"FOREWORD" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol11)

secure form. But we come now to the last epoch of the Elder
Days, when the scene shifts to Middle-earth and the mythical
element recedes: the High-elves return across the Great Sea to
make war upon Morgoth, Dwarves and Men come over the
mountains into Beleriand, and bound up with this history of the
movement of peoples, of the policies of kingdoms, of moment-
ous battles and ruinous defeats, are the heroic tales of Beren
One-hand and Turin Turambar. Yet in The War of the Jewels
the record is completed of all my father's further work on that
history in the years following the publication of The Lord of
the Rings; and even with all the labour that went into the
elaboration of parts of 'the Saga of Turin' it is obvious that this
bears no comparison with his aims or indeed his achievements
in the early 1950s.
In Part Two of this book it will be seen that in this later phase
of his work the Quenta Silmarillion underwent scarcely any
further significant rewriting or addition, other than the intro-
duction of the new chapter Of the Coming of Men into the
West with the radically altered earlier history of the Edain in
Beleriand; and that (the most remarkable fact in the whole
history of The Silmarillion) the last chapters (the tale of Hurin
and the dragon-gold of Nargothrond, the Necklace of the
Dwarves, the ruin of Doriath, the fall of Gondolin, the Kin-
slayings) remained in the form of the Quenta Noldorinwa of
1930 and were never touched again. Only some meagre hints
are found in later writings.
For this there can be no simple explanation, but it seems to
me that an important element was the centrality that my father
accorded to the story of Hurin and Morwen and their children,
Turin Turambar and Nienor Niniel. This became for him, I
believe, the dominant and absorbing story of the end of the

Elder Days, in which complexity of motive and character,
trapped in the mysterious workings of Morgoth's curse, sets it
altogether apart. He never finally achieved important passages
of Turin's life; but he extended the 'great saga' (as he justly
called it) into 'the Wanderings of Hurin', following the old story
that Hurin was released by Morgoth from his imprisonment in
Angband after the deaths of his children, and went first to the
ruined halls of Nargothrond. The dominance of the underlying
theme led to a new story, a new dimension to the ruin that
Hurin's release would bring: his catastrophic entry into the land
of the People of Haleth, the Forest of Brethil. There were no
antecedents whatsoever to this tale; but antecedents to the
manner of its telling are found in parts of the prose 'saga' of the
Children of Hurin (Narn i Chin Hurin, given in Unfinished
Tales), of which 'Hurin in Brethil' is a further extension. That
'saga' went back to the foundations in The Book of Lost Tales,
but its great elaboration belongs largely to the period after the
publication of The Lord of the Rings; and in its later develop-