The Book of Mazarbul

Tolkien made the pages. He wrote them in runes, burnt the edges with his pipe, punched stitch-holes, and washed them with paint until they looked like dried blood. The publisher left the facsimiles out of the first edition. The novel had to do the work in prose, which turned out to be the better instrument.

Gandalf reads aloud from what is left. The first surviving leaf is numbered one-three, so at least two are gone. Flói is killed by an arrow in the sunlit dale. Óin goes to the West-gate and does not come back. The drum starts. The last line is not even in the same script: a trailing scrawl of elf-letters, as if the writer, in a hurry, reached for the alphabet that would still move.

Mazarbul is Khuzdul for records. The Book of Records is a record of running out of time. Against the Red Book — which survives, is copied, is translated, becomes the thing you are holding — this is the other fate of a chronicle. It is read once, in a room that is about to be attacked again, and then it is a relic.

On the readability rating. Gandalf quotes enough of three pages to reconstruct the colony’s last months. The rest is holes. Later facsimiles are Tolkien’s reconstruction of those pages, not the recovery of a longer text.