The Silmarillion

FOREWORD

The Silmarillion, now published four years after the death of its

author, is an account of the Elder Days, or the First Age of the World. In

The Lord of the Rings were narrated the great events at the end of the

Third Age; but the tales of The Silmarillion are legends deriving from a

much deeper past, when Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, dwelt in Middleearth, and the HighElves made war upon him for the recovery of the

Silmarils.

Not only, however, does The Silmarillion relate the events of a far

earlier time than those of The Lord of the Rings; it is also, in all the

essentials of its conception, far the earlier work. Indeed, although it was

not then called The Silmarillion, it was already in being half a century

ago; and in battered notebooksextending back to 1917 can still be read

the earliest versions, often hastily pencilled, of the central stories of the

mythology. But it was never published (though some indication of its

content could be gleaned from The Lord of the Rings), and throughout

my fatherís long life he never abandoned it, nor ceased even in his last

years to work on it. In all that time The Silmarillion,considered simply as

a large narrative structure, underwent relatively little radical change; it

became long ago a fixed tradition, and background to later writings. But

it was far indeed from being a fixed text, and did not remain unchanged

even in certain fundamental ideas concerning the nature of the world it

portrays; while the same legends came to be retold in longer and shorterforms, and in different styles. As the years passed the changes and variants,

both in detail and in larger perspectives, became so complex, so pervasive,

and so many-layered that a final and definitive version seemed unattainable.

Moreover the old legends (ëoldí now not only in their derivation from the

remote First Age, but also in terms of my fatherís life) became the vehicleand depository of his profoundest reflections. In his later writing mythology

a n d p o e t r y s a n k d own b e h i n d h i s t h e o l o g i c a l a n d p h i l o s o p h i c a l

preoccupations: from which arose incompatibilities of tone.

On my fatherís death it fell to me to try to bring the work into

publishable form. It became clear to me that to attempt to present,within

the covers of a single book the diversity of the materials - to show The

Silmarillion as in truth a continuing and evolving creation extending over

more than half a century - would in fact lead only to confusion and the

submerging of what is essential I set myself therefore to work out a single

text selecting and arranging in such a way as seemed to me to produce

the mostcoherent and internally self-consistent narrative. In this work the

concluding chapters (from the death of T˙rin Turambar) introduced peculiar

difficulties, in that they had remained unchanged for many years, and- 6 -

were in some respects in serious disharmony with more developed

conceptions in other parts of the book.

A complete consistency (either within the compass of TheSilmarillion itself or between The Silmarillion and other published writings

of my fatherís) is not to be looked for, and could only be achieved, if at all

at heavy and needless cost. Moreover, my father came to conceive The

Silmarillion as a compilation, a compendious narrative, made long

afterwards from sources of great diversity (poems, and annals, and oral

tales) that had survivedin agelong tradition; and this conception has

indeed its parallel in the actual history of the book, for a great deal of

earlier prose and poetry does underlie it, and it is to some extent a

compendium in fact and not only in theory. To this may be ascribed the

varying speed of the narrative and fullness of detail in different parts, the

contrast (for example) of the precise...