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THE QUENTA SILMARILLION<br />
In the years that followed, my father turned to a new prose version of the history of the Elder<br />
Days, and that is found in a manuscript bearing the title Quenta Silmarillion, which I will<br />
refer to as ‘QS’. Of intermediate texts between this and its predecessor the Quenta<br />
Noldorinwa (p. 103) there is now no trace, though they must have existed; but from the point<br />
where the story of Beren and Lúthien enters the Silmarillion history there are several largely<br />
incomplete drafts, owing to my father’s long hesitation between longer and shorter versions<br />
of the legend. A fuller version, which may be called for this purpose ‘QS I’, was abandoned,<br />
on account of its length, at the point where King Felagund in Nargothrond gave the crown to<br />
Orodreth his brother (p. 109, extract from the Quenta Noldorinwa).<br />
This was followed by a very rough draft of the whole story; and that was the basis of a<br />
second, ‘short’ version, ‘QS II’, preserved in the same manuscript as QS I. It was very<br />
largely from these two versions that I derived the story of Beren and Lúthien as told in the<br />
published Silmarillion.<br />
The making of QS II was a work still in progress in 1937; but in that year there entered<br />
considerations altogether aloof from the history of the Elder Days. On 21 September The<br />
Hobbit was published by Allen and Unwin, and was an immediate success; but it brought<br />
with it great pressure on my father to write a further book about hobbits. In October he said<br />
in a letter to Stanley Unwin, the chairman of Allen and Unwin, that he was ‘a little perturbed.<br />
I cannot think of anything more to say about hobbits. Mr Baggins seems to have exhibited so<br />
fully both the Took and the Baggins side of their nature. But I have only too much to say, and<br />
much already written, about the world into which the hobbit intruded.’ He said that he<br />
wanted an opinion on the value of these writings on the subject of ‘the world into which the<br />
hobbit intruded’; and he put together a collection of manuscripts and sent them off to Stanley<br />
Unwin on 15 November 1937. Included in the collection was QS II, which had reached the<br />
moment when Beren took into his hand the Silmaril which he had cut from Morgoth’s crown.<br />
Long afterwards I learned that the list made out at Allen and Unwin of the manuscripts in
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