"GL5" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol10)

PART FIVE.

MYTHS
TRANSFORMED.

MYTHS TRANSFORMED.

In this last section of the book I give a number of late writings of my
father's, various in nature but concerned with, broadly speaking, the
reinterpretation of central elements in the 'mythology' (or legendar-
ium as he called it) to accord with the imperatives of a greatly modified
underlying conception. Some of these papers (there are notable
exceptions) offer exceptional difficulty: fluidity of ideas, ambiguous
and allusive expression, illegible passages. But the greatest problem is
that there is very little firm indication of date external or relative: to
order them into even an approximate sequence of composition seems
impossible (though I believe that virtually all of them come from the
years that saw the writing of Laws and Customs among the Eldar,
the Athrabeth, and late revisions of parts of the Quenta Silmarillion -
the late 1950s, in the aftermath of the publication of The Lord of the
Rings).
i'. In these writings can be read the record of a prolonged interior
debate. Years before this time, the first signs have been seen of
emerging ideas that if pursued would cause massive disturbance in The
Silmarillion: I have shown, as I believe, that when my father first
began to revise and rewrite the existing narratives of the Elder Days,
before The Lord of the Rings was completed, he wrote a version of the
Ainulindale that introduced a radical transformation of the astro-
nomical myth, but that for that time he stayed his hand (pp. 3 - 6, 43).
But now, as will be seen in many of the essays and notes that follow,
he had come to believe that such a vast upheaval was a necessity, that
the cosmos of the old myth was no longer valid; and at the same time
he was impelled to try to construct a more secure 'theoretical' or
'systematic' basis for elements in the legendarium that were not to be
dislodged. With their questionings, their certainties giving way to
doubt, their contradictory resolutions, these writings are to be read
with a sense of intellectual and imaginative stress in the face of such
a dismantling and reconstitution, believed to be an inescapable neces-
sity, but never to be achieved.

The texts, arranged in a very loose 'thematic' sequence, are num-
bered in Roman numerals. Almost all have received very minor editing
(matters of punctuation, insertion of omitted words, and suchlike).
Numbered notes (not present in all cases) follow the individual texts.

I.

I give first a short statement written on two slips found pinned to one
of the typescripts of the Annals of Aman, which would date it to
1958 or later (if my general conclusions about dating are correct,