Beren and Lúthien
Page 16
The wolvish fell he flung aside
and sprang unto his feet, and wide
staring amid the soundless gloom
1890he gasped as one living shut in tomb.
There to his side he felt her shrink,
felt Lúthien now shivering sink,
her strength and magic dimmed and spent,
and swift his arms about her went.
1895Before his feet he saw amazed
the gems of Fëanor, that blazed
with white fire glistening in the crown
of Morgoth’s might now fallen down.
To move that helm of iron vast
1900no strength he found, and thence aghast
he strove with fingers mad to wrest
the guerdon of their hopeless quest,
till in his heart there fell the thought
of that cold morn whereon he fought
1905with Curufin; then from his belt
the sheathless knife he drew, and knelt,
and tried its hard edge, bitter-cold,
o’er which in Nogrod songs had rolled
of dwarvish armourers singing slow
1910to hammer-music long ago.
Iron as tender wood it clove
and mail as woof of loom it rove.
The claws of iron that held the gem,
it bit them through and sundered them;
1915a Silmaril he clasped and held,
and the pure radiance slowly welled
red glowing through the clenching flesh.
Again he stooped and strove afresh
one more of the holy jewels three
1920that Fëanor wrought of yore to free.
But round those fires was woven fate;
not yet should they leave the halls of hate.
The dwarvish steel of cunning blade
by treacherous smiths of Nogrod made
1925snapped; then ringing sharp and clear
in twain it sprang, and like a spear
or errant shaft the brow it grazed
of Morgoth’s sleeping head, and dazed
their hearts with fear. For Morgoth groaned
1930with voice entombed, like wind that moaned
in hollow caverns penned and bound.
There came a breath; a gasping sound
moved through the halls, as Orc and beast
turned in their dreams of hideous feast;
1935in sleep uneasy Balrogs stirred,
and far above was faintly heard
an echo that in tunnels rolled,
a wolvish howling long and cold.
******
Up through the dark and echoing gloom
1940as ghosts from many-tunnelled tomb,
up from the mountains’ roots profound
and the vast menace underground,
their limbs aquake with deadly fear,
terror in eyes, and dread in ear,
1945together fled they, by the beat
affrighted of their flying feet.
At last before them far away
they saw the glimmering wraith of day,
the mighty archway of the gate—
1950and there a horror new did wait.
Upon the threshold, watchful, dire,
his eyes new-kindled with dull fire,
towered Carcharoth, a biding doom:
his jaws were gaping like a tomb,
1955his teeth were bare, his tongue aflame;
aroused he watched that no one came,
no flitting shade nor hunted shape,
seeking from Angband to escape.
Now past that guard what guile or might
1960could thrust from death into the light?
He heard afar their hurrying feet,
he snuffed an odour strange and sweet;
he smelled their coming long before
they marked the waiting threat at door.
1965His limbs he stretched and shook off sleep,
then stood at gaze. With sudden leap
upon them as they sped he sprang,
and his howling in the arches rang.
Too swift for thought his onset came,
1970too swift for any spell to tame;
and Beren desperate then aside
thrust Lúthien, and forth did stride
unarmed, defenceless to defend
Tinúviel until the end.
1975With left he caught at hairy throat,
with right hand at the eyes he smote—
his right, from which the radiance welled
of the holy Silmaril he held.
As gleam of swords in fire there flashed
1980the fangs of Carcharoth, and crashed
together like a trap, that tore
the hand about the wrist, and shore
through brittle bone and sinew nesh,
devouring the frail mortal flesh;
1985and in that cruel mouth unclean
engulfed the jewel’s holy sheen.
An isolated page gives five further lines in the process of composition:
Against the wall then Beren reeled
but still with his left he sought to shield
fair Lúthien, who cried aloud
to see his pain, and down she bowed
in anguish sinking to the ground.
