424 – Your Song
The Prancing Pony Podcast
The Prancing Pony Podcast kicks off Season 11 with a deep dive into the editorial legacy of Christopher Tolkien and his work on 'Beren and L
Key takeaways
- Christopher Tolkien described a 1,968-page manuscript in 1981 as being 'in no conceivable way publishable'.
- The editorial process involved managing layers of changes and scraps of text that were often nearly illegible.
Main topics
- Christopher Tolkien's editorial work
- The publication history of The History of Middle-earth
Notable quotes
in no conceivable way publishable
Conclusion
A profound look at the monumental effort required to preserve and pres
Transcript preview
Speaker 6 (0:00) Hello, if you're the kind of person who loves books and the stories behind them, let me tell you about a podcast you might enjoy. I'm Jack Wilson, the host of the History of Literature podcast, where we talk to writers, scholars, biographers, and other guests as we try to understand just how literature works and what its impact on the world has been. Why are great books so great? How can reading fiction and poetry make us think and feel? and how does that fit into our busy lives today? At the History of Literature podcast, we dive into the greatest books from all over the world, from famous classics to underappreciated gems. Our goal is to stretch our minds and to see what big-hearted and great-souled people we can become, using literature as our inspiration and our guide. If this sounds like a journey you'd like to join, try the History of Literature podcast, available on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 8 (1:02) Oh, hi there, listener. Gustavo Cirola here with the cast of Tales from the Stinky Dragon podcast, and we're about to set the record for the quickest D &D session. Everyone roll initiative. Speaker 1 (1:10) I got the highest roll with a 19. I move 10 feet toward the listener and say, Hi, I'm Barbara Dunkelman. You should listen to our show, Tales from the Stinky Dragon. It's an immersive D &D actual play show with a fully voiced cast of characters plus sound design. And then I finish my action with a high five. Go ahead and make a dexterity check. Speaker 8 (1:25) That's an 18. Oh, that's a good high five. I rolled a 16 on initiative. I walk over to the tavern piano. I play a sixth song and say, hi, I'm John Reisinger. Wow, do you hear that? Tales of the Sneaky Dragon also has its own original score. It's like a movie, but for your ears. All right, yeah, go ahead and roll a performance check. That's a two. Not your best job. Speaker 7 (1:43) Okay, but I promise the show's actual music sounds really good. Okay, me next. I moonwalk up to the Speaker 8 (1:47) listener. Speaker 7 (1:48) Sup, I'm Blaine Gibson. You should really check out the show. It's funny, heartwarming, and perfect for everybody. I'm talking D &D veterans, people new to the genre, old people, babies, everybody. And then I do a backflip. Speaker 8 (1:58) Alright, roll an athletics check. Speaker 7 (1:59) That's a nat 20! Woo! Speaker 8 (2:01) Okay, that leaves Chris. Speaker 6 (2:02) Hi, I'm Chris Damaris. Please subscribe to our podcast. Speaker 8 (2:05) And then I draw my sword to attack them! Put the Speaker 6 (2:08) sword down! Put the sword down! Get him! Get him! Now it's Speaker 8 (2:13) your turn, listener. Subscribe to Tales from the Stinky Dragon wherever you listen to podcasts today. Speaker 5 (2:29) Good evening, Little Masters, and welcome to episode 424 and the start of season 11 of the Prancing Pony podcast, where I hear this episode is in no conceivable way publishable. Speaker 2 (2:42) No, actually, we're fine. It's just the story of Beren and Luthien that Christopher wasn't so sure about. Okay, grab a drink, pull up a bench in the common room, folks. It is time to talk Tolkien. I'm Sarah, the Shieldmaiden of Rohan, and I'm here with the man of the West for whom it is an altogether essential element that he is a mortal man, Alancisto. Speaker 5 (3:03) Quite mortal at that. As long as the elves of the woodland still don't see me as a treacherous creature, I guess I'm okay. Folks, join us as we start season 11 by diving into a story that Christopher Tolkien explains was a deeply rooted presence in his father's life, the story of Beren and Luthien. Speaker 2 (3:20) Yeah, we should say stories, but we'll get there. Speaker 5 (3:25) These Speaker 2 (3:25) days, folks are coming to Middle Earth in so many different ways, from the Peter Jackson films to the Amazon TV show, from YouTube lore videos and from video game adaptations like Lotro. And of course, There's always the books. That's right. However you came here, we want to welcome each of you to our common room. Speaker 5 (3:43) The Prancing Pony podcast is in our 11th season of reading and talking our way through Middle Earth with, we hope, plenty of insight and deep lore