"FOREWORD" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol12)

dable array of battered box-files. Nearly a quarter of a century
later the story, as I have been able to tell it, is at last concluded.
This is not to say that I have given an account of everything
that my father wrote, even leaving aside the great body of his
work on the languages of the Elves. My father's very late writ-
ings have been selectively presented, and much further detail,
especially concerning names and the etymology of names, can
be found in texts such as those that I excerpted in Unfinished
Tales, notably in the part of that book entitled 'The History of
Galadriel and Celeborn'. Other omissions have arisen almost
one might say from inadvertence as the work and its publication
proceeded.
It began indeed as an entirely 'private' study, without thought
or purpose of publication: an exhaustive investigation and
analysis of all the materials concerned with what came to be
called the Elder Days, from the earliest beginnings, omitting no
detail of name-form or textual variation. From that original
work derives the respect for the precise wording of the texts,
and the insistence that no stone (especially stones bearing
names) be left unturned, that characterises, perhaps excessively,
The History of Middle-earth. Unfinished Tales, on the other
hand, was conceived entirely independently and in an essen-
tially different mode, at a time when I had no notion of the
publication of a massive and continuous history; and this con-
stitutes an evident weakness in my presentation of the whole
corpus, which could not be remedied. When Rayner Unwin, to
whom I am greatly indebted, undertook the uncertain venture

of publishing my work on the history of 'The Silmarillion' (in
form necessarily much altered) I had no intention of entering
into the history of the Later Ages: the inclusion of The Lost
Road, The Drowning of Anadune, The Notion Club Papers,
and above all the history of the writing of The Lord of the
Rings, extending the work far beyond my original design, was
entirely unforeseen.
Thus it came about that the later volumes were written and
published under much greater pressure of time and with less
idea of the overall structure than the earlier. Attempting to make
each book an independent entity in some degree, within the
constraints of length, I was often uncertain of what it would or
could contain until it was done; and this lack of prevision led to
some misjudgements of 'scale' - the degree of fulness or con-
ciseness that would ultimately prove appropriate to the whole.
Thus, for example, I should have returned at the end of my
account of the writing of The Lord of the Rings to give some
description, at least, of the later developments in the chapters
The Shadow of the Past and The Council of Elrond, and the
evolution in relation to these of the work Of the Rings of Power
and the Third Age. However, all the stories and all the histories
have now been told, and the 'legendarium' of the Elder Days has