"FOREWORD" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol09)

To
TAUM SANTOSKE.

FOREWORD.

With this book my account of the writing of The Lord of the
Rings is completed. I regret that I did not manage to keep it even
within the compass of three fat volumes; but the circumstances
were such that it was always difficult to project its structure and
foresee its extent, and became more so, since when working on
The Return of the King I was largely ignorant of what was to
come. I shall not attempt a study of the history of the
Appendices at this time. That work will certainly prove both
far-ranging and intricate; and since my father soon turned
again, when The Lord of the Rings was finished, to the myths
and legends of the Elder Days, I hope after this to publish his
major writings and rewritings deriving from that period, some
of which are wholly unknown.
When The Lord of the Rings had still a long way to go -
during the halt that lasted through 1945 and extended into
1946, The Return of the King being then scarcely begun - my
father had embarked on a work of a very different nature: The
Notion Club Papers; and from this had emerged a new lan-
guage, Adunaic, and a new and remarkable version of the
Numenorean legend, The Drowning of Anadune, the develop-
ment of which was closely entwined with that of The Notion Club
Papers. To retain the chronological order of writing which it
has been my aim to follow (so far as I could discover it) in The
History of Middle-earth I thought at one time to include in
Volume VIII, first, the history of the writing of The Two Towers
(from the point reached in The Treason of Isengard) and then
this new work of 1945 - 6, reserving the history of The Return o f
the King to Volume IX. I was persuaded against this, I am sure
rightly; and thus it is in the present book that the great disparity
of subject-matter appears - and the great difficulty of finding a
title for it. My father's suggested title for Book VI of The Lord
of the Rings was The End of the Third Age; but it seemed very
unsatisfactory to name this volume The End of the Third Age
and Other Writings, when the 'other writings', constituting two
thirds of the book, were concerned with matters pertaining to
the Second Age (and to whatever Age we find ourselves in now).

Sauron Defeated is my best attempt to find some sort of link
between the disparate parts and so to name to the whole.
At a cursory glance my edition of The Notion Club Papers
and The Drowning of Anadune may appear excessively compli-
cated; but I have in fact so ordered them that the works
themselves are presented in the clearest possible form. Thus the
final texts of the two parts of the Papers are each given complete
and without any editorial interruption, as also are two versions