FOREWORD.
In my Foreword to Sauron Defeated I wrote that I would not
attempt a study of the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings 'at
this time'. That was an ambiguous remark, for I rather doubted
that I would ever make the attempt; but I justified its postpone-
ment, at least, on the ground that 'my father soon turned
again, when The Lord of the Rings was finished, to the myths
and legends of the Elder Days', and so devoted the following
volumes to the later history of 'The Silmarillion'. My intentions
for the twelfth book were uncertain; but after the publication of
The War of the Jewels I came to think that since (contrary to my
original conception) I had included in The History of Middle-
earth a lengthy account of the writing of The Lord of the Rings
it would be a strange omission to say nothing whatever of the
Appendices, in which the historical structure of the Second and
Third Ages, based on a firm chronology, actually emerged.
Thus I embarked on the study of the history of these works,
of which I had little precise knowledge. As with the narrative
texts of The Lord of the Rings, those of the Appendices (and of
the Prologue) became divided, in some cases in a bewildering
fashion, at the time of the sale of the papers to Marquette
University; but I received most generous help, prompt and
meticulous, from Charles Elston, the Archivist of the Memorial
Library at Marquette, which enabled me to determine the
textual relations. It was only now that I came to understand that
texts of supplementary essays to The Lord of the Rings had
reached a remarkably finished form, though in many respects
far different from the published Appendices, at a much earlier
date than I had supposed: in the period (as I judge) immediately
following my father's writing of the last chapter of The Lord of
the Rings in 1948. There is indeed a total absence in these texts
of indications of external date; but it can be seen from many
points that when they were written the narrative was not yet in
final form, and equally clearly that they in fact preceded my
father's return to the First Age at the beginning of the 1950s,
as described in the Foreword to The War of the Jewels. A major
upheaval in the historical-linguistic structure was still to come:
the abandonment of their own tongue by the Noldor returning
out of the West and their adoption of the Sindarin of Middle-
earth.
In my account I have of course concentrated on these early
forms, which belong so evidently, in manner and air, with the
narrative itself. I have little doubt that my father had long con-
templated such a supplement and accompaniment to The Lord
of the Rings, regarding it as an essential element in the whole;
and I have found it impossible to show in any satisfactory way
how he conceived it at that time without setting out the early
texts in full, although this naturally entails the recital, especially
in the case of the history of Arnor and Gondor, of much that is
known from its survival in the published versions of the Appen-
dices. I have excluded the Appendix E ('Writing and Spelling'),
but I have included the Prologue; and I have introduced into
this part of the book an account of the origin and development
of the Akallabeth, since the evolution of the chronological
structure of the Second Age was closely related to my father's
original formalised computation of the dates of the Numenor-
ean kings.
Following this part I have given three essays written during
his last years; and also some brief writings that appear to derive
from the last years of his life, primarily concerned with or
arising from the question whether Glorfindel of Rivendell and
Glorfindel of Gondolin were one and the same. These late writ-
ings are notable for the many wholly new elements that entered
the 'legendarium'; and also for the number of departures from
earlier work on the Matter of the Elder Days. It may be sug-
gested that whereas my father set great store by consistency at
all points with The Lord of the Rings and the Appendices, so
little concerning the First Age had appeared in print that he was
under far less constraint. I am inclined to think, however, that
the primary explanation of these differences lies rather in his
writing largely from memory. The histories of the First Age
would always remain in a somewhat fluid state so long as they
were not fixed in published work; and he certainly did not have
all the relevant manuscripts clearly arranged and set out before
him. But it remains in any case an open question, whether (to
give a single example) in the essay Of Dwarves and Men he had
definitively rejected the greatly elaborated account of the houses
of the Edain that had entered the Quenta Silmarillion in about
1958, or whether it had passed from his mind.
The book concludes with two pieces further illustrating the
instruction that AElfwine of England received from Pengolod
the Wise in Tol Eressea, and the abandoned beginnings of two
remarkable stories, The New Shadow and Tal-elmar.
