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INTRODUCTION

The problems that confront one given responsibility for the writings of a dead author are hard to resolve. Some persons in this position may elect to make no material whatsoever available for publication, save perhaps for work that was in a virtually finished state at the time of the author’s death. In the case of the unpublished writings of J. R. R. Tolkien this might seem at first sight the proper course; since he himself, peculiarly critical and exacting of his own work, would not have dreamt of allowing even the more completed narratives in this book to appear without much further refinement.

On the other hand, the nature and scope of his invention seems to me to place even his abandoned stories in a peculiar position. That The Silmarillion should remain unknown was for me out of the question, despite its disordered state, and despite my father’s known if very largely unfulfilled intentions for its transformation; and in that case I presumed, after long hesitation, to present the work not in the form of an historical study, a complex of divergent texts interlinked by commentary, but as a completed and cohesive entity. The narratives in this book are indeed on an altogether different footing: taken together they constitute no whole, and the book is no more than a collection of writings, disparate in form, intent, finish, and date of composition (and in my own treatment of them), concerned with Númenor and Middle-earth. But the argument for their publication is not different in its nature, though it is of lesser force, from that which I held to justify the publication of The Silmarillion. Those who would not have forgone the images of Melkor with Ungoliant looking down from the summit of Hyarmentir upon ‘the fields and pastures of Yavanna, gold beneath the tall wheat of the gods’; of the shadows of Fingolfin’s host cast by the first moonrise in the West; of Beren lurking in wolf’s shape beneath the throne of Morgoth; or of the light of the Silmaril suddenly revealed in the darkness of the Forest of Neldoreth – they will find, I believe, that imperfections of form in these tales are much outweighed by the voice (heard now for the last time) of Gandalf, teasing the lordly Saruman at the meeting of the White Council in the year 2851, or describing in Minas Tirith after the end of the War of the Ring how it was that he came to send the Dwarves to the celebrated party at Bag-End; by the arising of Ulmo Lord of Waters out of the sea at Vinyamar; by Mablung of Doriath hiding ‘like a vole’ beneath the ruins of the bridge at Nargothrond; or by the death of Isildur as he floundered up out of the mud of Anduin.

Many of the pieces in this collection are elaborations of matters told more briefly, or at least referred to, elsewhere; and it must be said at once that much in the book will be found unrewarding by readers of The Lord of the Rings who, holding that the historical structure of Middle-earth is a means and not an end, the mode of the narrative and not its purpose, feel small desire of further exploration for its own sake, do not wish to know how the Riders of the Mark of Rohan were organised, and would leave the Wild Men of the Drúadan Forest firmly where they found them. My father would certainly not have thought them wrong. He said in a letter written in March 1955, before the publication of the third volume of The Lord of the Rings:

I now wish that no appendices had been promised! For I think their appearance in truncated and compressed form will satisfy nobody: certainly not me; clearly from the (appalling mass of ) letters I receive not those people who like that kind of thing – astonishingly many; while those who enjoy the book as an ‘heroic romance’ only, and find ‘unexplained vistas’ part of the literary effect, will neglect the appendices, very properly.

I am not now at all sure that the tendency to treat the whole thing as a kind of vast game is really good – certainly not for me, who find that kind of thing only too fatally attractive. It is, I suppose, a tribute to the curious effect that story has, when based on very elaborate and detailed workings of geography, chronology, and language, that so many should clamour for sheer ‘information’, or ‘lore’.

In a letter of the following year he wrote:

... while many like you demand maps, others wish for geological indications rather than places; many want Elvish grammars, phonologies, and specimens; some want metrics and prosodies.... Musicians want tunes, and musical notation; archaeologists want ceramics and metallurgy; botanists want a more accurate description of the mallorn, of elanor, niphredil, alfirin, mallos, and symbelmynë; historians want more details about the social and political structure of Gondor; general enquirers want information about the Wainriders, the Harad, Dwarvish origins, the Dead Men, the Beornings, and the missing two wizards (out of five).

But whatever view may be taken of this question, for some, as for myself, there is a value greater than the mere uncovering of curious detail in learning that Vëantur the Númenórean brought his ship Entulessë, the ‘Return’, into the Grey Havens on the spring winds of the six hundredth year of the Second Age, that the tomb of Elendil the Tall was set by Isildur his son on the summit of the beacon-hill Halifirien, that the Black Rider whom the Hobbits saw in the foggy darkness on the far side of Bucklebury Ferry was Khamûl, chief of the Ringwraiths of Dol Guldur – or even that the childlessness of Tarannon twelfth King of Gondor (a fact recorded in an Appendix to The Lord of the Rings) was associated with the hitherto wholly mysterious cats of Queen Berúthiel.

