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My father worked on the Lay of Leithian for six years, abandoning it in its turn in September 1931. In 1929 it was read so far as it then went by C. S. Lewis, who sent him a most ingenious commentary on a part of it; I acknowledge with thanks the permission of C. S. Lewis PTE Limited to include this.

In 1937 he said in a letter that ‘in spite of certain virtuous passages’ the Lay of Leithian had ‘grave defects’ (see p. 366). A decade or more later, he received a detailed, and remarkably unconstrained, criticism of the poem from someone who knew and admired his poetry. I do not know for certain who this was. In choosing ‘the staple octosyllabic couplet of romance,’ he wrote, my father had chosen one of the most difficult of forms ‘if one wishes to avoid monotony and sing-song in a very long poem. I am often astonished by your success, but it is by no means consistently maintained.’ His strictures on the diction of the Lay included archaisms so archaic that they needed annotation, distorted order, use of emphatic doth or did where there is no emphasis, and language sometimes flat and conventional (in contrast to passages of ‘gorgeous description’). There is no record of what my father thought of this criticism (written when The Lord of the Rings was already completed), but it must be associated in some way with the fact that in 1949 or 1950 he returned to the Lay of Leithian and began a revision that soon became virtually a new poem; and relatively little though he wrote of it, its advance on the old version in all those respects in which that had been censured is so great as to give it a sad prominence in the long list of his works that might have been. The new Lay is included in this book, and a page from a fine manuscript of it is reproduced as ssss1.

The sections of both poems are interleaved with commentaries which are primarily concerned to trace the evolution of the legends and the lands they are set in.

The two pages reproduced from the Lay of the Children of Húrin (p. 15) are from the original manuscript of the first version, lines 297–317 and 318–33. For differences between the readings of the manuscript and those of the printed text see ssss1. The page from the Lay of Leithian in Elvish script (p. 299) comes from the ‘A’ version of the original Lay (see pp. 150–1), and there are certain differences in the text from the ‘B’ version which is that printed. These pages from the original manuscripts 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.