dives, along with the usual digressions and speculations. And if we keep true to form, plenty of bad jokes and a few high-quality puns from time to time. But our... purpose here is to help you explore and enjoy the works, to discuss the story itself along with our favorite themes, Tolkien's inspirations, and plenty more. Speaker 2 (4:09) Yeah, and while we'll always take the work seriously, we hardly ever take ourselves seriously. We're just a couple of friends chatting at the pub, and we are genuinely glad you've joined us. We Speaker 5 (4:20) hope and are pretty confident that you'll be glad you joined as well. Now, before we get to tonight's chapter discussion, while we're skipping a proper intro segment, we're still going to go ahead and do a quick recap about what we're doing this season and the next two. So today, we're going to be doing an introduction to the book Baron Luthien. We're going to be covering Christopher Tolkien's preface as well as his sort of cheat sheet, if you will, to Morgoth and the elves and things like that, kind of giving us the lay of the land, not assuming the readers know all of the history of Middle-earth. And then we'll also be talking about the introduction to the story itself. Speaker 2 (4:58) And that's, I think, a really, really important thing to do is to Speaker 5 (5:01) bring Speaker 2 (5:02) Christopher's voice in right at the beginning. Speaker 5 (5:04) And Speaker 2 (5:04) then when we've done that, we're going to do about seven episodes on the earliest version of the story, which is the tale of Tanuviel, where noticeably, Beren is an elf. I'm sure we'll have plenty to talk about with that one. Speaker 5 (5:17) Lots to talk about. Speaker 2 (5:20) And then we're going to do about six to eight episodes. I think Alan is still making up his mind on just how long he wants to do this for on the Athrabeth-Finrod-Andreth. And that'll get us to about the end of January. Now, I'm hoping some of you already are at least aware of the Athrabeth-Finrod-Andreth. It comes from Morgoth's Ring. And it is this amazing discussion between Finrod. an elf, and a mortal woman, Andret, about the metaphysical differences between elves and men. Speaker 5 (5:55) And Speaker 2 (5:55) that is really going to help us to set the stage for the rest of the story of Beren and Luthien, where of course, at that point, he is a mortal. I Speaker 5 (6:04) mean, that becomes really the key element to the story is that difference between his mortality and her serial longevity. So Speaker 2 (6:12) really Speaker 5 (6:13) looking forward to the author, Beth. Speaker 2 (6:15) Right. I mean, that's why it is going to provide such great context to that part of the story. So I'm really, really happy that you've decided that we're going to do that. Speaker 5 (6:24) And Speaker 2 (6:25) then... starting in February, we're going to cover the rest of this volume. And when we get into the long section called the remainder of the lay, we're also going to bring in passages from the lay of Lathian that Christopher didn't include in this volume, which is great. I'm really pleased we're doing that. I Speaker 5 (6:40) can't wait. It's going to basically be a question of how much can we fit in because the rest of it is glorious. And I understand why he had to cut it for space, but wow, every one of these cantos has moments that you just want to just revel in. Speaker 2 (6:53) I Speaker 5 (6:53) can't wait. Of course, this book is completely different from the other books that we've done on the Prancing Pony podcast for so many reasons, mainly the poetry, but also just the fact that we're looking at the same story over and over, but in different versions. So we may have to adjust on the fly in terms of how much we spend in a particular section of the book, but we do promise that we'll get through all of this book. And this is, of course, the Baron and Luthien book, the single volume of The Great Tales. over the course of season 11. Next season, and I think we talked about this at the end of season 10 when Sean was on the show, I'm planning on covering the entirety of The Children of Huron with Matt from The Nerd of the Rings. And then in the season after that, James Tauber, our fellow co-host on Rings of Power Wrap-Up, will join me to work through The Fall of Gondolin. That will put the PPP into July of 2030. Wow. I know. I can't believe it. And after that, I think we're going to do a two-year look at the Silmarillion. Sort of not revisiting everything that we did in season one, because season one was fantastic, but looking at it through a fresh lens, looking at it again, like now that we've read everything, Speaker 2 (8:04) what do we think Speaker 5 (8:05) now? What new things have we connected? elements and angles have we discovered? And it'll sort of bring the show full circle after a full 16 years. And then we'll spend some time