J. R. R. Tolkien - The War of the Jewels II

J. R. R. TOLKIEN

The War of the Jewels

The Later Silmarillion

PART TWO

The Legend of Beleriand

Christopher Tolkien

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1994

Copyright The Tolkien Estate Limited and C.R. Tolkien 1994

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Source ISBN: 9780261103245

Ebook Edition DECEMBER 2021 ISBN: 9780007348282

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The War of the Jewels is a companion to and continuation of Morgoths Ring, Volume 10 in The History of Middle-earth. As I explained in that book, the two together contain virtually all of my fathers 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 Morgoths Ring I emphasised the distinction 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 Ainulindal; the Grey Annals, abandoned at the end of the tale of Trin; 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 Trin and Ninor from Trins return to Dor-lmin to their deaths in Brethil (see in this book). There were also an abandoned prose saga of Beren and Lthien (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 Trin in 1937 and never concluded.

I expressed the view in the foreword to Morgoths 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 Morgoths 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 momentous battles and ruinous defeats, are the heroic tales of Beren One-hand and Trin Turambar. Yet in The War of the Jewels the record is completed of all my fathers 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 Trin 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 introduction 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