Читать книгу The Shaping of Middle-earth онлайн | страница 40
And this is the last end of the tales of the days before the days, in the Northern regions of the Western World. These tales are some of those remembered and sung by the fading Elves, and most by the vanished Elves of the Lonely Isle. They have been told by Elves to Men of the race of Eärendel, and most to Eriol who alone of mortals of later days sailed to the Lonely Isle, and yet came back to Lúthien,5 and remembered things he had heard in Cortirion, the town of the Elves in Tol Eressëa.
1 Against Belaurin was written Palúrien (cf. §1 note 1).
2 and Men struck out.
3 Added here:
But of Men in that last Day the prophecy speaks not, save of Túrin only.
4 Added here: and the Door of Night (late pencilled addition).
5 Lúthien > Leithien (cf. §18 note 5).
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While the ‘Sketch’ is a good and clear manuscript, as it had to be (since it was to be read by R. W. Reynolds), it will be apparent that my father composed it extremely rapidly: I think it quite possible and even probable that he wrote it without consulting the earlier prose tales.
Very great advances have been made towards the form of the story as it appears in the published work; but there is no trace of a prose narrative even in fragmentary or note form that bridges the gap between the Lost Tales and this synopsis in the ‘Valinórean’ part of the mythology (i.e. to the flight of the Noldoli and the making of the Sun and Moon). This is not to say, of course, that none such ever existed, though the fact that my father did undoubtedly preserve a very high proportion of all that he ever wrote leads me to doubt it. I think it far more likely that while working on other things (during his time at Leeds) he had developed his ideas, especially on the ‘Valinórean’ part, without setting them to paper; and since the prose Tales had been set aside a good many years before, it may be that certain narrative shifts found in the ‘Sketch’ were less fully intended, less conscious, than such shifts in the later development of ‘The Silmarillion’, where he always worked on the basis of existing writings.