PREFACE.
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 Ainulindale, 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 193Os in their
entirety, even though in parts of the Annals the development from
the antecedent versions was no'. great; for the curious relations
between the Annals and the Quenta Silmarillion 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 Luthien have I
not done so, since that was preserved so little changed in the
published Silmarillion; 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
father's 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 Numenor, but also
into the history and legend of northern and western Europe, with
the associated poems The Song of AElfwine (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 Numenor, 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 193Os. 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 Sil-
marillion 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 dis-
cussion 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 Kor,
Tun, Earendel, Numenorean, etc. for frequent Kor, Tun,
Earendel, Numenorean 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 11), III (The
Lays of Beleriand), and IV (The Shaping of Middle-earth).
The sixth volume now in preparation will concern the evolution of
The Lard 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'.
AV1. The earliest Annals of Valinor.
AB1. The earliest Annals of Beleriand (in two versions, the
second early abandoned).
Texts in Vol. V:
FN. The Fall of Numenor (FN I and FN II referring to the
first and second texts).
AV2. The second version of the Annals of Valinor.
AB2. 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, Ainulindale, 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 Exten-
sion 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.)