The Lays of Beleriand. Christopher Tolkien

The Lays of Beleriand - Christopher  Tolkien


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      My father worked on the Lay of Leithian for six years, abandoning it in its turn in September 1931. In 1929 it was read so far as it then went by C. S. Lewis, who sent him a most ingenious commentary on a part of it; I acknowledge with thanks the permission of C. S. Lewis PTE Limited to include this.

      The sections of both poems are interleaved with commentaries which are primarily concerned to trace the evolution of the legends and the lands they are set in.

      The two earlier volumes in this series (the first and second parts of The Book of Lost Tales) are referred to as ‘I’ and ‘II’. The fourth volume will contain the ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ (1926), from which the Silmarillion ‘tradition’ derived; the Quenta Noldorinwa or History of the Noldoli (1930); the first map of the North-west of Middle-earth; the Ambarkanta (‘Shape of the World’) by Rúmil, together with the only existing maps of the entire World; the earliest Annals of Valinor and Annals of Beleriand, by Pengolod the Wise of Gondolin; and the fragments of translations of the Quenta and Annals from Elvish into Anglo-Saxon by Ælfwine of England.

       THE LAY OF THE CHILDREN OF HÚRIN

      There exists a substantial manuscript (28 pages long) entitled ‘Sketch of the Mythology with especial reference to “The Children of Húrin”’; and this ‘Sketch’ is the next complete narrative, in the prose tradition, after the Lost Tales (though a few fragmentary writings are extant from the intervening time). On the envelope containing this manuscript my father wrote at some later time:

      He seems to have written first ‘1921’ before correcting this to ‘1918’.

      R. W. Reynolds taught my father at King Edward’s School, Birmingham (see Humphrey Carpenter, Biography, p. 47). In a passage of his diary written in August 1926 he wrote that ‘at the end of last year’ he had heard again from R. W. Reynolds, that they had corresponded subsequently, and that he had sent Reynolds many of his poems, including Tinúviel and Túrin (‘Tinúviel meets with qualified approval, it is too prolix, but how could I ever cut it down, and the specimen I sent of Túrin with little or none’). This would date the ‘Sketch’ as originally written (it was subsequently heavily revised) definitely in 1926, probably fairly early in the year. It must have accompanied the specimen of Túrin (the alliterative poem), the background of which it was written to explain, to Anacapri, where Reynolds was then living in retirement.

      For the date of its commencement we have only my father’s later (and perhaps hesitant) statement that it was ‘begun c. 1918’. A terminus a quo is provided by a page of the earliest manuscript of the poem, which is written on a slip from the Oxford English Dictionary bearing the printer’s stamp May 1918. On the other hand the name Melian


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