"GL2" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol12)

PART TWO.

LATE WRITINGS.

LATE WRITINGS.

It is a great convenience in this so largely dateless history that my
father received from Allen and Unwin a quantity of their waste paper
whose blank sides he used for much of his late writing; for this paper
consisted of publication notes, and many of the pages bear dates:
some from 1967, the great majority from 1968, and some from 1970.
These dates provide, of course, only a terminus a quo: in the case, for
instance, of a long essay on the names of the rivers and beacon-hills of
Gondor (extensively drawn on in Unfinished Tales) pages dated 1967
were used, but the work can be shown on other and entirely certain
grounds to have been written after June 1969. This was the period of
The Disaster of the Gladden Fields, Cirion and Eorl, and The Battles
of the Fords of Isen, which I published in Unfinished Tales.
It was also a time when my father was moved to write extensively,
in a more generalised view, of the languages and peoples of the Third
Age and their interrelations, closely interwoven with discussion of
the etymology of names. Of this material I made a good deal of use
in the section The History of Galadriel and Celeborn (and elsewhere)
in Unfinished Tales; but I had, of course, to relate it to the structure
and content of that book, and the only way to do so, in view of the
extremely diffuse and digressive nature of my father's writing, was by
the extraction of relevant passages. In this book I give two of the most
substantial of these 'essays', from neither of which did I take much in
Unfinished Tales.
The first of these, Of Men and Dwarves, arose, as my father said,
'from consideration of the Book of Mazarbul' (that is, of his repre-
sentations of the burnt and damaged leaves, which were not in fact
published until after his death) and the inscription on the tomb of
Balin in Moria, but led far beyond its original point of departure.
From this essay I have excluded the two passages that were used in
Unfinished Tales, the account of the Druedain, and that of the meet-
ing of the Numenorean mariners with the Men of Eriador in the year
600 of the Second Age (see pp. 309, 314). The second, which I have
called The Shibboleth of Feanor, is of a very different nature, as
will be seen, and from this only a passage on Galadriel was used in
Unfinished Tales; I have included also a long excursus on the names of
the descendants of Finwe, King of the Noldor, which was my father's
final, or at any rate last, statement on many of the great names of

Elvish legend, and which I used in the published Silmarillion. I have
also given a third text, which I have called The Problem of Ros; and
following these are some of his last writings, probably in the last year
of his life (p. 377).
A word must be said of these 'historical-philological' essays. Apart
from the very last, just referred to, they were composed on a type-