"FOREWORD" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol11) ment there entered an immediacy in the telling and a fullness in
the recording of event and dialogue that must be described as a new narrative impulse: in relation to the mode of the 'Quenta', it is as if the focus of the glass by which the remote ages were viewed had been sharply changed. But with Hurin's grim and even it may seem sardonic departure from the ruin of Brethil and dying Manthor this impulse ceased - as it appears. Hurin never came back to Nargothrond and Doriath; and we are denied an account, in this mode of story-telling, of what should be the culminating moment of the saga after the deaths of his children and his wife- his confrontation of Thingol and Melian in the Thousand Caves. It might be, then, that my father had no inclination to return to the Quenta Silmarillion, and its characteristic mode, until he had told on an ample scale, and with the same immediacy as that of his sojourn in Brethil, the full tale of Hurin's tragic and destructive 'wanderings' - and their aftermath also: for it is to be remembered that his bringing of the treasure of Nargothrond to Doriath would lead to the slaying of Thingol by the Dwarves, the sack of Menegroth, and all the train of events that issued in the attack of the Feanorians on Dior Thingol's heir in Doriath and, at the last, the destruction of the Havens of Sirion. If my father had done this, then out of it might have come, I suppose, new chapters of the Quenta Silmarillion, and a return to that foreword to The Book of Lost Tales: 'The compendious or epitomising form and manner of The Silmarillion, with its suggestion of ages of poetry and "lore" behind it, strongly evokes a sense of "untold tales", even in the telling of them There is no narrative urgency, the pressure and fear of the immediate and unknown event. We do not actually see the Silmarils as we see the Ring.' But this is entirely speculative, because none of it came about: neither the 'great saga' nor the Quenta Silmarillion were concluded. Freely as my father often wrote of his work, he never so much as hinted at his larger intentions for the structure of the whole. I think that it must be said that we are left, finally, in the dark. 'The Silmarillion', again in the widest sense, is very evidently a literary entity of a singular nature. I would say that it can only be defined in terms of its history; and that history is with this book largely completed ('largely', because I have not entered further into the complexities of the tale of Turin in those parts that my father left in confusion and uncertainty, as explained in Unfinished Tales, p. 6). It is indeed the only 'completion' possible, because it was always 'in progress'; the published work is not in any way a completion, but a construction devised out of the existing materials. Those materials are now made |
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