The Book of Lost Tales - J. R. Tolkien [87]
Tirannë and Vainóni fall in with the evil magician Kurúki who gives them a baneful drink. They forget their names and wander distraught in the woods. Vainóni is lost. She meets Turambar who saves her from Orcs and aids in her search for her mother. They are wed and live in happiness. Turambar becomes lord of rangers of the woods and a harrier of the Orcs. He goes to seek out the Foalókë which ravages his land. The treasure-heap—and flight of his band. He slays the Foalókë and is wounded. Vainóni succours him, but the dragon in dying tells her all, lifting the veil Kurúki has set over them. Anguish of Turambar and Vainóni. She flees into the woods and casts herself over a waterfall. Madness of Turambar who dwells alone………. Úrin escapes from Angamandi and seeks Tirannë. Turambar flees from him and falls upon his sword………………………. Úrin builds a cairn and…………doom of Melko. Tirannë dies of grief and Úrin reaches Hisilómë…………………………………. Purification of Turambar and Vainóni who fare shining about the world and go with the hosts of Tulkas against Melko.
Detached jottings follow this, doubtless written at the same time:
Úrin escapes. Tirannë learns of Túrin. Both wander distraught…in the wood.
Túrin leaves Linwë for in a quarrel he slew one of Linwë’s kin (accidentally).
Introduce Failivrin element into the story?
Turambar unable to fight because of Foalókë’s eyes. Sees Failivrin depart.
This can only represent some of my father’s very earliest meditations on the story of Túrin Turambar. (That it appears in the notebook at the end of the fully-written Tale may seem surprising, but he clearly used these books in a rather eccentric way.) Nienóri is here called Vainóni, and Mavwin Tirannë; the spell of forgetfulness is here laid by a magician named Kurúki, although it is the dragon who lifts the veil that the magician set over them. Túrin’s two encounters with the dragon seem to have emerged from an original single one.
As I have mentioned before, the Tale of Turambar, like others of the Lost Tales, is written in ink over a wholly erased pencilled text, and the extant form of the tale is such that it could only be derived from a rougher draft preceding it; but the underlying text is so completely erased that there is no clue as to what stage it had reached in the development of the legend. It may well be—I think it is extremely probable—that in this outline concerning Vainóni, Tirannë, and Kurúki we glimpse by an odd chance a ‘layer’ in the Túrin-saga older even than the erased text underlying the extant version.
§ Miscellaneous Matters
(i) Beren
The rejected passage given on p. 71, together with the marginal note ‘If Beren be a Gnome (as now in the story of Tinúviel) the references to Beren must be altered’ (note 4), is the basis for my assertion (p. 52) that in the earliest, now lost, form of the Tale of Tinúviel Beren was a Man. I have shown, I hope, that the extant form of the Tale of Turambar preceded the extant form of the Tale of Tinúviel (p. 69). Beren was a Man, and akin to Mavwin, when the extant Turambar was written; he became a Gnome in the extant Tinúviel; and this change was then written into Turambar. What the replacement passage on p. 72 does is to change the relation of Egnor and Beren from kinship with Úrin’s wife to friendship with Úrin. (A correction to the typescript version of Tinúviel, p. 45, is later: making the comradeship of Úrin with Beren rather than with Egnor.) Two further changes to the text of Turambar consequent on the change in Beren from Man to Elf are given in notes 5 and 6.—It is interesting to observe that in the developed genealogy of The Silmarillion, when Beren was of course again a Man, he was also again akin to Morwen: for Beren was first cousin to Morwen’s father Baragund.
In the rejected passage on p. 71 my father wrote against the name Egnor ‘Damrod the Gnome’ (note 2), and in the amended passage he wrote that Úrin had known Beren ‘and had rendered him a service once in respect of Damrod his son’. There is no clue anywhere