"FOREWORD" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol12)

in the case of the history of Arnor and Gondor, of much that is
known from its survival in the published versions of the Appen-
dices. I have excluded the Appendix E ('Writing and Spelling'),
but I have included the Prologue; and I have introduced into
this part of the book an account of the origin and development
of the Akallabeth, since the evolution of the chronological
structure of the Second Age was closely related to my father's
original formalised computation of the dates of the Numenor-
ean kings.
Following this part I have given three essays written during
his last years; and also some brief writings that appear to derive
from the last years of his life, primarily concerned with or
arising from the question whether Glorfindel of Rivendell and
Glorfindel of Gondolin were one and the same. These late writ-
ings are notable for the many wholly new elements that entered
the 'legendarium'; and also for the number of departures from
earlier work on the Matter of the Elder Days. It may be sug-
gested that whereas my father set great store by consistency at
all points with The Lord of the Rings and the Appendices, so
little concerning the First Age had appeared in print that he was
under far less constraint. I am inclined to think, however, that
the primary explanation of these differences lies rather in his
writing largely from memory. The histories of the First Age
would always remain in a somewhat fluid state so long as they
were not fixed in published work; and he certainly did not have
all the relevant manuscripts clearly arranged and set out before
him. But it remains in any case an open question, whether (to
give a single example) in the essay Of Dwarves and Men he had
definitively rejected the greatly elaborated account of the houses
of the Edain that had entered the Quenta Silmarillion in about
1958, or whether it had passed from his mind.



The book concludes with two pieces further illustrating the
instruction that AElfwine of England received from Pengolod
the Wise in Tol Eressea, and the abandoned beginnings of two
remarkable stories, The New Shadow and Tal-elmar.

With the picture of such clarity in the tale of Tal-elmar of the
great ships of the Numenoreans drawing into the coast, and the
- fear among men of Middle-earth of the terrible 'Go-hilleg', this
'History' ends. It is a long time since I began the work of order-
ing and elucidating the vast collection of papers in which my
father's conception of Arda, Aman, and Middle-earth was con-
tained, making, not long after his death, some first transcrip-
tions from The Book of Lost Tales, of which I knew virtually
nothing, as a step towards the understanding of the origins of
'The Silmarillion'. I had little notion then of what lay before me,
of all the unknown works crammed in disorder in that formi-