on the non-legendarium work. So we've got a plan and we hope you'll join us. Looking forward to it. Speaker 2 (8:21) Wow. That's Speaker 5 (8:22) going Speaker 2 (8:23) to be absolutely amazing. I love the fact that you're going to return to the Silmarillion with everything that you've done. It's going to be fantastic. I Speaker 5 (8:31) really can't wait for that. It's going to be so good to get to do The Great Tales for three seasons. And to think there was a time where I thought we'd cover The Great Tales this year. Speaker 2 (8:40) All three. All three. My sweet summer Speaker 5 (8:43) child. Yeah. You know, the thing that finally convinced me that was not even... potentially possible was the fact that you and I spent, I think, 11 weeks on Aldarian and Erendis alone. I'm like, wait a minute. If that's the case, how in the world am I going to do 12 or 13 episodes each on Beren and Luthien, children who are in a fall of Gondolin? I mean, it's technically possible, Speaker 2 (9:06) but it's a heck of a squish. Speaker 5 (9:08) It's a very big squish. And as Corey said to Sean and I at the end of season one, you know what? You might've gone a little fast. when we covered the Silmarillion in like 42 episodes. Yeah, but that's hilarious Speaker 2 (9:19) coming from Corey, who took about 10 years to get to the Council of Elrond. Speaker 5 (9:25) That is true. That is true. We're Speaker 2 (9:28) going Speaker 5 (9:28) to go ahead and get into the book. But before we begin looking at the preface for this volume, I want to look at where it fits within the timeline of all the books that Christopher edited and published after the professor's death in 1973. And it's just a... Kind of coincidental side note through the vagaries of scheduling and the fact that we've had to redo some things. We're actually recording this on the anniversary of his death on September 2nd. So that feels really fitting, doesn't it? Speaker 2 (9:55) It really does. Raising a glass and toasting the professor. To Speaker 5 (10:00) the professor. To whom Speaker 2 (10:00) we owe so much. Speaker 5 (10:02) Indeed we do. So, of course, many of you know that in 1977, four years after the professor's death, Christopher published The Silmarillion. And that book did contain a very sizable prose version of the story that we'll be covering at length this entire season. Speaker 2 (10:17) Yep. Then three years later, in 1980, he published Unfinished Tales, which, of course, we spent all of last season covering along with. some parts of season nine. And then from 1983 through 1996, Christopher then published the 12 volumes of the history of Middle Earth. That Speaker 5 (10:37) is still mind boggling. I Speaker 2 (10:39) have no idea how he did it. Speaker 5 (10:42) That's almost a volume a year. Yeah. And the amount of work that had to go into that. Just can't conceive. Speaker 2 (10:50) Well, highly complicated, apart from anything else, just deciding what's going to go where and what isn't going to go in. And then dealing with his father's papers. Speaker 5 (10:59) Oh, and how scattered they were and how nearly illegible so many of them were. Yeah, incredible. He did take a break, shall we say, well-deserved, though it wasn't a complete break. He actually did some publishing of the academic works during this 11-year gap, but there was nothing else from the Legendarium published. after the end of the history of Middle-earth until 2007 when The Children of Hurin was published. Christopher then continued to work on more non-legendarium works for another 10 years before publishing this book, Beren and Luthien, in 2017, Speaker 2 (11:32) 40 Speaker 5 (11:33) years after he published The Silmarillion. Speaker 2 (11:36) We owe Christopher so much. As much as we do to his father. Yeah, absolutely. Speaker 5 (11:42) I Speaker 2 (11:42) mean, without him, we would still have The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and a few other bits and pieces and the outside legendarium stories. And, you know, that would have been wonderful. Speaker 2 (11:54) We can actually know so much more about his writing process and about what he was trying to do with his stories, all thanks to Christopher, who pretty much dedicated his life's work to his father's work. It's an extraordinary achievement. It really is. Speaker 5 (12:12) It Speaker 2 (12:12) really Speaker 5 (12:13) is. I know. Speaker 2 (12:14) So you said he was... He published this book in 2017. But Speaker 5 (12:18) the Speaker 2 (12:19) idea of publishing this work or something like it was apparently something he'd considered and even proposed to Rainer Unwin, as Speaker 5 (12:26) we'll see. We'll very soon see, yeah. I look at the way this timeline shook out, and it's so interesting to see this really heavy process of history of Middle Earth over a 13-year span. And then he took a decade. before getting to