"FOREWORD" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol11)

available, save only in a few details and in the matter of 'Turin'
just mentioned; and with them a criticism of the 'constructed'
Silmarillion becomes possible. I shall not enter into that
question; although it will be apparent in this book that there are
aspects of the work that I view with regret.

In The War of the Jewels I have included, as Part Four, a long
essay of a very different nature: Quendi and Eldar. While there
was no possibility of making The History of Middle-earth a
history of the languages as well, I have not wished to eschew
them altogether even when not essential to the narrative (as
Adunaic is in The Notion Club Papers); I have wished to give at
least some indication at different stages of the presence of this
vital and evolving element, especially in regard to the meaning
of names - thus the appendices to The Book of Lost Tales and
the Etymologies in The Lost Road. Quendi and Eldar illustrates
perhaps more than any other writing of my father's the sig-
nificance of names, and of linguistic change affecting names, in



his histories. It gives also an account of many things found
nowhere else, such as the gesture-language of the Dwarves, and
all that will ever be known, I believe, of Valarin, the language of
the Valar.

I take this opportunity to give the correct text of a passage in
Morgoth's Ring. Through an error that entered at a late stage
and was not observed a line was dropped and a line repeated in
note 16 on page 327; the text should read:
There have been suggestions earlier in the Athrabeth that
Andreth was looking much further back in time to the
awakening of Men (thus she speaks of 'legends of days when
death came less swiftly and our span was still far longer',
p. 313); in her words here, 'a rumour that has come down
through years uncounted', a profound alteration in the
conception seems plain.

I have received a communication from Mr Patrick Wynne
concerning Volume IX, Sauron Defeated, which I would like to
record here. He has pointed out that several of the names in
Michael Ramer's account of his experiences to the Notion Club
are 'not just Hungarian in style but actual Hungarian words'
(Ramer was born and spent his early childhood in Hungary, and
he refers to the influence of Magyar on his 'linguistic taste',
Sauron Defeated pp. 159, 201). Thus the world of the story that
he wrote and read to the Club was first named Gyonyoru (ibid.
p. 214, note 28), which means 'lovely'. His name for the planet
Saturn was first given as Gyuruchill (p. 221, note 60), derived
from Hungarian gyuru 'ring' and csillag 'star' (where cs is