With the picture of such clarity in the tale of Tal-elmar of the
great ships of the Numenoreans drawing into the coast, and the
- fear among men of Middle-earth of the terrible 'Go-hilleg', this
'History' ends. It is a long time since I began the work of order-
ing and elucidating the vast collection of papers in which my
father's conception of Arda, Aman, and Middle-earth was con-
tained, making, not long after his death, some first transcrip-
tions from The Book of Lost Tales, of which I knew virtually
nothing, as a step towards the understanding of the origins of
'The Silmarillion'. I had little notion then of what lay before me,
of all the unknown works crammed in disorder in that formi-
dable array of battered box-files. Nearly a quarter of a century
later the story, as I have been able to tell it, is at last concluded.
This is not to say that I have given an account of everything
that my father wrote, even leaving aside the great body of his
work on the languages of the Elves. My father's very late writ-
ings have been selectively presented, and much further detail,
especially concerning names and the etymology of names, can
be found in texts such as those that I excerpted in Unfinished
Tales, notably in the part of that book entitled 'The History of
Galadriel and Celeborn'. Other omissions have arisen almost
one might say from inadvertence as the work and its publication
proceeded.
It began indeed as an entirely 'private' study, without thought
or purpose of publication: an exhaustive investigation and
analysis of all the materials concerned with what came to be
called the Elder Days, from the earliest beginnings, omitting no
detail of name-form or textual variation. From that original
work derives the respect for the precise wording of the texts,
and the insistence that no stone (especially stones bearing
names) be left unturned, that characterises, perhaps excessively,
The History of Middle-earth. Unfinished Tales, on the other
hand, was conceived entirely independently and in an essen-
tially different mode, at a time when I had no notion of the
publication of a massive and continuous history; and this con-
stitutes an evident weakness in my presentation of the whole
corpus, which could not be remedied. When Rayner Unwin, to
whom I am greatly indebted, undertook the uncertain venture
of publishing my work on the history of 'The Silmarillion' (in
form necessarily much altered) I had no intention of entering
into the history of the Later Ages: the inclusion of The Lost
Road, The Drowning of Anadune, The Notion Club Papers,
and above all the history of the writing of The Lord of the
Rings, extending the work far beyond my original design, was
entirely unforeseen.
Thus it came about that the later volumes were written and
published under much greater pressure of time and with less
idea of the overall structure than the earlier. Attempting to make
each book an independent entity in some degree, within the
constraints of length, I was often uncertain of what it would or
could contain until it was done; and this lack of prevision led to
some misjudgements of 'scale' - the degree of fulness or con-
ciseness that would ultimately prove appropriate to the whole.
Thus, for example, I should have returned at the end of my
account of the writing of The Lord of the Rings to give some
description, at least, of the later developments in the chapters
The Shadow of the Past and The Council of Elrond, and the
evolution in relation to these of the work Of the Rings of Power
and the Third Age. However, all the stories and all the histories
have now been told, and the 'legendarium' of the Elder Days has
been very fully mined.
Since the ceaseless 'making' of his world extended from my
father's youth into his old age, The History of Middle-earth is in
some sense also a record of his life, a form of biography, if of a
very unusual kind. He had travelled a long road. He bequeathed
to me a massive legacy of writings that made possible the
tracing of that road, in as I hope its true sequence, and the un-
earthing of the deep foundations that led ultimately to the true
end of his great history, when the white ship departed from the
Grey Havens.
In the twilight of autumn it sailed out of Mithlond, until the
seas of the Bent World fell away beneath it, and the winds of
the round sky troubled it no more, and borne upon the high
airs above the mists of the world it passed into the ancient
West, and an end was come for the Eldar of story and of song.
It has been an absorbing and inspiring task, from the splendours
of the Ainulindale or the tragedy of the Children of Hurin down
to the smallest detail of changing expression and shifting names.
It has also of its nature been very laborious, and with times of
doubt, when confidence faltered; and I owe a great deal to all
those who have supported the work with generous encourage-
ment in letters and reviews. Most of all do I owe to my wife
Baillie, to whom I dedicate this last volume: but the dedication
may stand for the whole. Without her understanding and
encouragement over the years, making mutual the weight of
such a long and demanding work, it would never have been
achieved.
Note on the text.
