on a slip from the Oxford English Dictionary bearing the printer's
stamp May 1918. On the other hand the name Melian which occurs near
the beginning of the earliest manuscript shows it to be later than the
typescript version of the Tale of Tinuviel, where the Queen's name was
Gwenethlin and only became Melian in the course of its composition
(II. 51); and the manuscript version of that Tale which underlies the
typescript seems itself to have been one of the last completed elements in
the Lost Tales (see I. 204).
The Children of Hurin exists in two versions, which I shall refer to as
I and II, both of them found in manuscript and later typescript (IA, IB;
IIA, IIB). I do not think that the second is significantly later than the