"GL1" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol12)

say. To answer that question one would have to re-discover a great
deal of the now wholly lost history and legends of the Earliest Days;
and that is not likely to happen, for only the Elves preserve any
traditions about the Earliest Days, and their traditions are mostly
about themselves - not unnaturally: the Elves were much the most
important people of those times.
P2 (as revised).
And yet plainly they must be relatives of ours: nearer to us than
Elves are, or even Dwarves. For one thing, they spoke a very simi-
lar language (or languages), and liked and disliked much the same
things as we used to. What exactly the relationship is would be
difficult to say. To answer that question one would have to re-
discover much that is now lost and forgotten for ever. Only the Elves
now preserve traditions of the Elder Days, and even their traditions
are incomplete, being concerned chiefly with Elves.
P5.
Yet plainly they are relatives of ours: far nearer to us than are
Elves, or even Dwarves. They spoke the languages of Men, and
they liked and disliked much the same things as we once did. What
exactly our relationship was in the beginning can, however, no
longer be told. The answer to that question lies in the Elder Days
that are now lost and forgotten for ever. Only the Elves preserve
still any traditions of that vanished time, but these are concerned
mostly with their own affairs.

To the manuscript P 5, however, my father added, at the time of
writing, much new material. One of these passages was that concern-
ing the martial qualities of the Hobbits, or lack of them, the existence
of arms in the Shire (and here the word mathom first appears in the
texts of the Prologue), and the 'curious toughness' of Hobbit charac-
ter. This was already fairly close to the published form (FR pp. 14-15),
and its most notable omission is the absence of the reference to the
Battle of Greenfields; the text reads here:

The Hobbits were not warlike, though at times they had been
obliged to fight to maintain themselves in a hard and wild
world. But at this period there was no living memory of any
serious assault on the borders of the Shire. Even the weathers
were milder ...



The original text of the chapter The Scouring of the Shire had no
reference to the Battle of Greenfields: 'So ended the fierce battle of
Bywater, the only battle ever fought in the Shire' (IX.93). In the second
text (IX.101) my father repeated this, but altered it as he wrote to 'the
last battle fought in the Shire, and the only battle since the Greenfields,
1137, away up in the North Farthing'. It seems a good guess that (as
with the passage concerning the Shirriffs, p. 6) the appearance of the
Battle of Greenfields in the Prologue soon after this (see below) is to