by John Garth
In that sad band stood Failivrin in horror, and she stretched out her arms towards Túrin, but Túrin was held by the spell of the drake, for that beast had a foul magic in his glance, as have many others of his kind, and he turned the sinews of Túrin as it were to stone, for his eye held Túrin’s eye so that his will died, and he could not stir of his own purpose, yet might he hear and see…Even now did the Orcs begin to drive away that host of thralls, and his heart broke at the sight, yet he moved not; and the pale face of Failivrin faded afar, and her voice was borne to him crying: ‘O Túrin Mormakil, where is thy heart; O my beloved, wherefore dost thou forsake me?’
Knowledge does not bring power. Instead, when the isolating darkness in this tale lifts, the revelation can lacerate. For Turambar and Níniel at the end, the truth is unendurable.
‘The Tale of Turambar’ would not be a success if the hero were simply a puppet in Melko’s maleficent hands. The god’s curse appears to work not only through external circumstance, the ‘bad luck’ that haunts the family, but also through Túrin’s stubborn misjudgements and occasionally murderous impulses. Whereas Beren survives his emotional and physical injuries with innate resilience, Túrin endures his traumas through sheer obduracy, never losing their imprint. He first becomes a warrior to ‘ease his sorrow and the rage of his heart, that remembered always how Úrin and his folk had gone down in battle against Melko’; and later he invokes the memory of the Battle of Unnumbered Tears to persuade the Rodothlim to cast aside their secrecy, courting disaster. The curse is often indistinguishable, then, from what might be called psychological damage.
Tolkien’s declared aim was to create myths and fairy-tales, but there are haunting notes here from a more contemporary repertoire. One is naturalism. The desolation of Túrin’s world is often brought home through modest but eloquent tableaux: his cries as a seven-year-old taken from his mother; the swallows mustering under her roof when he returns years later to find her gone; his wine-soaked hand after murder at the feast. The other is ambiguity. Túrin’s victory over Glorund might be read as a final victory over his fate, yet it brings the curse to its full fruition by withdrawing the veil from Níniel’s memory. His dogged struggle through serial tragedy is courageous, but it causes terrible suffering. Likewise Úrin’s defiant words to Melko, ‘At least none shall pity him for this, that he had a craven for father.’
‘The Tale of Turambar’ is not so much fairy-story as human-story, told by a mortal occupant of the Cottage of Lost Play and immersed in what Tolkien later termed dyscatastrophe. Its only major flaw is the upturn at the very end, where the spirits of Túrin and Níniel pass through purgatorial flame and join the ranks of the Valar. Too similar to the climax of ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’, and contrary to the dark spirit of ‘Turambar’, it seems a clumsy way of depicting the consolatory Joy that Tolkien elsewhere reserved for those who have passed, not merely beyond life, but beyond the created world altogether.
Tolkien, still developing the story of Túrin many years later, wrote in 1951 that it ‘might be said (by people who like that sort of thing, though it is not very useful) to be derived from elements in Sigurd the Volsung, Oedipus, and the Finnish Kullervo’. Yet this is a judgement about criticism, not a denial of influence; and by the time he made the comment he had indeed moved far from the concept of unearthing lost tales. Through the narrator of ‘The Tale of Turambar’ he acknowledges his debt, while declaring the fictional premise of the whole ‘Book of Lost Tales’:
In these days many such stories do Men tell still, and more have they told in the past especially in those kingdoms of the North that once I knew. Maybe the deeds of other of their warriors have become mingled therein, and many matters beside that are not in the most ancient tale – but now I will tell to you the true and lamentable tale…
To Tolkien the philologist, deriving a single story from these overlapping but disparate narratives must have seemed no more strange than reconstructing an unrecorded Indo-European root from related words in various languages. Yet this is neither plagiarism nor, in fact, reconstruction at all, but a highly individual imaginative enterprise. Figures such as Beleg, the fugitive slave Flinding, and bright-eyed Failivrin enter ‘The Tale of Turambar’ unforeshadowed by Tolkien’s sources; the background and web of motives is all his own; and in stitching disparate elements together with many more of his own invention he brings the plot to a pitch of suspense and horror he rarely bettered. Most importantly, perhaps, Tolkien amplified the aspects of these myths and traditions that spoke most eloquently to his own era, replete with tragedy and irony.
