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.