"GL3" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol04)

III.

THE QUENTA.

This work is extant in a typescript (made by my father) for
which there is no trace of any preliminary notes or drafts. That
the Quenta, or at any rate the greater part of it, was written in
1930 seems to me to be certainly deducible (see the commen-
tary on $10, pp. 213-4). After a quite different initial section
(which is the origin of the Valaquenta) this text becomes a re-
working and expansion of the 'Sketch of the Mythology'; and
it quickly becomes evident that my father had S (the 'Sketch')
in front of him when he wrote the Quenta (which I shall refer
to as 'Q'). The latter moves towards The Silmarillion in its
published form, both in structure and in language (indeed al-
ready in S the first forms of many sentences can be perceived).
Eriol (as in S; not AElfwine) is mentioned both in the title of
Q and at the end of the work, and his coming to Kortirion, but
(again as in S) there is no trace of the Cottage of Lost Play. As
I have said of its absence from S (p. 48), this does not dem-
onstrate that my father had rejected the conception in its en-
tirety: in S he may have omitted it because his purpose was
solely to recount the history of the Elder Days in condensed
form, while in the title of Q it is said that the work was 'drawn
from the Book of Lost Tales which Eriol of Leithien wrote'. At
least then, we may think, some venue in which the Lost Tales
were told to Eriol in Kortirion still existed.*
The title makes it very plain that while Q was written in a
finished manner, my father saw it as a compendium, a 'brief

(*It is said at the end of the Quenta that Eriol 'remembered things that he
had heard in fair Cortirion'. But this Book of Lost Tales was composed by
Eriol (according to the title) out of a 'Golden Book' which he read in
Kortirion. (Previously the Golden Book of Tavrobel was written either by
Eriol (AElwine) himself, or by his son Heorrenda, or by some other person un-
named long after; see II. 291.))



history' that was 'drawn from' a much longer work; and this
aspect remained an important element in his conception of
'The Silmarillion' properly so called. I do not know whether
this idea did indeed arise from the fact that the starting point
of the second phase of the mythological narrative was a con-
densed synopsis (S); but it seems likely enough, from the step
by step continuity that leads from S through Q to the version
that was interrupted towards its end in 1937.
It seems very probable that the greater number of the exten-
sions and elaborations found in Q arose in the course of its
composition, and that while Q contains features, omitted in S,