Unfinished Tales - J. R. R. Tolkien [6]
The latest ‘scheme’, the text primarily followed, is entitled The Shadow of the Shadow: the Tale of the Mariner’s Wife; and the Tale of the Queen Shepherdess. The manuscript ends abruptly, and I can offer no certain explanation of why my father abandoned it. A typescript made to this point was completed in January 1965. There exists also a typescript of two pages that I judge to be the latest of all these materials; it is evidently the beginning of what was to be a finished version of the whole story, and provides the text on pp. 223 – 5 in this book (where the plot-outlines are at their most scanty). It is entitled Indis i·Kiryamo ‘The Mariner’s Wife’: a tale of ancient Númenórë, which tells of the first rumour of the Shadow.
At the end of this narrative (p. 264) I have set out such scanty indications as can be given of the further course of the story.
III
The Line of Elros: Kings of Númenor
Though in form purely a dynastic record, I have included this because it is an important document for the history of the Second Age, and a great part of the extant material concerning that Age finds a place in the texts and commentary in this book. It is a fine manuscript in which the dates of the Kings and Queens of Númenor and of their reigns have been copiously and sometimes obscurely emended: I have endeavoured to give the latest formulation. The text introduces several minor chronological puzzles, but also allows clarification of some apparent errors in the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings.
The genealogical table of the earlier generations of the Line of Elros is taken from several closely-related tables that derive from the same period as the discussion of the laws of succession in Númenor (pp. 268 – 9). There are some slight variations in minor names: thus Vardilmë appears also as Vardilyë, and Yávien as Yávië. The forms given in my table I believe to be later.
IV
The History of Galadriel and Celeborn
This section of the book differs from the others (save those in Part Four) in that there is here no single text but rather an essay incorporating citations. This treatment was enforced by the nature of the materials; as is made clear in the course of the essay, a history of Galadriel can only be a history of my father’s changing conceptions, and the ‘unfinished’ nature of the tale is not in this case that of a particular piece of writing. I have restricted myself to the presentation of his unpublished writings on the subject, and forgone any discussion of the larger questions that underlie the development; for that would entail consideration of the entire relation between the Valar and the Elves, from the initial decision (described in The Silmarillion) to summon the Eldar to Valinor, and many other matters besides, concerning which my father wrote much that falls outside the scope of this book.
The history of Galadriel and Celeborn is so interwoven with other legends and histories – of Lothlórien and the Silvan Elves, of Amroth and Nimrodel, of Celebrimbor and the making of the Rings of Power, of the war against Sauron and the Númenórean intervention – that it cannot be treated in isolation, and thus this section of the book, together with its five Appendices, brings together virtually all the unpublished materials for the history of the Second Age in Middle-earth (and the discussion in places inevitably extends into the Third). It is said in the Tale of Years given in Appendix B to The Lord of the Rings: ‘These were the dark years for Men of Middle-earth, but the years of the glory of Númenor. Of events in Middle-earth the records are few and brief, and their dates are often uncertain.’ But even that little surviving from the ‘dark years’ changed