"PREFACE" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol04)

PREFACE.

This book brings the 'History of Middle-earth' to some time in
the 1930s: the cosmographical work Ambarkanta and the earliest
Annals of Valinor and Annals of Beleriand, while later than the
Quenta Noldorinwa - the 'Silmarillion' version that was written,
as I believe, in 1930 - cannot themselves be more precisely dated.
This is the stage at which my father had arrived when The
Hobbit was written. Comparison of the Quenta with the pub-
lished Silmarillion will show that the essential character of the
work was now fully in being; in the shape and fall of sen-
tences, even of whole passages, the one is constantly echoed in
the other; and yet the published Silmarillion is between three
and four times as long.
After the hasty 'Sketch of the Mythology' (chapter II in this
book), the Quenta Noldorinwa was in fact the only complete ver-
sion of 'The Silmarillion' that my father ever made. Towards the
end of 1937 he interrupted work on a new version, Quenta
Silmarillion, which extended to part way through the story of
Turin Turambar, and began The Lord of the Rings (see The Lays
of Beleriand pp. 364 - 7). When after many years he returned to
the First Age, the vast extension of the world that had now come
into being meant that the Quenta Silmarillion, which had been
stopped in full flight, could not be taken up from where it fell;
and though he undertook exceedingly complex revisions and en-
largements of the earlier parts during the following years, he
never achieved again a complete and coherent structure. Especial-
ly in its concluding chapters the Quenta Noldorinwa is thus one
of the primary elements in the study of the work as a whole.



In the Annals of Valinor and the Annals of Beleriand am
seen the beginnings of the chronological structure which was
to become a central preoccupation. The Annals would develop
into a separate 'tradition', parallel to and overlapping but dis-
tinct from 'The Silmarillion' proper, and (after intervening ver-
sions) emerging in the years following the completion of The
Lord of the Rings in two chief works of the Matter of Middle-
earth, the Annals of Aman and the Grey Annals of Beleriand
(see pp. 310, 351). With the Quenta and with these earliest
versions of the Annals I give the brief texts in Anglo-Saxon
feigned to have been made by AElfwine (Eriol) from the works
that he studied in Tol Eressea, the Lonely Isle.
The commentaries are largely concerned to relate geography,
names, events, relationships and motives to what preceded and
what followed; inevitably this entails a great deal of reference
back to the previous books, and the text of the commentaries
is hardly enticing (though being in smaller print they can be
readily distinguished from the original works). My object is to