The Book of Lost Tales - J. R. Tolkien [78]
The story of the sack of Nargothrond is somewhat differently treated in the old story, although the essentials were to remain of the driving away of Failivrin/Finduilas among the captives and of the powerlessness of Túrin to aid her, being spellbound by the dragon. Minor differences (such as the later arrival of Glorund on the scene: in The Silmarillion Túrin only came back to Nargothrond after Glaurung had entered the caves and the sack was ‘well nigh achieved’) and minor agreements (such as the denial of the plunder to the Orcs) may here be passed over; most interesting is the account of Túrin’s words with the dragon. Here the whole issue of Túrin’s escaping or not escaping his doom is introduced, and it is significant that he takes the name Turambar at this juncture, whereas in the later legend he takes it when he joins the Woodmen in Brethil, and less is made of it. The old version is far less powerfully and concisely expressed, and the dragon’s words are less subtle and ingeniously untrue. Here too the moral is very explicitly pointed, that Túrin should not have abandoned Failivrin ‘in danger that he himself could see’—does this not suggest that, even under the dragon’s spell as he was, there was a weakness (a ‘blindness’, see p. 83) in Túrin which the dragon touched? As the story is told in The Silmarillion the moral would seem uncalled for: Túrin was opposed by an adversary too powerful for his mind and will.
There is here a remarkable passage in which suicide is declared a sin, depriving such a one of all hope ‘that ever his spirit would be freed from the dark glooms of Mandos or stray into the pleasant paths of Valinor’. This seems to go with the perplexing passage in the tale of The Coming of the Valar and the Building of Valinor concerning the fates of Men: see p. 60.
Finally, it is strange that in the old story the gold and treasure was carried out from the caves by the Orcs and remained there (it ‘lay by the caves above the stream’), and the dragon most uncharacteristically ‘slept before it’ in the open. In The Silmarillion Glaurung ‘gathered all the hoard and riches of Felagund and heaped them, and lay upon them in the innermost hall’.
(v) Túrin’s return to Hithlum (pp. 88–91)
In this passage the case is much as in previous parts of the tale: the large structure of the story was not greatly changed afterwards, but there are many important differences nonetheless.
In the Tale of Turambar it is clear that the house of Mavwin was not imagined as standing near to the hills or mountains that formed the barrier between Hithlum and the Lands Beyond: Túrin was told that never did Orcs ‘come hither deep into the land of Hisilómë’, in contrast to the Narn (p. 68), where ‘Húrin’s house stood in the south-east of Dorlómin, and the mountains were near; Nen Lalaith indeed came down from a spring under the shadow of Amon Darthir, over whose shoulder there was a steep pass’. The removal of Mavwin from one house to another in Hithlum, visited in turn by Túrin as he sought for her, was afterwards rejected, to the improvement of the story. Here Túrin comes back to his old home in the late summer, whereas in The Silmarillion the fall of Nargothrond took place in the late autumn (‘the leaves fell from the trees in a great wind as they went, for the autumn was passing to a dire winter,’ p. 213) and Túrin came to Dor-lómin in the Fell Winter (p. 215).
The names Brodda and Airin (later spelled Aerin) remained; but Brodda is here the lord of the land, and Airin plays a more important part in the scene in the hall, dealing justice with vigour and wisdom, than she does later. It is not said here that she had been married by force, though her life with Brodda is declared to have been very evil; but of course the situation in the later narratives is far more clear-cut—the Men of Hithlum were ‘Easterlings