FOREWORD.
The War of the Jewels is a companion to and continuation of
Morgoth's Ring, Volume 10 in The History of Middle-earth. As
I explained in that book, the two together contain virtually all
of my father's narrative writing on the subject of the Elder Days
in the years after The Lord of the Rings, but the division into
two is made 'transversely': between the first part of 'The
Silmarillion' ('the Legends of Aman') and the second ('the
Legends of Beleriand'). I use the term 'Silmarillion', of course, in
a very wide sense: this though potentially confusing is imposed
by the extremely complex relationship of the different 'works' -
especially but not only that of the Quenta Silmarillion and the
Annals; and my father himself employed the name in this way.
The division of the whole corpus into two parts is indeed a
natural one: the Great Sea divides them. The title of this second
part, The War of the Jewels, is an expression that my father
often used of the last six centuries of the First Age: the history of
Beleriand after the return of Morgoth to Middle-earth and the
coming of the Noldor, until its end.
In the foreword to Morgoth's Ring I emphasised the distinc-
tion between the first period of writing that followed in the
early 1950s the actual completion of The Lord of the Rings, and
the later work that followed its publication; in this book also,
therefore, two distinct 'phases' are documented.
The number of new works that my father embarked upon in
that first 'phase', highly creative but all too brief, is astonishing.
There were the new Lay of Leithian, of which all that he wrote
before he abandoned it was published in The Lays of Beleriand;
the Annals of Aman and new versions of the Ainulindale; the
Grey Annals, abandoned at the end of the tale of Turin; the new
Tale of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin (published in Unfinished
Tales), abandoned before Tuor actually entered the city; and all
the new tale of Turin and Nienor from Turin's return to
Dor-lomin to their deaths in Brethil (see p. 144 in this book).
There were also an abandoned prose saga of Beren and Luthien
(see V.295); the story of Maeglin; and an extensive revision of
the Quenta Silmarillion, the central work of the last period
before The Lord of the Rings, interrupted near the beginning of
the tale of Turin in 1937 and never concluded.
I expressed the view in the foreword to Morgoth's Ring that
'despair of publication, at least in the form that he regarded as
essential' (i.e. the conjunction of The Silmarillion and The Lord
of the Rings in a single work) was the fundamental cause of the
collapse of this new endeavour; and that this break destroyed all
prospect that what may be called 'the older Silmarillion' would
ever be completed. In Morgoth's Ring I have documented the
massive upheaval, in the years that followed, in his conception
of the old myths: an upheaval that never issued in new and
secure form. But we come now to the last epoch of the Elder
Days, when the scene shifts to Middle-earth and the mythical
element recedes: the High-elves return across the Great Sea to
make war upon Morgoth, Dwarves and Men come over the
mountains into Beleriand, and bound up with this history of the
movement of peoples, of the policies of kingdoms, of moment-
ous battles and ruinous defeats, are the heroic tales of Beren
One-hand and Turin Turambar. Yet in The War of the Jewels
the record is completed of all my father's further work on that
history in the years following the publication of The Lord of
the Rings; and even with all the labour that went into the
elaboration of parts of 'the Saga of Turin' it is obvious that this
bears no comparison with his aims or indeed his achievements
in the early 1950s.
In Part Two of this book it will be seen that in this later phase
of his work the Quenta Silmarillion underwent scarcely any
further significant rewriting or addition, other than the intro-
duction of the new chapter Of the Coming of Men into the
West with the radically altered earlier history of the Edain in
Beleriand; and that (the most remarkable fact in the whole
history of The Silmarillion) the last chapters (the tale of Hurin
and the dragon-gold of Nargothrond, the Necklace of the
Dwarves, the ruin of Doriath, the fall of Gondolin, the Kin-
slayings) remained in the form of the Quenta Noldorinwa of
1930 and were never touched again. Only some meagre hints
are found in later writings.
