The world was fair, the mountains tall,
In Elder Days before the fall
Of mighty kings in Nargothrond
And Gondolin, who now beyond
The Western Seas have passed away. . . .
And this was to be the crown and completion of the whole: the doom of the Noldorin Elves in their long struggle against the power of Morgoth, and the parts that Húrin and Túrin played in that history; ending with the tale of Eärendil, who escaped from the burning ruin of Gondolin.
When, many years later, early in 1950, The Lord of the Rings was finished, my father turned with energy and confidence to ‘the Matter of the Elder Days’, now become ‘the First Age’; and in the years immediately following he took out many old manuscripts from where they had long lain. Turning to The Silmarillion, he covered at this time the beautiful manuscript of the Quenta Silmarillion with corrections and expansions; but that revision ceased in 1951 before he reached the story of Túrin, where the Quenta Silmarillion was abandoned in 1937 with the advent of ‘the new story about Hobbits’.
He began a revision of the Lay of Leithian (the poem in rhyming verse telling the story of Beren and Lúthien that was abandoned in 1931) that soon became almost a new poem, of much greater accomplishment; but this petered out and was ultimately abandoned. He embarked on what was to be a long saga of Beren and Lúthien in prose, closely based on the rewritten form of the Lay; but that too was abandoned. Thus his desire, shown in successive attempts, to render the first of the ‘great tales’ on the scale that he sought was never fulfilled.
At that time also he turned again at last to the ‘great tale’ of the Fall of Gondolin, still extant only in the Lost Tale from some thirty-five years before and in the few pages devoted to it in the Quenta Noldorinwa of 1930. This was to be the presentation, when he was at the height of his powers, in close narrative and in all its bearings, of the extraordinary tale that he had read to the Essay Society of his college at Oxford in 1920, and which remained throughout his life a vital element in his imagination of the Elder Days. The special link with the tale of Túrin lies in the brothers Húrin, father of Túrin, and Huor, father of Tuor. Húrin and Huor in their youth entered the Elvish city of Gondolin, hidden within a circle of high mountains, as is told in The Children of Húrin (†); and afterwards, in the battle of Unnumbered Tears, they met again with Turgon, King of Gondolin, and he said to them (†): ‘Not long now can Gondolin remain hidden, and being discovered it must fall.’ And Huor replied: ‘Yet if it stands only a little while, then out of your house shall come the hope of Elves and Men. This I say to you, lord, with the eyes of death: though we part here for ever, and I shall not look on your white walls again, from you and from me a new star shall arise.’
This prophecy was fulfilled when Tuor, first cousin to Túrin, came to Gondolin and wedded Idril, daughter of Turgon; for their son was Eärendil: the ‘new star’, ‘hope of Elves and Men’, who escaped from Gondolin. In the prose saga of The Fall of Gondolin that was to be, begun probably in 1951, my father recounted the journey of Tuor and his Elvish companion, Voronwë, who guided him; and on the way, alone in the wilderness, they heard a cry in the woods:
And as they waited one came through the trees, and theysaw that he was a tall Man, armed, clad in black, with a longsword drawn; and they wondered, for the blade of thesword also was black, but the edges shone bright and cold.
That was Túrin, hastening from the sack of Nargothrond (†); but Tuor and Voronwë did not speak to him as he passed, and ‘they knew not that Nargothrond had fallen, and this was Túrin son of Húrin, the Blacksword. Thus only for a moment, and never again, did the paths of those kinsmen, Túrin and Tuor, draw together.’
In the new tale of Gondolin my father brought Tuor to the high place in the Encircling Mountains from where the eye could travel across the plain to the Hidden City; and there, grievously, he stopped, and never went further. And so in The Fall of Gondolin likewise he failed of his purpose; and we see neither Nargothrond nor Gondolin with his later vision.
