The Lays of Beleriand (49 page)

99 - 150. This is considered by all critics one of the noblest passages in the Geste.

112. Notice the double sense of within (macrocosmic and microcosmic). That the original poet may have been unconscious of this need not detract from our pleasure.

[Lewis was clearly right to suspect that the original poet had no such double sense in mind.]

117. H The legions of his marching hate

[Lewis was criticising the original line in B his evil legions' marshalled hate. With retention of marshalled for marching Lewis's line was adopted.]

[In the following comment the reading criticised was: swift ruin red of fire and sword

leapt forth on all denied his word,

and all the lands beyond the hills 125

were filled arith sorrow and with ills.]

124. The relative understood. I suspect both the construction and the word denied, neither of which has the true ring. H reads:

And ruin of red fire and sword

To all that would not hail him lord

Came fast, and far beyond the hills

Spread Northern wail and iron ills.

And therefore in wet woods and cold etc.

130. 'A weak line' (Peabody) .

[The original reading in B which Lewis criticised was who had this king once held in scorn, changed to who once a prince of Men was born]

137. Some emend. The rhythm, however, is good, and probably would occur more often if the syllabic prudery of scribes had not elsewhere 'emended' it.

172. LH When I lost all

[No alteration made to the text.]

173-4. L Thus, out of met night while he gazed, he thought, with heavy heart amazed

[No alteration made to the text.]

[In the following comment the reading criticised was: But ere he dared to call her name

or ask how she escaping came]

175-6. she escaping. A Latinised phrase, at once betraying very late corruption. The ugly assonace ere... dared confirms my suspicion of the distych. No satisfactory emendation has been proposed.

[she escaping came was changed to she escaped and came]

196. H Whining, his spirit ached for ease. Peabody observes of the whole passage: 'The combination of extreme simplicity, with convincing truth of psychology, and the pathos which, without comment, makes us aware that Gorlim is at once pardonable and unpardonable, render this part of the story extremely affecting.'

[No alteration made to line 196]

208. haply. LH chance.

[No alteration made to the text.]

209 - 10. One of the few passages in which Schick's theory of deliberate internal rime finds some support.

[See the comment on line 68.]

2I5. that. H the.

[No alteration made to the text.]

[The lines 313 - 16 referred to in the following comment had been bracketed for exclusion, and that at 3 I 7 changed to Then, before the text went to Lewis.]

313. H reads Thus Morgoth loved that his own foe Should in his service deal the blow.

Then Beren...

'Our scribe is right in his erasure of the second distych, but wrong in his erasure of the first' (Peabody). The first erased couplet certainly deserves to remain in the text; indeed its loss seriously impairs the reality of Morgoth. I should print as in H, enclosing Thus...

blow in brackets or dashes.

[My father ticked the first two lines (313-14), which may show that he accepted this suggestion. I have let all four stand in the text.]

400. Of Canto z as a whole Peabody writes: 'If this is not good romantic narrative, I confess myself ignorant of the meaning of the words.'

401. et seq. A more philosophical account of the period is given in the so called Poema Historiale, probably contemporary with the earliest MSS of the Geste.

The relevant passage runs as follows:

There was a time before the ancient sun

And swinging wheels of heaven had learned

to run

More certainly than dreams; for dreams

themselves

Had bodies then and filled the world with elves.

The starveling lusts whose walk is now

confined

To darkness and the cellarage of the mind,

And shudderings and despairs and shapes of sin Then walked at large, and were not cooped

within.

Thought cast a shadow: brutes could speak:

and men

Get children on a star. For spirit then

Kneaded a fluid world and dreamed it new

Each moment. Nothing yet was false or true.

[Humphrey Carpenter, who cites these verses in The Inklings, says (p. 30): Sometimes Lewis actually suggested entirely new passages to replace lines he thought poor, and here too he ascribed his own versions to supposedly historical sources. For example, he suggested that the lines about the "elder days" [401 ff.] could be replaced by the following stanza of his own, which he described as "the so called Poema Historiale

[&c.]".' But he cannot have intended these lines, which not only, as Humphrey Carpenter says, show 'how greatly Lewis's poetic imagination differed from Tolkien's', but are in a different metre, as a replacement; see Lewis's comment on lines 438 - 42.]

413. Another instance where the 'internal rime' theory is justified.

438-42. Almost certainly spurious. This abstract philosophical statement - which would not surprise us in the scholastic verse of the period, such as the Poema Historiale - is quite foreign to the manner of the Geste.

L reads:

...singing in the wood

And long he stood and long he stood

Till, many a day, with hound and hail

His people seek him ere they sail,

Then, finding not, take ship with tears.

But after a long tale of years

(Though but an hour to him it seemed)

He found her where she lay and dreamed.

[My father marked lines 438 ff. in the typescript, but made no change to the text.]

516. Flowering candles. The reader should notice how the normally plain style of the Geste has yet the power of rising into such expressions as this without losing its unity.

[In the following comment the reading criticised was: the silent elms stood dark and tall,

and mund their boles did shadows fall 518

where glimmered faint...]

518. did PRK, let JL. Though neither is good, PRK seems the better reading. Its slight clumsiness may be passed over by a reader intent on the story: the 'neat'

evasion let, with its purely formal attribution of an active role to the trees, is much worse, as cheap scenery is worse than a plain backcloth. H reads: The silent elms stood tall and grey

And at the roots long shadows lay

519-42. 'This passage', Peabody observes, 'amply atones for the poet's lapse (dormitat Homerus) in 518. Ipsa mollities.'

[I do not understand why Lewis picked particularly on did at line 518: the use of did as a metrical aid was very common in the B-text as Lewis saw it

- it occurred twice, for instance, in the passage here praised: did flutter 523, did waver 533, both subsequently changed.]

