The Lays of Beleriand (9 page)

even in Angband the Orcs trembled.

Then the word wandered down the ways of the forest that Turin Thalion was returned to war;

and Thingol heard it...

lead in the end to

In Menegroth, and in the deep halls of Nargothrond, and even in the hidden realm of Gondolin, the fame of the deeds of the Two Captains was heard; and in Angband also they were known.

But in the later story Turin was hidden under the name Gorthol, the read Helm, and it was his wearing of the Dragon-helm that revealed him to Morgoth. There is no suggestion of this in the earlier phase of the legend; the Dragon-helm makes no further appearance here in the poem.

A table may serve to clarify the development: Tale.

Turin's prowess on the

marches of Doriath

(Beleg not mentioned).

Death of Orgof.

Turin leaves Doriath;

a band forms round him

which includes Beleg.

Great prowess of the

band.

Lay.

Turin and Beleg

companions-in-arms on

the marches of Doriath;

Turin wears the

Dragon-helm.

Death of Orgof.

Turin leaves Doriath;

a band of outlaws forms

round him which attacks

all comers.

The band captures Beleg

(who knows nothing of

Turin's leaving Doriath)

and ties him to a tree.

Turin has him set free;

suffers a change of heart;

Beleg joins the band; all

swear an oath.

Great prowess of the band

against the Orcs.

Silmarillion and Narn

As in the poem.

Death of Saeros.

Turin leaves Doriath

and joins a band of

desperate outlaws.

The band captures Beleg

(whe is searching for

Turin bearing Thingol's

pardon) (and ties him to a

tree, Narn).

Turin has him set free;

suffers a change of heart;

but Beleg will not join the

band and departs. (No

mention of oath.)

(Later Beleg returns and

joins the band:)

Land of Dor-Cuarthol.

Before leaving this part of the story, it may be suggested that lines 605 ff., in which Turin declares to Beleg that This band alone /I count as comrades, contain the germ of Turin's words to him in the Xarn, p.94:

The grace of Thingol will not stretch to receive these companions of my fall, I think; but I will not part with them now, if they do not wish to part with me, &c.

The traitor, who betrayed the band to the Orcs, now first appears. At first he is called Bauglir both in A and in B as originally typed; and it might be thought that the name had much too obviously an evil significance. The explanation is quite clearly, however, that Bauglir became Blodrin at the same time as Bauglir replaced Belcha as a name of: Morgoth. (By the time my father reached line 990 Blodrin is the name as first written in both A and B; while similarly at line 1055 Bauglir is Morgoth's name, not Belcha, both in A and B as first written.) The change of Ban (father of Blodrin) to Bor was passing; he is Ban in the 1926 'Sketch of the Mythology', and so remained until, much later, he disappeared.

Blodrin's origin is interesting:

trapped as a child

he was dragged by the Dwarves to their deep mansions, and in Nogrod nurtured, and in nought was like, spite blood and birth, to the blissful Elves. (666 -- g) Thus Blodrin's evil nature is explicitly ascribed to the influence of the bearded Dwarves / of troth unmindful (1148-9); and Blodrin follows Ufedhin of the Tale of the Nauglafring as an example of the sinister .

effect of Elvish association with Dwarves -- not altogether absent in the tale of Eol and Maeglin as it appears in The Silmarillion. Though the nature -- and name -- of the traitor in Turin's band went through Protean mutations afterwards, it is not inconceivable that recollection of the Dwarvish element in Blodrin's history played some part in the emergence of Mim in this role. On the early hostile view of the Dwarves see II. 247.

The words of the poem just cited arise from the 'betrayal' of Flinding by his dwarvish knife, which slipped from its sheath; so later, in the Lay of Leithian, when Beren attempted to cut a second Silmaril from the Iron Crown (lines 4160-2)

The dwarvish steel of cunning blade

by treacherous smiths of Nogrod made

snapped...

The idea expressed in the Tale (II. 76) that Turin was taken alive by Morgoth's command 'lest he cheat the doom that was devised for him'

reappears in the poem: lest he flee his fate (705).