For this there can be no simple explanation, but it seems to
me that an important element was the centrality that my father
accorded to the story of Hurin and Morwen and their children,
Turin Turambar and Nienor Niniel. This became for him, I
believe, the dominant and absorbing story of the end of the
Elder Days, in which complexity of motive and character,
trapped in the mysterious workings of Morgoth's curse, sets it
altogether apart. He never finally achieved important passages
of Turin's life; but he extended the 'great saga' (as he justly
called it) into 'the Wanderings of Hurin', following the old story
that Hurin was released by Morgoth from his imprisonment in
Angband after the deaths of his children, and went first to the
ruined halls of Nargothrond. The dominance of the underlying
theme led to a new story, a new dimension to the ruin that
Hurin's release would bring: his catastrophic entry into the land
of the People of Haleth, the Forest of Brethil. There were no
antecedents whatsoever to this tale; but antecedents to the
manner of its telling are found in parts of the prose 'saga' of the
Children of Hurin (Narn i Chin Hurin, given in Unfinished
Tales), of which 'Hurin in Brethil' is a further extension. That
'saga' went back to the foundations in The Book of Lost Tales,
but its great elaboration belongs largely to the period after the
publication of The Lord of the Rings; and in its later develop-
ment there entered an immediacy in the telling and a fullness in
the recording of event and dialogue that must be described as a
new narrative impulse: in relation to the mode of the 'Quenta',
it is as if the focus of the glass by which the remote ages were
viewed had been sharply changed.
But with Hurin's grim and even it may seem sardonic
departure from the ruin of Brethil and dying Manthor this
impulse ceased - as it appears. Hurin never came back to
Nargothrond and Doriath; and we are denied an account, in
this mode of story-telling, of what should be the culminating
moment of the saga after the deaths of his children and his wife-
his confrontation of Thingol and Melian in the Thousand Caves.
It might be, then, that my father had no inclination to return
to the Quenta Silmarillion, and its characteristic mode, until he
had told on an ample scale, and with the same immediacy as
that of his sojourn in Brethil, the full tale of Hurin's tragic and
destructive 'wanderings' - and their aftermath also: for it is to
be remembered that his bringing of the treasure of Nargothrond
to Doriath would lead to the slaying of Thingol by the Dwarves,
the sack of Menegroth, and all the train of events that issued in
the attack of the Feanorians on Dior Thingol's heir in Doriath
and, at the last, the destruction of the Havens of Sirion. If my
father had done this, then out of it might have come, I suppose,
new chapters of the Quenta Silmarillion, and a return to that
quality in the older writing that I attempted to describe in my
foreword to The Book of Lost Tales: 'The compendious or
epitomising form and manner of The Silmarillion, with its
suggestion of ages of poetry and "lore" behind it, strongly
evokes a sense of "untold tales", even in the telling of them
There is no narrative urgency, the pressure and fear of the
immediate and unknown event. We do not actually see the
Silmarils as we see the Ring.'
But this is entirely speculative, because none of it came about:
neither the 'great saga' nor the Quenta Silmarillion were
concluded. Freely as my father often wrote of his work, he never
so much as hinted at his larger intentions for the structure of the
whole. I think that it must be said that we are left, finally, in
the dark.
'The Silmarillion', again in the widest sense, is very evidently
a literary entity of a singular nature. I would say that it can only
be defined in terms of its history; and that history is with this
book largely completed ('largely', because I have not entered
further into the complexities of the tale of Turin in those parts
that my father left in confusion and uncertainty, as explained
in Unfinished Tales, p. 6). It is indeed the only 'completion'
possible, because it was always 'in progress'; the published
work is not in any way a completion, but a construction devised
out of the existing materials. Those materials are now made
available, save only in a few details and in the matter of 'Turin'
just mentioned; and with them a criticism of the 'constructed'
Silmarillion becomes possible. I shall not enter into that
question; although it will be apparent in this book that there are
aspects of the work that I view with regret.
