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This fifth volume of The History of Middle-earth completes the presentation and analysis of my father’s writings on the subject of the First Age up to the time at the end of 1937 and the beginning of 1938 when he set them for long aside. The book provides all the evidence known to me for the understanding of his conceptions in many essential matters at the time when The Lord of the Rings was begun; and from the Annals of Valinor, the Annals of Beleriand, the Ainulindalë, and the Quenta Silmarillion given here it can be quite closely determined which elements in the published Silmarillion go back to that time, and which entered afterwards. To make this a satisfactory work of reference for these purposes I have thought it essential to give the texts of the later 1930s in their entirety, even though in parts of the Annals the development from the antecedent versions was not great; for the curious relations between the Annals and the Quenta Silmariliion are a primary feature of the history and here already appear, and it is clearly better to have all the related texts within the same covers. Only in the case of the prose form of the tale of Beren and Lúthien have I not done so, since that was preserved so little changed in the published Silmariliion; here I have restricted myself to notes on the changes that were made editorially.

I cannot, or at any rate I cannot yet, attempt the editing of my fathers strictly or narrowly linguistic writings, in view of their extraordinary complexity and difficulty; but I include in this book the general essay called The Lhammas or Account of Tongues, and also the Etymologies, both belonging to this period. The latter, a kind of etymological dictionary, provides historical explanations of a very large number of words and names, and enormously increases the known vocabularies of the Elvish tongues – as they were at that time, for like everything else the languages continued to evolve as the years passed. Also hitherto unknown except by allusion is my father’s abandoned ‘time-travel’ story The Lost Road, which leads primarily to Númenor, but also into the history and legend of northern and western Europe, with the associated poems The Song of Ælfwine (in the stanza of Pearl) and King Sheave (in alliterative verse). Closely connected with The Lost Road were the earliest forms of the legend of the Drowning of Númenor, which are also included in the book, and the first glimpses of the story of the Last Alliance of Elves and Men.