The Lost Road and Other Writings. Christopher Tolkien

The Lost Road and Other Writings - Christopher  Tolkien


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target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_e837f352-e0b8-5f8b-9aa4-2f0fc4f709df">§14 The rewriting of the passage concerning Beleriand reinforces the suggestion in FN I that it remained a country less destroyed after the Great Battle than is described in the other texts: it was ‘still in a measure blessed’ – and moreover the Elves who remained in Middle-earth ‘abode mostly in Beleriand’. Here Elendil ‘Elf-friend’ appears, displacing Amroth of FN I. It might be thought from the words ‘in Beleriand there arose a king, who was of Númenórean race’ that he was not a survivor of the Downfall; but this is clearly not the case. In The Lost Road, closely connected with FN II, Elendil (the father in the Númenórean incarnation of ‘Elwin-Edwin’) is a resolute foe of Sauron and his dominance in Númenor; and though The Lost Road breaks off before the sailing of Tar-kalion’s fleet, Elendil must have been among those who ‘sat in their ships upon the east coast of the land’ (FN §9) and so escaped the Downfall.

      Here is certainly the first appearance of Gil-galad, the Elf-king in Beleriand, descended from Fëanor (it would be interesting to know his parentage), and the story of the Last Alliance moves a stage further; and there seems no question but that it was in this manuscript that the name Mordor, the Black Country, first emerged in narrative.

       The further development of The Fall of Númenor

      FN II was followed by a typescript made on my father’s typewriter of that period, but not typed by him. This is seen from its being an exact copy of FN II after all corrections had been made to it, and from two or three misreadings of the manuscript. I have no doubt that the typescript was made soon afterwards. In itself it has no textual value, but my father used it as the basis for certain further changes.

      Associated with it is a loose manuscript page bearing passages that relate closely to changes made to the typescript. There is here a textual development that has important bearings on the dating in general.

      (The section enclosed in square brackets is represented in the manuscript by a mark of omission, obviously meaning that the existing text was to be followed.) Here the words ‘[the Gods] bent back the edges of the Middle-earth’ have disappeared; it is the Great Sea in the West and ‘the Barren Land’ in the East that are ‘cast back’ by Ilúvatar. It is now said that the new lands and new seas came into being ‘where aforetime nought had been but the paths of the Sun and Moon’ (i.e. at the roots of the world, see the Ambarkanta diagrams IV. 243, 245). This was in turn lost in the further rewriting (below), where the final and very brief statement found in the Akallabêth (p. 279) is reached.

      The second form of this revised version of §8 follows immediately in the manuscript:

      Then Ilúvatar cast back the Great Sea west of Middle-earth, and the Empty Land east of it, and new lands and new seas were made; and the world was diminished: for Valinor and Eressëa were taken from it into the realm of hidden things. And thereafter however a man might sail, he could never again reach the True West, but would come back weary at last to the place of his beginning; for all lands and seas were equally distant from the centre of the earth, and all roads were bent. There was flood and great confusion of waters in that time, and sea covered much that in the Elder Days had been dry, both in the West and East of Middle-earth.

      Thus the passage concerning the drowning of Beleriand at the time of the Númenórean cataclysm and the survival of Lindon was again removed. In this form my father then copied it onto the typescript, with change of Empty Land to Empty Lands. (If this region, called in the first version the Barren Land, is to be related to the Ambarkanta map V (IV. 251) it must be what is there called the Burnt Land of the Sun; perhaps also the Dark Land, which is there shown as a new continent, formed from the southern part of Pelmar or Middle-earth (map IV) after the vast extension of the former inland sea of Ringil at the time of the breaking of Utumno). – The expression Elder Days is not found in any writing of my father’s before this.


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