The Children of Húrin

APPENDIX

These interrelated but independent stories had from far back stood out from the long and complex history of Valar, Elves and Men in Valinor and the Great Lands; and in the years that followed his abandonment of the Lost Tales before they were completed my father turned away from prose composition and began work on a long poem with the title Túrin son of Húrin and Glórund the Dragon, later changed in a revised version to The Children of Húrin. This was in the earlier 1920s, when he held appointments at the University of Leeds. For this poem he employed the ancient English alliterative metre (the verse form of Beowulf and other Anglo-Saxon poetry), imposing on modern English the demanding patterns of stress and ‘initial rhyme’ observed by the old poets: a skill in which he achieved great mastery, in very different modes, from the dramatic dialogue of The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth to the elegy for the men who died in the battle of the Pelennor Fields. The alliterative Children of Húrin was by far the longest of his poems in this metre, running to well over two thousand lines; yet he conceived it on so lavish a scale that even so he had reached no further in the narrative than the assault of the Dragon on Nargothrond when he abandoned it. With so much more of the Lost Tale still to come it would have needed on this scale many more thousands of lines; while a second version, abandoned at an earlier point in the narrative, is about double the length of the first version to that same point.

In that part of the legend of the Children of Húrin that my father achieved in the alliterative poem the old story in The Book of Lost Tales was substantially extended and elaborated. Most notably, it was now that the great underground fortress-city of Nargothrond emerged, and the wide lands of its dominion (a central element not only in the legend of Túrin and Niënor but in the history of the Elder Days of Middle-earth), with a description of the farmlands of the Elves of Nargothrond that gives a rare suggestion of the ‘arts of peace’ in the ancient world, such glimpses being few and far between. Coming south along the river Narog Túrin and his companion (Gwindor in the text in this book) found the lands near the entrance to Nargothrond to all appearance deserted:

And so the two travellers came to the doors of Nargothrond, in the gorge of the Narog:

Seized by Elves they were haled through the portal, which closed behind them:

But in the text of The Children of Húrin given in this book we are told no more than this (†):

How did this come about? In what follows I shall try to answer that question.

It seems virtually certain that all that my father wrote of his alliterative poem on Túrin was accomplished at Leeds, and that he abandoned it at the end of 1924 or early in 1925; but why he did so must remain unknown. What he then turned to is however not mysterious: in the summer of 1925 he embarked on a new poem in a wholly different metre, octosyllabic rhyming couplets, entitled The Lay of Leithian ‘Release from Bondage’. Thus he took up now another of the tales that he described years later, in 1951, as I have already noted, as full in treatment, independent, and yet linked to ‘the general history’; for the subject of The Lay of Leithian is the legend of Beren and Lúthien. He worked on this second long poem for six years, and in its turn abandoned it, in September 1931, having written more than 4000 lines. As does the alliterative Children of Húrin which it succeeded and supplanted, this poem represents a substantial advance in the evolution of the legend from the original Lost Tale of Beren and Lúthien.

While The Lay of Leithian was in progress, in 1926, he wrote a ‘Sketch of the Mythology’, expressly intended for R.W. Reynolds, who had been his teacher at King Edward’s school in Birmingham, ‘to explain the background of the alliterative version of Túrin and the Dragon’. This brief manuscript, which would run to some twenty printed pages, was avowedly written as a synopsis, in the present tense and in a succinct style; and yet it was the starting-point of the subsequent ‘Silmarillion’ versions (though that name was not yet given). But while the entire mythological conception was set out in this text, the tale of Túrin has very evidently pride of place – and indeed the title in the manuscript is ‘Sketch of the mythology with especial reference to the “Children of Húrin”’, in keeping with his purpose in writing it.

In 1930 there followed a much more substantial work, the Quenta Noldorinwa (the History of the Noldor: for the history of the Noldorin Elves is the central theme of ‘The Silmarillion’). This was directly derived from the ‘Sketch’, and while much enlarging the earlier text and writing in a more finished manner, my father nonetheless still saw the Quenta very much as a summarising work, an epitome of far richer narrative conceptions: as is in any case clearly shown by the sub-title that he gave to it, in which he declared that it was ‘a brief history [of the Noldor] drawn from the Book of Lost Tales’.

