Unfinished Tales. J. R. R. Tolkien

pursued them. I have imposed a simple structure of convenience by dividing the texts into Parts corresponding to the first Three Ages of the World, there being in this inevitably some overlap, as with the legend of Amroth and its discussion in ‘The History of Galadriel and Celeborn’. The fourth part is an appendage, and may require some excuse in a book called ‘Unfinished Tales’, since the pieces it contains are generalised and discursive essays with little or no element of ‘story’. The section on the Drúedain did indeed owe its original inclusion to the story of ‘The Faithful Stone’ which forms a small part of it; and this section led me to introduce those on the Istari and the Palantíri, since they (especially the former) are matters about which many people have expressed curiosity, and this book seemed a convenient place to expound what there is to tell.

      The notes may seem to be in some places rather thick on the ground, but it will be seen that where clustered most densely (as in ‘The Disaster of the Gladden Fields’) they are due less to the editor than to the author, who in his later work tended to compose in this way, driving several subjects abreast by means of interlaced notes. I have throughout tried to make it clear what is editorial and what is not. And because of this abundance of original material appearing in the notes and appendices I have thought it best not to restrict the page-references in the Index to the texts themselves but to cover all parts of the book except the Introduction.

      I have throughout assumed on the reader’s part a fair knowledge of the published works of my father (more especially The Lord of the Rings), for to have done otherwise would have greatly enlarged the editorial element, which may well be thought quite sufficient already. I have, however, included short defining statements with almost all the primary entries in the Index, in the hope of saving the reader from constant reference elsewhere. If I have been inadequate in explanation or unintentionally obscure, Mr Robert Foster’s Complete Guide to Middle-earth supplies, as I have found through frequent use, an admirable work of reference.

      Page-references to The Silmarillion are to the hardback edition; to The Lord of the Rings by title of the volume, book, and chapter.

      There follow now primarily bibliographical notes on the individual pieces.

      PART ONE

      I

       Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin

      My father said more than once that ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ was the first of the tales of the First Age to be composed, and there is no evidence to set against his recollection. In a letter of 1964 he declared that he wrote it ‘ “out of my head” during sick-leave from the army in 1917’, and at other times he gave the date as 1916 or 1916 – 17. In a letter to me written in 1944 he said: ‘I first began to write [The Silmarillion ] in army huts, crowded, filled with the noise of gramophones’: and indeed some lines of verse in which appear the Seven Names of Gondolin are scribbled on the back of a piece of paper setting out ‘the chain of responsibility in a battalion’. The earliest manuscript is still in existence, filling two small school exercise-books; it was written rapidly in pencil, and then, for much of its course, overlaid with writing in ink, and heavily emended. On the basis of this text my mother, apparently in 1917, wrote out a fair copy; but this in turn was further substantially emended, at some time that I cannot determine, but probably in 1919 – 20, when my father was in Oxford on the staff of the then still uncompleted Dictionary. In the spring of 1920 he was invited to read a paper to the Essay Club of his college (Exeter); and he read ‘The Fall of Gondolin’. The notes of what he intended to say by way of introduction to his ‘essay’ still survive. In these he apologised for not having been able to produce a critical paper, and went on: ‘Therefore I must read something already written, and in desperation I have fallen back on this Tale. It has of course never seen the light before.... A complete cycle of events in an Elfinesse of my own imagining has for some time past grown up (rather, has been constructed) in my mind. Some of the episodes have been scribbled down....

      This tale is not the best of them, but it is the only one that has so far been revised at all and that, insufficient as that revision has been, I dare read aloud.’

      The tale of Tuor and the Exiles of Gondolin (as ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ is entitled in the early MSS) remained untouched for many years, though my father at some stage, probably between 1926 and 1930, wrote a brief, compressed version of the story to stand as part of The Silmarillion (a title which, incidentally, first appeared in his letter to The Observer of 20 February 1938); and this was changed subsequently to bring it into harmony with altered conceptions in other parts of the book. Much later he began work on an entirely refashioned account, entitled ‘Of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin’. It seems very likely that this was written in 1951, when The Lord of the Rings was finished but its publication doubtful. Deeply changed in style and bearings, yet retaining many of the essentials of the story written in his youth, ‘Of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin’ would have given in fine detail the whole legend that constitutes the brief 23rd chapter of the published Silmarillion; but, grievously, he went no further than the coming of Tuor and Voronwë to the last gate and Tuor’s sight of Gondolin across the plain of Tumladen. To his reasons for abandoning it there is no clue.

      This is the text that is given here. To avoid confusion I have retitled it ‘Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin’, since it tells nothing of the fall of the city. As always with my father’s writings there are variant readings, and in one short section (the approach to and passage of the river Sirion by Tuor and Voronwë) several competing forms; some minor editorial work has therefore been necessary.

      It is thus the remarkable fact that the only full account that my father ever wrote of the story of Tuor’s sojourn in Gondolin, his union with Idril Celebrindal, the birth of Ea¨rendil, the treachery of Maeglin, the sack of the city, and the escape of the fugitives – a story that was a central element in his imagination of the First Age – was the narrative composed in his youth. There is no question, however, that that (most remarkable) narrative is not suitable for inclusion in this book. It is written in the extreme archaistic style that my father employed at that time, and it inevitably embodies conceptions out of keeping with the world of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion in its published form. It belongs with the rest of the earliest phase of the mythology, ‘the Book of Lost Tales’: itself a very substantial work, of the utmost interest to one concerned with the origins of Middle-earth, but requiring to be presented in a lengthy and complex study if at all.

      II

       The Tale of the Children of Húrin

      The development of the legend of Túrin Turambar is in some respects the most tangled and complex of all the narrative elements in the story of the First Age. Like the tale of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin it goes back to the very beginnings, and is extant in an early prose narrative (one of the ‘Lost Tales’) and in a long, unfinished poem in alliterative verse. But whereas the later ‘long version’ of Tuor never proceeded very far, my father carried the later ‘long version’ of Túrin much nearer completion. This is called Narn i Hîn Húrin; and this is the narrative that is given in the present book.

      There are however great differences in the course of the long Narn in the degree to which the narrative approaches a perfected or final form. The concluding section (from The Return of Túrin to Dor-lómin to The Death of Túrin) has undergone only marginal editorial alteration; while the first section (to the end of Túrin in Doriath) required a good deal of revision and selection, and in some places some slight compression, the original texts being scrappy and disconnected. But the central section of the narrative (Túrin among the outlaws, Mîm the Petty-dwarf, the land of Dor-Cúarthol, the death of Beleg at Túrin’s hand, and Túrin’s life in Nargothrond) constituted a much more difficult editorial problem. The Narn is here at its least finished, and in places diminishes to outlines of possible turns in the story. My father was still evolving this part when he ceased to work on it; and the shorter version for The Silmarillion was to wait on the final development of the Narn. In preparing the text of The Silmarillion for publication I derived, by necessity, much of this section of the tale of Túrin from these very materials, which are of quite extraordinary complexity in their variety and interrelations.