"FOREWORD" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol12)

of time, Mr Charles Noad has contributed more perhaps than to any
of the previous volumes which he has read independently in proof;
and with the conclusion of the work I must express again my gratitude
to him for his meticulous, informed, and extraordinarily generous
labour. I wish also to record my appreciation of the great skill and care
which Mr Norman Tilley of Nene Phototypesetters has again brought
to this particularly demanding text - including the 'invisible mending'
of errors in my manuscript tables.
Mr Noad has also made a number of suggestions for the improve-
ment of the text by clarification and additional reference which where
possible I have adopted. There remain some points which would have
required too much rewriting, or too much movement of text, to intro-
duce, and two of these may be mentioned here.
One concerns the translation of the curse of the Orc from the Dark
Tower given on p. 83. When writing this passage I had forgotten
that Mr Carl Hostetter, editor of the periodical Vinyar Tengwar, had
pointed out in the issue (no. 26) for November 1992 that there is

a translation of the words in a note to one of the typescripts of
Appendix E (he being unaware of the existence of the certainly earlier
version that I have printed); and I had also overlooked the fact that
a third version is found among notes on words and phrases 'in
alien speech' in The Lord of the Rings. All three differ significantly
(bagronk, for example, being rendered both as 'cesspool' and as 'tor-
ture (chamber)'); from which it seems clear that my father was at this
time devising interpretations of the words, whatever he may have
intended them to mean when he first wrote them.
I should also have noticed that the statement in the early texts of
Appendix D (The Calendars), pp. 124, 131, that the Red Book 'ends
before the Lithe of 1436' refers to the Epilogue to The Lord of the
Rings, in which Samwise, after reading aloud from the Book over
many months, finally reached its end on an evening late in March of
that year (IX.120-1).
Lastly, after the proofs of this book had been revised I received a
letter from Mr Christopher Gilson in which he referred to a brief
but remarkable text associated with Appendix A that he had seen at
Marquette. This was a curious chance, for he had no knowledge of the
book beyond the fact that it contained some account of the Appen-
dices; while although I had received a copy of the text from Marquette
I had passed it over without observing its significance. Preserved with
other difficult and disjointed notes, it is very roughly written on a slip
of paper torn from a rejected manuscript. That manuscript can be
identified as the close predecessor of the Appendix A text concerning
the choice of the Half-elven which I have given on pp. 256-7. The
writing on the verso reads:
and his father gave him the name Aragorn, a name used in the
House of the Chieftains. But Ivorwen at his naming stood by, and
said 'Kingly Valour' (for so that name is interpreted): 'that he shall
have, but I see on his breast a green stone, and from that his true
name shall come and his chief renown: for he shall be a healer and