It is to be borne in mind that at that time the Quenta represented (if only in a somewhat bare structure) the full extent of my father’s ‘imagined world’. It was not the history of the First Age, as it afterwards became, for there was as yet no Second Age, nor Third Age; there was no Númenor, no hobbits, and of course no Ring. The history ended with the Great Battle, in which Morgoth was finally defeated by the other Gods (the Valar), and by them ‘thrust through the Door of Timeless Night into the Void, beyond the Walls of the World’; and my father wrote at the end of the Quenta: ‘Such is the end of the tales of the days before the days in the Northern regions of the Western world.’

Thus it will seem strange indeed that the Quenta of 1930 was nonetheless the only completed text (after the ‘Sketch’) of ‘The Silmarillion’ that he ever made; but as was so often the case, external pressures governed the evolution of his work. The Quenta was followed later in the 1930s by a new version in a beautiful manuscript, bearing at last the title Quenta Silmarillion, History ofthe Silmarilli. This was, or was to be, much longer than the preceding Quenta Noldorinwa, but the conception of the work as essentially a summarising of myths and legends (themselves of an altogether different nature and scope if fully told) was by no means lost, and is again defined in the title: ‘The Quenta Silmarillion . . .. This is a history in brief drawn from many older tales; for all the matters that it contains were of old, and still are among the Eldar of the West, recounted more fully in other histories and songs.’

It seems at least probable that my father’s view of The Silmarillion did actually arise from the fact that what may be called the ‘Quenta phase’ of the work in the 1930s began in a condensed synopsis serving a particular purpose, but then underwent expansion and refinement in successive stages until it lost the appearance of a synopsis, but nonetheless retaining, from the form of its origin, a characteristic ‘evenness’ of tone. I have written elsewhere that ‘the compendious or epitomising form and manner of The Silmarillion, with its suggestion of ages of poetry and ‘‘lore” behind it, strongly evokes a sense of “untold tales”, even in the telling of them; “distance” is never lost. There is no narrative urgency, the pressure and fear of the immediate and unknown event. We do not actually see the Silmarils as we see the Ring.’

However, the Quenta Silmarillion in this form came to an abrupt and, as it turned out, a decisive end in 1937. The Hobbit was published by George Allen and Unwin on 21 September of that year, and not long afterwards, at the invitation of the publisher, my father sent in a number of his manuscripts, which were delivered in London on 15 November 1937. Among these was the Quenta Silmarillion, so far as it then went, ending in the middle of a sentence at the foot of a page. But while it was gone he continued the narrative in draft form as far as Túrin’s flight from Doriath and his taking up the life of an outlaw:

This is the forerunner of the passage, in the text in this book p. 98, at the beginning of Túrin among the Outlaws.

My father had reached these words when the Quenta Silmarillion and the other manuscripts were returned to him; and three days later, on 19 December 1937, he wrote to Allen and Unwin saying: ‘I have written the first chapter of a new story about Hobbits – “A long expected party”.’

It was at this point 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. The further history from that point remained during the years that followed in the simple, 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.

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:

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.

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 came 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’).

The second matter concerns the story of the slaying of Glaurung at the crossing of the ravine. There are here a draft and a final version. In the draft, Túrin and his companions climbed up the further side of the chasm until they came beneath the brink; they hung there as the night passed, and Túrin ‘strove with dark dreams of dread in which all his will was given to clinging and holding’. When day came Glaurung prepared to cross at a point ‘many paces to the northward’, and so Túrin had to climb down to the river-bed and then up the cliff again to get beneath the Dragon’s belly.

In the final version (†) Túrin and Hunthor were only part way up the further side when Túrin said that they were wasting their strength in climbing up now, before they knew where Glaurung would cross; ‘they halted therefore and waited’. It is not said that they descended from where they were when they ceased to climb, and the passage concerning Túrin’s dream ‘in which all his will was given to clinging’ reappears from the draft text. But in the revised story there was no need for them to cling: they could and surely would have descended to the bottom and waited there. In fact, this is what they did: it is said in the final text (Unfinished Tales, p. 134) that they were not standing in Glaurung’s path and that Túrin ‘clambered along the water-edge to come beneath him’. It seems then that the final story carries an unneeded trait from the previous draft. To give it coherence I have emended (†) ‘since they were not standing right in Glaurung’s path’ to ‘since they were not right in Glaurung’s path’, and ‘clambered along the water-edge’ to ‘clambered along the cliff’.

These are small matters in themselves, but they clarify what are perhaps the most sharply visualised scenes in the legends of the Elder Days, and one of the greatest events.