The Shaping of Middle-earth. Christopher Tolkien

is his first appearance in the Lay of Leithian (III. 191, 195).

      The seven sons of Fëanor with the same name-forms as here in S have appeared in the Lay of the Children of Húrin (III. 65, 86); the naming of Damrod and Díriel together in S suggests that they were already twin brothers.

      Of the sons of Fingolfin Turgon of course goes back to the Lost Tales, where he was the son, not the grandson, of Finwë; the other son Finweg appears in the Lay of the Children of Húrin, where the emendation to Fingon (see III. 5, 80) is later than S – and the Quenta, where he was still Finweg in the text as first written.

      The sons of Finrod first emerge here, and as the inserted passage in S was first written Orodreth was apparently the eldest son; Angrod was Anrod; and Felagund was Felagoth. Felagoth occurs as an intervening stage between Celegorm and Felagund in the A-text of the Lay of Leithian (III. 169, 195).

4

      In this section again S moves at a step close to the essential structure of the narrative in The Silmarillion, though there are important features not yet present. I have discussed previously (I. 156–8) the radical differences between the tale of The Theft of Melko and the story in The Silmarillion, and it will be seen that it was with S that almost all these differences entered: there is thus no need to repeat the comparison again here. But various more minor matters may be noticed.

      The quarrel of the Noldorin princes has as yet none of the complexity and subtlety that entered into it afterwards with the history of Míriel, the first wife of Finwë and mother of Fëanor; the quarrel is in any case treated with great brevity.

      It is said here that ‘Fëanor has cursed for ever anyone, God or Elf or mortal that shall come hereafter, who touches [the Silmarils]’. In §5, by a later interpolation, the oath is taken by Fëanor and his sons at the time of the torchlit concourse in Tûn, but the statement in §4 my father allowed to stand, clearly because he overlooked it. In the alliterative fragment The Flight of the Noldoli, however, which on general grounds I assume to belong to the earlier part of 1925 (III. 131), the oath is sworn by Fëanor and his sons as in the interpolation in S §5, ‘in the mighty square upon the crown of Côr’ (see III. 136). I incline to think that the statement here in §4 was a slip of memory.

      The events immediately following the council of the Gods in which Morgoth’s lies were disclosed and Fëanor banished from Tûn (in S the banishment is not said to be limited to a term of years) are not yet given the form they have in The Silmarillion. The entire story of Morgoth’s going to Formenos (not yet so named) and his speech with Fëanor before the doors (The Silmarillion pp. 71–2) has yet to appear. Morgoth’s northward movement up the coast in feint is also absent; rather he comes at once to Arvalin ‘where the shadow is thickest in all the world’, as is said in The Silmarillion (p. 73) of Avathar.

      In the story of Morgoth’s encounter with Ungoliant and the destruction of the Trees details of the final version appear, as Ungoliant’s ascent of the great mountain (later named Hyarmentir) ‘from pinnacle to pinnacle’, and the ladder made for Morgoth to climb. There is no mention of the great festival, but it appears in §5: it looks as if my father omitted to include it earlier and brought it in a bit further on as an afterthought.

      In the tale of The Theft of Melko Ungoliant fled south at once after the destruction of the Trees (I. 154), and of Melko’s subsequent movements after his crossing of the Ice it is only told (by Sorontur to Manwë, I. 176) that he was busy building himself a new dwelling-place in the region of the Iron Mountains. But in S the story of ‘the Thieves’ Quarrel’ and Morgoth’s rescue by the Balrogs emerges suddenly fully-formed.

5

      From the account of the great festival (see commentary on §4) is absent both the original occasion for holding it (commemoration of the coming of the Eldar to Valinor, I. 143) and that given in The Silmarillion (the autumn feast: pp. 74–5). The later feature that the Teleri were not present appears (see I. 157); but there is no suggestion of the important elements of Fëanor coming alone to the festival from Formenos, the formal reconciliation with Fingolfin, and Fëanor’s refusal to surrender the Silmarils before he heard the news of his father’s death and the theft of the jewels (The Silmarillion pp. 75, 78–9).

      In the later emendations to the text of S we see the growth of the story of the divided counsels of the Gnomes, with the introduction of the attempt of Finrod (later Finarfin) to calm the conflicting factions – though this element was present in the tale of The Flight of the Noldoli, where Finwë Nólemë plays the part of the appeaser (I. 162). After a good deal of further shifting in this passage in later texts, and the introduction of Galadriel, the alignment, and the motives, of the princes as they appear in The Silmarillion are more complex (pp. 83–4); but the element is already present that only one of Finrod’s sons sided with him (here Felagund, in The Silmarillion Orodreth).

      The emendation making Fingolfin and Finweg (Fingon) rule over ‘a half of the Noldoli of Tûn’ must be incorrect; my father probably intended the revised text to read ‘over the Noldoli of Tûn’.

      The rapid shifting in the part of Finrod (Finarfin) in these events can be observed in the successive interpolations made in S. It seems that in the original text he did not appear at all (the first mention of him is in the interpolated passage in §3, p. 15). He is said not to have left Tûn; then he is said to have been slain at Swanhaven; and finally it is told that he and his sons were not at Swanhaven, but left Tûn reluctantly, carrying with them many things of their making. Finrod was then introduced as only arriving with his people in the far North after the burning of the ships by the Fëanorians on the other side of the strait. As S was originally written Fingolfin, deserted and shipless, returned to Valinor, and it was his son Finweg (Fingon) who led the main host over the Grinding Ice; but with the introduction of Finrod he becomes the one who returned. (Finweg as the leader of the host was not then changed to Fingolfin, but this was obviously an oversight.)

      In the account of the northward journey of the Noldoli after the battle of Swanhaven it seems that all the host was embarked in the ships of the Teleri, since Mandos’ emissary hails them from a high cliff ‘as they sail by’; but this may be merely due to compression, since in the Tale (I. 166) some marched along the shore while ‘the fleet coasted beside them not far out to sea’, and the same is told in The Silmarillion (‘some by ship and some by land’, p. 87). The storm raised by Uinen is not mentioned.

      It is curious that the curse upon the Gnomes, that they should suffer from treachery and the fear of treachery among their own kindred, is separated from the Prophecy of Mandos; but it is not said by whom this curse was pronounced. Nothing is told in S as originally written of the content of the Prophecy of Mandos, save that it concerned ‘the fate of after days’, but my father subsequently added that it told of ‘the curse of war against one another because of Swanhaven’, thus bringing the ‘curse’ into the content of the ‘Prophecy’, as in The Silmarillion. There is no trace of the old prophecies concerning Turgon and Gondolin (I. 167, 172), but nor is there any suggestion of the nature of the doom of the Noldor as it is stated in The Silmarillion.

      For the original story of the crossing of the Grinding Ice by the Gnomes, where there is no element of treachery (though the blaming of Fëanor was already present), see I. 167–9.

6

      The making of the Sun and Moon is here compressed into a couple of phrases. Virtually all of the extremely elaborate account in the old Tale of the Sun and Moon has disappeared: the tears of Vána leading to the last fruit of Laurelin, the breaking of the ‘Fruit of Noon’, the Bath of the Setting Sun where the Sun-maiden and her ship were drawn on coming out of the East, the song of Lórien leading to the last flower of Silpion, the fall of the ‘Rose of Silpion’ which caused the markings on the Moon, the refusal to allow Silmo