this, to getting the Children of Huron, and then took another decade to get to Beren and Luthien. Thankfully, as we'll also mention later, it was only one year later when he published The Fall of Gondolin to complete The Great Tales. But wow, how do you come back to this? You almost feel like, I'm done, I've retired, I've dealt with this, I don't need to do any more. The story's there. And yet, he wanted to put this together. And it's, as we'll see in a little bit, It's something that he'd been thinking about long before and he literally had forgotten he thought about it. Speaker 2 (13:17) Well, I'm not surprised considering how many things he was juggling in all of these years. I mean, look at the number of decades that he was working to put all of this together. Publishing The Silmarillion in 1977 and this book in 2017. Speaker 5 (13:33) 40 years span. 40 years. And when you realize he'd been working on The Silmarillion for a few years before that, and he got Fall of Gondolin out a year later, you're talking about a 45-year career of... digging through his father's writings to bring us all of this. It is, like you said, it is a debt that we cannot even begin to repay. Great stuff. Speaker 2 (13:54) Yes, indeed. Speaker 5 (13:55) So with that, let's go ahead and dig into the preface itself. We're going to break this into a couple of different parts. I'm going to start with the beginning of the preface. After the publication of The Silmarillion in 1977, I spent several years investigating the earlier history of the work and writing a book which I called The History of The Silmarillion. Later, this became the somewhat shortened basis of the earlier volumes of The History of Middle-Earth. In 1981, I wrote at length to Rainer Unwin, the chairman of Allen & Unwin, giving him an account of what I had been and was still doing. At that time, as I informed him, The book was, sorry, I just, as I read this, my brain wants to explode when I read what he wrote to Alan Unwin in 1981. The book was 1,968 pages long and 16 and a half inches across and obviously not for publication. Speaker 2 (14:54) Rainer's probably thinking, like father, like son, now what? Speaker 5 (14:59) That's not a book. That is a deadly weapon. I'm going to continue to read more, but I'm going to summarize the next little bit because, of course, we can't read everything. Christopher goes on to explain, rightly so, this is in no conceivable way publishable, rather like our podcast, prohibitive both in terms of physical size and intimidating detail. He did it, his own words were, for my own satisfaction in getting things right. I hear that. I love that. He describes the process, and I can see why he thinks there's zero chance for this to ever be published. The papers are chaos. There are layers of changes on every single page, scattered scraps from everywhere, text on the back of other writings, and some of these things are completely illegible. And then I'm going to go back to his actual words. He writes, in theory, I could produce a lot of books out of the history, and there are many possibilities and combinations of possibilities. For example, I could do Baron. with the original lost tale, the lay of Lathian, and an essay on the development of the legend. My preference, if it came to anything so positive, would probably be for the treating of one legend as a developing entity, rather than to give all the lost tales at one go. But the difficulties of exposition in detail would, in such a case, be great, because one would have to explain so often what was happening elsewhere in other unpublished writings. Now he comes back to So that's what he wrote in 1981, and now he comes back to his introduction in 2017. I said that I would enjoy writing a book called Baron on the lines I suggested, but the problem would be its organization so that the matter was comprehensible without the editor becoming overpowering. When I wrote this, I meant what I said about publication. I had no thought of its possibility other than my idea of selecting a single legend as a developing entity. I seem now, he writes in almost surprise, To have done precisely that, though with no thought of what I had said in my letter to Rainer Unwin 35 years ago, I had altogether forgotten it until I came on it by chance when this book was all but completed. We're going to unpack that now. Wow. Oh my Speaker 2 (17:16) goodness. I mean. Speaker 5 (17:20) It's just mind-boggling. Mind Speaker 2 (17:23) -boggling, yes. It really is. Speaker 5 (17:26) How do you just, I thought of this great idea. And then 35 years later, I start working on it. And then I look back and go, oh, wait, I thought about this once. Speaker 2 (17:40) Yeah. Of course, when we look at what he does in those intervening years, that kind of makes sense that he might have forgotten something like this. Speaker 5 (17:47) I forget