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By Root 1333 0

In the Tale of the Nauglafring the coming of the Dwarves from Nogrod is only known when they approach the bridge before Tinwelint’s caves (p. 226); on the other hand, it is said (p. 230) that the ‘woven magic’ of the queen was a defence against ‘men of hostile heart’, who could never make their way through the woods unless aided by treachery from within. Perhaps this provides an explanation of a sort of how the Dwarves bringing treasure from Nogrod were able to penetrate to the halls of Tinwelint without hindrance and apparently undetected (cf. also the coming of Úrin’s band in the Tale of Turambar, p. 114). In the event, the protective magic was easily—too easily—overthrown by the simple device of a single treacherous Elf of Artanor who ‘offered to lead the host through the magics of Gwendelin’. This was evidently unsatisfactory; but I shall not enter further into this question here. Extraordinary difficulties of narrative structure were caused by this element of the inviolability of Doriath, as I hope to describe at a future date.

It might be thought that the story of the drowning of the treasure at the Stony Ford (falling into the waters of the river with the Dwarves who bore it) was evolved from that in the rejected conclusion of the Tale of Turambar (p. 136)—Tinwelint ‘hearing that curse [set on the treasure by Úrin] caused the gold to be cast into a deep pool of the river before his doors’. In the Tale of the Nauglafring, however, Tinwelint, influenced by the queen’s foreboding words, still has the intention of doing this, but does not fulfil his intention (p. 223).

The account of the second departure of Beren and Tinúviel (p. 240) raises again the extremely difficult question of the peculiar fate that was decreed for them by the edict of Mandos, which I have discussed on pp. 59–60. There I have suggested that

the peculiar dispensation of Mandos in the case of Beren and Tinúviel as here conceived is therefore that their whole ‘natural’ destiny as Elves was changed: having died as Elves might die (from wounds or from grief) they were not reborn as new beings, but returned in their own persons—yet now ‘mortal even as Men’.

Here however Tinúviel ‘faded’, and vanished in the woods; and Beren searched all Hithium and Artanor for her, until he too ‘faded from life’. Since this fading is here quite explicitly the mode in which ‘that doom of mortality that Mandos had spoken’ came upon them (p. 240), it is very notable that it is likened to, and even it seems identified with, the fading of ‘the Elves of later days throughout the world’—as though in the original idea Elvish fading was a form of mortality. This is in fact made explicit in a later version.

The seven Sons of Fëanor, their oath (sworn not in Valinor but after the coming of the Noldoli to the Great Lands), and the maiming of Maidros appear in the outlines for Gilfanon’s Tale; and in the latest of these outlines the Fëanorians are placed in Dor Lómin (= Hisilómë, Hithlum), see I.238, 240, 243. Here, in the Tale of the Nauglafring, appear for the first time the names of the Sons of Fëanor, five of them (Maidros, Maglor, Celegorm, Cranthor, Curufin) in the forms, or almost the forms, they were to retain, and Curufin already with his sobriquet ‘the Crafty’. The names Amrod and Amras in The Silmarillion were a late change; for long these two sons of Fëanor were Damrod (as here) and Díriel (here Dinithel or Durithel, see Changes made to Names, p. 245).

Here also appear Dior the Fair, also called Ausir the Wealthy, and his daughter Elwing; his son Auredhir early disappeared in the development of the legends. But Dior ruled in ‘the southern vales’ (p. 241) of Hisilómë, not in Artanor, and there is no suggestion of any renewal of Tinwelint’s kingdom after his death, in contrast to what was told later (The Silmarillion p. 236); moreover the Fëanorians, as noted above, dwelt also in Hisilómë—and how all this is to be related to what is said elsewhere of the inhabitants of that region I am unable to say: cf. the Tale of Tinúviel, p. 10: ‘Hisilómë where dwelt Men, and