"FOREWORD" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol10)

This second break was destructive - in the sense, that The
Silmarillion would never now be finally achieved. In the years
that followed he was overwhelmed: the demands of his position
in the University, and the necessity of moving house, led him to
declare that the preparation of The Lord of the Rings for
publication, which should have been 'a labour of delight', had
been 'transformed into a nightmare'. Publication was followed
by a huge correspondence of discussion, explanation, and
analysis, of which the examples retrieved and published in the
volume of his letters provide abundant evidence. It seems not to
have been until the end of the 1950s that he turned again
seriously to the Silmarillion narrative (for which there was now
an insistent demand). But it was too late. As will be seen in the
latter part of this book, much had changed since (and, as I
incline to think, in direct relation to) the publication of The
Lord of the Rings and its immediate aftermath. Meditating long
on the world that he had brought into being and was now in
part unveiled, he had become absorbed in analytic speculation
concerning its underlying postulates. Before he could prepare a
new and final Silmarillion he must satisfy the requirements of a
coherent theological and metaphysical system, rendered now
more complex in its presentation by the supposition of obscure
and conflicting elements in its roots and its tradition.
Among the chief 'structural' conceptions of the mythology
that he pondered in those years were the myth of Light; the
nature of Aman; the immortality (and death) of the Elves; the
mode of their reincarnation; the Fall of Men and the length of
their early history; the origin of the Orcs; and above all, the
power and significance of Melkor-Morgoth, which was en-
larged to become the ground and source of the corruption of



Arda. For this reason I have chosen Morgoth's Ring as the title
of this book. It derives from a passage in my father's essay
'Notes on motives in the Silmarillion' (pp. 394 ff.), in which he
contrasted the nature of Sauron's power, concentrated in the
One Ring, with that of Morgoth, enormously greater, but dis-
persed or disseminated into the very matter of Arda: 'the whole
of Middle-earth was Morgoth's Ring'.

Thus this book and (as I hope) its successor attempt to
document two radically distinct 'phases': that following the
completion of The Lord of the Rings, and that following its
publication. For a number of reasons, however, I have found it
more satisfactory in presentation to divide the material, not
according to these two 'phases', but by separating the narrative
into two parts. While this division is artificial, I have been able
to include in this book a high proportion of all that my father
wrote in the years after The Lord of the Rings was finished,