The rest of the story as told in the poem differs only in detail from that in the Tale. The survival of Beleg in the attack by Orcs and his swift recovery from his grievous wounds (II. 77), present in much changed circumstances in The Silmarillion (p. 206), is here made perhaps more comprehensible, in that Elves from Doriath, who were searching for Turin (654 -- 5), found Beleg and took him back to be healed by Melian in the Thousand Caves (727 -- 3I). In the account of Beleg's meeting with Flinding in Taur-na-Fuin, led to him by his blue lamp, the poem is following the Tale very closely.* My father's painting of the scene (Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien no. 37) was almost certainly made a few years later, when the Elf lying under the tree was still called Flinding son of Fuilin (in the Tale bo-Dhuilin, earlier go-Dhuilin, son of Duilin; the

. patronymic prefix has in the poem (814, 900) reverted to the earlier form go-, see II. 119).

In the Tale it is only said (II. 81 ) that Flinding was of the people of the

- Rodothlim 'before the Orcs captured him'-, from the poem (819 -- 21) it

; seems that he was carried off, with many others, from Nargothrond, but this can scarcely be the meaning, since nought yet knew they [the Orcs] of Nargothrond (1578). The marginal note in B against these lines 'Captured in battle at gates of Angband' refers to the later story, first

' appearing in the 1930 'Silmarillion'.

The poem follows the Tale in the detail of Flinding's story to Beleg, except that in the poem he was recaptured by the Orcs in Taur-na-Fuin (846ff.) and escaped again (crept from their clutches as a crawling worm, 879), whereas in the Tale he was not recaptured but 'fled heedlessly'(II. 79). The notable point in the Tale that Flinding 'was overjoyed to have speech with a free Noldo' reappears in the poem: Marvelling he heard/the ancient tongue of the Elves of Tun. The detail of their encountering of the Orc-host is slightly different: in the Tale the Orcs had changed their path, in the poem it seems that Beleg and Flinding merely came more quickly than did the Orcs to the point where the Orc-road emerged from the edge of the forest. In the Tale it seems indeed that the Orcs had not left the forest when they encamped for the night: the eyes of the wolves 'shone like points of red light among the trees', and

'Beleg and Flinding laid Turin down after his rescue 'in the woods at no

:great distance from the camp'. The cup outcarven on the cold hill-of the poem (1036), where the Orcs made their bivouac, is the 'bare

;dell' of The Silmarillion.

In contrast to the Tale (see p. 26) Beleg is now frequently called

:Beleg the bowman, his great bow (not yet named) is fully described,

."and his unmatched skill as an archer (1071 ff.). There is also in the poem the feature of the arrow Dailir, unfailingly found and always unharmed (1080 ff.), until it broke when Beleg fell upon it while carrying Turin

:,(1189 -- 92): of this there is never a mention later. The element of Beleg's The element of the blue lamp is lacking from the account in The Silmarillion; see Unfinished Tales p. 51 note 2.)

archery either arose from, or itself caused, the change in the story of the entry of Beleg and Flinding into the Orc-camp that now appears: in the Tale they merely 'crept between the wolves at a point where there was a great gap between them', whereas in the poem Beleg performed the feat of shooting seven wolves in the darkness, and only so was 'a great gap opened' (1097). But the words of the Tale, 'as the luck of the Valar had it Turin was lying nigh', are echoed in

till the Gods brought them

and the craft and cunning of the keen huntsman to Turin the tall where he tumbled lay(I 130 -- 2): The lifting and carrying of Turin by the two Elves, referred to in the Tale as 'a great feat', 'seeing that he was a Man and of greater stature than they' (II. So), is expanded in the poem (1156 ff.) into a comment on the stature of Men and Elves in the ancient time, which agrees with earlier statements on this topic (see I. 235, II. 142, 220). The notable lines though Men were of mould less mighty builded

ere the earth's goodness from the Elves they drew (1157 -- 8) are to be related to the statements cited in II. 326: 'As Men's stature grows [the Elves'] diminishes', and 'ever as Men wax more powerful and numerous so the fairies fade and grow small and tenuous, filmy and transparent, but Men larger and more dense and gross'. The mention here (1164) of the ten races of Hithlum occurs nowhere else, and it is not clear whether it refers to all the peoples of Men and Elves who in one place or another in the Lost Tales are set in Hithlum, which as I have remarked 'seems to have been in danger of having too many inhabitants'

(see II. 249 251).

