"GL3" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol03)

There bow was bent and shaft was sped, 85
the fallow deer as phantoms fled,
and horses proud with braided mane,
with shining bit and silver rein,
went fleeting by on moonlit night,
as swallows arrow-swift in flight; 90
a blowing and a sound of bells,
a hidden hunt in hollow dells.
There songs were made and things of gold,
and silver cups and jewels untold,
and the endless years of Faery land 95

rolled over far Beleriand,
until a day beneath the sun,
when many marvels were begun.

NOTES.

The opening of the poem in B is complicated by the fact that my father
partly rewrote, and retyped, the first Canto - a rewriting entirely distinct
from the later fundamental recasting that the early part of the poem
underwent. This first rewriting of the opening Canto was done while the
original composition of the poem was still proceeding, but was fairly far
advanced. The second version was typed in exactly the same form as that
it replaced, whereas the last part of the B-text is not typed; but the name
Beleriand appears in it, as typed, and not as an emendation, whereas
elsewhere in B the form is Broseliand, always emended in ink to
Beleriand.* Moreover it was the first version of Canto I in the B-text that
C. S. Lewis read on the night of 6 December 1929, and I think it very
probable that it was Lewis's criticism that led my father to rewrite the
opening (see pp. 315 - 16). In the following notes the first version of B is
called B(1), the rewritten text given above being B(2).

I - 30 A: A king was in the dawn of days:
his golden crown did brightly blaze
with ruby red and crystal clear;
his meats were sweet, his dishes dear;
red robes of silk, an ivory throne, 5
and ancient halls of arched stone,
and wine and music lavished free,
and thirty champions and three,
all these he had and heeded not.
His daughter dear was Melilot: 10
from dawn to dusk, fron sun to sea,
no fairer maiden found could be.
Her robe was blue as summer skies,
but not so blue as were her eyes;
'twas sewn with golden lilies fair, 15
but none so golden as her hair.