Текст книги "The Book of Lost Tales, Part One"

Автор книги: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

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J. R. R. Tolkien

The Book of Lost Tales

Part I

Christopher Tolkien

FOREWORD

The Book of Lost Tales, written between sixty and seventy years ago, was the first substantial work of imaginative literature by J. R. R. Tolkien, and the first emergence in narrative of the Valar, of the Children of Ilъvatar, Elves and Men, of the Dwarves and the Orcs, and of the lands in which their history is set, Valinor beyond the western ocean, and Middle-earth, the ‘Great Lands’ between the seas of east and west. Some fifty-seven years after my father ceased to work on the Lost Tales, The Silmarillion,* profoundly transformed from its distant forerunner, was published; and six years have passed since then. This Foreword seems a suitable opportunity to remark on some aspects of both works.

The Silmarillion is commonly said to be a ‘difficult’ book, needing explanation and guidance on how to ‘approach’ it; and in this it is contrasted to The Lord of the Rings. In Chapter 7 of his book The Road to Middle-earth Professor T. A. Shippey accepts that this is so (‘The Silmarillion could never be anything but hard to read’, p. 201), and expounds his view of why it should be. A complex discussion is not treated justly when it is extracted, but in his view the reasons are essentially two (p. 185). In the first place, there is in The Silmarillion no ‘mediation’ of the kind provided by the hobbits (so, in The Hobbit, ‘Bilbo acts as the link between modern times and the archaic world of dwarves and dragons’). My father was himself well aware that the absence of hobbits would be felt as a lack, were ‘The Silmarillion’ to be published—and not only by readers with a particular liking for them. In a letter written in 1956 (The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, p. 238), soon after the publication of The Lord of the Rings, he said:

I do not think it would have the appeal of the L.R.—no hobbits! Full of mythology, and elvishness, and all that ‘heigh stile’ (as Chaucer might say), which has been so little to the taste of many reviewers.

In ‘The Silmarillion’ the draught is pure and unmixed; and the reader is worlds away from such ‘mediation’, such a deliberate collison (far more than a matter of styles) as that produced in the meeting between King Thйoden and Pippin and Merry in the ruins of Isengard:

‘Farewell, my hobbits! May we meet again in my house! There you shall sit beside me and tell me a1ll that your hearts desire: the deeds of your grandsires, as far as you can reckon them…’

The hobbits bowed low. ‘So that is the King of Rohan!’ said Pippin in an undertone. ‘A fine old fellow. Very polite.’

In the second place,

Where The Silmarillion differs from Tolkien’s earlier works is in its refusal to accept novelistic convention. Most novels (including The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings) pick a character to put in the foreground, like Frodo and Bilbo, and then tell the story as it happens to him. The novelist of course is inventing the story, and so retains omniscience: he can explain, or show, what is ‘really’ happening and contrast it with the limited perception of his character.

There is, then, and very evidently, a question of literary ‘taste’ (or literary ‘habituation’) involved; and also a question of literary ‘disappointment’—the ‘(mistaken) disappointment in those who wanted a second Lord of the Rings’ to which Professor Shippey refers. This has even produced a sense of outrage—in one case formulated to me in the words ‘It’s like the Old Testament!’: a dire condemnation against which, clearly, there can be no appeal (though this reader cannot have got very far before being overcome by the comparison). Of course, ‘The Silmarillion’ was intended to move the heart and the imagination, directly, and without peculiar effort or the possession of unusual faculties; but its mode is inherent, and it may be doubted whether any ‘approach’ to it can greatly aid those who find it unapproachable.

There is a third consideration (which Professor Shippey does not indeed advance in the same context):

One quality which [The Lord of the Rings] has in abundance is the Beowulfian ‘impression of depth’, created just as in the old epic by songs and digressions like Aragorn’s lay of Tinъviel, Sam Gamgee’s allusions to the Silmaril and the Iron Crown, Elrond’s account of Celebrimbor, and dozens more. This, however, is a quality of The Lord of the Rings, not of the inset stories. To tell these in their own right and expect them to retain the charm they got from their larger setting would be a terrible error, an error to which Tolkien would be more sensitive than any man alive. As he wrote in a revealing letter dated 20 September 1963:

I am doubtful myself about the undertaking [to write The Silmarillion]. Part of the attraction of The L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed. (Letters, p. 333)

To go there is to destroy the magic. As for the revealing of ‘new unattainable vistas’, the problem there—as Tolkien must have thought many times—was that in The Lord of the Rings Middle-earth was already old, with a vast weight of history behind it. The Silmarillion, though, in its longer form, was bound to begin at the beginning. How could ‘depth’ be created when you had nothing to reach further back to?