With the abandonment, towards the end of 1931, of The Lay of Leithian at this point in the tale of Beren and Lúthien my father had very largely reached the final form in narrative structure—as represented in the published Silmarillion. Although, after the completion of his work on The Lord of the Rings, he made some extensive revisions to The Lay of Leithian as it had lain since 1931 (see the Appendix, p. 257), it seems certain that he never extended the story any further in verse, save for this passage found on a separate sheet headed ‘a piece from the end of the poem’.
Where the forest-stream went through the wood,
and silent all the stems there stood
of tall trees, moveless, hanging dark
with mottled shadows on their bark
above the green and gleaming river,
there came through leaves a sudden shiver,
a windy whisper through the still
cool silences; and down the hill,
as faint as a deep sleeper’s breath,
an echo came as cold as death:
‘Long are the paths, of shadow made
where no foot’s print is ever laid,
over the hills, across the seas!
Far, far away are the Lands of Ease,
but the Land of the Lost is further yet,
where the Dead wait, while ye forget.
No moon is there, no voice, no sound
of beating heart; a sigh profound
once in each age as each age dies
alone is heard. Far, far it lies,
the Land of Waiting where the Dead sit,
in their thought’s shadow, by no moon lit.’
THE QUENTA SILMARILLION
In the years that followed, my father turned to a new prose version of the history of the Elder Days, and that is found in a manuscript bearing the title Quenta Silmarillion, which I will refer to as ‘QS’. Of intermediate texts between this and its predecessor the Quenta Noldorinwa (p. 103) there is now no trace, though they must have existed; but from the point where the story of Beren and Lúthien enters the Silmarillion history there are several largely incomplete drafts, owing to my father’s long hesitation between longer and shorter versions of the legend. A fuller version, which may be called for this purpose ‘QS I’, was abandoned, on account of its length, at the point where King Felagund in Nargothrond gave the crown to Orodreth his brother (p. 109, extract from the Quenta Noldorinwa).
This was followed by a very rough draft of the whole story; and that was the basis of a second, ‘short’ version, ‘QS II’, preserved in the same manuscript as QS I. It was very largely from these two versions that I derived the story of Beren and Lúthien as told i
n the published Silmarillion.
The making of QS II was a work still in progress in 1937; but in that year there entered considerations altogether aloof from the history of the Elder Days. On 21 September The Hobbit was published by Allen and Unwin, and was an immediate success; but it brought with it great pressure on my father to write a further book about hobbits. In October he said in a letter to Stanley Unwin, the chairman of Allen and Unwin, that he was ‘a little perturbed. I cannot think of anything more to say about hobbits. Mr Baggins seems to have exhibited so fully both the Took and the Baggins side of their nature. But I have only too much to say, and much already written, about the world into which the hobbit intruded.’ He said that he wanted an opinion on the value of these writings on the subject of ‘the world into which the hobbit intruded’; and he put together a collection of manuscripts and sent them off to Stanley Unwin on 15 November 1937. Included in the collection was QS II, which had reached the moment when Beren took into his hand the Silmaril which he had cut from Morgoth’s crown.
Long afterwards I learned that the list made out at Allen and Unwin of the manuscripts in my father’s consignment contained, in addition to Farmer Giles of Ham, Mr Bliss, and The Lost Road, two elements referred to as Long Poem and The Gnomes Material, titles which carry a suggestion of despair. Obviously the unwelcome manuscripts landed on the desk at Allen and Unwin without adequate explanation. I have told in detail the strange story of this consignment in an appendix to The Lays of Beleriand (1985), but to be brief, it is painfully clear that the Quenta Silmarillion (included in ‘the Gnomes Material’, together with whatever other texts may have been given this name) never reached the publishers’ reader—save for a few pages that had been attached, independently (and in the circumstances very misleadingly) to The Lay of Leithian. He was utterly perplexed, and proposed a solution to the relationship between the Long Poem and this fragment (much approved) of the prose work (i.e. the Quenta Silmarillion) that was (very understandably) radically incorrect. He wrote a puzzled report conveying his opinion, across which a member of the staff wrote, also understandably, ‘What are we to do?’