The construction of the book has been difficult, and in the result is somewhat complex. The narratives are all ‘unfinished’, but to a greater or lesser degree, and in different senses of the word, and have required different treatment; I shall say something below about each one in turn, and here only call attention to some general features.

The most important is the question of ‘consistency’, best illustrated from the section entitled ‘The History of Galadriel and Celeborn’. This is an ‘Unfinished Tale’ in a larger sense: not a narrative that comes to an abrupt halt, as in ‘Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin’, nor a series of fragments, as in ‘Cirion and Eorl’, but a primary strand in the history of Middle-earth that never received a settled definition, let alone a final written form. The inclusion of the unpublished narratives and sketches of narrative on this subject therefore entails at once the acceptance of the history not as a fixed, independently-existing reality which the author ‘reports’ (in his ‘persona’ as translator and redactor), but as a growing and shifting conception in his mind. When the author has ceased to publish his works himself, after subjecting them to his own detailed criticism and comparison, the further knowledge of Middle-earth to be found in his unpublished writings will often conflict with what is already ‘known’; and new elements set into the existing edifice will in such cases tend to contribute less to the history of the invented world itself than to the history of its invention. In this book I have accepted from the outset that this must be so; and except in minor details such as shifts in nomenclature (where retention of the manuscript form would lead to disproportionate confusion or disproportionate space in elucidation) I have made no alterations for the sake of consistency with published works, but rather drawn attention throughout to conflicts and variations. In this respect therefore ‘Unfinished Tales’ is essentially different from The Silmarillion, where a primary though not exclusive objective in the editing was to achieve cohesion both internal and external; and except in a few specified cases I have indeed treated the published form of The Silmarillion as a fixed point of reference of the same order as the writings published by my father himself, without taking into account the innumerable ‘unauthorised’ decisions between variants and rival versions that went into its making.

In content the book is entirely narrative (or descriptive): I have excluded all writings about Middle-earth and Aman that are of a primarily philosophic or speculative nature, and where such matters from time to time arise I have not pursued them. I have imposed a simple structure of convenience by dividing the texts into Parts corresponding to the first Three Ages of the World, there being in this inevitably some overlap, as with the legend of Amroth and its discussion in ‘The History of Galadriel and Celeborn’. The fourth part is an appendage, and may require some excuse in a book called ‘Unfinished Tales’, since the pieces it contains are generalised and discursive essays with little or no element of ‘story’. The section on the Drúedain did indeed owe its original inclusion to the story of ‘The Faithful Stone’ which forms a small part of it; and this section led me to introduce those on the Istari and the Palantíri, since they (especially the former) are matters about which many people have expressed curiosity, and this book seemed a convenient place to expound what there is to tell.

The notes may seem to be in some places rather thick on the ground, but it will be seen that where clustered most densely (as in ‘The Disaster of the Gladden Fields’) they are due less to the editor than to the author, who in his later work tended to compose in this way, driving several subjects abreast by means of interlaced notes. I have throughout tried to make it clear what is editorial and what is not. And because of this abundance of original material appearing in the notes and appendices I have thought it best not to restrict the page-references in the Index to the texts themselves but to cover all parts of the book except the Introduction.

I have throughout assumed on the reader’s part a fair knowledge of the published works of my father (more especially The Lord of the Rings), for to have done otherwise would have greatly enlarged the editorial element, which may well be thought quite sufficient already. I have, however, included short defining statements with almost all the primary entries in the Index, in the hope of saving the reader from constant reference elsewhere. If I have been inadequate in explanation or unintentionally obscure, Mr Robert Foster’s Complete Guide to Middle-earth supplies, as I have found through frequent use, an admirable work of reference.

Page-references to The Silmarillion are to the hardback edition; to The Lord of the Rings by title of the volume, book, and chapter.

There follow now primarily bibliographical notes on the individual pieces.

