The Peoples of Middle-earth (45 page)

The earliest text, which I will call I, of the later period is a very rough typescript which begins thus:

The Heirs of Elendil

There is no space here to set out the lines of the kings and lords of Arnor and Gondor, even in such brief form as they appear in the Red Book. For the compiling of these annals the Hobbits must have drawn both on the books of lore in Rivendell, and on records made available to them by King Elessar, such as the

'Book of the Kings' of Gondor, and the 'House of the Stewards'; for until the days of the War of the Ring they had known little of such matters, and afterwards were chiefly interested in them in so far as they concerned Elessar, or helped in the correction of the dating of their own annals.

The line of Arnor, the Heirs of Isildur. After Elendil and Isildur there were eight high kings in Arnor, ending with Earendur.

The realm of Arnor then became divided, and the kings ceased to take names in High-elven form. But the line was maintained by Amlaith son of Earendur, who ruled at Fornost.

After Amlaith there were thirteen kings (1) at Fornost, of whom the last was Arvedui, the twenty-fifth of the line. When he was lost at sea, the kingship came to an end in the North, and Fornost was deserted; but the line was continued by the Lords of the Dunedain, who were fostered by Elrond.

Of these the first was Aranarth son of Arvedui, and after him there followed fifteen chieftains, ending with Aragorn II, who became king again both of Arnor and Gondor.

It was the token and the marvel of the Northern line that, though their power departed and their people dwindled to few, through all the many generations the succession was unbroken from father to son. Also, though the length of the lives of the Dunedain grew ever less in Middle-earth, and their waning was swifter in the North, while the kings lasted in Gondor, afterwards it was otherwise; and many of the chieftains of the North lived still to twice the age of the oldest of other Men. Aragorn indeed lived to be one hundred and ninety years of age, longer than any of his line since Arvegil son of King Argeleb II; but in Aragorn the dignity of the kings of old was renewed, and he received in some measure their former gifts.

In his opening words 'There is no space here to set out the lines of the kings and lords of Arnor and Gondor' my father was surely thinking of The Heirs of Elendil in the elaborate form it had reached in the manuscript C. Merely to set out the names and dates of the rulers would take little enough space, yet that would serve little purpose in itself. It seems plain that he either knew or feared that he would be under severe constraint in the telling of the history of the Realms in Exile; but it seems extraordinary that he should have felt impelled to reduce the history of Arnor and the later petty realms almost to vanishing point.

After the passage given above, however, he continued with The line of Gondor, the Heirs of Anarion, and here he adopted another course: to give 'excerpts' from the history of Gondor. He began with a passage that remained with little change as the opening paragraph of the section Gondor and the Heirs of Anarion in Appendix A (I, iv); but then passed at once to 'the first great evil' that came upon Gondor, the civil war of the Kin-strife, thus omitting the first fourteen centuries of its history. This was quite briefly told, and was followed by a short account of 'the second and greatest evil', the plague that came in the reign of Telemnar; and that by 'the third evil', the invasion of the Wainriders. He had recounted the marriage of Arvedui, last king in the North, to the daughter of King Ondohir, and the great victory of Earnil in 1944, when he abandoned the text.

One might suppose that he perceived that, in so short a space as he had determined was necessary, this would not work. The 'excerpts'

could not stand in isolation without further explanation. At the end of this text he had written that the northern kingdom could send no aid to Gondor 'for Angmar renewed its attack upon Arthedain': yet neither Angmar nor Arthedain had been mentioned. What was required (one might think) was a brief precis of the whole history of the two kingdoms; but as will be seen in a moment, this was not at all what he had in mind.

It is notable that at this stage he said very little about the sources for the history; and it seems probable that his conception of them was still very undeveloped.

In a second text, H, still with the same title, he substantially expanded the opening passage:

Until the War of the Ring the people of the Shire had little knowledge of the history of the Westlands beyond the traditions of their own wanderings; but afterwards all that concerned the King Elessar became of deep interest to them, while in the Buckland the tales of Rohan were no less esteemed. Thus the Red Book from its beginning contained many annals, genealogies, and traditions of the realms of the South, drawn through Bilbo from the books of lore in Rivendell, or through Frodo and Peregrin from the King himself, and from the records of Gondor that he opened to them: such as 'The Book of the Kings and Stewards' (now lost), and the Akallabeth, that is 'The Downfall of Numenor'.(2) To this matter other notes and tales were added at a later date by other hands, after the passing of Elessar.

There is no space here to set out this matter, even in the brief forms in which it usually appears in the Book; but some excerpts are given that may serve to illustrate the story of the War of the Ring, or to fill up some of the gaps in the account.

My father now expressly referred to 'excerpts' from the Red Book. He retained from text I the very brief statement concerning the Northern Line; and in the section on the Southern Line he did as he had done in I, omitting all the history of Gondor before the Kin-strife. But when he came to the story of the civil war he expanded it to ten times its length in I. One may wonder what his intention now was in respect of the shape and length of this Appendix; but I doubt whether he was thinking of such questions when he wrote it. The historian of Gondor reasserted himself, and he told the story as he wished to tell it.

The remarkable thing is that this text was the immediate forerunner of the story of the Kin-strife as it was published in Appendix A (in the First Edition: in the Second Edition the events leading to it were altered and expanded, see p. 258).(3) And at the words 'Eldakar ... was king for fifty-eight years, of which ten were spent in exile' (RK p. 328) text II was abandoned in its turn.(4)

In a third text, HI, my father retained the actual first page of II, carrying the opening remarks on the sources and the scanty statement on the Northern Line. For the Southern Line he entered, as before, immediately into the history of the Kin-strife, and brought the text virtually word for word to its form in Appendix A in the First Edition.

