"FOREWORD" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol06)

I do not of course know how it came about that these particular
manuscripts came to be left out of the consignment to Marquette;
but I think that an explanation in general terms can be found
readily enough. Immensely prolific as my father was ('I found not
being able to use a pen or pencil as defeating as the loss of her beak
would be to a hen,' he wrote to Stanley Unwin in 1963, when
suffering from an ailment in his right arm), constantly revising,
re-using, beginning again, but never throwing any of his writing
away, his papers became inextricably complex, disorganised, and
dispersed. It does not seem likely that at the time of the transfer to
Marquette he would have been greatly concerned with or have had
any precise recollection of the early drafts, some of them sup-
planted and overtaken as much as twenty years before; and
no doubt they had long since been set aside, forgotten, and
buried.
However this may be, it is self-evidently desirable that the
separated manuscripts should be joined together again, and the
whole corpus preserved in one place. This must have been my
father's intention at the time of the original sale; and accordingly
the manuscripts at present in my keeping will be handed over to
Marquette University.
The greater part of the material cited or described in this book is
found in the papers that remained behind; but the third section of
the book (called 'The Third Phase') constituted a difficult prob-
lem, because in this case the manuscripts were divided. Most of
the chapters in this 'phase' of composition went to Marquette in
1958, but substantial parts of several of them did not. These parts
had become separated because my father had rejected them, while
using the remainder as constituent elements in new versions. The
interpretation of this part of the history would have been alto-
gether impossible without very full co-operation from Marquette,
and this I have abundantly received. Above all, Mr Taum Santoski
has engaged with great skill and care in a complex operation in

which we have exchanged over many months annotated copies of
the texts; and it has been possible in this way to determine the
textual history, and to reconstruct the original manuscripts which
my father himself dismembered nearly half a century ago. I record
with pleasure and deep appreciation the generous assistance that I
have received from him, and also from Mr Charles B. Elston, the
Archivist of the Memorial Library at Marquette, from Mr John
D. Rateliff, and from Miss Tracy Muench.

This attempt to give an account of the first stages in the writing
of The Lard of the Rings has been beset by other difficulties than
the fact of the manuscripts being widely sundered; difficulties
primarily in the interpretation of the sequence of writing, but also
in the presentation of the results in a printed book.
Briefly, the writing proceeded in a series of 'waves' or (as I have
called them in this book) 'phases'. The first chapter was itself