I have said elsewhere that ‘with the completion of the great “intrusion” and departure of The Lord of the Rings, it seems that he returned to the Elder Days with a desire to take up again the far more ample scale with which he had begun long before, in The Book of Lost Tales. The completion of the Quenta Silmarillion remained an aim; but the “great tales”, vastly developed from their original forms, from which its later chapters should be derived, were never achieved.’ These remarks are true of the ‘great tale’ of The Children of Húrin as well; but in this case my father achieved much more, even though he was never able to bring a substantial part of the later and hugely extended version to final and finished form.
At the same time as he turned again to the Lay of Leithian and The Fall of Gondolin he began his new work on The Children of Húrin, not with Túrin’s childhood, but with the latter part of the story, the culmination of his disastrous history after the destruction of Nargothrond. This is the text in this book from The Return of Túrin to Dor-lómin (†) to his death. Why my father should have proceeded in this way, so unlike his usual practice of starting again at the beginning, I cannot explain. But in this case he left also among his papers a mass of later but undated writing concerned with the story from Túrin’s birth to the sack of Nargothrond, with great elaboration of the old versions and expansion into narrative previously unknown.
By far the greater part of this work, if not all of it, belongs to the time following the actual publication of The Lord of the Rings. In those years The Children of Húrin became for him the dominant story of the end of the Elder Days, and for a long time he devoted all his thought to it. But he found it hard now to impose a firm narrative structure as the tale grew in complexity of character and event; and indeed in one long passage the story is contained in a patchwork of disconnected drafts and plot-outlines.
Yet The Children of Húrin in its latest form is the chief narrative fiction of Middle-earth after the conclusion of The Lord of the Rings; and the life and death of Túrin is portrayed with a convincing power and an immediacy scarcely to be found elsewhere among the peoples of Middle-earth. For this reason I have attempted in this book, after long study of the manuscripts, to form a text that provides a continuous narrative from start to finish, without the introduction of any elements that are not authentic in conception.
(2) THE COMPOSITION OF THE TEXT
In Unfinished Tales, published more than a quarter of a century ago, I presented a partial text of the long version of this tale, known as the Narn, from the Elvish title Narn i Chîn Húrin, the Tale of the Children of Húrin. But that was one element in a large book of various content, and the text was very incomplete, in keeping with the general purpose and nature of the book: for I omitted a number of substantial passages (and one of them very long) where the Narn text and that in the much briefer version in The Silmarillion are very similar, or where I decided that no distinctive ‘long’ text could be provided.
The form of the Narn in this book therefore differs in a number of ways from that in Unfinished Tales, some of them deriving from the far more thorough study of the formidable complex of manuscripts that I made after that book was published. This led me to different conclusions about the relations and sequence of some of the texts, chiefly in the extremely confusing evolution of the legend in the period of ‘Túrin among the Outlaws’. A description and explanation of the composition of this new text of The Children of Húrin follows here.
An important element in all this is the peculiar status of the published Silmarillion; for as I have mentioned in the first part of this Appendix my father abandoned the Quenta Silmarillion at the point that he had reached (Túrin’s becoming an outlaw after his flight from Doriath) when he began The Lord of the Rings in 1937. In the formation of a narrative for the published work I made much use of The Annals of Beleriand, originally a ‘Tale of Years’, but which in successive versions grew and expanded into annalistic narrative in
parallel with the successive ‘Silmarillion’ manuscripts, and which extended to the freeing of Húrin by Morgoth after the deaths of Túrin and Niënor.
Thus the first passage that I omitted from the version of the Narn i Chîn Húrin in Unfinished Tales (p. 58 and note 1) is the account of the sojourn of Húrin and Huor in Gondolin in their youth; and I did so simply because the tale is told in The Silmarillion (pp. 158–9). But my father did in fact write two versions: one of them was expressly intended for the opening of the Narn, but was very closely based on a passage in The Annals of Beleriand, and indeed for most of its length differs little. In The Silmarillion I used both texts, but here I have followed the Narn version.
