"FOREWORD" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol11)

FOREWORD.

The War of the Jewels is a companion to and continuation of
Morgoth's Ring, Volume 10 in The History of Middle-earth. As
I explained in that book, the two together contain virtually all
of my father's narrative writing on the subject of the Elder Days
in the years after The Lord of the Rings, but the division into
two is made 'transversely': between the first part of 'The
Silmarillion' ('the Legends of Aman') and the second ('the
Legends of Beleriand'). I use the term 'Silmarillion', of course, in
a very wide sense: this though potentially confusing is imposed
by the extremely complex relationship of the different 'works' -
especially but not only that of the Quenta Silmarillion and the
Annals; and my father himself employed the name in this way.
The division of the whole corpus into two parts is indeed a
natural one: the Great Sea divides them. The title of this second
part, The War of the Jewels, is an expression that my father
often used of the last six centuries of the First Age: the history of
Beleriand after the return of Morgoth to Middle-earth and the
coming of the Noldor, until its end.
In the foreword to Morgoth's Ring I emphasised the distinc-
tion between the first period of writing that followed in the
early 1950s the actual completion of The Lord of the Rings, and
the later work that followed its publication; in this book also,
therefore, two distinct 'phases' are documented.
The number of new works that my father embarked upon in
that first 'phase', highly creative but all too brief, is astonishing.
There were the new Lay of Leithian, of which all that he wrote
before he abandoned it was published in The Lays of Beleriand;
the Annals of Aman and new versions of the Ainulindale; the
Grey Annals, abandoned at the end of the tale of Turin; the new
Tale of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin (published in Unfinished
Tales), abandoned before Tuor actually entered the city; and all
the new tale of Turin and Nienor from Turin's return to
Dor-lomin to their deaths in Brethil (see p. 144 in this book).
There were also an abandoned prose saga of Beren and Luthien
(see V.295); the story of Maeglin; and an extensive revision of
the Quenta Silmarillion, the central work of the last period

before The Lord of the Rings, interrupted near the beginning of
the tale of Turin in 1937 and never concluded.
I expressed the view in the foreword to Morgoth's Ring that
'despair of publication, at least in the form that he regarded as
essential' (i.e. the conjunction of The Silmarillion and The Lord
of the Rings in a single work) was the fundamental cause of the
collapse of this new endeavour; and that this break destroyed all
prospect that what may be called 'the older Silmarillion' would
ever be completed. In Morgoth's Ring I have documented the
massive upheaval, in the years that followed, in his conception
of the old myths: an upheaval that never issued in new and