Unfinished Tales - J. R. R. Tolkien [7]
Divergent versions need not indeed always be treated solely as a question of settling the priority of composition; and my father as ‘author’ or ‘inventor’ cannot always in these matters be distinguished from the ‘recorder’ of ancient traditions handed down in diverse forms among different peoples through long ages (when Frodo met Galadriel in Lórien, more than sixty centuries had passed since she went east over the Blue Mountains from the ruin of Beleriand). ‘Of this two things are said, though which is true only those Wise could say who now are gone.’
In his last years my father wrote much concerning the etymology of names in Middle-earth. In these highly discursive essays there is a good deal of history and legend embedded; but being ancillary to the main philological purpose, and introduced as it were in passing, it has required extraction. It is for this reason that this part of the book is largely made up of short citations, with further material of the same kind placed in the Appendices.
PART THREE
I
The Disaster of the Gladden Fields
This is a ‘late’ narrative – by which I mean no more, in the absence of any indication of precise date, than that it belongs in the final period of my father’s writing on Middle-earth, together with ‘Cirion and Eorl’, ‘The Battles of the Fords of Isen’, ‘the Drúedain’, and the philological essays excerpted in ‘The History of Galadriel and Celeborn’, rather than to the time of the publication of The Lord of the Rings and the years following it. There are two versions: a rough typescript of the whole (clearly the first stage of composition), and a good typescript incorporating many changes that breaks off at the point where Elendur urged Isildur to flee (p. 355). The editorial hand has here had little to do.
II
Cirion and Eorl and the Friendship of Gondor and Rohan
I judge these fragments to belong to the same period as ‘The Disaster of the Gladden Fields’, when my father was greatly interested in the earlier history of Gondor and Rohan; they were doubtless intended to form parts of a substantial history, developing in detail the summary accounts given in Appendix A to The Lord of the Rings. The material is in the first stage of composition, very disordered, full of variants, breaking off into rapid jottings that are in part illegible.
III
The Quest of Erebor
In a letter written in 1964 my father said:
There are, of course, quite a lot of links between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that are not clearly set out. They were mostly written or sketched out, but cut out to lighten the boat: such as Gandalf’s exploratory journeys, his relations with Aragorn and Gondor; all the movements of Gollum, until he took refuge in Moria, and so on. I actually wrote in full an account of what really happened before Gandalf’s visit to Bilbo and the subsequent ‘Unexpected Party’, as seen by Gandalf himself. It was to have come in during a looking-back conversation in Minas Tirith; but it had to go, and is only represented in brief in Appendix A pp. 358 – 60, though the difficulties that Gandalf had with Thorin are omitted.
This account of Gandalf’ s is given here. The complex textual situation is described in the Appendix to the narrative, where I have given substantial extracts from an earlier version.
IV
The Hunt for the Ring
There is much writing bearing on the events of the year 3018 of the Third Age, which are otherwise known from the Tale of Years and the reports of Gandalf and others to the Council of Elrond; and these writings are clearly those referred to as ‘sketched out’ in the letter just cited. I have given them the title ‘The Hunt for the Ring’. The manuscripts themselves, in great though hardly exceptional confusion, are sufficiently described on p. 442; but the question of their date (for I believe them all, and also those of ‘Concerning Gandalf, Saruman, and the Shire’, given as the third element in this