what I had for dinner three days ago. Yeah. Well, Speaker 2 (17:49) yes, there's that too. Speaker 2 (17:54) So let's unpack what we've got from the first bit here of the preface, because Christopher starts by going back 40 years from the publication of this book to the release of the Silmarillion. And then what he saw would be his next project, which was, as he thought at the time, the history of the Silmarillion. Yeah, Speaker 5 (18:12) which eventually became Lost Tales, basically, right? Speaker 2 (18:15) Yes, exactly. If only he'd known at the time that he would end up doing 12 books of that. Anyway, so four years after that work, so this is 36 years before he wrote this preface, he'd written to his publisher, Rainer Unwin, and gave him a breakdown of, well, this impossible book. It Speaker 5 (18:37) really is that. Can you imagine? I mean, it's nearly 2,000 pages in length. But it's also 16 and a half inches across. This is not a coffee table book so much as an actual coffee table. Speaker 2 (18:50) Right. Speaker 5 (18:51) You could use this as a lethal weapon. And it is sort of funny that he added that it was not for publication. I mean, that's like, duh. Speaker 2 (19:00) Yeah. Speaker 5 (19:01) But you and I both know I would buy a 2000 page, 16 and a half inch across book if he did publish it. Speaker 2 (19:07) Oh, yes. Yes. I'd find space. Yes. Speaker 5 (19:10) I would. Speaker 2 (19:11) Yeah, no problem. I would too. But it's not just the size of this thing that made it unpublishable. There's more complications to it than that. The discussions, he says, were just too detailed and minute. So why did he embark on this at all? It seems he'd really done it because he wanted to, he says, get things right. He's as much of a perfectionist as his father, for sure. And because he wanted to know precisely how to do how the story evolved from its early beginnings. You Speaker 5 (19:37) it. Speaker 5 (19:41) know, I want to know how the story evolved from its early beginnings, so I'm grateful he did the work. I certainly couldn't have done it. Speaker 2 (19:47) Yeah, 100%. So either for himself or for later scholars, what he's doing is he's making sure that his father's literary history, as he calls it, it wasn't mistaken or turned into a nonsense. Speaker 5 (20:02) Turned into a nonsense. Once again, Christopher with the great phrases. And there's good reason to fear that, right? I mean, if he is thinking about future scholars trying to dive through all this material and make sense of it, he's talking about what state that material is in. Chaos, layer upon layer of changes on a single page, scattered scraps written on the backs of other works. And here's another of Christopher's phrases that I think needs to be incorporated into everyday life. He describes the disorder as simply inexaggerable. Speaker 2 (20:34) I swear he made that up. But if it isn't a word, it should be. Is that a Speaker 5 (20:37) word? My autocorrect says it's not a word, but it is also American autocorrect, so I could be wrong there. But I love that concept. It is simply inexaggerable. One cannot exaggerate it enough. It's impossible to be hyperbolic about this. Speaker 2 (20:52) Right. I mean, this is some disorder. Oh, yeah. It really does emphasize just how much work he had to put into doing anything with it. But continuing in this 1981 letter, he tells Rayner that he could, in theory, produce a lot of work, a lot of books. And thankfully, he did just that. I was going Speaker 5 (21:13) to say he did exactly that. Speaker 2 (21:15) Yeah, yeah. Not just one enormous volume, thank goodness, because frankly, I think I'd need a crane to lift it. Can Speaker 5 (21:23) you imagine the history of Middle Earth in a single book? Speaker 2 (21:27) Oh, yeah. I'm not sure my Speaker 5 (21:30) shelves would actually take the weight. No, even the three-volume one is too much. The pages are so thin, you can't really read it very well. And it's difficult to navigate with the table of contents for each book and the index for each book. Yeah, no doubt. Glad that he did it as 12 different volumes. And of course, one of these hypothetical works that he mentions to Rayner is described as barren with the original lost tale. The Lay of Lathian, and then an essay as well, which is pretty close to what we have here, isn't it? Speaker 2 (22:00) Yes, it is. And he even says he'd prefer to handle a single legend as a developing entity instead of doing all the Lost Tales at once. Speaker 5 (22:10) Yeah, sorry, Christopher, you're going to have to do all the Lost Tales at once first. Speaker 2 (22:14) Yes. Speaker 5 (22:15) Good news, you get two volumes to do it, though. Speaker 2 (22:17) That's true. Yeah. I mean, in the end, he does make it work, but it is a lot of work to make it. in any way coherent. It Speaker 5 (22:24) really, really is. The problem with doing