PART ONE

Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin

My father said more than once that ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ was the first of the tales of the First Age to be composed, and there is no evidence to set against his recollection. In a letter of 1964 he declared that he wrote it ‘ “out of my head” during sick-leave from the army in 1917’, and at other times he gave the date as 1916 or 1916 – 17. In a letter to me written in 1944 he said: ‘I first began to write [The Silmarillion ] in army huts, crowded, filled with the noise of gramophones’: and indeed some lines of verse in which appear the Seven Names of Gondolin are scribbled on the back of a piece of paper setting out ‘the chain of responsibility in a battalion’. The earliest manuscript is still in existence, filling two small school exercise-books; it was written rapidly in pencil, and then, for much of its course, overlaid with writing in ink, and heavily emended. On the basis of this text my mother, apparently in 1917, wrote out a fair copy; but this in turn was further substantially emended, at some time that I cannot determine, but probably in 1919 – 20, when my father was in Oxford on the staff of the then still uncompleted Dictionary. In the spring of 1920 he was invited to read a paper to the Essay Club of his college (Exeter); and he read ‘The Fall of Gondolin’. The notes of what he intended to say by way of introduction to his ‘essay’ still survive. In these he apologised for not having been able to produce a critical paper, and went on: ‘Therefore I must read something already written, and in desperation I have fallen back on this Tale. It has of course never seen the light before.... A complete cycle of events in an Elfinesse of my own imagining has for some time past grown up (rather, has been constructed) in my mind. Some of the episodes have been scribbled down....

This tale is not the best of them, but it is the only one that has so far been revised at all and that, insufficient as that revision has been, I dare read aloud.’

The tale of Tuor and the Exiles of Gondolin (as ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ is entitled in the early MSS) remained untouched for many years, though my father at some stage, probably between 1926 and 1930, wrote a brief, compressed version of the story to stand as part of The Silmarillion (a title which, incidentally, first appeared in his letter to The Observer of 20 February 1938); and this was changed subsequently to bring it into harmony with altered conceptions in other parts of the book. Much later he began work on an entirely refashioned account, entitled ‘Of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin’. It seems very likely that this was written in 1951, when The Lord of the Rings was finished but its publication doubtful. Deeply changed in style and bearings, yet retaining many of the essentials of the story written in his youth, ‘Of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin’ would have given in fine detail the whole legend that constitutes the brief 23rd chapter of the published Silmarillion; but, grievously, he went no further than the coming of Tuor and Voronwë to the last gate and Tuor’s sight of Gondolin across the plain of Tumladen. To his reasons for abandoning it there is no clue.

This is the text that is given here. To avoid confusion I have retitled it ‘Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin’, since it tells nothing of the fall of the city. As always with my father’s writings there are variant readings, and in one short section (the approach to and passage of the river Sirion by Tuor and Voronwë) several competing forms; some minor editorial work has therefore been necessary.

It is thus the remarkable fact that the only full account that my father ever wrote of the story of Tuor’s sojourn in Gondolin, his union with Idril Celebrindal, the birth of Ea¨rendil, the treachery of Maeglin, the sack of the city, and the escape of the fugitives – a story that was a central element in his imagination of the First Age – was the narrative composed in his youth. There is no question, however, that that (most remarkable) narrative is not suitable for inclusion in this book. It is written in the extreme archaistic style that my father employed at that time, and it inevitably embodies conceptions out of keeping with the world of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion in its published form. It belongs with the rest of the earliest phase of the mythology, ‘the Book of Lost Tales’: itself a very substantial work, of the utmost interest to one concerned with the origins of Middle-earth, but requiring to be presented in a lengthy and complex study if at all.

The Tale of the Children of Húrin

The development of the legend of Túrin Turambar is in some respects the most tangled and complex of all the narrative elements in the story of the First Age. Like the tale of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin it goes back to the very beginnings, and is extant in an early prose narrative (one of the ‘Lost Tales’) and in a long, unfinished poem in alliterative verse. But whereas the later ‘long version’ of Tuor never proceeded very far, my father carried the later ‘long version’ of Túrin much nearer completion. This is called Narn i Hîn Húrin; and this is the narrative that is given in the present book.

There are however great differences in the course of the long Narn in the degree to which the narrative approaches a perfected or final form. The concluding section (from The Return of Túrin to Dor-lómin to The Death of Túrin) has undergone only marginal editorial alteration; while the first section (to the end of Túrin in Doriath) required a good deal of revision and selection, and in some places some slight compression, the original texts being scrappy and disconnected. But the central section of the narrative (Túrin among the outlaws, Mîm the Petty-dwarf, the land of Dor-Cúarthol, the death of Beleg at Túrin’s hand, and Túrin’s life in Nargothrond) constituted a much more difficult editorial problem. The Narn is here at its least finished, and in places diminishes to outlines of possible turns in the story. My father was still evolving this part when he ceased to work on it; and the shorter version for The Silmarillion was to wait on the final development of the Narn. In preparing the text of The Silmarillion for publication I derived, by necessity, much of this section of the tale of Túrin from these very materials, which are of quite extraordinary complexity in their variety and interrelations.

