The Book of Lost Tales - J. R. Tolkien [37]
§ 2. Places and peoples in the Tale of Tinúviel
To consider first what can be learned of the geography of the Great Lands from this tale: the early ‘dictionary’ of the Gnomish language makes it clear that the meaning of Artanor was ‘the Land Beyond’, as it is interpreted in the text (p. 9). Several passages in the Lost Tales cast light on this expression. In an outline for Gilfanon’s untold tale (I. 240) the Noldoli exiled from Valinor
now fought for the first time with the Ores and captured the pass of the Bitter Hills; thus they escaped from the Land of Shadows…They entered the Forest of Artanor and the Region of the Great Plains…
(which latter, I suggested, may be the forerunner of the later Talath Dirnen, the Guarded Plain of Nargothrond). The tale to follow Gilfanon’s, according to the projected scheme (I. 241), was to be that of Tinúviel, and this outline begins: ‘Beren son of Egnor wandered out of Dor Lómin [i.e. Hisilómë, see I. 112] into Artanor…’ In the present tale, it is said that Beren came ‘through the terrors of the Iron Mountains until he reached the Lands Beyond’ (p. 11), and also (p. 21) that some of the Dogs ‘roamed the woods of Hisilómë or passing the mountainous places fared even at times into the region of Artanor and the lands beyond and to the south’. And finally, in the Tale of Turambar (p. 72) there is a reference to ‘the road over the dark hills of Hithlum into the great forests of the Land Beyond where in those days Tinwelint the hidden king had his abode’.
It is quite clear, then, that Artanor, afterwards called Doriath (which appears in the title to the typescript text of the Tale of Tinúviel, together with an earlier form Dor Athro, p. 41), lay in the original conception in much the same relation to Hisilómë (the Land of Shadow(s), Dor Lómin, Aryador) as does Doriath to Hithlum (Hisilómë) in The Silmarillion: to the south, and divided from it by a mountain-range, the Iron Mountains or Bitter Hills.
In commenting on the tale of The Theft of Melko and the Darkening of Valinor I have noticed (I. 158–9) that whereas in the Lost Tales Hisilómë is declared to be beyond the Iron Mountains, it is also said (in the Tale of Turambar, p. 77) that these mountains were so named from Angband, the Hells of Iron, which lay beneath ‘their northernmost fastnesses’, and that therefore there seems to be a contradictory usage of the term ‘Iron Mountains’ within the Lost Tales—‘unless it can be supposed that these mountains were conceived as a continuous range, the southerly extension (the later Mountains of Shadow) forming the southern fence of Hisilómë, while the northern peaks, being above Angband, gave the range its name’.
Now in the Tale of Tinúviel Beren, journeying north from Artanor, ‘drew nigh to the lower hills and treeless lands that warned of the approach of the bleak Iron Mountains’ (p. 14). These he had previously traversed, coming out of Hisilómë but now ‘he followed the Iron Mountains till he drew nigh to the terrible regions of Melko’s abode’. This seems to support the suggestion that the mountains fencing Hisilómë from the Lands Beyond were continuous with those above Angband; and we may compare the little primitive map (I. 81), where the mountain range f isolates Hisilómë (g): see I. 112, 135. The implication is that ‘dim’ or ‘black’ Hisilómë had no defence against Melko.
There appear now also the Mountains of Night (pp. 20, 46–7), and it seems clear that the great pinewoods of Taurfuin, the Forest of Night, grew upon those heights (in The Silmarillion Dorthonion ‘Land of Pines’, afterwards named Taur-nu-Fuin). Dairon was lost there, but Tinúviel, though she passed near, did not enter ‘that dark region’. There is nothing to show that it was not placed then as it was later—to the east of Ered Wethrin, the Mountains of Shadow. It is also at least possible