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By Root 959 0

rather than attempt to smooth them artificially away, is liable to be an intricate and crabbed thing, in which the reader is never left alone for a moment. I have attempted to make the Tales themselves accessible and uncluttered while providing a fairly full account, for those who want it, of the actual textual evidences. To achieve this I have drastically reduced the quantity of annotation to the texts in these ways: the many changes made to names are all recorded, but they are lumped together at the end of each tale, not recorded individually at each occurrence (the places where the names occur can be found from the Index); almost all annotation concerned with content is taken up into, or boiled down into, a commentary or short essay following each tale; and almost all linguistic comment (primarily the etymology of names) is collected in an Appendix on Names at the end of the book, where will be found a great deal of information relating to the earliest stages of the ‘Elvish’ languages. In this way the numbered notes are very largely restricted to variants and divergences found in other texts, and the reader who does not wish to trouble with these can read the Tales knowing that that is almost all that he is missing.

The commentaries are limited in their scope, being mostly concerned to discuss the implications of what is said within the context of the Tales themselves, and to compare them with the published Silmarillion. I have eschewed parallels, sources, influences; and have mostly avoided the complexities of the development between the Lost Tales and the published work (since to indicate these even cursorily would, I think, be distracting), treating the matter in a simplified way, as between two fixed points. I do not suppose for one moment that my analyses will prove either altogether just or altogether accurate, and there must be clues to the solution of puzzling features in the Tales which I have failed to observe. There is also included a short glossary of words occurring in the Tales and poems that are obsolete, archaic, or rare.

The texts are given in a form very close to that of the original manuscripts. Only the most minor and obvious slips have been silently corrected; where sentences fall awkwardly, or where there is a lack of grammatical cohesion, as is sometimes the case in the parts of the Tales that never got beyond a first rapid draft, I have let them stand. I have allowed myself greater freedom in providing punctuation, for my father when writing at speed often punctuated erratically or not at all; and I have gone further than he did in consistency of capitalisation. I have adopted, though hesitantly, a consistent system of accentuation for Elvish names. My father wrote, for instance: Palûrien, Palúrien, Palurien; nen, Onen; Kôr, Kor. I have used the acute accent for macron, circumflex, and acute (and occasional grave) accents of the original texts, but the circumflex on monosyllables—thus Palúrien, Ónen, Kôr: the same system, at least to the eye, as in later Sindarin.

Lastly, the division of this edition into two parts is entirely due to the length of the Tales. The edition is conceived as a whole, and I hope that the second part will appear within a year of the first; but each part has its own Index and Appendix on Names. The second part contains what are in many respects the most interesting of the Tales: Tinúviel, Turambar (Túrin), The Fall of Gondolin, and the Tale of the Nauglafring (the Necklace of the Dwarves); outlines for the Tale of Eärendel and the conclusion of the work; and lfwine of England.

I

THE COTTAGE OF LOST PLAY

On the cover of one of the now very battered ‘High School Exercise Books’ in which some of the Lost Tales were composed my father wrote: The Cottage of Lost Play, which introduceth [the] Book of Lost Tales; and on the cover is also written, in my mother’s hand, her initials, E.M.T., and a date, Feb. 12th 1917. In this book the tale was written out by my mother; and it is a fair copy of a very rough pencilled manuscript of my father’s on loose sheets, which were