The outcome of a tissue of subsequent misunderstandings was that my father, wholly unaware that the Quenta Silmarillion had not in fact been read by anybody, told Stanley Unwin that he rejoiced that at least it had not been rejected ‘with scorn’, and that he now certainly hoped ‘to be able, or to be able to afford, to publish the Silmarillion!’
While QS II was gone he continued the narrative in a further manuscript, which told of the death of Beren in The Wolf-hunt of Carcharoth, intending to copy the new writing into QS II when the texts were returned; but when they were, on 16 December 1937, he put The Silmarillion aside. He still asked, in a letter to Stanley Unwin of that date, ‘And what more can hobbits do? They can be comic, but their comedy is suburban unless it is set against things more elemental.’ But three days later, on 19 December 1937, he announced to Allen and Unwin: ‘I have written the first chapter of a new story about Hobbits—“A long expected party”.’
It was at this point, as I wrote in the Appendix to The Children of Húrin, that the continuous and evolving tradition of The Silmarillion in the summarising, Quenta mode came to an end, brought down in full flight, at Túrin’s departure from Doriath, becoming an outlaw. The further history from that point remained during the years that followed in the compressed and undeveloped form of the Quenta of 1930, frozen, as it were, while the great structures of the Second and Third Ages arose with the writing of The Lord of the Rings. But that further history was of cardinal importance in the ancient legends, for the concluding stories (deriving from the original Book of Lost Tales) told of the disastrous history of Húrin, father of Túrin, after Morgoth released him, and of the ruin of the Elvish kingdoms of Nargothrond, Doriath, and Gondolin of which Gimli chanted in the mines of Moria many thousands of years afterwards.
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.
Many years later my father wrote in a letter (16 July 1964): ‘I offered them the legends of the Elder Days, but their readers turned that down. They wanted a sequel. But I wanted heroic legends and high romance. The result was The Lord of the Rings.’
*
When The Lay of Leithian was abandoned there was no explicit account of what followed the moment when ‘the fangs of Carcharoth crashed together like a trap’ on Beren’s hand in which he clutched the Silmaril; for this we must go back to the original Tale of Tinúviel (pp. 77–80), where there was a story of the desperate flight of Beren and Lúthien, of the hunt out of Angband pursuing them, and of Huan’s finding them and guiding them back to Doriath. In the Quenta Noldorinwa (p. 138) my father said of this simply that ‘there is little to tell’.
In the final story of the return of Beren and Lúthien to Doriath the chief (and radical) change to notice is the manner of their escape from the gates of Angband after the wounding of Beren by Carcharoth. This event, which The Lay of Leithian did not reach, is told in the words of The Silmarillion:
Thus the quest of the Silmaril was like to have ended in ruin and despair; but in that hour above the wall of the valley three mighty birds appeared, flying northward with wings swifter than the wind.
Among all birds and beasts the wandering and need of Beren had been noised, and Huan himself had bidden all things watch, that they might bring him aid. High above the realm of Morgoth Thorondor and his vassals soared, and seeing now the madness of the Wolf and Beren’s fall came swiftly down, even as the powers of Angband were released from the toils of sleep. Then they lifted up Beren and Lúthien from the earth, and bore them aloft into the clouds . . .
(As they passed high over the lands) Lúthien wept, for she thought that Beren would surely die; he spoke no word, nor opened his eyes, and knew thereafter nothing of his flight. And at the last the eagles set them down upon the borders of Doriath; and they were come to that same dell whence Beren had stolen in despair and left Lúthien asleep.
