The Book of Lost Tales - J. R. Tolkien [33]
In the story of the defeat of Tevildo and the rescue of Beren the germ of the later legend is clearly seen, though for the most part only in broad structural resemblances. It is curious to observe that the loud speaking of Tinúviel sitting perched on the sill of the kitchen hatch in the castle of the Cats, so that Beren might hear, is the precursor of her singing on the bridge of Tol-in-Gaurhoth the song that Beren heard in his dungeon (The Silmarillion p. 174). Tevildo’s intention to hand her over to Melko remained in Sauron’s similar purpose (ibid.); the killing of the cat Oikeroi (p. 28) is the germ of Huan’s fight with Draugluin—the skin of Huan’s dead opponent is put to the same use in either case (pp. 30–1, The Silmarillion pp. 178–9); the battle of Tevildo and Huan was to become that of Huan and Wolf-Sauron, and with essentially the same outcome: Huan released his enemy when he yielded the mastery of his dwelling. This last is very notable: the utterance by Tinúviel of the spell which bound stone to stone in the evil castle (p. 29). Of course, when this was written the castle of Tevildo was an adventitious feature in the story—it had no previous history: it was an evil place through and through, and the spell (deriving from Melko) that Tevildo was forced to reveal was the secret of Tevildo’s own power over his creatures as well as the magic that held the stones together. With the entry of Felagund into the developing legend and the Elvish watchtower on Tol Sirion (Minas Tirith: The Silmarillion pp. 120, 155–6) captured by the Necromancer, the spell is displaced: for it cannot be thought to be the work of Felagund, who built the fortress, since if it had been he would have been able to pronounce it in the dungeon and bring the place down over their heads—a less evil way for them to die. This element in the legend remained, however, and is fully present in The Silmarillion (p. 175), though since my father did not actually say there that Sauron told Huan and Lúthien what the words were, but only that he ‘yielded himself’, one may miss the significance of what happened:
And she said: ‘There everlastingly thy naked self shall endure the torment of his scorn, pierced by his eyes, unless thou yield to me the mastery of thy tower.’
Then Sauron yielded himself, and Lúthien took the mastery of the isle and all that was there….
Then Lúthien stood upon the bridge, and declared her power: and the spell was loosed that bound stone to stone, and the gates were thrown down, and the walls opened, and the pits laid bare.
Here again the actual matter of the narrative is totally different in the early and late forms of the legend: in The Silmarillion ‘many thralls and captives came forth in wonder and dismay…for they had lain long in the darkness of Sauron’, whereas in the tale the inmates who emerged from the shaken dwelling (other than Beren and the apparently inconsequent figure of the blind slave-Gnome Gimli) were a host of cats, reduced by the breaking of Tevildo’s spell to ‘puny size’. (If my father had used in the tale names other than Huan, Beren, and Tinúviel, and in the absence of all other knowledge, including that of authorship, it would not be easy to demonstrate from a simple comparison between this part of the Tale and the story as told in The Silmarillion that the resemblances were more than superficial and accidental.)
A more minor narrative point may be noticed here. The typescript version would presumably have treated the fight of Huan and Tevildo somewhat differently, for in the manuscript Tevildo and his companion can flee up great trees (p. 28), whereas in the typescript nothing