The Book of Lost Tales - J. R. Tolkien [152]
2 The original sentence here was:
Doughty were those Men and great wielders of sword and axe, and still in those unfaded days might mortal weapons wound the bodies of the elfin-folk.
See note 1.
3 The original sentence here was: ‘and those Men being wildered with magics’. See note 1.
4 This sentence, from ‘and yet another sorrow…’, was added to the text later.
5 ‘those’: the text has ‘the Men’, obviously left unchanged through oversight. See note 1.
6 ‘in the earth’ is an emendation of the original reading ‘on the earth’.
7 ‘damasked in strange wise’, i.e. ‘damascened’, ornamentally inlaid with designs in gold and silver. The word ‘damascened’ is used of the sword of Tinwelint made by the Dwarves, on which were seen images of the wolf-hunt (p. 227), and of Glorfindel’s arms (p. 173).
8 The text has ‘Eltas’, but with ‘Ailios’ written above in pencil. Since Ailios appears as the teller at the beginning of the tale, and not as the result of emendation, ‘Eltas’ here was probably no more than a slip.
9 ‘save only’ is a later emendation of the original ‘not even’. See p. 256.
10 It is odd that Gwendelin appears here, not Gwenniel as hitherto in this tale. Since the first part of the tale is in ink over an erased pencil text, the obvious explanation is that the erased text had Gwendelin and that my father changed this to Gwenniel as he went along, overlooking it in this one instance. But the matter is probably more complex—one of those small puzzles with which the texts of the Lost Tales abound—for after the manuscript in ink ceases the form Gwenniel occurs, though once only, and Gwendelin is then used for all the rest of the tale. See Changes made to Names, p. 244.
11 Here the manuscript in ink ends; see p. 221.
12 Against this sentence my father wrote a direction that the story was to be that the Nauglafring caught in the bushes and held the king.
13 A rejected passage in the manuscript here gives an earlier version of the events, according to which it was Gwendelin, not Huan, who brought the news to Beren:
…and her bitter weeping filled the forest. Now there did Gwendeling [sic] gather to her many of the scattered woodland Elves and of them did she hear how matters had fared even as she had guessed: how the hunting party had been surrounded and o’erwhelmed by the Nauglath while the Indrafangs and Orcs fell suddenly with death and fire upon all the realm of Tinwelint, and not the least host was that of Ufedhin that slew the guardians of the bridge; and it was said that Naugladur had slain Tinwelint when he was borne down by numbers, and folk thought Narthseg a wild Elf had led the foemen hither, and he had been slain in the fighting.
Then seeing no hope Gwendelin and her companions fared with the utmost speed out of that land of sorrow, even to the kingdom of i.Guilwarthon in Hisilómë, where reigned Beren and Tinúviel her daughter. Now Beren and Tinúviel lived not in any settled abode, nor had their realm boundaries well-marked, and no other messenger save Gwendelin daughter of the Vali had of a surety found those twain the living-dead so soon.
It is clear from the manuscript that the return of Mablung and Huan to Artanor and their presence at the hunt (referred to in general terms at the end of the Tale of Tinúviel, p. 41) was added to the tale, and with this new element went the change in Gwendelin’s movements immediately after the disaster. But though the textual history is here extremely hard to interpet, what with erasures and additions on loose pages, I think it is almost certain that this reshaping was done while the original composition of the tale was still in progress.
14 The first of these lacunae that I have left