Undoubtedly Tolkien meant the sequel to Túrin’s story, ‘The Tale of the Nauglafring’, to be the ‘lost tale’ behind the garbled references in Norse myth to the mysterious Brísingamen, a necklace forged by dwarves, worn by the love-goddess Freyja, and stolen by the trickster Loki. Possibly it was this scheme that originally gave rise to the Silmarils, their fabulous radiance (relating Brísingamen to Old Norse brísingr, ‘fire’), their theft by Melko, and their association with half-divine Tinúviel. However that may be, the curse of Glorund’s hoard now brings Artanor to ruin as Tinwelint orders the gold to be made into a necklace for the Silmaril that Beren cut from Melko’s crown.
The elf-king’s dealings and double-dealings with the dwarven smiths form one of the least satisfying elements in the Lost Tales. Self-interested greed could have sharpened Tinwelint’s wits, but instead it appears to stupefy him. The only real artistic flaw, however, is that the Dwarves, misshapen in body and soul, come close to caricature. The narrative briefly regains potency as Tinwelint appears resplendent in the Necklace of the Dwarves:
Behold now Tinwelint the king rode forth a-hunting, and more glorious was his array than ever aforetime, and the helm of gold was above his flowing locks, and with gold were the trappings of his steed adorned; and the sunlight amid the trees fell upon his face, and it seemed to those that beheld it like to the glorious face of the sun at morning…
The procession of paratactic clauses, fusing annalistic distance with breathless excitement, became a hallmark of Tolkien’s writing. So did what follows: a daring shift from the main event to another scene, cranking up the tension and foreboding before the denouement. We learn of Tinwelint’s fate only when his stricken queen is presented with his head still ‘crowned and helmed in gold’. His glorious ride to the hunt turns out to have been the swansong of Faërie in the Great Lands.
The muted tone of the rest of the tale suggests the ebb of enchantment. Artanor falls not with a bang, but a whimper. Not even Beren and Tinúviel are allowed to escape the decline as they reappear to reclaim the Silmaril. In their second span of life the resurrected lovers are now mortal, and the Necklace hastens Tinúviel’s death; Beren ends in lonely wandering. Deprived even of the honour of a tragic ending, their exit reflects what Tom Shippey has called (with reference to the fate of Frodo in The Lord of the Rings) an ‘unrecognized touch of hardness’ in Tolkien.
But now, probably in 1919 or 1920, he was contemplating a huge narrative enterprise, certainly mournful but nevertheless shot through with splendour and enchantment. He had arrived at the longest-planned story of all, to which the ‘Nauglafring’ was merely the prologue. If the scheme had been realized, Christopher Tolkien calculates, ‘the whole Tale of Eärendel would have been somewhere near half the length of all the tales that were in fact written’. Beyond the arrival of Tinúviel’s granddaughter Elwing at the shoreland refuge of Tuor and the exiles of Gondolin, virtually nothing of the remainder of ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ passed beyond notes and outlines. The tale would have recounted Eärendel’s many hazardous sailings west and his final voyage into the starry skies, transfigured by suffering: a considerably more solemn figure than the blithe fugitive whom Tolkien had envisioned in his poem of September 1914. Meanwhile, the Elves of Kôr would march out into the Great Lands to cast Melko down from the pinnacle of his triumph.
After Eärendel’s tale, two further sections were planned bef
ore the book would be finished. For his account of how the rebel archangel is finally stripped of his powers, Tolkien would have waded into ‘that very primitive undergrowth’ of folklore he had praised in the Kalevala. Melko was to escape his bonds and stir strife among the Elves, mostly now gathered in the Lonely Isle; but he was to be chased up a gigantic pinetree at Tavrobel (Great Haywood) into the sky, becoming a creature of envy ‘gnawing his fingers and gazing in anger on the world’. With his marring of the Sun’s primal magic and the inexorable rise of the human race, the Lost Tales told to Eriol were to reach an end, as the chronological narrative caught up with the Germanic wanderer’s own day.
In a coda involving Eriol (or his son Heorrenda, according to some projections) the faëry island was to be hauled to its latter-day location off the Great Lands of Europe, but then broken asunder into Ireland and Britain in another tussle of the sea gods. The island Elves would march to the aid of their diminishing mainland kin in a war against Melko’s servants: the great Faring Forth. Despite hopes of a new golden age, with the rekindling of the ‘Magic Sun’ or even the Two Trees, it seems that human treachery was to bring about the outright defeat of the Elves, and Men were to begin the invasion of Britain.
