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of Eltas’ narrative (pp. 135–6). Here Úrin gathers a band of Elves and Men who are wild and fierce, and they go to the caves, which are lightly guarded because the ‘Orqui’ (i.e. Orcs) are abroad seeking Glorund. They carry off the treasure, and the Orcs returning curse it. Úrin casts the treasure before the king and reproaches him (saying that he might have sent a greater company to the caves to secure the treasure, if not to aid Mavwin in her distress); ‘Tintoglin would not touch it and bid Úrin hold what he had won, but Úrin would depart with bitter words’. Úrin’s men were not willing to leave it, and they sneaked back; there was an affray in the king’s halls, and much blood was spilt on the gold. The outline concludes thus:

The Gongs sack Linwë’s halls and Linwë is slain and the gold is carried far away. Beren Ermabwed falls upon them at a crossing of Sirion and the treasure is cast into the water, and with it the Silmaril of Fëanor. The Nauglath that dwell nigh dive after the gold but only one mighty necklace of gold (and that Silmaril is on it) do they find. This becomes a mark of their king.

These two outlines are partly concerned with the story of the Nauglafring and show my father pondering that story before he wrote it; there is no need to consider these elements here. It is evident that he was in great doubt as to the further course of the story after the release of Úrin—what happened to the dragon’s hoard? Was it guarded or unguarded, and if guarded by whom? How did it come at last into Tinwelint’s hands? Who cursed it, and at what point in the story? If it was Úrin and his band that seized it, were they Men or Elves or both?

In the final text, written on slips placed in the manuscript book and given above pp. 113–16, these questions were resolved thus: Úrin’s band was at first Men, then changed to Elves (see note 33); the treasure was guarded by the dwarf Mîm, whom Úrin slew, and it was he who cursed the gold as he died; Úrin’s band became a baggage-train to carry the treasure to Tinwelint in sacks and wooden boxes (and they got it to the bridge before the king’s door in the heart of the forest without, apparently, any difficulty). In this text there is no hint of what happened to the treasure after Úrom’s departure (because the Tale of the Nauglafring begins at that point).

Subsequent to the writing of the Tale of Turambar proper, my father inserted Mîm into the text at an earlier point in the story (see pp. 103, 118 note 26), making him the captain of the guard appointed by Glorund to watch the treasure in his absence; but whether this was written in before or after the appearance of Mîm at the end (pp. 113–14)—whether it represents a different idea, or is an explanation of how Mîm came to be there—I cannot say.

In The Silmarillion (pp. 230–2) the story is wholly changed, in that the treasure remained in Nargothrond, and Húrin after the slaying of Mîm (for a far better reason than that in the early narrative) brought nothing from it to Doriath save the Necklace of the Dwarves.

Of the astonishing feature at the end of Eltas’ narrative (pp. 115–16) of the ‘deification’ of Túrin Turambar and Nienóri (and the refusal of the Gods of Death to open their doors to them) it must be said that nowhere is there any explanation given—though in much later versions of the mythology Túrin Turambar appears in the Last Battle and smites Morgoth with his black sword. The purifying bath into which Túrin and Nienóri entered, called Fôs’Almir in the final text, was in the rejected text named Fauri; in the Tale of the Sun and Moon it has been described (I. 187), but is there given other names: Tanyasalpë, Faskalanúmen, and Faskalan.

There remains one further scrap of text to be considered. The second of the rejected outlines given above (pp. 136–7) was written in ink over a pencilled outline that was not erased, and I have been able to disinter a good deal of it from beneath the later writing. The two passages have nothing to do with each other; for some reason my father did not trouble in this case to erase earlier writing.