"GL1" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol05)

there of Sauron. The Lost Road is therefore, as I have said, entirely
integrated with 'the main mythology' - and this is true already in the
preliminary drafts.
Now as the papers were found, there follows immediately after the last
page of The Lost Road a further manuscript with a new page-numbering,
but no title. Quite apart from its being so placed, this text gives a strong
physical impression of belonging to the same time as The Last Road; and
it is closely associated in content with the last part of The Last Road, for it
tells the story of Numenor and its downfall - though this second text was
written with a different purpose, to be a complete if very brief history: it
is indeed the first fully-written draft of the narrative that ultimately
became the Akallabeth. But it is earlier than The Lost Road; for where
that has Sauron and Tarkalion this has Sur and Angor.
A second, more finished manuscript of this history of Numenor
followed, with the title (written in afterwards) The Last Tale: The Fall of
Numenor. This has several passages that are scarcely different from
passages in The Lost Road, but it seems scarcely possible to show for
certain which preceded and which followed, unless the evidence cited on
p. 74, note 25, is decisive that the second version of The Fall of Numenor
was the later of the two; in any case, a passage rewritten very near the
time of the original composition of this version is certainly later than The
Last Road, for it gives a later form of the story of Sauron's arrival in
Numenor (see pp. 26 - 7).
It is therefore clear that the two works were intimately connected; they
arose at the same time and from the same impulse, and my father worked
on them together. But still more striking is the existence of a single page
that can only be the original 'scheme' for The Fall of Numenor, the actual
first writing down of the idea. The very name Numenor is here only in
process of emergence. Yet in this primitive form of the story the term
Middle-earth is used, as it never was in the Quenta: it did not appear
until the Annals of Valinor and the Ambarkanta. Moreover the form
Ilmen occurs, which suggests that this 'scheme' was later than the actual
writing of the Ambarkanta, where Ilmen was an emendation of Ilma
(earlier Silma): IV.240, note 3.
I conclude therefore that 'Numenor' (as a distinct and formalised
conception, whatever 'Atlantis-haunting', as my father called it, lay
behind) arose in the actual context of his discussions with C. S. Lewis in
(as seems probable) 1936. A passage in the 1964 letter can be taken to say

precisely that: 'I began an abortive book of time-travel of which the end
was to be the presence of my hero in the drowning of Atlantis. This was to
be called Numenor, the Land in the West.' Moreover, 'Numenor' was
from the outset conceived in full association with 'The Silmarillion';
there never was a time when the legends of Numenor were 'unrelated to
the main mythology'. My father erred in his recollection (or expressed
himself obscurely, meaning something else); the letter cited above was
indeed written nearly thirty years later.

II.
THE FALL OF NUMENOR.