The final crisis may be glimpsed in a powerful ‘Epilogue’ that Tolkien dashed down on paper, purporting to be the words of Eriol before he sealed his Book of Lost Tales at Tavrobel:
And now is the end of the fair times come very nigh, and behold, all the beauty that yet was on earth – fragments of the unimagined loveliness of Valinor whence came the folk of the Elves long long ago – now goeth it all up in smoke.
Eriol, writing with the immediacy of a diarist, has fled in the face of a terrible battle between Men on the High Heath nearby – surely Cannock Chase with the Sher Brook (Old English scír, ‘bright’) running down towards Great Haywood:
Behold, I stole by the evening from the ruined heath, and my way fled winding down the valley of the Brook of Glass, but the setting of the Sun was blackened with the reek of fires, and the waters of the stream were fouled with the war of men and grime of strife…
And now sorrow…has come upon the Elves, empty is Tavrobel and all are fled, [?fearing] the enemy that sitteth on the ruined heath, who is not a league away; whose hands are red with the blood of Elves and stained with the lives of his own kin, who has made himself an ally to Melko…
In words that echo the last ride of Tinwelint, Eriol recalls Gilfanon, oldest of the Eldar of the Lonely Isle, in a cavalcade of light and song; and the people of Tavrobel dancing ‘as clad in dreams’ about the grey bridge and the rivers’ meeting. But now, Eriol records, the island Elves are fading too, or Men growing yet more blind. His last words are a prophecy of disenchantment, when most will scoff at the idea of fairies, ‘lies told to the children’. Some will at least regard them fondly as metaphors of nature, ‘a wraith of vanishing loveliness in the trees’. Only a few will believe, and be able to see the Elves thronging their ancient towns in Autumn, their season, ‘fallen as they are upon the Autumn of their days’.
But behold, Tavrobel shall not know its name, and all the land be changed, and even these written words of mine belike will all be lost, and so I lay down the pen, and so of the fairies cease to tell.
It may be no more than coincidence that A Spring Harvest, the posthumous volume of Smith’s poems arranged by Tolkien and Christopher Wiseman, closes with this sestet:
So we lay down the pen,
So we forbear the building of the rime,
And bid our hearts be steel for times and a time
Till ends the strife, and then,
When the New Age is verily begun,
God grant that we may do the things undone.
But it seems equally likely that here, at the projected close of his Lost Tales, Tolkien meant to pay a quiet tribute to G. B. Smith, who had looked forward so eagerly to reading them.
The fading of the Elves, a phenomenon surely intended to ‘explain’ the Shakespearean and Victorian view of fairies, leaves the world and its fate in human hands. On the face of it, this seems a grim conclusion: man, in Eriol’s closing words, is ‘blind, and a fool, and destruction alone is his knowledge’. Tolkien did not get very far with his Lost Tale of how Ilúvatar’s secondborn children arrived in the era of the Sun; but what little he wrote shows that Melko corrupted them early on. Losing their first home through his machinations, unlike the Valar and the Eldar they found no new Eden. ‘The Tale of Turambar’, meanwhile, may be taken as a distillation of Men’s unhappy lot; and even after Melko is banished to the sky and deprived of his earthly powers, he is able to plant evil in the human heart.
There seems every reason to envy the Elves, graced with superhuman skill, beauty, and longevity, living on until ‘the Great End’ with much of the vigour of youth and, should they die from violence or grief, even being reborn as elf-children. Tolkien’s Eldar could not be less like the deathless Struldbruggs of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, whose life is an endless descent into fathomless depths of physical and mental decrepitude.
Yet without the agency of human beings, Ilúvatar’s universal drama would not reach completion. Whereas the cosmogonic Music prescribed the fate of the Elves, and even the Ainur, humans were granted ‘a free virtue’ to act beyond it, so that ‘everything should in shape and deed be completed, and the world fulfilled unto the last and smallest’. Without this ‘free virtue’, it seems, all would be complete in conception (if not execution) as soon as the Music was over; there would be nothing for us to do but follow our pre-ordained steps. (Happily, Tolkien seems not to have tried to illustrate the implication that the Elves, the Valar, and Melko lack free will, which would surely have blighted his narratives.)
