LITMIR.BIZ

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my father appears to have hesitated long on the matter of the elvish or mortal nature of Beren.

In the tale there is, necessarily, a quite different reason for the hostility and distrust shown to Beren in Artanor (Doriath)—namely that ‘the Elves of the woodland thought of the Gnomes of Dor Lómin as treacherous creatures, cruel and faithless’ (see below, p. 65). It seems clear that at this time the history of Beren and his father (Egnor) was only very sketchily devised; there is in any case no hint of the story of the outlaw band led by his father and its betrayal by Gorlim the Unhappy (The Silmarillion pp. 162ff.) before the first form of the Lay of Leithian, where the story appears fully formed (the Lay was in being to rather beyond this point by the late summer of 1925). But an association of Beren’s father (changed to Beren himself) with Úrin (Húrin) as ‘brother in arms’ is mentioned in the typescript version of the tale (pp. 44–5); according to the latest of the outlines for Gilfanon’s Tale (I. 240) ‘Úrin and Egnor marched with countless battalions’ (against the forces of Melko).

      In the old story, Tinúviel had no meetings with Beren before the day when he boldly accosted her at last, and it was at that very time that she led him to Tinwelint’s cave; they were not lovers, Tinúviel knew nothing of Beren but that he was enamoured of her dancing, and it seems that she brought him before her father as a matter of courtesy, the natural thing to do. The betrayal of Beren to Thingol by Daeron (The Silmarillion p. 166) therefore has no place in the old story—there is nothing to betray; and indeed it is not shown in the tale that Dairon knew anything whatsoever of Beren before Tinúviel led him into the cave, beyond having once seen his face in the moonlight.

Despite these radical differences in the narrative structure, it is remarkable how many features of the scene in Tinwelint’s hall (pp. 12–13), when Beren stood before the king, endured, while all the inner significance was shifted and enlarged. To the beginning go back, for instance, Beren’s abashment and silence, Tinúviel’s answering for him, the sudden rising of his courage and uttering of his desire without preamble or hesitation. But the tone is altogether lighter and less grave than it afterwards became; in the jeering laughter of Tinwelint, who treats the matter as a jest and Beren as a benighted fool, there is no hint of what is explicit in the later story: ‘Thus he wrought the doom of Doriath, and was ensnared within the curse of Mandos’ (The Silmarillion p. 167). The Silmarils are indeed famous, and they have a holy power (p. 34), but the fate of the world is not bound up with them (The Silmarillion p. 67); Beren is an Elf, if of a feared and distrusted people, and his request lacks the deepest dimension of outrage; and he and Tinúviel are not lovers.

      In this passage is the first mention of the Iron Crown of Melko, and the setting of the Silmarils in the Crown; and here again is a detail that was never lost: ‘Never did this crown leave his head’ (cf. The Silmarillion p. 81: ‘That crown he never took from his head, though its weight became a deadly weariness’).

      But from this point Vëannë’s story diverges in an altogether unexpected fashion from the later narrative. At no other place in the Lost Tales is the subsequent transformation more remarkable than in this, the precursor of the story of the capture of Beren and Felagund and their companions by Sauron the Necromancer, the imprisonment and death of all save Beren in the dungeons of Tol-in-Gaurhoth (the Isle of Werewolves in the river Sirion), and the rescue of Beren and overthrow of Sauron by Lúthien and Huan.

Most notably, what may be referred to as ‘the Nargothrond Element’ is entirely absent, and in so far as it already existed had as yet made no contact with the story of Beren and Tinúviel (for Nargothrond, not yet so named, at this period see pp. 81, 123–4). Beren has no ring of Felagund, he has no companions on his northward journey, and there is no relationship between (on the one hand) the story of his capture, his speech with Melko, and his dispatch to the house of Tevildo, and (on the other) the events of the later narrative whereby Beren and the band of Elves out of Nargothrond found themselves in Sauron’s dungeon. Indeed, all the complex background of legend, of battles and rivalries, oaths and alliances, out of which the story of Beren and Lúthien arises in The Silmarillion, is very largely absent. The castle of the Cats ‘is’ the tower of Sauron on Tol-in-Gaurhoth, but only in the sense that it occupies the same ‘space’ in the narrative: beyond this there is no point in seeking even shadowy resemblances between the two establishments. The monstrous gormandising cats, their kitchens and their sunning terraces, and their engagingly Elvish-feline names (Miaugion, Miaulë, Meoita) all disappeared without trace. Did Tevildo? It would scarcely be true, I think, to say even that Sauron ‘originated’ in a cat: in the next phase of the legends the Necromancer (Thû) has no feline attributes. On the other hand it would be wrong to regard it as a simple matter of replacement (Thû stepping into the narrative place vacated by Tevildo) without any element of transformation of what was previously there. Tevildo’s immediate successor is ‘the Lord of Wolves’, himself a werewolf, and he retains the Tevildo-trait of hating Huan more than any other creature in the world. Tevildo was ‘an evil fay in beastlike shape’ (p. 29); and the battle between the two great beasts, the hound against the werewolf (originally the hound against the demon in feline form) was never lost.

      When the tale returns to Tinúviel in Artanor the situation is quite the reverse: for the story of her imprisonment in the house in Hirilorn and her escape from it never underwent any significant change. The passage in The Silmarillion (p. 172) is indeed very brief, but its lack of detail is due to compression rather than to omission based on dissatisfaction; the Lay of Leithian, from which the prose account in The Silmarillion directly derives, is in this passage so close, in point of narrative detail, to the Tale of Tinúviel as to be almost identical with it.

      It may be observed that in this part of the story the earliest version had a strength that was diminished later, in that the duration of Tinúviel’s imprisonment and her journey to Beren’s rescue relates readily enough to that of Beren’s captivity, which was intended by his captors to be unending; whereas in the later story there is a great deal of event and movement (with the addition of Lúthien’s captivity in Nargothrond) to be fitted into the time when Beren was awaiting his death in the dungeon of the Necromancer.

While the strong element of ‘explanatory’ beast-fable (concerning cats and dogs) was to be entirely eliminated, and Tevildo Prince of Cats replaced by the Necromancer, Huan nonetheless remained from it as the great Hound of Valinor. His encounter with Tinúviel in the woods, her inability to escape from him, and indeed his love for her from the moment of their meeting (suggested in the tale, p. 23, explicit in The Silmarillion p. 173), were already present, though the context of their encounter and the motives of Huan were wholly different from the absence of ‘the Nargothrond Element’ (Felagund, Celegorm and Curufin).

In the story of the defeat of Tevildo and the rescue of Beren the germ of the later legend is clearly seen, though for the most part only in broad structural resemblances. It is curious to observe that the loud speaking of Tinúviel sitting perched on the sill of the kitchen hatch in the castle of the Cats, so that Beren might hear, is the precursor of her singing on the bridge of Tol-in-Gaurhoth the song that Beren heard in his dungeon (The Silmarillion p. 174). Tevildo’s intention to hand her over to Melko remained in Sauron’s similar purpose (ibid.); the killing of the cat Oikeroi (p. 28) is the germ of Huan’s fight with Draugluin—the skin of Huan’s dead opponent is put to the same use in either case (pp. 30–1, The Silmarillion pp. 178–9); the battle of Tevildo and Huan was to become that of Huan and Wolf-Sauron, and with essentially the same outcome: Huan released his enemy when he yielded the mastery of his dwelling. This last is very notable: the utterance by Tinúviel of the spell which bound

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