For the first part of this central section, as far as the beginning of Túrin’s sojourn in Mîm’s dwelling on Amon Rûdh, I have contrived a narrative, in scale commensurate with other parts of the Narn, out of the existing materials (with one gap, see p. 124 and note 12); but from that point onwards (see p. 135) until Túrin’s coming to Ivrin after the fall of Nargothrond I have found it unprofitable to attempt it. The gaps in the Narn are here too large, and could only be filled from the published text of The Silmarillion; but in an Appendix (pp. 193 ff.) I have cited isolated fragments from this part of the projected larger narrative.

In the third section of the Narn (beginning with The Return of Túrin to Dor-lómin) a comparison with The Silmarillion (pp. 215 – 26) will show many close correspondences, and even identities of wording; while in the first section there are two extended passages that I have excluded from the present text (see p. 76 and note 1, and p. 86 and note 2), since they are close variants of passages that appear elsewhere and are included in the published Silmarillion. This overlapping and interrelation between one work and another may be explained in different ways, from different points of view. My father delighted in re-telling on different scales; but some parts did not call for more extended treatment in a larger version, and there was no need to rephrase for the sake of it. Again, when all was still fluid and the final organisation of the distinct narratives still a long way off, the same passage might be experimentally placed in either. But an explanation can be found at a different level. Legends like that of Túrin Turambar had been given a particular poetic form long ago – in this case, the Narn i Hîn Húrin of the poet Dírhavel – and phrases, or even whole passages, from it (especially at moments of great rhetorical intensity, such as Túrin’s address to his sword before his death) would be preserved intact by those who afterwards made condensations of the history of the Elder Days (as The Silmarillion is conceived to be).

PART TWO

A Description of the Island of Númenor

Although descriptive rather than narrative, I have included selections from my father’s account of Númenor, more especially as it concerns the physical nature of the Island, since it clarifies and naturally accompanies the tale of Aldarion and Erendis. This account was certainly in existence by 1965, and was probably written not long before that.

I have redrawn the map from a little rapid sketch, the only one, as it appears, that my father ever made of Númenor. Only names or features found on the original have been entered on the redrawing. In addition, the original shows another haven on the Bay of Andúnië, not far to the westward of Andúnië itself; the name is hard to read, but is almost certainly Almaida. This does not, so far as I am aware, occur elsewhere.

Aldarion and Erendis

This story was left in the least developed state of all the pieces in this collection, and has in places required a degree of editorial rehandling that made me doubt the propriety of including it. However, its very great interest as the single story (as opposed to records and annals) that survived at all from the long ages of Númenor before the narrative of its end (the Akallabêth), and as a story unique in its content among my father’s writings, persuaded me that it would be wrong to omit it from this collection of ‘Unfinished Tales’.

To appreciate the necessity for such editorial treatment it must be explained that my father made much use, in the composition of narrative, of ‘plot-outlines’, paying meticulous attention to the dating of events, so that these outlines have something of the appearance of annal-entries in a chronicle. In the present case there are no less than five of these schemes, varying constantly in their relative fullness at different points and not infrequently disagreeing with each other at large and in detail. But these schemes always had a tendency to move into pure narrative, especially by the introduction of short passages of direct speech; and in the fifth and latest of the outlines for the story of Aldarion and Erendis the narrative element is so pronounced that the text runs to some sixty manuscript pages.

This movement away from a staccato annalistic style in the present tense into fullblown narrative was however very gradual, as the writing of the outline progressed; and in the earlier part of the story I have rewritten much of the material in the attempt to give some degree of stylistic homogeneity throughout its course. This rewriting is entirely a matter of wording, and never alters meaning or introduces unauthentic elements.

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.

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 as my father’s contemplation of it grew and changed; and I have made no attempt to smooth away inconsistency, but rather exhibited it and drawn attention to it.

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

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.

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.

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 section, to derive from the same time) may be mentioned here. They were written after the publication of The Lord of the Rings, for there are references to the pagination of the printed text; but they differ in the dates they give for certain events from those in the Tale of Years in Appendix B. The explanation is clearly that they were written after the publication of the first volume but before that of the third, containing the Appendices.

The Battles of the Fords of Isen

This, together with the account of the military organisation of the Rohirrim and the history of Isengard given in an Appendix to the text, belongs with other late pieces of severe historical analysis; it presented relatively little difficulty of a textual kind, and is only unfinished in the most obvious sense.