Taken together with the Lost Tales, the idea of this ‘free virtue’ sheds light on the riddle of how Melko’s discords may make ‘Life more worth the living’. A parallel may be drawn with a phenomenon that Tolkien found deeply moving: the ‘ennoblement of the ignoble’ through hardship and fear. ‘On a journey of a length sufficient to provide the untoward in any degree from discomfort to fear’, he once wrote, in a transparent reference to the Great War, ‘the change in companions well-known in “ordinary life” (and in oneself) is often startling.’ The potential for such change or ennoblement in the face of danger lies at the heart of all his portrayals of character. It is this equation, by which individuals become far more than the sum of their parts, that takes them beyond the provisions of the Music towards a destination altogether unforeseen. So it is that in Tolkien’s legendarium the weak rise up to shake the world, embodying what he called ‘the secret life in creation, and the part unknowable to all wisdom but One, that resides in the intrusions of the Children of God into the Drama’.
Humans in his pre-Christian mythology cannot commune consciously with their Creator through sacraments and prayer, but glimpse him uncomprehendingly through the sublimities of nature. Tuor and Eriol are captivated by the ambivalent, alien sea because ‘there liveth still in water a deeper echo of the Music of the Ainur than in any substance else that is in the world, and at this latest day many of the Sons of Men will hearken unsatedly to the voice of the Sea and long for they know not what’. What they long for, unconsciously, is eternal life in heaven. It is a yearning for home: the souls of Men will outlive the world in which their bodies die.
One of Tolkien’s most radical imaginative leaps was to put this tenet of his faith in perspective by placing his human figures in a picture dominated by – indeed, painted by – a sibling race with a destiny apart. To Swift, the human desire for immortality was a folly to be satirized without mercy through the Struldbruggs. Tolkien took a more sympathetic view: to him, immortality was indeed in our nature, and the human folly lay only in mistakenly coveting mere corporeal permanence. From the earliest writings onwards, he left the question of what will happen to the Elves after the End a profound enigma. Their own opinion seems to be that they will expire with the world, and they have
little hope of bliss in Ilúvatar’s heaven. Death, Tolkien later wrote, was the ‘Gift of Ilúvatar’ to Men, releasing them into an eternal life that is more than mere longevity. The resurrection of Beren and Tinúviel, therefore, may be sadly brief compared to the earthly span they might have enjoyed as Elves, but implicitly their second death will give them what no other Elves can have: a future ‘beyond the walls of the world’. In Tolkien’s view, that is the ultimate release.
The spring, summer, and ages-long autumn of the Elves may be regarded as a consummation of the intrinsic potential in creation, but a consummation as limited and flawed as the finite world itself. Except for what they have learned of elvish art and grace, Men remain the benighted travellers we first encountered in ‘A Song of Aryador’ of 1915. Meanwhile, the imperfect gods under God are bound to founder in their care of the world. So one of the narrators of the Lost Tales declares that the Valar ought to have gone to war against Melko straight after the destruction of the Two Trees, adding suggestively: ‘and who knows if the salvation of the world and the freeing of Men and Elves shall ever come from them again? Some there are who whisper that it is not so, and hope dwelleth only in a far land of Men, but how so that may be I do not know.’ The implication must surely be that the failure of God’s angelic representatives would ultimately pave the way for God’s direct intervention as Christ.
The Lost Tales emerged at a steady pace. Etymological work among the Oxford English Dictionary slips in the Old Ashmolean took up little more than half the day, and although Tolkien also began taking private pupils in Old English he did not make enough money from this to give up the dictionary work until the spring of 1920. The family moved out of St John Street in late summer of 1919, and Tolkien remained sufficiently unwell to take a small army pension; but, compared to the years before and after, this was a settled interlude of uninterrupted creativity. However, Tolkien never wrote the Lost Tales describing the birth of Men, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, the voyage of Eärendel, the expulsion of Melko, the Faring Forth, or the Battle of the High Heath. The full expression of these events had to wait until he had found a different form for the mythology, and in some points was never achieved. By the early 1920s, problems had come into focus that needed solutions, and his concepts had shifted – not least at the linguistic foundations of his mythology. He continued to refine his invented languages, making time-consuming changes to their internal histories and their phonological and morphological foundations (so, for example, the tongue of the Gnomes now commonly formed plurals by vowel mutation rather than by adding a suffix, as English does in rare instances such as foot/feet*). He revised, rewrote, and rearranged the Lost Tales he had already written. Eriol became Ælfwine, a mariner from Anglo-Saxon England as late as the eleventh century. Tolkien now conceived Elvish Tol Eressëa as an entirely distinct island to the west. He also set to work retelling the story of Turambar as a long narrative poem.