The Shaping of Middle-earth. Christopher Tolkien

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      This book brings the ‘History of Middle-earth’ to some time in the 1930s: the cosmographical work Ambarkanta and the earliest Annals of Valinor and Annals of Beleriand, while later than the Quenta Noldorinwa – the ‘Silmarillion’ version that was written, as I believe, in 1930 – cannot themselves be more precisely dated.

      This is the stage at which my father had arrived when The Hobbit was written. Comparison of the Quenta with the published Silmarillion will show that the essential character of the work was now fully in being; in the shape and fall of sentences, even of whole passages, the one is constantly echoed in the other; and yet the published Silmarillion is between three and four times as long.

      After the hasty ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ (chapter II in this book), the Quenta Noldorinwa was in fact the only complete version of ‘The Silmarillion’ that my father ever made. Towards the end of 1937 he interrupted work on a new version, Quenta Silmarillion, which extended to part way through the story of Túrin Turambar, and began The Lord of the Rings (see The Lays of Beleriand pp. 364–7). When after many years he returned to the First Age, the vast extension of the world that had now come into being meant that the Quenta Silmarillion, which had been stopped in full flight, could not be taken up from where it fell; and though he undertook exceedingly complex revisions and enlargements of the earlier parts during the following years, he never achieved again a complete and coherent structure. Especially in its concluding chapters the Quenta Noldorinwa is thus one of the primary elements in the study of the work as a whole.

      In the Annals of Valinor and the Annals of Beleriand are seen the beginnings of the chronological structure which was to become a central preoccupation. The Annals would develop into a separate ‘tradition’, parallel to and overlapping but distinct from ‘The Silmarillion’ proper, and (after intervening versions) emerging in the years following the completion of The Lord of the Rings in two chief works of the Matter of Middle-earth, the Annals of Aman and the Grey Annals of Beleriand (see pp. 262, 294). With the Quenta and with these earliest versions of the Annals I give the brief texts in Anglo-Saxon feigned to have been made by Ælfwine (Eriol) from the works that he studied in Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle.

      The commentaries are largely concerned to relate geography, names, events, relationships and motives to what preceded and what followed; inevitably this entails a great deal of reference back to the previous books, and the text of the commentaries is hardly enticing (though being in smaller print they can be readily distinguished from the original works). My object is to try to show, and not merely impressionistically, how Middle-earth and its history was built up gradually and delicately, and how a long series of small shifts or combinations would often lead to the emergence of new and unforeseen structures – as for example in the story of Gwindor of Nargothrond (p. 180).

      The arrangement of the texts of the ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ and the Quenta, split into numbered sections comparable from one text to the other, is explained on p. 11. The earlier volumes in the series are referred to as I (The Book of Lost Tales Part I), II (The Book of Lost Tales Part II), and III (The Lays of Beleriand).

      The maps and diagrams in the book are reproduced with the permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and I thank the staff of the Department of Western Manuscripts at the Bodleian for their assistance.

      The fifth volume will contain my father’s unfinished ‘time-travel’ story, The Lost Road, together with the earliest forms of the legend of Númenor, which were closely related to it; the Lhammas or Account of Tongues; the Etymologies; and all the writings concerned with the First Age up to the time when The Lord of the Rings was begun.

I

       PROSE FRAGMENTS FOLLOWING THE LOST TALES

      Before giving the ‘Sketch of the Mythology’, the earliest form of the prose ‘Silmarillion’, there are some brief prose texts that can be conveniently collected here.

      (i)

      Among loose papers there is an early piece, soon abandoned, entitled Turlin and the Exiles of Gondolin. It will be seen that it relates closely to the beginning of the tale of The Fall of Gondolin (II. 149) but at the same time contains much that is new. That it was the beginning of a later version of the tale is clear at once from the name Mithrim, for this only replaced Asgon by emendation in the final text of The Fall of Gondolin (II. 202). This brief text reads as follows. At the first three occurrences of the name Turlin in the narrative (but not in the title) it was emended to Turgon; at the fourth and fifth Turgon was so written from the first. I give Turgon throughout.

      ‘Then’ said Ilfiniol son of Bronweg ‘know that Ulmo Lord of Waters forgot never the sorrows of the Elfin kindreds beneath the power of Melko, but he might do little because of the anger of the other Gods who shut their hearts against the race of the Gnomes, and dwelt behind the veiled hills of Valinor heedless of the Outer World, so deep was their ruth and regret for the death of the Two Trees. Nor did any save Ulmo only dread the power of Melko that wrought ruin and sorrow over all the Earth; but Ulmo desired that Valinor should gather all its might to quench his evil ere it be too late, and him seemed that both purposes might perchance be achieved if messengers from the Gnomes should win to Valinor and plead for pardon and for pity upon the Earth; for the love of Palúrien and Oromë her son for those wide realms did but slumber still. Yet hard and evil was the road from the Outer Earth to Valinor, and the Gods themselves had meshed the ways with magic and veiled the encircling hills. Thus did Ulmo seek unceasingly to stir the Gnomes to send messengers unto Valinor, but Melko was cunning and very deep in wisdom, and unsleeping was his wariness in all things that touched the Elfin kindreds, and their messengers overcame not the perils and temptations of that longest and most evil of all roads, and many that dared to set forth were lost for ever.

      Now tells the tale how Ulmo despaired that any of the Elfin race should surpass the dangers of the way, and of the deepest and the latest design that he then fashioned, and of those things which came of it.

      In those days the greater part of the kindreds of Men dwelt after the Battle of Unnumbered Tears in that land of the North that has many names, but which the Elves of Kôr have named Hisilómë which is the Twilit Mist, and the Gnomes, who of the Elf-kin know it best, Dor-Lómin the Land of Shadows. A people mighty in numbers were there, dwelling about the wide pale waters of Mithrim the great lake that lies in those regions, and other folk named them Tunglin or folk of the Harp, for their joy was in the wild music and minstrelsy of the fells and woodlands, but they knew not and sang not of the sea. Now this folk came into those places after the dread battle, being too late summoned thither from afar, and they bore no stain of treachery against the Elfin kin; but indeed many among them clung to such friendship with the hidden Gnomes of the mountains and Dark Elves as might be still for the sorrow and mistrust born of those ruinous deeds in the Vale of Niniach. Turgon was a man of that folk, son of Peleg, son of Indor, son of [Ear >] Fengel who was their chief and hearing the summons had marched out of the deeps of the East with all his folk. But Turgon dwelt not much with his kindred, and loved rather solitude and the friendship of the Elves whose tongues he knew, and he wandered alone about the long shores of Mithrim, now hunting in its woods, now making sudden music in the rocks upon his rugged harp of wood strung with the sinews of bears. But he sang not for the ears of Men, and many hearing the power of his rough songs came from afar to hearken to his harping; [?but] Turgon left his singing and departed to lonely places in the mountains.

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