The Book of Lost Tales, Part 1 - J. R. R. Tolkien [6]
The tracing of this long evolution is to me of deep interest, and I hope that it may prove so to others who have a taste for this kind of enquiry: whether the major transformations of plot or cosmological theory, or such a detail as the premonitory appearance of Legolas Greenleaf the keen-sighted in the tale of The Fall of Gondolin. But these old manuscripts are by no means of interest only for the study of origins. Much is to be found there that my father never (so far as one can tell) expressly rejected, and it is to be remembered that ‘The Silmarillion’, from the 1926 ‘Sketch’ onwards, was written as an abridgement or epitome, giving the substance of much longer works (whether existing in fact, or not) in a smaller compass. The highly archaic manner devised for his purpose was no fustian: it had range and great vigour, peculiarly apt to convey the magical and eerie nature of the early Elves, but as readily turned to the sarcastic, sneering Melko or the affairs of Ulmo and Ossë. These last approach at times a comic conception, and are delivered in a rapid and lively language that did not survive in the gravity of my father’s later ‘Silmarillion’ prose (so Ossë ‘fares about in a foam of business’ as he anchors the islands to the sea-bed, the cliffs of Tol Eressëa new-filled with the first sea-birds ‘are full of a chattering and a smell of fish, and great conclaves are held upon its ledges’, and when the Shoreland Elves are at last drawn over the sea to Valinor Ulmo marvellously ‘fares at the rear in his fishy car and trumpets loudly for the discomfiture of Ossë’).
The Lost Tales never reached or even approached a form in which my father could have considered their publication before he abandoned them; they were experimental and provisional, and the tattered notebooks in which they were written were bundled away and left unlooked at as the years passed. To present them in a printed book has raised many thorny editorial problems. In the first place, the manuscripts are intrinsically very difficult: partly because much of the text was written rapidly in pencil and is now in places extremely hard to read, requiring a magnifying glass and much patience, not always rewarded. But also in some of the Tales my father erased the original pencilled text and wrote a revised version over it in ink—and since at this period he used bound notebooks rather than loose sheets, he was liable to find himself short of space: so detached portions of tales were written in the middle of other tales, and in places a fearsome textual jigsaw puzzle was produced.
Secondly, the Lost Tales were not all written progressively one after the other in the sequence of the narrative; and (inevitably) my father began a new arrangement and revision of the Tales while the work was still in progress. The Fall of Gondolin was the first of the tales told to Eriol to be composed, and the Tale of Tinúviel the second, but the events of those tales take place towards the end of the history; on the other hand the extant texts are later revisions. In some cases nothing earlier than the revised form can now be read; in some both forms are extant for all, or a part, of their length; in some there is only a preliminary draft; and in some there is no formed narrative at all, but only notes and projections. After much experimentation I have found that no method of presentation is feasible but to set out the Tales in the sequence of the narrative.
And finally, as the writing of the Tales progressed, relations were changed, new conceptions entered, and the development of the languages pari passu with the narrative led to continual revision of names.
An edition that takes account of such complexities, as this does,