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In the inevitable Appendix I have placed three works which are not given complete: the Genealogies, the List of Names, and the second ‘Silmarillion’ Map, all of which belong in their original forms to the earlier 1930s. The Genealogies only came to light recently, but they add in fact little to what is known from the narrative texts. The List of Names might have been better included in Vol. IV, but this was again a work of reference which provides very little new matter, and it was more convenient to postpone it and then to give just those few entries which offer new detail. The second Map is a different case. This was my father’s sole ‘Silmarillion’ map for some forty years, and here I have redrawn it to show it as it was when first made, leaving out all the layer upon layer of later accretion and alteration. The Tale of Years and the Tale of Battles, listed in title-pages to The Silmarillion as elements in that work (see p. 202), are not included, since they were contemporary with the later Annals and add nothing to the material found in them; subsequent alteration of names and dates was also carried out in a precisely similar way.

In places the detailed discussion of dating may seem excessive, but since the chronology of my father’s writings, both ‘internal’ and ‘external’, is extremely difficult to determine and the evidence full of traps, and since the history can be very easily and very seriously falsified by mistaken deductions on this score, I have wished to make as plain as I can the reasons for my assertions.

In some of the texts I have introduced paragraph-numbering. This is done in the belief that it will provide a more precise and therefore quicker method of reference in a book where the discussion of its nature moves constantly back and forth.

As in previous volumes I have to some degree standardized usage in respect of certain names: thus for example I print Gods, Elves, Orcs, Middle-earth, etc. with initial capitals, and Kôr, Tûn, Eärendel, Númenórean, etc. for frequent Kór, Tún, Earendel, Númenórean of the manuscripts.