The Tale has it that it was Beleg's knife that had slipped from him as he crept into the camp; in the poem it is Flinding's (1142 ff.). In the Tale Beleg returned to fetch his sword from the place where he had left it, since they could carry Turin no further; in the poem they carried Turin all the way up to the dark thicket in a dell whence they had set out (1110, 1202). The 'whetting spell' of Beleg over his (still unnamed) sword is an entirely new element (and without trace later); it arises in association with line 1141, No blade mould bite on the bonds he more. In style it is reminiscent of Luthien's 'lengthening spell' in Canto V of the Lay of Leithian; but of the names in the spell, of Ogbar, Caurin, Rodrim, Saithnar, Nargil, Celeg Aithorn, there seems to be now no other trace.

There now occurs in the poem the mysterious leering laugh (1224), to which it seems that the ghostly laughter of grim phantom in line 1286 refers, and which is mentioned again in the next part of the poem (1488 -- 90). The narrative purpose of this is evidently to cause the covering of the lamp and to cause Beleg to work too quickly in the darkness at the cutting of the bonds. It may be also that the wounding of leg's hand when he put it on the point of Dailir his arrow (1187)acc ounts for his clumsiness; for every aspect of this powerful scene hadbee n pondered and refined.

In the poem the great storm is introduced: first presaged in lines1064

ff., when Beleg and Flinding were at the edge of the dell (as it is inThe Silmarillion):

Lo! black cloud-drifts

surged up like smoke from the sable North,

and the sheen was shrouded of the shivering moon; the wind came wailing from the woeful mountains, and the heath unhappy hissed and whispered

and bursting at last after Beleg's death (1301 ff.), to last all through the following day, during which Turin and Flinding crouched on the hillside (1320, 1330 -- r). On account of the storm the Orcs were unable to find Turin, and departed, as in The Silmarillion; in the Tale Flinding roused Turin to flee as soon as the shouts of discovery were heard from theOrc

-camp, and nothing more is said of the matter. But in the poem it is still, as in the Tale, the sudden uncovering of Flinding's lamp as he fellbac k from Turin's assault that illumined Beleg's face; in the last accounttha t my father wrote of this episode he was undecided whether it was the cover falling off the lamp or a great flash of lightning that gave the light, and in the published work I chose the latter.

There remain a few isolated points, mostly concerning names. In thispart of the poem we meet for the first time:

Nargothrond 821, 904;

Taur-ma-Fuin (for Taur Fuin of the Lost Tales) 766, 828; called alsoDe adly Nightshade 767, 837, 13I7, and Forest of Night 896; Dor-na-Fauglith 946, 1035, 1326, called also the Plains of Drouth826, the Thirsty Plain 947 (and in A, note to 826, the Blasted Plain).

The name Dor-na-Fauglith arose during the composition of the poem(see note to 946). By this time the story of the blasting of the great northern plain, so that it became a dusty desert, in the battle that endedthe Siege of Angband, must have been conceived, though it does not appear in writing for several years.

Here also is the first reference to the triple peaks of Thangorodrim(1000

), called the thunderous towers (951), though in the 'Prologue'to the poem it is said that Hurin was set on its steepest peak (96); and from lines 713- 14 (as rewritten in the B-text) we learn that Angband waswro ught at the roots of the great mountain.

The name Fangros (631; Fangair A) occurs once elsewhere, in a veryobs cure note, where it is apparently connected with the burning of the ships of the Noldoli.

Melian's name Mablui -- by the hands enchanted of Melian Mablui, 731 -- clearly contains mab 'hand', as in Mablung, Ermabwed (see II. 339).

That the Dwarves were said in A and originally in B to dwell in the South (1147, emended in B to East) is perhaps to be related to the statement in the Tale of the Nauglafring that Nogrod lay 'a very long journey southwoard beyond the wide forest on the borders of those great heaths nigh Umboth-muilin the Pools of Twilight' (II. 225).

I cannot explain the reference in line 1006 to the wild wheatfields of the wargod's realm; nor that in the lines concerning Beleg's fate after death to the long waiting of the dead in the halls of the Moon (1284).

III.

FAILIVRIN.

Flinding go-Fuilin faithful-hearted

the brand of Beleg with blood stained

lifted.with loathing from the leafy mould,

and hid it in the hollow of a huge thorn-tree; then he turned to Turin yet tranced brooding, and softly said he: 'O son of Hurin,

unhappy-hearted, what helpeth it

to sit thus in sorrow's silent torment

without hope or counsel?' But Hurin's son,