The second passage that I omitted from the Narn in Unfinished Tales (pp. 65–6 and note 2) is the account of the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, an omission made for the same reason; and here again my father wrote two versions, one in the Annals, and a second, much later but with the Annals text in front of him, and for the most part closely followed. This second narrative of the great battle was, again, expressly intended as a constituent element in the Narn (the text is headed Narn II, i.e. the second section of the Narn), and states at the outset († in the text in this book): ‘Here there shall be recounted only those deeds which bear upon the fate of the House of Hador and the children of Húrin the Steadfast.’ In pursuit of this my father retained from the Annals account only the description of the ‘westward battle’ and the destruction of the host of Fingon; and by this simplification and reduction of the narrative he altered the course of the battle as told in the Annals. In The Silmarillion I of course followed the Annals, though with some features taken from the Narn version; but in this book I have kept to the text that my father thought appropriate to the Narn as a whole.
From Túrin in Doriath the new text is a good deal changed in relation to that in Unfinished Tales. There is here a range of writing, much of it very rough, concerned with the same narrative elements at different stages of development, and in such a case it is obviously possible to take different views on how the original material should be treated. I have come to think that when I composed the text in Unfinished Tales I allowed myself more editorial freedom than was necessary. In this book I have reconsidered the original manuscripts and reconstituted the text, in many (usually very minor) places restoring the original words, introducing sentences or brief passages that should not have been omitted, correcting a few errors, and making different choices among the original readings.
As regards the structure of the narrative in this period of Túrin’s life, from his flight out of Doriath to the lair of the outlaws on Amon Rûdh, my father had certain narrative ‘elements’ in mind: the trial of Túrin before Thingol; the gifts of Thingol and Melian to Beleg; the maltreatment of Beleg by the outlaws in Túrin’s absence; the meetings of Túrin and Beleg. He moved these ‘elements’ in relation to each other, and placed passages of dialogue in different contexts; but found it difficult to compose them into a settled ‘plot’ – ‘to find out what really happened’. But it seems now clear to me, after much further study, that my father did achieve a satisfying structure and sequence for this part of the story before he abandoned it; and also that the narrative in much reduced form that I composed for the published Silmarillion conforms to this – but with one difference.
In Unfinished Tales there is a third gap in the narrative on p. 96: the story breaks off at the point where Beleg, having at last found Túrin among the outlaws, cannot persuade him to return to Doriath († in the new text), and does not take up again until the outlaws encounter the Petty-dwarves. Here I referred again to The Silmarillion for the filling of the gap, noting that there follows in the story Beleg’s farewell to Túrin and his return to Menegroth ‘where he received the sword Anglachel from Thingol and lembas from Melian’. But it is in fact demonstrable that my father rejected this; for ‘what really happened’ was that Thingol gave Anglachel to Beleg after the trial of Túrin, when Beleg first set off to find him. In the present text therefore the gift of the sword is placed at that point (†), and there is no mention there of the gift of lembas. In the later passage, when Beleg returned to Menegroth after the finding of Túrin, there is of course no reference to Anglachel in the new text, but only to Melian’s gift.
This is a convenient point to notice that I have omitted from the text two passages that I included in Unfinished Tales but which are parenthetical to the narrative: these are the history of how the Dragon-helm came into the possession of Hador of Dor-lómin (Unfinished Tales, p. 75), and the origin of Saeros (Unfinished Tales, p. 77). It seems, incidentally, certain from a closer understanding of the relations of the manuscripts that my father rejected the name Saeros and replaced it by Orgol, which by ‘linguistic accident’ coincides with Old English orgol, orgel ‘pride’. But it seems to me too late now to remove Saeros.
The major lacuna in the narrative as given in Unfinished Tales (p. 104) is filled in the new text on pages 141 to 181, from the end of the section Of Mîm the Dwarf and through The Land of Bow and Helm, The Death of Beleg, Túrin in Nargothrond, and The Fall of Nargothrond.
