Unfinished Tales. Литагент HarperCollins USD

Celeborn is so interwoven with other legends and histories – of Lothlórien and the Silvan Elves, of Amroth and Nimrodel, of Celebrimbor and the making of the Rings of Power, of the war against Sauron and the Númenórean intervention – that it cannot be treated in isolation, and thus this section of the book, together with its five Appendices, brings together virtually all the unpublished materials for the history of the Second Age in Middle-earth (and the discussion in places inevitably extends into the Third). It is said in the Tale of Years given in Appendix B to The Lord of the Rings: ‘These were the dark years for Men of Middle-earth, but the years of the glory of Númenor. Of events in Middle-earth the records are few and brief, and their dates are often uncertain.’ But even that little surviving from the ‘dark years’ changed as my father’s contemplation of it grew and changed; and I have made no attempt to smooth away inconsistency, but rather exhibited it and drawn attention to it.

      Divergent versions need not indeed always be treated solely as a question of settling the priority of composition; and my father as ‘author’ or ‘inventor’ cannot always in these matters be distinguished from the ‘recorder’ of ancient traditions handed down in diverse forms among different peoples through long ages (when Frodo met Galadriel in Lórien, more than sixty centuries had passed since she went east over the Blue Mountains from the ruin of Beleriand). ‘Of this two things are said, though which is true only those Wise could say who now are gone.’

      In his last years my father wrote much concerning the etymology of names in Middle-earth. In these highly discursive essays there is a good deal of history and legend embedded; but being ancillary to the main philological purpose, and introduced as it were in passing, it has required extraction. It is for this reason that this part of the book is largely made up of short citations, with further material of the same kind placed in the Appendices.

      PART THREE

      I

       The Disaster of the Gladden Fields

      This is a ‘late’ narrative – by which I mean no more, in the absence of any indication of precise date, than that it belongs in the final period of my father’s writing on Middle-earth, together with ‘Cirion and Eorl’, ‘The Battles of the Fords of Isen’, ‘the Drúedain’, and the philological essays excerpted in ‘The History of Galadriel and Celeborn’, rather than to the time of the publication of The Lord of the Rings and the years following it. There are two versions: a rough typescript of the whole (clearly the first stage of composition), and a good typescript incorporating many changes that breaks off at the point where Elendur urged Isildur to flee (p. 355). The editorial hand has here had little to do.

      II

       Cirion and Eorl and the Friendship of Gondor and Rohan

      I judge these fragments to belong to the same period as ‘The Disaster of the Gladden Fields’, when my father was greatly interested in the earlier history of Gondor and Rohan; they were doubtless intended to form parts of a substantial history, developing in detail the summary accounts given in Appendix A to The Lord of the Rings. The material is in the first stage of composition, very disordered, full of variants, breaking off into rapid jottings that are in part illegible.

      III

       The Quest of Erebor

      In a letter written in 1964 my father said:

      There are, of course, quite a lot of links between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that are not clearly set out. They were mostly written or sketched out, but cut out to lighten the boat: such as Gandalf’s exploratory journeys, his relations with Aragorn and Gondor; all the movements of Gollum, until he took refuge in Moria, and so on. I actually wrote in full an account of what really happened before Gandalf’s visit to Bilbo and the subsequent ‘Unexpected Party’, as seen by Gandalf himself. It was to have come in during a looking-back conversation in Minas Tirith; but it had to go, and is only represented in brief in Appendix A pp. 358 – 60, though the difficulties that Gandalf had with Thorin are omitted.

      This account of Gandalf’ s is given here. The complex textual situation is described in the Appendix to the narrative, where I have given substantial extracts from an earlier version.

      IV

       The Hunt for the Ring

      There is much writing bearing on the events of the year 3018 of the Third Age, which are otherwise known from the Tale of Years and the reports of Gandalf and others to the Council of Elrond; and these writings are clearly those referred to as ‘sketched out’ in the letter just cited. I have given them the title ‘The Hunt for the Ring’. The manuscripts themselves, in great though hardly exceptional confusion, are sufficiently described on p. 442; but the question of their date (for I believe them all, and also those of ‘Concerning Gandalf, Saruman, and the Shire’, given as the third element in this section, to derive from the same time) may be mentioned here. They were written after the publication of The Lord of the Rings, for there are references to the pagination of the printed text; but they differ in the dates they give for certain events from those in the Tale of Years in Appendix B. The explanation is clearly that they were written after the publication of the first volume but before that of the third, containing the Appendices.

      V

       The Battles of the Fords of Isen

      This, together with the account of the military organisation of the Rohirrim and the history of Isengard given in an Appendix to the text, belongs with other late pieces of severe historical analysis; it presented relatively little difficulty of a textual kind, and is only unfinished in the most obvious sense.

      PART FOUR

      I

       The Drúedain

      Towards the end of his life my father revealed a good deal more about the Wild Men of the Drúadan Forest in Anórien and the statues of the Púkel-men on the road up to Dunharrow. The account given here, telling of the Drúedain in Beleriand in the First Age, and containing the story of ‘The Faithful Stone’, is drawn from a long, discursive, and unfinished essay concerned primarily with the interrelations of the languages of Middle-earth. As will be seen, the Drúedain were to be drawn back into the history of the earlier Ages; but of this there is necessarily no trace in the published Silmarillion.

      II

       The Istari

      It was proposed soon after the acceptance of The Lord of the Rings for publication that there should be an index at the end of the third volume, and it seems that my father began to work on it in the summer of 1954, after the first two volumes had gone to press. He wrote of the matter in a letter of 1956: ‘An index of names was to be produced, which by etymological interpretation would also provide quite a large Elvish vocabulary.... I worked at it for months, and indexed the first two volumes (it was the chief cause of the delay of Volume III), until it became clear that size and cost were ruinous.’

      In the event there was no index to The Lord of the Rings until the second edition of 1966, but my father’s original rough draft has been preserved. From it I derived the plan of my index to The Silmarillion, with translation of names and brief explanatory statements, and also, both there and in the index to this book, some of the translations and the wording of some of the ‘definitions’. From it comes also the ‘essay on the Istari’ with which this section of the book opens – an entry wholly uncharacteristic of the original index in its length, if characteristic of the way in which my father often worked.

      For the other citations in this section I have given in the text itself such indications of date as can be provided.

      III

       The Palantíri