The letter quoted here certainly shows that my father felt this, or perhaps rather one should say, at times felt this, to be a problem. Nor was it a new thought: while he was writing The Lord of the Rings, in 1945, he said in a letter to me (Letters, p. 110):

A story must be told or there’ll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving. I th1ink you are moved by Celebrimbor because it conveys a sudden sense of endless untold stories: mountains seen far away, never to be climbed, distant trees (like Niggle’s) never to be approached—or if so only to become ‘near trees’…

This matter is perfectly illustrated for me by Gimli’s song in Moria, where great names out of the ancient world appear utterly remote:

The world was fair, the mountains tall,

In Elder Days before the fall

Of mighty kings in Nargothrond

And Gondolin, who now beyond

The Western Seas have passed away…

‘I like that!’ said Sam. ‘I should like to learn it. In Moria, in Khazad-dыm. But it makes the darkness seem heavier, thinking of all those lamps.’ By his enthusiastic ‘I like that!’ Sam not only ‘mediates’ (and engagingly ‘Gamgifies’) the ‘high’, the mighty kings of Nargothrond and Gondolin, Durin on his carven throne, but places them at once at an even remoter distance, a magical distance that it might well seem (at that moment) destructive to traverse.

Professor Shippey says that ‘to tell [the stories that are only alluded to in The Lord of the Rings] in their own right and expect them to retain the charm they got from their larger setting would be a terrible error’. The ‘error’ presumably lies in the holding of such an expectation, if the stories were told, not in the telling of the stories at all; and it is apparent that Professor Shippey sees my father as wondering, in 1963, whether he should or should not put pen to paper, for he expands the words of the letter, ‘I am doubtful myself about the undertaking’, to mean ‘the undertaking to write The Silmarillion’. But when my father said this he was not—most emphatically not—referring to the work itself, which was in any case already written, and much of it many times over (the allusions in The Lord of the Rings are not illusory): what was in question for him, as he said earlier in this same letter, was its presentation, in a publication, after the appearance of The Lord of the Rings, when, as he thought, the right time to make it known was already gone.

I am afraid all the same that the presentation will need a lot of work, and I work so slowly. The legends have to be worked over (they were written at different times, some many years ago) and made consistent; and they have to be integrated with The L.R.; and they have to be given some progressive shape. No simple device, like a journey and a quest, is available.

I am doubtful myself about the undertaking…

When after his death the question arose of publishing ‘The Silmarillion’ in some form, I attached no importance to this doubt. The effect that ‘the glimpses of a large history in the background’ have in The Lord of the Rings is incontestable and of the utmost importance, but I did not think that the ‘glimpses’ used there with such art should preclude all further knowledge of the ‘large history’.

The literary ‘impression of depth…created by songs and digressions’ cannot be made a criterion by which a work in a wholly different mode is measured: this would be to treat the history of the Elder Days as of value primarily or even solely in the artistic use made of it in The Lord of the Rings. Nor should the device of a backward movement in imagined time to dimly apprehended events, whose attraction lies in their very dimness, be understood mechanically, as if a fuller accou1nt of the mighty kings of Nargothrond and Gondolin would imply a dangerously near approach to the bottom of the well, while an account of the Creation would signify the striking of the bottom and a definitive running-out of ‘depth’—‘nothing to reach further back to’.

This, surely, is not how things work, or at least not how they need work. ‘Depth’ in this sense implies a relation between different temporal layers or levels within the same world. Provided that the reader has a place, a point of vantage, in the imagined time from which to look back, the extreme oldness of the extremely old can be made apparent and made to be felt continuously. And the very fact that The Lord of the Rings establishes such a powerful sense of a real time-structure (far more powerful than can be done by mere chronological assertion, tables of dates) provides this necessary vantage-point. To read The Silmarillion one must place oneself imaginatively at the time of the ending of the Third Age—within Middle-earth, looking back: at the temporal point of Sam Gamgee’s ‘I like that!’—adding, ‘I should like to know more about it’. Moreover the compendious or epitomising form and manner of The Silmarillion, with its suggestion of ages of poetry and ‘lore’ behind it, strongly evokes a sense of ‘untold tales’, even in the telling of them; ‘distance’ is never lost. There is no narrative urgency, the pressure and fear of the immediate and unknown event. We do not actually see the Silmarils as we see the Ring. The maker of ‘The Silmarillion’, as he himself said of the author of Beowulf, ‘was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote’.