In The War of the Jewels I have included, as Part Four, a long
essay of a very different nature: Quendi and Eldar. While there
was no possibility of making The History of Middle-earth a
history of the languages as well, I have not wished to eschew
them altogether even when not essential to the narrative (as
Adunaic is in The Notion Club Papers); I have wished to give at
least some indication at different stages of the presence of this
vital and evolving element, especially in regard to the meaning
of names - thus the appendices to The Book of Lost Tales and
the Etymologies in The Lost Road. Quendi and Eldar illustrates
perhaps more than any other writing of my father's the sig-
nificance of names, and of linguistic change affecting names, in
his histories. It gives also an account of many things found
nowhere else, such as the gesture-language of the Dwarves, and
all that will ever be known, I believe, of Valarin, the language of
the Valar.
I take this opportunity to give the correct text of a passage in
Morgoth's Ring. Through an error that entered at a late stage
and was not observed a line was dropped and a line repeated in
note 16 on page 327; the text should read:
There have been suggestions earlier in the Athrabeth that
Andreth was looking much further back in time to the
awakening of Men (thus she speaks of 'legends of days when
death came less swiftly and our span was still far longer',
p. 313); in her words here, 'a rumour that has come down
through years uncounted', a profound alteration in the
conception seems plain.
I have received a communication from Mr Patrick Wynne
concerning Volume IX, Sauron Defeated, which I would like to
record here. He has pointed out that several of the names in
Michael Ramer's account of his experiences to the Notion Club
are 'not just Hungarian in style but actual Hungarian words'
(Ramer was born and spent his early childhood in Hungary, and
he refers to the influence of Magyar on his 'linguistic taste',
Sauron Defeated pp. 159, 201). Thus the world of the story that
he wrote and read to the Club was first named Gyonyoru (ibid.
p. 214, note 28), which means 'lovely'. His name for the planet
Saturn was first given as Gyuruchill (p. 221, note 60), derived
from Hungarian gyuru 'ring' and csillag 'star' (where cs is
pronounced as English ch in church); Gyuruchill was then
changed to Shomoru, probably from Hungarian szomoru 'sad'
(though that is pronounced 'somoru'), and if so, an allusion to
the astrological belief in the cold and gloomy temperament of
those born under the influence of that planet. Subsequently
these names were replaced by others (Emberu, and Enekol for
Saturn) that cannot be so explained.
In this connection, Mr Carl F. Hostetter has observed that the
Elvish star-name Lumbar ascribed to Saturn (whether or not my
father always so intended it, see Morgoth's Ring pp. 434 - 5) can
be explained in the same way as Ramer's Shomoru, in view of
the Quenya word lumbe, 'gloom, shadow', recorded in the
Elvish Etymologies (The Lost Road and Other Writings,
p. 170).
Mr Hostetter has also pointed out that the name Byrde given
to Finwe s first wife Miriel in the Annals of Aman (Morgoth s
Ring, pp. 92, 185) is not, as I said (p. 103), an Old English word
meaning 'broideress', for that is not found in Old English. The
name actually depends on an argument advanced (on very good
evidence) by my father that the word byrde 'broideress' must in
fact have existed in the old language, and that it survived in the
Middle English burde 'lady, damsel', its original specific sense
faded and forgotten. His discussion is found in his article Some
Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography (The Review of
English Studies 1.2, April 1925).
I am very grateful to Dr Judith Priestman for her generous
help in providing me with copies of texts and maps in the
Bodleian Library. The accuracy of the intricate text of this book
has been much improved by the labour of Mr Charles Noad,
unstintedly given and greatly appreciated. He has read the first
proof with extreme care and with critical understanding, and
has made many improvements; among these is an interpretation
of the way in which the narrow path, followed by Turin and
afterwards by Brandir the Lame, went down through the woods
above the Taeglin to Cabed-en-Aras: an interpretation that
justifies expressions of my father's that I had taken to be merely
erroneous (pp. 157, 159).
There remain a number of writings of my father's, other than
those that are expressly philological, that I think should be
included in this History of Middle-earth, and I hope to be able
to publish a further volume in two years' time.
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