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my father’s consignment contained, in addition to Farmer Giles of Ham, Mr Bliss, and The
Lost Road, two elements referred to as Long Poem and The Gnomes Material, titles which
carry a suggestion of despair. Obviously the unwelcome manuscripts landed on the desk at
Allen and Unwin without adequate explanation. I have told in detail the strange story of this
consignment in an appendix to The Lays of Beleriand (1985), but to be brief, it is painfully
clear that the Quenta Silmarillion (included in ‘the Gnomes Material’, together with
whatever other texts may have been given this name) never reached the publishers’ reader—
save for a few pages that had been attached, independently (and in the circumstances very
misleadingly) to The Lay of Leithian. He was utterly perplexed, and proposed a solution to
the relationship between the Long Poem and this fragment (much approved) of the prose
work (i.e. the Quenta Silmarillion) that was (very understandably) radically incorrect. He
wrote a puzzled report conveying his opinion, across which a member of the staff wrote,
also understandably, ‘What are we to do?’
The outcome of a tissue of subsequent misunderstandings was that my father, wholly
unaware that the Quenta Silmarillion had not in fact been read by anybody, told Stanley
Unwin that he rejoiced that at least it had not been rejected ‘with scorn’, and that he now
certainly hoped ‘to be able, or to be able to afford, to publish the Silmarillion!’
While QS II was gone he continued the narrative in a further manuscript, which told of the
death of Beren in The Wolf-hunt of Carcharoth, intending to copy the new writing into QS II
when the texts were returned; but when they were, on 16 December 1937, he put The
Silmarillion aside. He still asked, in a letter to Stanley Unwin of that date, ‘And what more
can hobbits do? They can be comic, but their comedy is suburban unless it is set against
things more elemental.’ But three days later, on 19 December 1937, he announced to Allen
and Unwin: ‘I have written the first chapter of a new story about Hobbits—“A long expected
party”.’
It was at this point, as I wrote in the Appendix to The Children of Húrin, that the
continuous and evolving tradition of The Silmarillion in the summarising, Quenta mode
came to an end, brought down in full flight, at Túrin’s departure from Doriath, becoming an
outlaw. The further history from that point remained during the years that followed in the
compressed and undeveloped form of the Quenta of 1930, frozen, as it were, while the great
structures of the Second and Third Ages arose with the writing of The Lord of the Rings. But
that further history was of cardinal importance in the ancient legends, for the concluding
stories (deriving from the original Book of Lost Tales) told of the disastrous history of
Húrin, father of Túrin, after Morgoth released him, and of the ruin of the Elvish kingdoms of
Nargothrond, Doriath, and Gondolin of which Gimli chanted in the mines of Moria many
thousands of years afterwards.
The world was fair, the mountains tall,
in Elder Days before the fall
of mighty kings in Nargothrond
And Gondolin, who now beyond
the Western Seas have passed away . . .
And this was to be the crown and completion of the whole: the doom of the Noldorin Elves
in their long struggle against the power of Morgoth, and the parts that Húrin and Túrin played