The Book of Lost Tales - J. R. Tolkien [31]
The story of Beren’s coming upon Tinúviel in the moonlit glade in its earliest recorded form (pp. 11–12) was never changed in its central image; and it should be noticed that the passage in The Silmarillion (p. 165) is an extremely concentrated and exalted rendering of the scene: many elements not mentioned there were never in fact lost. In a very late reworking of the passage in the Lay of Leithian* the hemlocks and the white moths still appear, and Daeron the minstrel is present when Beren comes to the glade. But there are nonetheless the most remarkable differences; and the chief of these is of course that Beren was here no mortal Man, but an Elf, one of the Noldoli, and the absolutely essential element of the story of Beren and Lúthien is not present. It will be seen later (pp. 71–2, 139) that this was not originally so, however: in the now lost (because erased) first form of the Tale of Tinúviel he had been a Man (it is for this reason that I have said that the reading man in the manuscript (see p. 33 and note 10), later changed to Gnome, is a ‘significant slip’). Several years after the composition of the tale in the form in which we have it he became a Man again, though at that time (1925–6) my father appears to have hesitated long on the matter of the elvish or mortal nature of Beren.
In the tale there is, necessarily, a quite different reason for the hostility and distrust shown to Beren in Artanor (Doriath)—namely that ‘the Elves of the woodland thought of the Gnomes of Dor Lómin as treacherous creatures, cruel and faithless’ (see below, p. 65). It seems clear that at this time the history of Beren and his father (Egnor) was only very sketchily devised; there is in any case no hint of the story of the outlaw band led by his father and its betrayal by Gorlim the Unhappy (The Silmarillion pp. 162ff.) before the first form of the Lay of Leithian, where the story appears fully formed (the Lay was in being to rather beyond this point by the late summer of 1925). But an association of Beren’s father (changed to Beren himself) with Úrin (Húrin) as ‘brother in arms’ is mentioned in the typescript version of the tale (pp. 44–5); according to the latest of the outlines for Gilfanon’s Tale (I. 240) ‘Úrin and Egnor marched with countless battalions’ (against the forces of Melko).
In the old story, Tinúviel had no meetings with Beren before the day when he boldly accosted her at last, and it was at that very time that she led him to Tinwelint’s cave; they were not lovers, Tinúviel knew nothing of Beren but that he was enamoured of her dancing, and it seems that she brought him before her father as a matter of courtesy, the natural thing to do. The betrayal of Beren to Thingol by Daeron (The Silmarillion p. 166) therefore has no place in the old story—there is nothing to betray; and indeed it is not shown in the tale that Dairon knew anything whatsoever of Beren before Tinúviel led him into the cave, beyond having once seen his face in the moonlight.
Despite these radical differences in the narrative structure, it is remarkable how many features of the scene in Tinwelint’s hall (pp. 12–13), when Beren stood before the king, endured, while all the inner significance was shifted and enlarged. To the beginning go back, for instance, Beren’s abashment and silence, Tinúviel’s answering for him, the sudden rising of his courage and uttering of his desire without preamble or hesitation. But the tone is altogether lighter and less grave than it afterwards became; in the jeering laughter of Tinwelint, who treats the matter as a jest and Beren as a benighted fool, there is no hint of what is explicit in the later story: ‘Thus he wrought the doom of Doriath, and was ensnared within the curse of Mandos’ (The Silmarillion p. 167). The Silmarils are indeed famous, and they have a holy power (p. 34), but the fate of the world is not bound up with them (The Silmarillion p. 67); Beren is an Elf, if of a feared and distrusted people, and his request lacks the deepest dimension of outrage; and he and Tinúviel are not lovers.