PART FOUR

The Drúedain

Towards the end of his life my father revealed a good deal more about the Wild Men of the Drúadan Forest in Anórien and the statues of the Púkel-men on the road up to Dunharrow. The account given here, telling of the Drúedain in Beleriand in the First Age, and containing the story of ‘The Faithful Stone’, is drawn from a long, discursive, and unfinished essay concerned primarily with the interrelations of the languages of Middle-earth. As will be seen, the Drúedain were to be drawn back into the history of the earlier Ages; but of this there is necessarily no trace in the published Silmarillion.

The Istari

It was proposed soon after the acceptance of The Lord of the Rings for publication that there should be an index at the end of the third volume, and it seems that my father began to work on it in the summer of 1954, after the first two volumes had gone to press. He wrote of the matter in a letter of 1956: ‘An index of names was to be produced, which by etymological interpretation would also provide quite a large Elvish vocabulary.... I worked at it for months, and indexed the first two volumes (it was the chief cause of the delay of Volume III), until it became clear that size and cost were ruinous.’

In the event there was no index to The Lord of the Rings until the second edition of 1966, but my father’s original rough draft has been preserved. From it I derived the plan of my index to The Silmarillion, with translation of names and brief explanatory statements, and also, both there and in the index to this book, some of the translations and the wording of some of the ‘definitions’. From it comes also the ‘essay on the Istari’ with which this section of the book opens – an entry wholly uncharacteristic of the original index in its length, if characteristic of the way in which my father often worked.

For the other citations in this section I have given in the text itself such indications of date as can be provided.

III

The Palantíri

For the second edition of The Lord of the Rings (1966) my father made substantial emendations to a passage in The Two Towers, III 11 ‘The Palantír’ (three-volume hardback edition p. 203), and some others in the same connection in The Return of the King, V 7 ‘The Pyre of Denethor’ (edition cited p. 132), though these emendations were not incorporated in the text until the second impression of the revised edition (1967). This section of the present book is derived from writings on the palantíri associated with this revision; I have done no more than assemble them into a continuous essay.

The Map of Middle-earth

My first intention was to include in this book the map that accompanies The Lord of the Rings with the addition to it of further names; but it seemed to me on reflection that it would be better to copy my original map and take the opportunity to remedy some of its minor defects (to remedy the major ones being beyond my powers). I have therefore redrawn it fairly exactly, on a scale half as large again (that is to say, the new map as drawn is half as large again as the old map in its published dimensions). The area shown is smaller, but the only features lost are the Havens of Umbar and the Cape of Forochel. ^* This has allowed of a different and larger mode of lettering, and a great gain in clarity.

All the more important place-names that occur in this book but not in The Lord of the Rings are included, such as Lond Daer, Drúwaith Iaur, Edhellond, the Undeeps, Greylin; and a few others that might have been, or should have been, shown on the original map, such as the rivers Harnen and Carnen, Annúminas, Eastfold, Westfold, the Mountains of Angmar. The mistaken inclusion of Rhudaur alone has been corrected by the addition of Cardolan and Arthedain, and I have shown the little island of Himling off the far north-western coast, which appears on one of my father’s sketch-maps and on my own first draft. Himling was the earlier form of Himring (the great hill on which Maedhros son of Fëanor had his fortress in The Silmarillion), and though the fact is nowhere referred to it is clear that Himring’s top rose above the waters that covered drowned Beleriand. Some way to the west of it was a larger island named Tol Fuin, which must be the highest part of Taur-nu-Fuin. In general, but not in all cases, I have preferred the Sindarin name (if known), but I have usually given the translated name as well when that is much used. It may be noted that ‘The Northern Waste’, marked at the head of my original map, seems in fact certainly to have been intended as an equivalent to Forodwaith. ^*

I have thought it desirable to mark in the entire length of the Great Road linking Arnor and Gondor, although its course between Edoras and the Fords of Isen is conjectural (as also is the precise placing of Lond Daer and Edhellond).

Lastly, I would emphasize that the exact preservation of the style and detail (other than nomenclature and lettering) of the map that I made in haste twenty-five years ago does not argue any belief in the excellence of its conception or execution. I have long regretted that my father never replaced it by one of his own making. However, as things turned out it became, for all its defects and oddities, ‘the Map’, and my father himself always used it as a basis afterwards (while frequently noticing its inadequacies). The various sketch-maps that he made, and from which mine was derived, are now a part of the history of the writing of The Lord of the Rings. I have thought it best therefore, so far as my own contribution to these matters extends, to let my original design stand, since it does at least represent the structure of my father’s conceptions with tolerable faithfulness.

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