As a general rule I have preserved my father's often varying usage in
the spelling of names (as e.g. Baraddur beside Barad-dur), but in cer-
tain cases I have given a standard form (as Adunaic where Adunaic
is sometimes written, and Gil-galad rather than Gilgalad). In his late
texts he seldom used the diaeresis (as in Finwe), but (in intention
at least) always employed N to represent initial ng sounded as in
English sing (thus Noldor); in this book I have extended the diaeresis
throughout (other than in Old English names, as AElfwine), but re-
stricted N to the texts in which it occurs.
References to The History of Middle-earth are given as in previous
volumes in Roman numerals (thus VI.314). For the necessarily abun-
dant references to the published Appendices I have used the letters
RK (The Return of the King), the page-numbers being those of the
three-volume hardback edition; and occasionally FR and TT for The
Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers.
To the removal of error (especially in the citation of texts) from The
Peoples of Middle-earth, which was completed under great pressure
of time, Mr Charles Noad has contributed more perhaps than to any
of the previous volumes which he has read independently in proof;
and with the conclusion of the work I must express again my gratitude
to him for his meticulous, informed, and extraordinarily generous
labour. I wish also to record my appreciation of the great skill and care
which Mr Norman Tilley of Nene Phototypesetters has again brought
to this particularly demanding text - including the 'invisible mending'
of errors in my manuscript tables.
Mr Noad has also made a number of suggestions for the improve-
ment of the text by clarification and additional reference which where
possible I have adopted. There remain some points which would have
required too much rewriting, or too much movement of text, to intro-
duce, and two of these may be mentioned here.
One concerns the translation of the curse of the Orc from the Dark
Tower given on p. 83. When writing this passage I had forgotten
that Mr Carl Hostetter, editor of the periodical Vinyar Tengwar, had
pointed out in the issue (no. 26) for November 1992 that there is
a translation of the words in a note to one of the typescripts of
Appendix E (he being unaware of the existence of the certainly earlier
version that I have printed); and I had also overlooked the fact that
a third version is found among notes on words and phrases 'in
alien speech' in The Lord of the Rings. All three differ significantly
(bagronk, for example, being rendered both as 'cesspool' and as 'tor-
ture (chamber)'); from which it seems clear that my father was at this
time devising interpretations of the words, whatever he may have
intended them to mean when he first wrote them.
I should also have noticed that the statement in the early texts of
Appendix D (The Calendars), pp. 124, 131, that the Red Book 'ends
before the Lithe of 1436' refers to the Epilogue to The Lord of the
Rings, in which Samwise, after reading aloud from the Book over
many months, finally reached its end on an evening late in March of
that year (IX.120-1).
Lastly, after the proofs of this book had been revised I received a
letter from Mr Christopher Gilson in which he referred to a brief
but remarkable text associated with Appendix A that he had seen at
Marquette. This was a curious chance, for he had no knowledge of the
book beyond the fact that it contained some account of the Appen-
dices; while although I had received a copy of the text from Marquette
I had passed it over without observing its significance. Preserved with
other difficult and disjointed notes, it is very roughly written on a slip
of paper torn from a rejected manuscript. That manuscript can be
identified as the close predecessor of the Appendix A text concerning
the choice of the Half-elven which I have given on pp. 256-7. The
writing on the verso reads:
and his father gave him the name Aragorn, a name used in the
House of the Chieftains. But Ivorwen at his naming stood by, and
said 'Kingly Valour' (for so that name is interpreted): 'that he shall
have, but I see on his breast a green stone, and from that his true
name shall come and his chief renown: for he shall be a healer and
a renewer.'
Above this is written: 'and they did not know what she meant, for
there was no green stone to be seen by other eyes' (followed by
illegible words); and beneath it: 'for the green Elfstone was given to
him by Galadriel'. A large X is also written, but it is not clear whether
this relates to the whole page or only to a part of it.
Mr Gilson observes that this text, clearly to be associated with work
on the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen (see p. 263), seems to be the only
place where the name Aragorn is translated; and he mentions my
father's letter of 17 December 1972 to Mr Richard Jeffery (Letters no.
347), who had asked whether Aragorn could mean 'tree-king'. In his
reply my father said that it 'cannot contain a "tree" word', and that
'"Tree-King" would have no special fitness for him'. He continued:
The names in the line of Arthedain are peculiar in several ways; and
several, though Sindarin in form, are not readily interpretable. But
it would need more historical records and linguistic records of
Sindarin than exist (sc. than I have found time or need to invent! ) to
explain them.