The red squares that are meant to highlight the characters in the sample words actually obscure them.
This fifth volume of The History of Middle-earth completes the presentation and analysis of my father’s writings on the subject of the First Age up to the time at the end of 1937 and the beginning of 1938 when he set them for long aside. The book provides all the evidence known to me for the understanding of his conceptions in many essential matters at the time when The Lord of the Rings was begun; and from the Annals of Valinor, the Annals of Beleriand, the Ainulindalë, and the Quenta Silmarillion given here it can be quite closely determined which elements in the published Silmarillion go back to that time, and which entered afterwards. To make this a satisfactory work of reference for these purposes I have thought it essential to give the texts of the later 1930s in their entirety, even though in parts of the Annals the development from the antecedent versions was not great; for the curious relations between the Annals and the Quenta Silmariliion are a primary feature of the history and here already appear, and it is clearly better to have all the related texts within the same covers. Only in the case of the prose form of the tale of Beren and Lúthien have I not done so, since that was preserved so little changed in the published Silmariliion; here I have restricted myself to notes on the changes that were made editorially.
I cannot, or at any rate I cannot yet, attempt the editing of my fathers strictly or narrowly linguistic writings, in view of their extraordinary complexity and difficulty; but I include in this book the general essay called The Lhammas or Account of Tongues, and also the Etymologies, both belonging to this period. The latter, a kind of etymological dictionary, provides historical explanations of a very large number of words and names, and enormously increases the known vocabularies of the Elvish tongues – as they were at that time, for like everything else the languages continued to evolve as the years passed. Also hitherto unknown except by allusion is my father’s abandoned ‘time-travel’ story The Lost Road, which leads primarily to Númenor, but also into the history and legend of northern and western Europe, with the associated poems The Song of Ælfwine (in the stanza of Pearl) and King Sheave (in alliterative verse). Closely connected with The Lost Road were the earliest forms of the legend of the Drowning of Númenor, which are also included in the book, and the first glimpses of the story of the Last Alliance of Elves and Men.
In the inevitable Appendix I have placed three works which are not given complete: the Genealogies, the List of Names, and the second ‘Silmarillion’ Map, all of which belong in their original forms to the earlier 1930s. The Genealogies only came to light recently, but they add in fact little to what is known from the narrative texts. The List of Names might have been better included in Vol. IV, but this was again a work of reference which provides very little new matter, and it was more convenient to postpone it and then to give just those few entries which offer new detail. The second Map is a different case. This was my father’s sole ‘Silmarillion’ map for some forty years, and here I have redrawn it to show it as it was when first made, leaving out all the layer upon layer of later accretion and alteration. The Tale of Years and the Tale of Battles, listed in title-pages to The Silmarillion as elements in that work (see p. 202), are not included, since they were contemporary with the later Annals and add nothing to the material found in them; subsequent alteration of names and dates was also carried out in a precisely similar way.
In places the detailed discussion of dating may seem excessive, but since the chronology of my father’s writings, both ‘internal’ and ‘external’, is extremely difficult to determine and the evidence full of traps, and since the history can be very easily and very seriously falsified by mistaken deductions on this score, I have wished to make as plain as I can the reasons for my assertions.
In some of the texts I have introduced paragraph-numbering. This is done in the belief that it will provide a more precise and therefore quicker method of reference in a book where the discussion of its nature moves constantly back and forth.
As in previous volumes I have to some degree standardized usage in respect of certain names: thus for example I print Gods, Elves, Orcs, Middle-earth, etc. with initial capitals, and Kôr, Tûn, Eärendel, Númenórean, etc. for frequent Kór, Tún, Earendel, Númenórean of the manuscripts.
The earlier volumes of the series are referred to as I (The Book of Lost Tales Part I), II (The Book of Lost Tales Part II), III (The Lays of Beleriand), and IV (The Shaping of Middle-earth). The sixth volume now in preparation will concern the evolution of The Lord of the Rings.
The tables illustrating The Lhammas are reproduced with the permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, who kindly supplied photographs.
I list here for convenience the abbreviations used in the book in reference to various works (for a fuller account see pp. 107–8).
Texts in Vol. IV:
| S | The Sketch of the Mythology or ‘earliest Silmarillion’. |
| Q | The Quenta (‘Quenta Noldorinwa’), the second version of ‘The Silmarillion’. |
| AV 1 | The earliest Annals of Valinor. |
| AB 1 | The earliest Annals of Beleriand (in two versions, the second early abandoned). |
Texts in Vol. V:
| FN | The Fall of Númenor (FN I and FN II referring to the first and second texts). |
| AV 2 | The second version of the Annals of Valinor. |
| AB 2 | The second version (or strictly the third) of the Annals of Beleriand. |
| QS | The Quenta Silmarillion, the third version of ‘The Silmarillion’, nearing completion at the end of 1937. |
Other works (Ambarkanta, Ainulindalë, Lhammas, The Lost Road) are not referred to by abbreviations.
In conclusion, I take this opportunity to notice and explain the erroneous representation of the Westward Extension of the first ‘Silmarillion’ Map in the previous volume (The Shaping of Middle-earth p. 228). It will be seen that this map presents a strikingly different appearance from that of the Eastward Extension on p. 231. These two maps, being extremely faint, proved impossible to reproduce from photographs supplied by the Bodleian Library, and an experimental ‘reinforcement’ (rather than re-drawing) of a copy of the Westward Extension was tried out. This I rejected, and it was then found that my photocopies of the originals gave a result sufficiently clear for the purpose. Unhappily, the rejected ‘reinforced’ version of the Westward Extension map was substituted for the photocopy. (Photocopies were also used for diagram III on p. 247 and map V on p. 251, where the originals are in faint pencil.)
THE FALL OF NÚMENOR AND THE LOST ROAD