"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

quality in the older writing that I attempted to describe in my
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