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 in 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?’