"PREFACE" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol03)

PREFACE.
This third part of 'The History of Middle-earth' contains the two
major poems by J. R. R. Tolkien concerned with the legends of
the Elder Days: the Lay of the Children of Hurin in alliterative
verse, and the Lay of Leithian in octosyllabic couplets. The
alliterative poem was composed while my father held appoint-
ments at the University of Leeds (1920 -- 5); he abandoned it for
the Lay of Leithian at the end of that time, and never turned to it
again. I have found no reference to it in any letter or other writing
of his that has survived (other than the few words cited on p. 3),
and I do not recollect his ever speaking of it. But this poem, which
though extending to more than 2000 lines is only a fragment in
relation to what he once planned, is the most sustained embodi-
ment of his abiding love of the resonance and richness of sound
that might be achieved in the ancient English metre. It marks also
an important stage in the evolution of the Matter of the Elder
Days, and contains passages that strongly illumine his imagin-
ation of Beleriand; it was, for example, in this poem that the
great redoubt of Nargothrond arose from the primitive caves of
the Rodothlim in the Lost Tales, and only in this poem was
Nargothrond described. It exists in two versions, the second
being a revision and enlargement that proceeds much less far into
the story, and both are given in this book.
My father worked on the Lay of Leithian for six years,
abandoning it in its turn in September 193 I. In 1929 it was read so
far as it then went by C. S. Lewis, who sent him a most ingenious
commentary on a part of it; I acknowledge with thanks the
permission of C. S. Lewis PTE Limited to include this.
In 1937 he said in a letter that 'in spite of certain virtuous
passages' the Lay of Leithian had 'grave defects' (see p. 366). A
decade or more later, he received a detailed, and remarkably
unconstrained, criticism of the poem from someone who knew
and admired his poetry. I do not know for certain who this was. In
choosing 'the staple octosyllabic couplet of romance,' he wrote,
my father had chosen one of the most difficult of forms 'if one
wishes to avoid monotony and sing-song in a very long poem. I am
often astonished by your success, but it is by no means consist-
ently maintained.' His strictures on the diction of the Lay

included archaisms so archaic that they needed annotation,
distorted order, use of emphatic doth or did where there is no
emphasis, and language sometimes flat and conventional (in
contrast to passages of 'gorgeous description'). There is no record
of what my father thought of this criticism (written when The
Lord of the Rings was already completed), but it must be
associated in some way with the fact that in 1949 or 1950 he
returned to the Lay of Leithian and began a revision that soon
became virtually a new poem; and relatively little though he
wrote of it, its advance on the old version in all those respects in
which that had been censured is so great as to give it a sad