The Lost Road and Other Writings. Christopher Tolkien

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СКАЧАТЬ href="#ulink_e083a98f-0185-5da7-9acb-8cae991051a7">§8 The concluding sentence does not appear; see the commentary on FN I.

§9 ‘Partly by the [desire >] command of Tar-kalion, and partly by their own will (because some still revered the Gods and would not go with war into the West) many had remained behind, and sat in their ships…’

      There is now no mention of the great wind that arose.

§10 The paragraph now opens: ‘There, though shorn of their former power, and few in number and scattered, they after became lords and kings of Men. Some were evil and forsook not Sauron in their hearts; and some were of good will and retained memory of the Gods. But all alike …’

      In ‘the span of their lives, which had of old been greater than that of the lesser races’ the words ‘greater than’ > ‘thrice’.

      The concluding sentence reads: ‘For which reason in after days they would bury their dead in ships, or set them in pomp …’

§11 ‘And the spell that lay there was not wholly vain’ > ‘And this was not wholly fantasy’, but this was struck out.

      ‘For the ancient line of the world remained in the mind of Ilúvatar and in the thought of the Gods, and in the memory of the world …’

      At the end of the paragraph is added: ‘Therefore they built very high towers in those days.’

§12 The paragraph now begins: ‘But most, who could not see this or conceive it in thought, scorned the builders of towers, and trusted to ships that sailed upon water. But they came only to the lands of the New World, and found them like to those of the Old, and subject to death; and they reported that the world was round. But upon the Straight Road only the Gods could walk, and only the ships of the Elves of Avallon could journey. For the Road being straight, whereas the surface of the earth was bent…’

      The paragraph concludes: ‘Therefore many abandoned the Gods, and put them out of their legends. But Men of Middle-earth looked up with wonder upon them, and with great fear, for they descended out of the air; and they took the Númenóreans to be Gods, and some were content that this should be so.’

§13 The paragraph begins: ‘But not all the hearts of the Númenóreans were crooked; and the knowledge of the days before the ruin, descending from their fathers and the Elf-friends, and those that had held converse with the Gods, was long preserved among the wise. And they said that the fate of Men …’

      ‘But the fate of Men … is not complete within the world.’

      ‘there were wars of faith among the mighty of Middle-earth’

§14 But there remains still a legend of Beleriand: for that land in the West of the North of the Old World, where Morgoth had been overthrown, was still in a measure blessed and free from his shadow; and many of the exiles of Númenor had come thither. Though changed and broken it retained still in ancient days the name that it had borne in the days of the Gnomes. And it is said that in Beleriand there arose a king, who was of Númenórean race, and he was named Elendil, that is Elf-friend. And he took counsel with the Elves that remained in Middle-earth (and these abode then mostly in Beleriand); and he made a league with Gil-galad the Elf-king who was descended from Fëanor. And their armies were joined, and passed the mountains and came into inner lands far from the Sea. And they came at last even to Mordor the Black Country, where Sauron, that is in the Gnomish tongue named Thû, had rebuilt his fortresses. And they encompassed the stronghold, until Thû came forth in person, and Elendil and Gil-galad wrestled with him; and both were slain. But Thû was thrown down, and his bodily shape destroyed, and his servants were dispelled, and the host of Beleriand destroyed his dwelling; but Thû’s spirit fled far away, and was hidden in waste places, and took no shape again for many ages. But it is sung sadly by the Elves that the war with Thû hastened the fading of the Eldar, decreed by the Gods; for Thû had power beyond their measure, as Felagund, King of Nargothrond, had found aforetime; and the Elves expended their strength and substance in the assault upon him. And this was the last of the services of the Firstborn to Men, and it is held the last of the deeds of alliance before the fading of the Elves and the estrangement of the Two Kindreds. And here endeth the tale of the ancient world as it is known to the Elves.

       Commentary on the second version of The Fall of Númenor

§1 On ‘Orcs, that are mockeries of the creatures of Ilúvatar’ see QS §18 and commentary. – It was said in FN I §5 that Morgoth ‘did not come in person, but only in spirit, and as a shadow upon the mind and heart.’ Now the idea of his ‘return’ in any sense seems to be denied; but there appears the concept of his malevolent and guiding Will that remains always in the world.

      ‘such as obeyed dwelt again in Eressëa’: in FN I ‘the Elves were summoned to Valinor, as has been told, and many obeyed, but not all.’ In the Quenta (IV. 162) ‘the Gnomes and Dark-elves rehabited for the most part the Lonely Isle … But some returned even unto Valinor, as all were free to do who willed’ (retained in QS, pp. 331–2 §27). The name Avallon (‘for it is hard by Valinor’) appears, but as a new name for Tol Eressëa; afterwards, in the form Avallónë (‘for it is of all cities the nearest to Valinor’), it became the name of a haven in the isle: Akallabêth p. 260.

§2 At first my father preserved exactly the rewriting of FN I given in the commentary on FN I §2, whereby Atalantë is the name of the city Andúnië after the Downfall. I have suggested that he did not in fact intend this; at any rate he corrected it here, so that Atalantë again becomes the name of Númenor drowned. Númenos now reappears from FN I §2 as originally written, where it was the name of the western city, but becomes the name of the high place of the king in the centre of the land (afterwards Armenelos).

Elrond (see the commentary on FN I §14) now becomes the first King of Númenor and the builder of Númenos; his brother Elros has still not emerged.

The statement here that the Númenóreans ‘took on the speech of the Elves of the Blessed Realm, as it was and is in Eressëa’ suggests that they abandoned their own Mannish tongue; and that this is the meaning is shown in The Lost Road (p. 68). In the Lhammas it is said (p. 179) that ‘already even in [Húrin’s father’s] day Men in Beleriand forsook the daily use of their own tongue and spoke and gave even names unto their children in the language of the Gnomes.’ The words ‘as it was and is in Eressëa’ would contradict any idea that the Lonely Isle was destroyed in the Downfall (see the commentary on FN I §7). But the difficult passage which suggests it was preserved in the present text, §7 (though СКАЧАТЬ