The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull
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Название: The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1
Автор: Christina Scull
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Критика
isbn: 9780008273484
isbn:
With no contemporary evidence to date the writing of the first (pencil) version of The Fall of Gondolin in two exercise books, one must rely on statements made by Tolkien decades later. He dated the writing of The Fall of Gondolin to the end of 1916 or to 1917, and sometimes mentioned having written it only while on sick leave, and sometimes while in hospital and on sick leave. Its writing could equally precede or follow The Cottage of Lost Play, or he may have worked on both at once. One factor in suggesting that it came second is that, with The Cottage of Lost Play completed by early February 1917, and the next tale not begun until June 1917 at the earliest, the writing (or most of the writing) of The Fall of Gondolin would fit well into the intervening period.
Tolkien substantially overwrote the pencil version of The Fall of Gondolin in ink, without erasing the pencilled text though in places striking it through. Christopher Tolkien has described this revision as ‘by no means a complete recasting (still less a re-imagining)’ (The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, p. 146). From this emended state Edith Tolkien wrote out a fair copy, which Christopher Tolkien in *Unfinished Tales (1980) believed was done ‘apparently in 1917’ (p. 5). By the time he came to edit The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, however, he came to think it ‘improbable’ that the revision and fair copy were made in 1917, and associated them more closely to his father’s preparation of The Fall of Gondolin for public reading in spring 1920 (Part Two, p. 146). This later judgement seems to be supported by the evidence presented in the note on The Fall of Gondolin given below, item 23 in the sequence of texts.
The story after The Fall of Gondolin, The Tale of Tinúviel, was evidently not foreseen, but inspired by a contemporary event in Tolkien’s own life, when his wife Edith danced for him in a woodland glade near Roos (*Yorkshire). Tolkien wrote about this event several times. In 1963, for instance, in a letter to Nancy Smith, he said: ‘The kernel of the mythology, the matter of Lúthien Tinúviel and Beren, arose from a small woodland glade filled with “hemlocks” (or other white umbellifers) near Roos on the Holderness peninsula – to which I occasionally went when free from regimental duties while in the Humber Garrison in 1917’ (Letters, p. 221, ‘1918’ corrected by the present authors to ‘1917’; see *Tolkien on Tolkien). And on 16 July 1964 he told Christopher Bretherton that he wrote The Fall of Gondolin in 1917, and later in the same year ‘the original version of the “Tale of Lúthien Tinúviel and Beren” … founded on a small wood with a great undergrowth of “hemlock” … near Roos in Holderness …’ (Letters, p. 345).
Internal evidence in the tale and in later retellings suggest that the visit to the wood took place in early summer, probably in late May or early June. The flowering season for hemlocks and other umbellifers in England at its widest range is May to September; Tolkien also mentions chestnut trees in flower and white moths fluttering: chestnut trees usually flower in late May or early June, and moths are unlikely to be active outside the warmer months. In The Tale of Tinúviel Tolkien actually states that Beren first saw Tinúviel in ‘June’. As for external evidence, Tolkien was certainly with the Humber Garrison between mid-April and mid-August 1917, except for a period at a signalling school. In a note to a letter to Christopher Tolkien of 11 July 1972, he said that ‘the earliest form of the legend’ was ‘written in hospital’, which would place all or part of the actual writing of the first pencil version to mid-August–October 1917 (Letters
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