To TAUM SANTOSKE. FOREWORD. With this book my account of the writing of The Lord of the Rings is completed. I regret that I did not manage to keep it even within the compass of three fat volumes; but the circumstances were such that it was always difficult to project its structure and foresee its extent, and became more so, since when working on The Return of the King I was largely ignorant of what was to come. I shall not attempt a study of the history of the Appendices at this time. That work will certainly prove both far-ranging and intricate; and since my father soon turned again, when The Lord of the Rings was finished, to the myths and legends of the Elder Days, I hope after this to publish his major writings and rewritings deriving from that period, some of which are wholly unknown. When The Lord of the Rings had still a long way to go - during the halt that lasted through 1945 and extended into 1946, The Return of the King being then scarcely begun - my father had embarked on a work of a very different nature: The Notion Club Papers; and from this had emerged a new lan- guage, Adunaic, and a new and remarkable version of the Numenorean legend, The Drowning of Anadune, the develop- ment of which was closely entwined with that of The Notion Club Papers. To retain the chronological order of writing which it has been my aim to follow (so far as I could discover it) in The History of Middle-earth I thought at one time to include in Volume VIII, first, the history of the writing of The Two Towers (from the point reached in The Treason of Isengard) and then this new work of 1945 - 6, reserving the history of The Return o f the King to Volume IX. I was persuaded against this, I am sure rightly; and thus it is in the present book that the great disparity of subject-matter appears - and the great difficulty of finding a title for it. My father's suggested title for Book VI of The Lord of the Rings was The End of the Third Age; but it seemed very unsatisfactory to name this volume The End of the Third Age and Other Writings, when the 'other writings', constituting two thirds of the book, were concerned with matters pertaining to the Second Age (and to whatever Age we find ourselves in now). Sauron Defeated is my best attempt to find some sort of link between the disparate parts and so to name to the whole. At a cursory glance my edition of The Notion Club Papers and The Drowning of Anadune may appear excessively compli- cated; but I have in fact so ordered them that the works themselves are presented in the clearest possible form. Thus the final texts of the two parts of the Papers are each given complete and without any editorial interruption, as also are two versions of The Drowning of Anadune. All account and discussion of the evolution of the works is reserved to commentaries and appen- dages which are easily identified. In view of the great disparity between Part One and Parts Two and Three I have thought that it would be helpful to divide the Index into two, since there is scarcely any overlap of names. I acknowledge with many thanks the help of Dr Judith Priest- man of the Bodleian Library, and of Mr Charles B. Elston of Marquette Unversity, in making available photographs for use in this book (from the Bodleian those on pages 42 and 138-41, from Marquette those on pages 19 and 130). Mr John D. Rateliff and Mr F. R. Williamson have very kindly assisted me on particular points in connection with The Notion Club Papers; and Mr Charles Noad has again generously given his time to an independent reading of the proofs and checking of citations. This book is dedicated to Taum Santoski, in gratitude for his support and encouragement throughout my work on The Lord of the Rings and in recognition of his long labour in the ordering and preparation for copying of the manuscripts at Marquette, a labour which despite grave and worsening illness he drove himself to complete. Since this book was set in type Mr Rateliff has pointed out to me the source of Arundel Lowdham's allusion to 'the Pig on the Ruined Pump' (p. 179), which escaped me, although my father knew the work from which it comes well, and its verses formed part of his large repertoire of occasional recitation. It derives from Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno, chapter X - where however the Pig sat beside, not on, the Pump: There was a Pig, that sat alone, Beside a ruined Pump. By day and night he made his moan: It would have stirred a heart of stone To see him wring his hoofs and groan, Because he could not jump. In Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, chapter XXIII, this becomes the first verse of a poem called The Pig-Tale, at the end of which the Pig, encouraged by a passing Frog, tries but signally fails to jump to the top of the Pump: Uprose that Pig, and rushed, full whack, Against the ruined Pump: Rolled over like an empty sack, And settled down upon his back, While all his bones at once went 'Crack!' It was a fatal jump. On a very different subject, Mr Noad has observed and communicated to me the curious fact that in the Plan of Shelob's Lair reproduced in The War of the Ring, p. 201, my father's compass-points 'N' and 'S' are reversed. Frodo and Sam were of course moving eastward in the tunnel, and the South was on their right. In my description (p. 200, lines 16 and 20) I evidently followed the compass-points without thinking, and so carelessly wrote of the 'southward' instead of the 'northward' tunnels that left the main tunnel near its eastern end.