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Probably towards the end of 1951, when The Lord of the Rings was completed but difficulties lay in the way of its publication, my father wrote a very long letter to his friend Milton Waldman, at that time an editor at the publishing house of Collins. The context and occasion of this letter lay in the painful differences that arose over my father’s insistence that The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings should be published in ‘conjunction or in connexion’ ‘as one long Saga of the Jewels and the Rings’. There is however no need to enter into this matter here. The letter that he wrote with a view to justifying and explaining his contention emerged as a brilliant exposition of his conception of the earlier Ages (the latter part of the letter, as he himself said, was no more than ‘a long and yet bald résumé’ of the narrative of The Lord of the Rings), and it is for this reason that I believe that it merits inclusion within the covers of The Silmarillion, as is done in this edition.

The original letter is lost, but Milton Waldman had a typescript made of it, and sent a copy to my father: it was from this copy that the letter was printed (in part) in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1981), no.131. The text given here is that in Letters, pp.143–157, with minor corrections and the omission of some of the footnotes. There were many errors in the typescript, especially in names; these were very largely corrected by my father, but he did not observe the sentence on p.xviii: ‘There was nothing wrong essentially in their lingering against counsel, still sadly with the mortal lands of their old heroic deeds.’ Here the typist certainly omitted words in the manuscript, and perhaps misread those given as well.

I have removed a number of errors in the text and index which until now have escaped correction in the hardback printings (only) of The Silmarillion. Chief among these are those that concern the numbering in sequence of certain of the rulers of Númenor (for these errors and an explanation of how they arose see Unfinished Tales (1980), p.226, note 11, and The Peoples of Middle-earth (1996), p.154, §31).

Christopher Tolkien 1999