There the eagles laid her at Beren’s side and returned to the peaks of Crissaegrim and their high eyries; but Huan came to her, and together they tended Beren, even as before when she healed him of the wound that Curufin gave to him. But this wound was fell and poisonous. Long Beren lay, and his spirit wandered upon the dark borders of death, knowing ever an anguish that pursued him from dream to dream. Then suddenly, when her hope was almost spent, he woke again, and looked up, seeing leaves against the sky; and he heard beneath the leaves singing soft and slow beside him LúthienTinúviel. And it was spring again.
Thereafter Beren was named Erchamion, which is the One-handed; and suffering was graven in his face. But at last he was drawn back to life by the love of Lúthien, and he rose, and together they walked in the woods once more.
*
The story of Beren and Lúthien has now been told as it evolved in prose and verse over twenty years from the original Tale of Tinúviel. After initial hesitation Beren, whose father was at first Egnor the Forester, of the Elvish people called the Noldoli, translated into English as ‘Gnomes’, has become the son of Barahir, a chieftain of Men, and the leader of a band of rebels in hiding against the hateful tyranny of Morgoth. The memorable story has emerged (in 1925, in The Lay of Leithian) of the treachery of Gorlim and the slaying of Barahir (pp. 94 ff.); and while Vëannë who told the ‘lost tale’ knew nothing of what had brought Beren to Artanor, and surmised that it was a simple love of wandering (p. 41), he has become after the death of his father a far-famed enemy of Morgoth forced to flee to the South, where he opens the sto
ry of Beren and Tinúviel as he peers in the twilight through the trees of Thingol’s forest.
Very remarkable is the story, as it was told in The Tale of Tinúviel, of the captivity of Beren, on his journey to Angband in quest of a Silmaril, by Tevildo Prince of Cats; so too is the total subsequent transformation of that story. But if we say that the castle of the cats ‘is’ the tower of Sauron on Tol-in-Gaurhoth ‘Isle of Werewolves’ it can only be, as I have remarked elsewhere, 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, have all vanished without trace. But beyond their hatred of dogs (and the importance to the story of the mutual loathing of Huan and Tevildo) it is evident that the inhabitants of the castle are no ordinary cats: very notable is this passage from the Tale (p. 69) concerning ‘the secret of the cats and the spell that Melko had entrusted to [Tevildo]’:
and those were words of magic whereby the stones of his evil house were held together, and whereby he held all beasts of the catfolk under his sway, filling them with an evil power beyond their nature; for long has it been said that Tevildo was an evil fay in beastlike shape.
It is also interesting to observe in this passage, as elsewhere, the manner in which aspects and incidents of the original tale may reappear but in a wholly different guise, arising from a wholly altered narrative conception. In the old Tale Tevildo was forced by Huan to reveal the spell, and when Tinúviel uttered it ‘the house of Tevildo shook; and there came therefrom a host of indwellers’ (which was a host of cats). In the Quenta Noldorinwa (p. 135) when Huan overthrew the terrible werewolf-wizard Thû, the Necromancer, in Tol-in-Gaurhoth he ‘won from him the keys and the spells that held together his enchanted walls and towers. So the stronghold was broken and the towers thrown down and the dungeons opened. Many captives were released . . .’
But here we move into the major shift in the story of Beren and Lúthien, when it was combined with the altogether distinct legend of Nargothrond. Through the oath of undying friendship and aid sworn to Barahir, the father of Beren, Felagund the founder of Nargothrond was drawn into Beren’s quest of the Silmaril (p. 117, lines 157 ff.); and there entered the story of the Elves from Nargothrond who disguised as Orcs were taken by Thû and ended their days in the gruesome dungeons of Tol-in-Gaurhoth. The quest of the Silmaril involved also Celegorm and Curufin, sons of Fëanor and a powerful presence in Nargothrond, through the destructive oath sworn by the Fëanorians of vengeance against any ‘who hold or take or keep a Silmaril against their will’. The captivity of Lúthien in Nargothrond, from which Huan rescued her, involved her in the plots and ambitions of Celegorm and Curufin: pp. 151–2, lines 247–72.