As has now been fully recorded, my father greatly desired to publish ‘The Silmarillion’ together with The Lord of the Rings. I say nothing of its practicability at the time, nor do I make any guesses at the subsequent fate of such a much longer combined work, quadrilogy or tetralogy, or at the different courses that my father might then have taken—for the further development of ‘The Silmarillion’ itself, the history of the Elder Days, would have been arrested. But by its posthumous publication nearly a quarter of a century later the natural order of presentation of the whole ‘Matter of Middle-earth’ was inverted; and it is certainly debatable whether it was wise to publish in 1977 a version of the primary ‘legendarium’ standing on its own and claiming, as it were, to be self-explanatory. The published work has no ‘framework’, no suggestion of what it is and how (within the imagined world) it came to be. This I now think to have been an error.

The letter of 1963 quoted above shows my father pondering the mode in which the legends of the Elder Days might be presented. The original mode, that of The Book of Lost Tales, in which a Man, Eriol, comes after a great voyage over the ocean to the island where the Elves dwell and learns their history from their own lips, had (by degrees) fallen away. When my father died in 1973 ‘The Silmarillion’ was in a characteristic state of disarray: the earlier parts much revised or largely rewritten, the concluding parts still as he had left them some twenty years before; but in the latest writing there is no trace or suggestion of any ‘device’ or ‘framework’ in which it was to be set. I think that in the end he concluded that nothing would serve, and no more would be said beyond an explanation of how (within the imagined world) it came to be recorded.

In the original edition of The Lord of the Rings Bilbo gave to Frodo at Rivendell as his parting gift ‘some books of lore that he had made at various times, written in his spidery hand, and labell1ed on their red backs: Translations from the Elvish, by B.B.’ In the second edition (1966) ‘some books’ was changed to ‘three books’, and in the Note on the Shire Records added to the Prologue in that edition my father said that the content of ‘the three large volumes bound in red leather’ was preserved in that copy of the Red Book of Westmarch which was made in Gondor by the King’s Writer Findegil in the year 172 of the Fourth Age; and also that

These three volumes were found to be a work of great skill and learning in which…[Bilbo] had used all the sources available to him in Rivendell, both living and written. But since they were little used by Frodo, being almost entirely concerned with the Elder Days, no more is said of them here.

In The Complete Guide to Middle-earth Robert Foster says: ‘Quenta Silmarillion was no doubt one of Bilbo’s Translations from the Elvish preserved in the Red Book of Westmarch.’ So also I have assumed: the ‘books of lore’ that Bilbo gave to Frodo provided in the end the solution: they were ‘The Silmarillion’. But apart from the evidence cited here, there is, so far as I know, no other statement on this matter anywhere in my father’s writings; and (wrongly, as I think now) I was reluctant to step into the breach and make definite what I only surmised.

The choice before me, in respect of ‘The Silmarillion’, was threefold. I could withhold it indefinitely from publication, on the ground that the work was incomplete and incoherent between its parts. I could accept the nature of the work as it stood, and, to quote my Foreword to the book, ‘attempt to present the diversity of the materials—to show “The Silmarillion” as in truth a continuing and evolving creation extending over more than half a century’ and that, as I have said in Unfinished Tales (p. 1), would have entailed ‘a complex of divergent texts interlinked by commentary’—a far larger undertaking than those words suggest. In the event, I chose the third course, ‘to work out a single text, selecting and arranging in such a way as seemed to me to produce the most coherent and internally self-consistent narrative’. Having come, at length, to that decision, all the editorial labour of myself and of Guy Kay who assisted me was directed to the end that my father had stated in the letter of 1963: ‘The legends have to be worked over…and made consistent; and they have to be integrated with the L.R.’ Since the object was to present ‘The Silmarillion’ as ‘a completed and cohesive entity’ (though that could not in the nature of the case be entirely successful), it followed that there would be in the published book no exposition of the complexities of its history.

Whatever may be thought of this matter, the result, which I by no means foresaw, has been to add a further dimension of obscurity to ‘The Silmarillion’, in that uncertainty about the age of the work, whether it is to be regarded as ‘early’ or ‘late’ or in what proportions, and about the degree of editorial intrusion and manipulation (or even invention), is a stumbling-block and a source of much misapprehension. Professor Randel Helms, in Tolkien and the Silmarils (p. 93), has stated the question thus:

Anyone interested, as I am, in the growth of The Silmarillion will want to study Unfinished Tales, not only for its intrinsic value but also because its relationship to the former provides what will become a classic example of a long-standing problem in literary criticism: what, really, is a literary work? Is it what the author intended (or may have intended) it to be, or is it what a later editor makes of it? The problem becomes especially intense for the practising critic when, as happened with The Silmarill1ion, a writer dies before finishing his work and leaves more than one version of some of its parts, which then find publication elsewhere. Which version will the critic approach as the ‘real’ story?

