"GL3" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol03)

III.
THE LAY OF LEITHIAN.

My father wrote in his diary that he began 'the poem of Tinuviel' during
the period of the summer examinations of 1925 (see p. 3), and he
abandoned it in September 193 I (see below), when he was 39. The rough
workings for the whole poem are extant (and 'rough' means very rough
indeed); from them he wrote a fair copy, which I shall call 'A'.*
On this manuscript A my father most uncharacteristically inserted
dates, the first of these being at line 557 (August 23, 1925); and he
composed the last hundred-odd lines of the third Canto (ending at line
757) while on holiday at Filey on the Yorkshire coast in September 1925.
The next date is two and a half years and 400 lines later, 27 - 28 March
1928 written against line 1161; and thereafter each day for a further nine
days, till 6 April 1928, is marked, during which time he wrote out no less
than 1768 lines, to 2929.
Since the dates refer to the copying of verses out fair in the manuscript,
not to their actual composition, it might be thought that they prove little;
but the rough workings of lines 2497 - 2504 are written on an abandoned
letter dated x April 1928, and these lines were written in the fair copy A
on 4 April - showing that lines 2505 - 2929 were actually composed
between x and 6 April. I think therefore that the dates on A can be taken
as effectively indicating the time of composition.
The date November 1929 (at line 3031) is followed by a substantial
amount of composition in the last week of September 1930, and again in
the middle of September 193 I; the last date is 17 September of that year
against line 4085 very near the point where the Lay. was abandoned.
Details of the dates are given in the Notes.
There is also a typescript text ('B') made by my father, of which the
last few hundred lines are in manuscript, and this text ends at precisely
the same point as does A. This typescript was begun quite early, since my
father mentioned in his diary for 16 August 1926 having done 'a little
typing of part of Tinuviel', and before the end of 1929 he gave it to
C. S. Lewis to read. On 7 December of that year Lewis wrote to him
about it, saying:

I sat up late last night and have read the Geste as far as to where Beren
and his gnomish allies defeat the patrol of orcs above the sources of the

(* This was written on the backs of examination-scripts, tied together and prepared as a
blank manuscript: it was large enough to last through the six years, and a few scripts at the
end of the bundle remained unused.)

Narog and disguise themselves in the reaf [Old English: 'garments,
weapons, taken from the slain']. I can quite honestly say that it is ages
since I have had an evening of such delight: and the personal interest
of reading a friend's work had very little to do with it. I should have
enjoyed it just as well as if I'd picked it up in a bookshop, by an
unknown author. The two things that come out clearly are the sense of
reality in the background and the mythical value: the essence of a myth