"GL2" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol09)

Notion Club Papers are now published for the first time, the final
typescripts D of Part One and F of Part Two must obviously be the
text printed, and this makes for difficulties of presentation (it is of
course very much easier to begin with an original draft and to relate it
by consecutive steps to a final form that is already known). The two
Parts are separated, with notes following each Part. Following the text
of the Papers I give important sections that were rejected from or sig-
nificantly changed in the final text, earlier forms of the 'Numenorean'
fragments that 'came through' to Arundel Lowdham and of the
Old English text written by his father, and reproductions of the
'facsimiles' of that text with analysis of the tengwar.
Although the final text of Part Two of the Papers and The Drown-
ing of Anadune were intimately connected,(5) especially in respect of
Adunaic, any attempt to combine them in a single presentation makes
for inextricable confusion; the latter is therefore treated entirely separ-
ately in the third part of this book, and in my commentary on Part
Two of the Papers I have not thought it useful to make continual
reference forward to The Drowning of Anadune: the interrelations
between the two works emerge more clearly when the latter is reached.

There are some aspects of the framework of the Papers, provided
by the Foreword of the Editor, Mr. Howard Green, and the list of
members of the Notion Club, which are better discussed here than in
the commentary.

The Foreword.

The original manuscript A of Part One, as already noticed, has no
title or introductory statement of any kind, but begins with the words
'When Ramer had finished reading his latest story...' The first page of
B begins thus:

Beyond Lewis
or
Out of the Talkative Planet.

Being a fragment of an apocryphal Inklings' Saga, made
by some imitator at some time in the 1980s.

Preface to the Inklings.

While listening to this fantasia (if you do), I beg of the
present company not to look for their own faces in this
mirror. For the mirror is cracked, and at the best you
will only see your countenances distorted, and adorned
maybe with noses (and other features) that are not your

own, but belong to other members of the company -
if to anybody.