Then, having recounted the plague and the invasion of the Wainriders without much enlarging what was said in text I, he wrote a very full account of the claim of Arvedui on the southern crown: and this was for most of its length word for word the text in Appendix A, beginning 'On the death of Ondohir and his sons ...' (RK p. 329), with the record of the exchanges between Arvedui and the Council of Gondor, and the appearance of Malbeth the Seer who named him Arvedui at his birth. The only difference is the absence of the reference to the Steward Pelendur, who in the Appendix A text is said to have 'played the chief part' in the rejection of the claim.

He then went on, in a passage that was again retained in Appendix A (RK pp. 330-1), to describe the message of Earnil to Arvedui, the fleet sent into the North under Earnur, and the destruction of Arthedain by Angmar. The story of the defeat of the Witch-king (RK

pp. 331-2) had not yet been written; and with a brief reference to the overthrow of Angmar my father continued with 'It was thus in the reign of King Earnil, as later became clear, that the Witch-king escaping from the North came to Mordor ...' With the account of the character of Earnur (RK p. 332) text III ends.(5)

By now it can be seen how the long account of the Realms in Exile in Appendix A came into being. Strange as it seems, the evidence of the texts described above can lead only to this conclusion: that what began as an attempt (for whatever reason) to reduce the rich material of The Heirs of Elendil in a more than drastic fashion developed by steps into a long and finely written historical essay taking up some twenty printed pages. What considerations made this acceptable in relation to the requirements of brevity, in the absence of any evidence external to the texts themselves I am entirely unable to explain.

There are three versions of a brief text, which I will call IV for it certainly followed III, in which the opening section of Appendix A (I The Numenorean Kings. (i) Numenor), RK pp. 313 ff., is seen emerging. The opening paragraph 'Feanor was the greatest of the Eldar in arts and lore ...', very briefly recounting the history of the Silmarils, the rebellion of Feanor, and the war against Morgoth, was not present in the First Edition, where, as here in IV, the section opened with the words 'There were only three unions of the High Elves and Men ...'; but at this stage my father had not yet introduced the brief history of Numenor (RK pp. 315 ff., beginning 'As a reward for their sufferings in the cause against Morgoth ...'), which arose from his attempt to curtail and compress the Tale of Years of the Second Age (see pp. 180-1), and the passage concerning the Choice of Elros and Elrond, here called i-Pheredhil, differed from that published.

At the end of the First Age an irrevocable choice was given to the Half-elven, to which kindred they would belong. Elros chose to be of Mankind, and was granted a great life-span; and he became the first King of Numenor. His descendants were long-lived but mortal. Later when they became powerful they begrudged the choice of their forefather, desiring the immortality within the life of the world that was the fate of the Elves.

In this way began their rebellion which, under the evil teaching of Sauron, brought about the Downfall of Numenor and the ruin of the ancient world.

Elrond chose to be of Elvenkind, and became a master of wisdom. To him therefore was granted the same grace as to those of the High Elves that still lingered in Middle-earth: that when weary at last of the mortal lands they could take ship from the Grey Havens and pass into the Uttermost West, notwithstand-ing the change of the world. But to the children of Elrond a choice was also appointed: to pass with him from the circles of the world; or if they wedded with one of Mankind, to become mortal and die in Middle-earth. For Elrond, therefore, all chances of the War of the Ring were fraught with sorrow.

Elros was the first king of Numenor, and was afterwards known by the royal name of Tar-Minyatur.

The fourth king of Numenor was Tar-Elendil. From his daughter Silmarien came the line of the Lords of Andunie, of whom Amandil the Faithful was the last.

Elendil the Tall was the son of Amandil. He was the leader of the remnant of the Faithful who escaped from the Downfall with the Nine Ships, and established realms in exile in the North-west of Middle-earth. His sons were Isildur and Anarion.

Then follows in IV the lists of the kings, chieftains, and stewards of the Realms in Exile much as they are given in Appendix A (RK pp.

318-19). The references to Numenor in the passage just given were of course removed when the much longer account was introduced.

The Choice of the Children of Elrond as stated here differs notably from that in the final form, in the express statement that they would choose mortality if they chose to wed a mortal. In the text T 4 of the Tale of Years (p. 234, entry for the year 2300), as also in T 3, the choice is (as here in Appendix A): 'if [Elrond] departed they should have then the choice either to pass over the Sea with him, or to become mortal, if they remained behind.'(6)

After the abandoned text III, in which the account of the Northern Line was still confined to half a page, there is scarcely any rejected, preliminary material before the final typescript from which section I (iii) of Appendix A was printed, Eriador, Arnor, and the Heirs of Isildur. On the evidence of the extant texts this final typescript was the very one in which my father first set down the history of the North Kingdom in continuous narrative form. The story of Arvedui and the Lossoth, the Snowmen of Forochel, RK pp. 321-2, 'wrote itself' in precisely the form in which it was printed. But this is scarcely credible (see p. 279).

At the end of the story of the Lossoth, however, my father is seen in rejected pages taking a course that he decided against. At the end of the penultimate paragraph of this section (concerning the journeys of King Elessar to Annuminas and the Brandywine Bridge, RK p. 324) he continued: 'Arador was the grandfather of the king', and typed out part of a new text of the story of Aragorn and Arwen, which after some distance was abandoned. On this matter see the next section of this chapter, pp. 268 ff.