that for this story, for the story of Beren and Luthien he wrote in 1981, was the matter of its organization. His concern was that the matter would have to somehow be comprehensible without the editor becoming overpowering. That's a big task to do. You talked about this a little bit in a lecture that you gave for one of the space modules, right? Speaker 2 (22:49) That's right. Yes. One of the signal, the course is formerly known as space that are now known as ever learn. Yes. That's right. Because I think quite correctly, what Christopher was concerned about was that the editorial hand and voice could go too far and overwhelm. Because what he was doing, really skillfully actually, was presenting his father's work, but he had to have a hand in it because it wasn't coherent. And he did occasionally have to have a voice in it so that he could provide his commentary. But if you do too much commentary, if you do over-editing, what you end up with is not your father's work, it's yours. No, exactly. That's a Speaker 5 (23:35) thing he challenged himself with, with all of the history of Middle-earth. You can see it, the struggle between how much do I put in here of my voice versus how much do I just put in my father's text. Speaker 2 (23:44) Right. Yes. And this is a huge challenge for him as to how he's actually going to go ahead and do this. And it's quite the balance. that he has to strike. Of course, not just in this book, The Tale of Beren and Luthien. You see it all the way through the 12 books of the History of Middle Earth series. He has to strike that balance. He needs to offer us the context that we require so that we can understand what is going on, because none of this is all coherent from what his father's papers are giving him. No, Speaker 5 (24:19) not at all. Not remotely coherent. Speaker 2 (24:21) So without... Christopher's notes and commentaries that contextualize what Tolkien is doing, it makes it almost impossible for anyone to understand. So you still need that, but it's a lighter touch, perhaps. I Speaker 5 (24:35) got to say, it's a tough balance for him to strike, like you said, and it's constant. You see it in Unfinished Tales. You see it in Fall of Gondolin. You see it in all 12 volumes of History of Middle-Earth. You don't see it so much in Children of Hurin. The editor voice there is non-existent almost because that's such a complete story in many ways. But you even see it in the Silmarillion when you understand what parts he had to fill in and how he labored over that and like, oh, I have to make this call. It has to be this or it has to be that because the two can't be reconciled otherwise. And that's a very unenviable position to be in. Speaker 2 (25:12) It is. And of course, in later years, he looked back on what he did to put together the Silmarillion and wished he'd done it differently. Speaker 3 (25:20) And Speaker 2 (25:21) I think because the Silmarillion was the first thing that he did, I think he got better at it. Speaker 3 (25:26) The Speaker 2 (25:27) other thing to remember is that he did in fact write passages to insert into the Silmarillion to provide bridging rather than insert commentary, which is what he did with the later works, the History of Middle Earth. And so we don't always know which bits were written by Tolkien. Speaker 5 (25:47) and which Speaker 2 (25:48) bits were written by Christopher. Certainly not when you Speaker 5 (25:50) read The Silmarillion on its own. When we read The History of Middle-Earth, we start to learn some of the segments where we're like, okay, this must be an area where he inserted something. So what happens there is the editorial voice just becomes merged and we don't detect that it's the editorial voice. But yeah, you're right. He regretted some of those choices. Certainly the lack of a frame narrative was one of the big things that he thought in hindsight, I should have done this differently. That's just the nature of writing. I mean, how many times did his father say, I wish I'd done this differently? Oh my goodness. Speaker 2 (26:21) Yes. So many times. All Speaker 5 (26:23) the time. So Speaker 2 (26:23) many times. But we're really going to have fun with this when we get to the Athrabeth because the Athrabeth is a little cray-cray. You're not wrong. You're not wrong. So you have the Athrabeth. and then it'll stop and there will be some commentary by Tolkien on his own writing of the Athrabeth. Speaker 4 (26:46) Next Speaker 2 (26:47) to that will be commentary by Christopher on the commentary of his father. And then there will be some commentary by Christopher on the Athrabeth text. And then we go back to the Athrabeth text and it's just… Speaker 5 (27:00) And then there's an appendix that also has commentary. Yes, yes. Speaker 2 (27:05) So, Christopher comments on the Athrabeth and on his father's commentary on the Athrabeth. Speaker 5