"GL2" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol09)

arranged and dated, but never written.
The typescript F is a complex document, in that my father rejected a
substantial section of it ('F 1') as soon as he had typed it, replaced it
('F 2'), and then continued on to the end, the structure of the text
being thus F 1, F 1 > F 2, F 2 (see p. 237 and note 37).
For both Parts, but especially for Part Two, there is a quantity of
rough, discontinuous drafting, often scarcely legible.

While Part Two was being further developed (that is, after the
completion of the manuscript E so far as it went) the Adunaic *
language emerged (as it appears), with an abandoned but elaborate
account of the phonology, and pari passu with The Notion Club
Papers my father not only wrote a first draft of an entirely new version
of the story of Numenor but developed it through further texts: this is
The Drowning of Anadune, in which all the names are in Adunaic.
How is all this to be equated with his statement in the letter to
Stanley Unwin in July 1946 that 'three parts' of the work were written
in a fortnight at the end of 1945? Obviously it cannot be, not even on
the supposition that when he said 'a fortnight' he greatly underesti-
mated the time. Though not demonstrable, an extremely probable
explanation, as it seems to me, is that at the end of that fortnight he
stopped work in the middle of writing the manuscript E, at the point
where The Notion Club Papers end, and at which time Adunaic had
not yet arisen. Very probably Part One was at the stage of the
manuscript B.(4) On this view, the further development of what had
then been achieved of Part One, and more especially of Part Two
(closely associated with that of the Adunaic language and the writing
of The Drowning of Anadune), belongs to the following year, the
earlier part of 1946. Against this, of course, is the fact that the letter to
Stanley Unwin in which my father referred to the Papers was written
in July 1946, but that letter gives no impression of further work after
'my health gave way after Christmas'. But it is to be remembered that
The Lord of the Rings had been at a halt for more than a year and a
half, and it may well be that he was deeply torn between the
burgeoning of Adunaic and Anadune and the oppression of the
abandoned Lord of the Rings. He did not need to spell out to Stanley
Unwin what he had in fact been doing! But he said that he was 'putting
The Lord of the Rings before all else', which no doubt meant 'I am
now going to put it before all else', and that included Adunaic. To the
interrupted Notion Club Papers he never returned.
The diverse and shifting elements in all this work, not least the
complex but essential linguistic material, have made the construction

(* Adunaic is always so spelt at this time (not Adunaic), and I write it so
throughout.)



of a readily comprehensible edition extremely difficult, requiring much
experimentation among possible forms of presentation. Since The