But he also says: ‘Christopher Tolkien has helped us in this instance by honestly pointing out that The Silmarillion in the shape that we have it is the invention of the son not the father’ and this is a serious misapprehension to which my words have given rise.
Again, Professor Shippey, while accepting (p. 169) my assurance that a ‘very high proportion’ of the 1937 ‘Silmarillion’ text remained into the published version, is nonetheless elsewhere clearly reluctant to see it as other than a ‘late’ work, even the latest work of its author. And in an article entitled ‘The Text of The Hobbit: Putting Tolkien’s Notes in Order’ (English Studies in Canada, VII, 2, Summer 1981) Constance B. Hieatt concludes that ‘it is very clear indeed that we shall never be able to see the progressive steps of authorial thinking behind The Silmarillion’.
But beyond the difficulties and the obscurities, what is certain and very evident is that for the begetter of Middle-earth and Valinor there was a deep coherence and vital interrelation between all its times, places, and beings, whatever the literary modes, and however protean some parts of the conception might seem when viewed over a long lifetime. He himself understood very well that many who read The Lord of the Rings with enjoyment would never wish to regard Middle-earth as more than the mise-en-scиne of the story, and would delight in the sensation of ‘depth’ without wishing to explore the deep places. But the ‘depth’ is not of course an illusion, like a line of imitation book-backs with no books inside them; and Quenya and Sindarin are comprehensive structures. There are explorations to be conducted in this world with perfect right quite irrespective of literary critical considerations; and it is proper to attempt to comprehend its structure in its largest extent, from the myth of its Creation. Every person, every feature of the imagined world that seemed significant to its author is then worthy of attention in its own right, Manwл or Fлanor no less than Gandalf or Galadriel, the Silmarils no less than the Rings; the Great Music, the divine hierarchies, the abodes of the Valar, the fates of the Children of Ilъvatar, are essential elements in the perception of the whole. Such enquiries are in no way illegitimate in principle; they arise from an acceptance of the imagined world as an object of contemplation or study valid as many other objects of contemplation or study in the all too unimaginary world. It was in this opinion and in the knowledge that others shared it that I made the collection called Unfinished Tales.
But the author’s vision of his own vision underwent a continual slow shifting, shedding and enlarging: only in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings did parts of it emerge to become fixed in print, in his own lifetime. The study of Middle-earth and Valinor is thus complex; for the object of the study was not stable, but exists, as it were ‘longitudinally’ in time (the author’s lifetime), and not only ‘transversely’ in time, as a printed book that undergoes no essential further change. By the publication of ‘The Silmarillion’ the ‘longitudinal’ was cut ‘transversely’, and a kind of finality imposed.
This rather rambling discussion is an attempt to explain my primary motives in offering The Book of Lost Tales for publication. It is the first step in presenting the ‘longitudinal’ view of Middle-earth and Valinor: when the huge geographical expansion, swelling out from the centre and (as it were) thrusting Beleriand into th1e west, was far off in the future; when there were no ‘Elder Days’ ending in the drowning of Beleriand, for there were as yet no other Ages of the World; when the Elves were still ‘fairies’, and even Rъmil the learned Noldo was far removed from the magisterial ‘loremasters’ of my father’s later years. In The Book of Lost Tales the princes of the Noldor have scarcely emerged, nor the Grey-elves of Beleriand; Beren is an Elf, not a Man, and his captor, the ultimate precursor of Sauron in that rфle, is a monstrous cat inhabited by a fiend; the Dwarves are an evil people; and the historical relations of Quenya and Sindarin were quite differently conceived. These are a few especially notable features, but such a list could be greatly prolonged. On the other hand, there was already a firm underlying structure that would endure. Moreover in the history of the history of Middle-earth the development was seldom by outright rejection—far more often it was by subtle transformation in stages, so that the growth of the legends (the process, for instance, by which the Nargothrond story made contact with that of Beren and Lъthien, a contact not even hinted at in the Lost Tales, though both elements were present) can seem like the growth of legends among peoples, the product of many minds and generations.
The Book of Lost Tales was begun by my father in 1916–17 during the First War, when he was 25 years old, and left incomplete several years later. It is the starting-point, at least in fully-formed narrative, of the history of Valinor and Middle-earth; but before the Tales were complete he turned to the composition of long poems, the Lay of Leithian in rhyming couplets (the story of Beren and Lъthien), and The Children of Hъrin in alliterative verse. The prose form of the ‘mythology’ began again from a new starting-point* in a quite brief synopsis, or ‘Sketch’ as he called it, written in 1926 and expressly intended to provide the necessary background of knowledge for the understanding of the alliterative poem. The further written development of the prose form proceeded from that ‘Sketch’ in a direct line to the version of ‘The Silmarillion’ which was nearing completion towards the end of 1937, when my father broke off to send it as it stood to Allen and Unwin in November of that year; but there were also important side-branches and subordinate texts composed in the 1930s, as the Annals of Valinor and the Annals of Beleriand (fragments of which are extant also in the Old English translations made by
This edition of the Lost Tales in two parts is to be, as I hope, the beginning of a series that will carry the history further through these later writings, in verse and prose; and in this hope I have applied to this present book an ‘overriding’ title intended to cover also those that may follow it, though I fear that ‘The History of Middle-earth’ may turn out to have been over-ambitious. In any case this title does not imply a ‘History’ in the conventional sense: my intention is to give complete or largely complete texts, so that the books will be more like a series of editions. I do not set myself as a primary object the unravelling of many single and separate threads, but rather the making available of works that can and should be read as wholes.
The t1racing of this long evolution is to me of deep interest, and I hope that it may prove so to others who have a taste for this kind of enquiry: whether the major transformations of plot or cosmological theory, or such a detail as the premonitory appearance of Legolas Greenleaf the keen-sighted in the tale of The Fall of Gondolin. But these old manuscripts are by no means of interest only for the study of origins. Much is to be found there that my father never (so far as one can tell) expressly rejected, and it is to be remembered that ‘The Silmarillion’, from the 1926 ‘Sketch’ onwards, was written as an abridgement or epitome, giving the substance of much longer works (whether existing in fact, or not) in a smaller compass. The highly archaic manner devised for his purpose was no fustian: it had range and great vigour, peculiarly apt to convey the magical and eerie nature of the early Elves, but as readily turned to the sarcastic, sneering Melko or the affairs of Ulmo and Ossл. These last approach at times a comic conception, and are delivered in a rapid and lively language that did not survive in the gravity of my father’s later ‘Silmarillion’ prose (so Ossл ‘fares about in a foam of business’ as he anchors the islands to the sea-bed, the cliffs of Tol Eressлa new-filled with the first sea-birds ‘are full of a chattering and a smell of fish, and great conclaves are held upon its ledges’, and when the Shoreland Elves are at last drawn over the sea to Valinor Ulmo marvellously ‘fares at the rear in his fishy car and trumpets loudly for the discomfiture of Ossл’).