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 lfwine (Eriol)), the cosmological account called Ambarkanta, the Shape of the World, by Rъmil, and the Lhammas or ‘Account of Tongues’, by Pengolod of Gondolin. Thereafter the history of the First Age was laid aside for many years, until The Lord of the Rings was completed, but in the years preceding its actual publication my father returned to ‘The Silmarillion’ and associated works with great vigour.

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’).

The Lost Tales never reached or even approached a form in which my father could have considered their publication before he abandoned them; they were experimental and provisional, and the tattered notebooks in which they were written were bundled away and left unlooked at as the years passed. To present them in a printed book has raised many thorny editorial problems. In the first place, the manuscripts are intrinsically very difficult: partly because much of the text was written rapidly in pencil and is now in places extremely hard to read, requiring a magnifying glass and much patience, not always rewarded. But also in some of the Tales my father erased the original pencilled text and wrote a revised version over it in ink—and since at this period he used bound notebooks rather than loose sheets, he was liable to find himself short of space: so detached portions of tales were written in the middle of other tales, and in places a fearsome textual jigsaw puzzle was produced.

Secondly, the Lost Tales were not all written progressively one after the other in the sequence of the narrative; and (inevitably) my father began a new arrangement and revision of the Tales while the work was still in progress. The Fall of Gondolin was the first of the tales told to Eriol to be composed, and the Tale of Tinъviel the second, but the events of those tales take place towards the end of the history; on the other hand the extant texts are later revisions. In some cases nothing earlier than the revised form can now be read; in some both forms are extant for all, or a part, of their length; in some there is only a preliminary draft; and in some there is no formed narrative at all, but only notes and projections. After much experimentation I have found that no method of presentation is feasible but to set out the Tales in the sequence of the narrative.

And finally, as the writing of the Tales progressed, relations were changed, new conceptions entered, and the development of the languages pari passu with the narrative led to continual revision of names.

An edition that takes account of such complexities, as this does, rather than attempt to smooth them artificially away, is liable to be an intricate1 and crabbed thing, in which the reader is never left alone for a moment. I have attempted to make the Tales themselves accessible and uncluttered while providing a fairly full account, for those who want it, of the actual textual evidences. To achieve this I have drastically reduced the quantity of annotation to the texts in these ways: the many changes made to names are all recorded, but they are lumped together at the end of each tale, not recorded individually at each occurrence (the places where the names occur can be found from the Index); almost all annotation concerned with content is taken up into, or boiled down into, a commentary or short essay following each tale; and almost all linguistic comment (primarily the etymology of names) is collected in an Appendix on Names at the end of the book, where will be found a great deal of information relating to the earliest stages of the ‘Elvish’ languages. In this way the numbered notes are very largely restricted to variants and divergences found in other texts, and the reader who does not wish to trouble with these can read the Tales knowing that that is almost all that he is missing.

The commentaries are limited in their scope, being mostly concerned to discuss the implications of what is said within the context of the Tales themselves, and to compare them with the published Silmarillion. I have eschewed parallels, sources, influences; and have mostly avoided the complexities of the development between the Lost Tales and the published work (since to indicate these even cursorily would, I think, be distracting), treating the matter in a simplified way, as between two fixed points. I do not suppose for one moment that my analyses will prove either altogether just or altogether accurate, and there must be clues to the solution of puzzling features in the Tales which I have failed to observe. There is also included a short glossary of words occurring in the Tales and poems that are obsolete, archaic, or rare.

The texts are given in a form very close to that of the original manuscripts. Only the most minor and obvious slips have been silently corrected; where sentences fall awkwardly, or where there is a lack of grammatical cohesion, as is sometimes the case in the parts of the Tales that never got beyond a first rapid draft, I have let them stand. I have allowed myself greater freedom in providing punctuation, for my father when writing at speed often punctuated erratically or not at all; and I have gone further than he did in consistency of capitalisation. I have adopted, though hesitantly, a consistent system of accentuation for Elvish names. My father wrote, for instance: Palыrien, Palъrien, Palurien; nen, Onen; Kфr, Kor. I have used the acute accent for macron, circumflex, and acute (and occasional grave) accents of the original texts, but the circumflex on monosyllables—thus Palъrien, Уnen, Kфr: the same system, at least to the eye, as in later Sindarin.