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The two earlier volumes in this series (the first and second parts of The Book of Lost Tales) are referred to as ‘I’ and ‘II’. The fourth volume will contain the ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ (1926), from which the Silmarillion ‘tradition’ derived; the Quenta Noldorinwa or History of the Noldoli (1930); the first map of the North-west of Middle-earth; the Ambarkanta (‘Shape of the World’) by Rúmil, together with the only existing maps of the entire World; the earliest Annals of Valinor and Annals of Beleriand, by Pengolod the Wise of Gondolin; and the fragments of translations of the Quenta and Annals from Elvish into Anglo-Saxon by Ælfwine of England.

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There exists a substantial manuscript (28 pages long) entitled ‘Sketch of the Mythology with especial reference to “The Children of Húrin”’; and this ‘Sketch’ is the next complete narrative, in the prose tradition, after the Lost Tales (though a few fragmentary writings are extant from the intervening time). On the envelope containing this manuscript my father wrote at some later time:

ssss1. Form orig[inally] composed c. 1926–30 for R. W. Reynolds to explain background of ‘alliterative version’ of Túrin & the Dragon: then in progress (unfinished) (begun c. 1918).

He seems to have written first ‘1921’ before correcting this to ‘1918’.

R. W. Reynolds taught my father at King Edward’s School, Birmingham (see Humphrey Carpenter, Biography, p. 47). In a passage of his diary written in August 1926 he wrote that ‘at the end of last year’ he had heard again from R. W. Reynolds, that they had corresponded subsequently, and that he had sent Reynolds many of his poems, including Tinúviel and Túrin (‘Tinúviel meets with qualified approval, it is too prolix, but how could I ever cut it down, and the specimen I sent of Túrin with little or none’). This would date the ‘Sketch’ as originally written (it was subsequently heavily revised) definitely in 1926, probably fairly early in the year. It must have accompanied the specimen of Túrin (the alliterative poem), the background of which it was written to explain, to Anacapri, where Reynolds was then living in retirement.