Before their departure from Valinor there took place the dreadful event that marred the history of the Noldor in Middle-earth. F?anor demanded of those Teleri, the third host of the Eldar on the Great Journey, who dwelt now on the coast of Aman, that they give up to the Noldor their fleet of ships, their great pride, for without ships the crossing to Middle-earth by such a host would not be possible. This the Teleri refused utterly.
Then F?anor and his people attacked the Teleri in their city of Alqualond?, the Haven of the Swans, and took the fleet by force. In that battle, which was known as The Kinslaying, many of the Teleri were slain. This is referred to in The Tale of Tinúviel (p. 42): ‘the evil deeds of the Gnomes at the Haven of the Swans’, and see p. 130, lines 514–19.
F?anor was slain in battle soon after the return of the Noldor to Middle-earth, and his seven sons held wide lands in the east of Beleriand, between Dorthonion (Taur-na-fuin) and the Blue Mountains.
The second son of Finw? was Fingolfin (the half-brother of F?anor), who was held the overlord of all the Noldor; and he with his son Fingon ruled Hithlum, which lay to the north and west of the great chain of Ered Wethrin, the Mountains of Shadow. Fingolfin died in single combat with Morgoth. The second son of Fingolfin, the brother of Fingon, was Turgon, the founder and ruler of the hidden city of Gondolin.
The third son of Finw?, the brother of Fingolfin and half-brother of F?anor, was in earlier texts Finrod, later Finarfin (see p. 104). The eldest son of Finrod/Finarfin was in earlier texts Felagund, but later Finrod; he, inspired by the magnificence and beauty of Menegroth in Doriath, founded the underground fortress-city of Nargothrond, for which he was named Felagund, ‘Lord of Caves’: thus earlier Felagund = later Finrod Felagund.
The doors of Nargothrond opened onto the gorge of the river Narog in West Beleriand; but Felagund’s realm extended far and wide, east to the river Sirion and west to the river Nenning that reached the sea at the haven of Eglarest. But Felagund was slain in the dungeons of Th? the Necromancer, later Sauron; and Orodreth, the second son of Finarfin, took the crown of Nargothrond, as told in this book (pp. 109, 120).
The other sons of Finarfin, Angrod and Egnor, vassals of their brother Finrod Felagund, dwelt on Dorthonion, looking northwards over the vast plain of Ard-galen. Galadriel, the sister of Finrod Felagund, dwelt long in Doriath with Melian the Queen. Melian (in early texts Gwendeling and other forms) was a Maia, a spirit of great power who took human form and dwelt in the forests of Beleriand with King Thingol: she was the mother of Lúthien and the foremother of Elrond.
In the sixtieth year after the return of the Noldor, ending many years of peace, a great host of Orcs came down from Angband, but was utterly defeated and destroyed by the Noldor. This was called Dagor Aglareb, the Glorious Battle; but the Elvish lords took warning from it, and set the Siege of Angband, which lasted for almost four hundred years.
The Siege of Angband ended with a terrible suddenness (though long prepared) on a night of midwinter. Morgoth released rivers of fire that ran down from Thangorodrim, and the great grassy plain of Ard-galen that lay to the north of Dorthonion was transformed into a parched and arid waste, known thereafter by a changed name, Anfauglith, the Gasping Dust.
This catastrophic assault was called Dagor Bragollach, the Battle of Sudden Flame (p. 106). Glaurung Father of Dragons emerged from Angband now for the first time in his full might; vast armies of Orcs poured southwards; the Elvish lords of Dorthonion were slain, and a great part of the warriors of B?or’s people (pp. 105–6). King Fingolfin and his son Fingon were driven back with the warriors of Hithlum to the fortress of Eithel Sirion (Sirion’s Well), where the great river rose in the east face of the Mountains of Shadow. The torrents of fire were stopped by the Mountains of Shadow, and Hithlum and Dor-lómin remained unconquered.
It was in the year after the Bragollach that Fingolfin, in a fury of despair, rode to Angband and challenged Morgoth.
*
BEREN AND LúTHIEN
IN A LETTER of my father’s written on the 16th of July 1964 he said:
The germ of my attempt to write legends of my own to fit my private languages was the tragic tale of the hapless Kullervo in the Finnish Kalevala. It remains a major matter in the legends of the First Age (which I hope to publish as The Silmarillion), though as ‘The Children of Húrin’ it is entirely changed except in the tragic ending. The second point was the writing, ‘out of my head’, of ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, the story of Idril and Earendel, during sick-leave from the army in 1917; and by the original version of the ‘Tale of Lúthien Tinúviel and Beren’ later in the same year. That was founded on a small wood with a great undergrowth of ‘hemlock’ (no doubt many other related plants were also there) near Roos in Holderness, where I was for a while on the Humber Garrison.
My father and mother were married in March 1916, when he was twenty-four and she was twenty-seven. They lived at first in the village of Great Haywood in Staffordshire; but he embarked for France and the Battle of the Somme early in June of that year. Taken ill, he was sent back to England at the beginning of November 1916; and in the spring of 1917 he was posted to Yorkshire.
This primary version of The Tale of Tinúviel, as he called it, written in 1917, does not exist—or more precisely, exists only in the ghostly form of a manuscript in pencil that he all but entirely erased for most of its length; over this he wrote the text that is for us the earliest version. The Tale of Tinúviel was one of the constituent stories of my father’s major early work of his ‘mythology’, The Book of Lost Tales, an exceedingly complex work which I edited in the first two volumes of The History of Middle-earth, 1983–4. But since the present book is expressly devoted to the evolution of the legend of Beren and Lúthien I will here very largely pass by the strange setting and audience of the Lost Tales, for The Tale of Tinúviel is in itself almost entirely independent of that setting.