555 - 6. 'O si sic omnia! Does not our poet show glimpses of the true empyrean of poesy, however, in his work-manlike humility, he has chosen more often to inhabit the milder and aerial (not aetherial) middle heaven?' (Pumpernickel). Some have seen in the conception of death-into-life a late accretion. But cf.

the very early lyric preserved in the MS N3057, now in the public library at Narrowthrode (the ancient Nargothrond), which is probably as early as the Geste, though like all the scholastic verse it strikes a more modern note:

Because of endless pride

Reborn with endless error,

Each hour I look aside

Upon my secret mirror,

And practice postures there

To make my image fair.

You give me grapes, and I,

Though staring, turn to see

How dark the cool globes lie

In the white hand of me,

And stand, yet gazing thither,

Till the live clusters wither.

So should I quickly die

Narcissus-like for want,

Save that betimes my eye

Sees there such shapes as haunt

Beyond nightmare and make

Pride humble for pride's sake.

Then, and then only, turning

The stiff neck mund, I grow

A molten man all burning

And look behind, and know

Who made the flaw, what light makes dark,

what fair

Makes foul my shadowy form reflected there,

That self-love, big with love, dying, its child may bear.

[It is a matter for speculation, what the author of Nargothrond thought of the public library at Narrowthrode. - This poem, with some alterations, was included in The Pilgrim's Regress (1933).]

563-92. Sic in all MSS. The passage is, of course, genuine, and truly worthy of the Geste. But surely it must originally have stood at 391 Of 393? The artificial insertion of Beren's journey in its present place -

where it appears as retrospect not as direct narrative, though defensible, belongs to a kind of art more sophisticated than that of the Geste: it is just such a transposition as a late Broseliandic literary redactor would make under the influence of the classical epic.

[A quarter of a century later, or more, my father rewrote this part of the poem; and he took Lewis's advice. See p. 352.]

[The original reading of B criticised in the next comment (lines 629 ff.) was:

Then stared he wild in dumbness bound

at silent trees, deserted ground;

the dizzy moon was twisted grey

in tears, for she had fled away.)

629 - 30 Thus in PRKJ. The Latinised adverbial use of the adjective in mild and the omitted articles in the next line are suspicious.

L But wildly Beren gazed around

On silent trees (and)* empty ground.

The dizzy moon etc.

(* Peabody supplies and. But the monosyllabic foot is quite possible. Cf. 687.)

H But wildly Beren gazed around.

Emptied the tall trees stood. The ground

Lay empty. A lonely moon looked grey

Upon the untrodden forest may.

I prefer H because it gets rid of the conceit (it is little more) about the moon. (This sort of half-hearted personification is, of course, to be distinguished from genuine mythology.)

[Against this my father scribbled on Lewis's text: 'Not so!! The moon

' was dizzy and twisted because of the tears in his eyes.' Nonetheless he struck the two lines out heavily in the typescript, and I have excluded them from the text.]

635-6. An excellent simile.

641. Peabody, though a great friend to metrical resolutions in general, finds this particular resolution (Bewildered enchanted) 'singularly harsh'. Perhaps the original text read wildered.

: [The reading in B was bewildered, enchanted and forlorn. My father then changed bewildered to wildered and placed it after enchanted.]

651-2. JHL transpose.

[This was done. Cf. lines 1222 - 3, where these lines are repeated but left in the original sequence.]

[After line 652 B had:

Thus thought his heart. No words would come

from his fast lips, for smitten dumb

a spell lay on him, as a dream

in longing chained beside the stream.

After seeing Lewis's comment my father marked this passage 'revise', and also with a deletion mark, on which basis I have excluded the four lines from the text.]

Only in PR. Almost undoubtedly spurious. 'The latest redactors', says Pumpernickel, 'were always needlessly amplifying, as if the imagination of their readers could do nothing for itself, and thus blunting the true force and energy of the Geste....'

Read:

A heartache and a loneliness

- Enchanted waters pitiless.'

A summer maned etc.

[heartache was the original reading of B at 651 x, changed later to hunger, but retained at 1223.]

653-72. Of this admirable passage Peabody remarks: 'It is as if the wood itself were speaking.'

677-9. LH From dim cave the damp moon eyed

White mists that float from earth to hide

The sluggard morrow's sun and drip

[No alteration made to the text.]

683. Beat, which is utterly inappropriate to the sound described, must be a corruption. No plausible emendation has been suggested.

[My father scribbled in a hesitant substitute for beat and a different form for line 684 (of his own feet on leafy....) but I cannot read the rhyming words.)

685-708. In praise of this passage I need not add to the in-numerable eulogies of my predecessors.

710. Bentley read sam far off, to avoid the ugliness that always results from w-final followed by an initial vowel in the next word.

[The reading criticised was saw afar, and the line was changed as suggested.)

715. Stole he PRK. He stole JHL. PRK looks like the metrical 'improvement' of a scribe: dearly bought by a meaningless inversion.

[The reading criticised was Then stole he nigh, changed to Then nigh he stole.)

727 - 45 This passage, as it stands, is seriously corrupt, though the beauty of the original can still be discerned.

[See the following notes.]

[The original reading of B in lines 729 - 30 was: the hillock green he leapt upon -

the elfin loveliness was gone;]

729. Intolerable bathos and prose in a passage of such tension.

[The original reading of B in line 739 was:

its echoes wove a halting spell:]

739. Why halting? 'Let the amanuensis take back his rubbish' (Bentley) .

[Against this my father wrote 'A spell to halt anyone', but in the margin of B he wrote staying/binding, and I have adopted binding in the text.]