There is a complex relationship in this part of the ‘Túrin saga’ between the original manuscripts, the story as it is told in The Silmarillion, the disconnected passages collected in the appendix to the Narn in Unfinished Tales, and the new text in this book. I have always supposed that it was my father’s general intention, in the fullness of time, when he had achieved to his satisfaction the ‘great tale’ of Túrin, to derive from it a much briefer form of the story in what one may call ‘the Silmarillion mode’. But of course this did not happen; and so I undertook, now more than thirty years ago, the strange task of trying to simulate what he did not do: the writing of a ‘Silmarillion’ version of the latest form of the story, but deriving this from the heterogeneous materials of the ‘long version’, the Narn. That is Chapter 21 in the published Silmarillion.
Thus the text in this book that fills the long gap in the story in Unfinished Tales is derived from the same original materials as is the corresponding passage in The Silmarillion (pp. 204–15), but they are used for a different purpose in each case, and in the new text with a better understanding of the labyrinth of drafts and notes and their sequence. Much in the original manuscripts that was omitted or compressed in The Silmarillion remains available; but where there was nothing to be added to the Silmarillion version (as in the tale of the death of Beleg, derived from the Annals of Beleriand) that version is simply repeated.
In the result, while I have had to introduce bridging passages here and there in the piecing together of different drafts, there is no element of extraneous ‘invention’ of any kind, however slight, in the longer text here presented. The text is nonetheless artificial, as it could not be otherwise: the more especially since this great body of manuscript represents a continual evolution in the actual story. Drafts that are essential to the formation of an uninterrupted narrative may in fact belong to an earlier stage. Thus, to give an example from an earlier point, a primary text for the story of the coming of Túrin’s band to the hill of Amon Rûdh, the dwelling place that they found upon it and their life there, and the ephemeral success of the land of Dor-Cúarthol, was written before there was any suggestion of the Petty-dwarves; and indeed a fully-developed description of Mîm’s house beneath the summit appears before Mîm himself.
In the remainder of the story, from Túrin’s return to Dor-lómin, to which my father gave a finished form, there are naturally very few differences from the text in Unfinished Tales. But there are two matters of detail in the account of the attack on Glaurung at Cabed-en-Aras where I have emended the original words and which should be explained.
The first concerns the geography. It is said (†) that when Túrin and his companions set out from Nen Girith on the fateful evening they did not go straight towards the Dragon, lying on the further side of the ravine, but took first the path towards the Crossings of Teiglin; and ‘then, before they ca
me so far, they turned southward by a narrow track’ and went through the woods above the river towards Cabed-en-Aras. As they approached, in the original text of the passage, ‘the first stars glimmered in the east behind them’.
When I prepared the text for Unfinished Tales I did not observe that this could not be right, since they were certainly not moving in a westerly direction, but east, or southeast, away from the Crossings, and the first stars in the east must have been before them, not behind them. When discussing this in The War of the Jewels (1994, p. 157) I accepted the suggestion that the ‘narrow track’ going southward turned again westward to reach the Teiglin. But this seems to me now to be improbable, as being without point in the narrative, and that a much simpler solution is to emend ‘behind them’ to ‘before them’, as I have done in the new text.
The sketch map that I drew in Unfinished Tales (p. 149) to illustrate the lie of the land is not in fact well oriented. It is seen from my father’s map of Beleriand, and is so reproduced in my map for The Silmarillion, that Amon Obel was almost due east from the Crossings of Teiglin (‘the moon rose beyond Amon Obel’, p. 241), and the Teiglin was flowing south-east or south-southeast in the ravines. I have now redrawn the sketch map, and have entered also the approximate place of Cabed-en-Aras (it is said in the text, †, that ‘right in the path of Glaurung there lay now one of these gorges, by no means the deepest, but the narrowest, just north of the inflow of Celebros’).
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