"GL1" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol12)

PART ONE.

THE PROLOGUE
AND APPENDICES TO
THE LORD OF THE
RINGS.

I.

THE PROLOGUE.

It is remarkable that this celebrated account of Hobbits goes so far
back in the history of the writing of The Lord of the Rings: its earliest
form, entitled Foreword: Concerning Hobbits, dates from the period
1938 - 9, and it was printed in The Return of the Shadow (VI.310-14).
This was a good 'fair copy' manuscript, for which there is no prepara-
tory work extant; but I noticed in my very brief account of it that my
father took up a passage concerning Hobbit architecture from the
chapter A Short Cut to Mushrooms (see VI.92, 294 - 5).
Comparison with the published Prologue to The Lord of the Rings
will show that while much of that original version survived, there was
a great deal still to come: the entire account of the history of the
Hobbits (FR pp. 11-15) in section 1 of the Prologue, the whole of
section 2, Concerning Pipe-weed, and the whole of section 3, Of
the Ordering of the Shire, apart from the opening paragraph; while
corresponding to section 4, Of the Finding of the Ring, there was no
more than a brief reference to the story of Bilbo and Gollum (VI.314).
In order to avoid confusion with another and wholly distinct 'Fore-
word', given in the next chapter, I shall use the letter P in reference to
the texts that ultimately led to the published Prologue, although the
title Foreword: Concerning Hobbits was used in the earlier versions.
The original text given in The Return of the Shadow I shall call there-
fore P 1.
My father made a typescript of this, P 2, and judging from the type-
writer used I think it probable that it belonged to much the same time
as P 1 - at any rate, to a fairly early period in the writing of The Lord
of the Rings. In my text of P 1 in The Return of the Shadow I ignored
the changes made to the manuscript unless they seemed certainly to
belong to the time of writing (VI.310), but all such changes were taken
up into P 2, so that it was probably not necessary to make the distinc-
tion. The changes were not numerous and mostly minor,(1) but the
whole of the conclusion of P 1, following the words 'his most mys-
terious treasure: a magic ring' (VI.314), was struck out and replaced
by a much longer passage, in which my father recounted the actual
story of Bilbo and Gollum, and slightly altered the final paragraph.
This new conclusion I give here. A part of the story as told here
survived into the published Prologue, but at this stage there was no
suggestion of any other version than that in The Hobbit, until the