The Book of Lost Tales - J. R. Tolkien [32]
In this passage is the first mention of the Iron Crown of Melko, and the setting of the Silmarils in the Crown; and here again is a detail that was never lost: ‘Never did this crown leave his head’ (cf. The Silmarillion p. 81: ‘That crown he never took from his head, though its weight became a deadly weariness’).
But from this point Vëannë’s story diverges in an altogether unexpected fashion from the later narrative. At no other place in the Lost Tales is the subsequent transformation more remarkable than in this, the precursor of the story of the capture of Beren and Felagund and their companions by Sauron the Necromancer, the imprisonment and death of all save Beren in the dungeons of Tol-in-Gaurhoth (the Isle of Werewolves in the river Sirion), and the rescue of Beren and overthrow of Sauron by Lúthien and Huan.
Most notably, what may be referred to as ‘the Nargothrond Element’ is entirely absent, and in so far as it already existed had as yet made no contact with the story of Beren and Tinúviel (for Nargothrond, not yet so named, at this period see pp. 81, 123–4). Beren has no ring of Felagund, he has no companions on his northward journey, and there is no relationship between (on the one hand) the story of his capture, his speech with Melko, and his dispatch to the house of Tevildo, and (on the other) the events of the later narrative whereby Beren and the band of Elves out of Nargothrond found themselves in Sauron’s dungeon. Indeed, all the complex background of legend, of battles and rivalries, oaths and alliances, out of which the story of Beren and Lúthien arises in The Silmarillion, is very largely absent. The castle of the Cats ‘is’ the tower of Sauron on Tol-in-Gaurhoth, but only in the sense that it occupies the same ‘space’ in the narrative: beyond this there is no point in seeking even shadowy resemblances between the two establishments. The monstrous gormandising cats, their kitchens and their sunning terraces, and their engagingly Elvish-feline names (Miaugion, Miaulë, Meoita) all disappeared without trace. Did Tevildo? It would scarcely be true, I think, to say even that Sauron ‘originated’ in a cat: in the next phase of the legends the Necromancer (Thû) has no feline attributes. On the other hand it would be wrong to regard it as a simple matter of replacement (Thû stepping into the narrative place vacated by Tevildo) without any element of transformation of what was previously there. Tevildo’s immediate successor is ‘the Lord of Wolves’, himself a werewolf, and he retains the Tevildo-trait of hating Huan more than any other creature in the world. Tevildo was ‘an evil fay in beastlike shape’ (p. 29); and the battle between the two great beasts, the hound against the werewolf (originally the hound against the demon in feline form) was never lost.
When the tale returns to Tinúviel in Artanor the situation is quite the reverse: for the story of her imprisonment in the house in Hirilorn and her escape from it never underwent any significant change. The passage in The Silmarillion (p. 172) is indeed very brief, but its lack of detail is due to compression rather than to omission based on dissatisfaction; the Lay of Leithian, from which the prose account in The Silmarillion directly derives, is in this passage so close, in point of narrative detail, to the Tale of Tinúviel as to be almost identical with it.
It may be observed that in this part of the story the earliest version had a strength that was diminished later, in that the duration of Tinúviel’s imprisonment and her journey to Beren’s rescue relates readily enough to that of Beren’s captivity, which was intended by his captors to be unending; whereas in the later story there is a great deal of event and movement (with the addition of Lúthien’s captivity in Nargothrond) to be fitted into the time when Beren was awaiting his death in the dungeon of the Necromancer.
While the strong element of ‘explanatory’ beast-fable (concerning cats and dogs) was to be entirely eliminated, and Tevildo Prince of Cats replaced by the Necromancer, Huan nonetheless