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By Root 1261 0

Elves in the Great Lands—and to prayers, both of thanksgiving and request, addressed to them: thus Túrin’s guardians ‘thanked the Valar’ that they accomplished the journey to Artanor (p. 72), and more remarkably, Úrin ‘called upon the Valar of the west, being taught much concerning them by the Eldar of Kôr—the Gnomes he had encountered—and his words came, who shall say how, to Manwë Súlimo upon the heights of Taniquetil’ (p. 77). (Úrin was already an ‘Elf-friend’, instructed by the Noldoli; cf. the replacement passage on p. 72.) Was his prayer ‘answered’? Possibly this is the meaning of the very strange expression ‘as the luck of the Valar had it’ (p. 79), when Flinding and Beleg found Túrin lying near the point where they entered the Orc-camp.*

Dreams sent by the Valar came to the chieftains of the Rodothlim, though this was changed later and the reference to the Valar removed (p. 83 and note 10); the Woodmen said ‘Would that the Valar would lift the spell that lies upon Níniel’ (p. 101); and Túrin ‘cried out bitterly against the Valar and his fate of woe’ (p. 111).

An interesting reference to the Valar (and their power) occurs in Tinwelint’s reply (p. 95) to Mavwin’s words ‘Give me but a woodman’s cot and my son’. The king said: ‘That I cannot, for I am but a king of the wild Elves, and no Vala of the western isles.’ In the small part of Gilfanon’s Tale that was actually written it is told (I.231) of the Dark Elves who remained in Palisor that they said that ‘their brethren had gone westward to the Shining Isles. There, said they, do the Gods dwell, and they called them the Great Folk of the West, and thought they dwelt on firelit islands in the sea.’

(v) Túrin’s age

According to the Tale of Turambar, when Túrin left Mavwin he was seven years old, and it was after he had dwelt among the woodland Elves for seven years that all tidings from his home ceased (p. 74); in the Narn the corresponding years are eight and nine, and Túrin was seventeen, not fourteen, when ‘his grief was renewed’ (pp. 68, 76–7). It was exactly twelve years to the day of his departure from Mavwin when he slew Orgof and fled from Artanor (p. 75), when he was nineteen; in the Narn (p. 79) it was likewise twelve years since he left Hithlum when he hunted Saeros to his death, but he was twenty.

‘The tale tells not the number of days that Turambar sojourned with the Rodothlim but these were very many, and during that time Nienóri grew to the threshold of womanhood’ (pp. 91–2). Nienóri was seven years younger than Túrin: she was twelve when he fled from Artanor (ibid.). He cannot then have dwelt among the Rodothlim for more than (say) five or six years; and it is said that when he was chosen chieftain of the Woodmen he possessed ‘wisdom great beyond his years’.

Bethos, chieftain of the Woodmen before Túrin, ‘had fought though then but a boy in the Battle of Unnumbered Tears’ (p. 101), but he was killed in a foray, since ‘despite his years he still rode abroad’. But it is impossible to relate Bethos’ span (from ‘a boy’ at the Battle of Unnumbered Tears to his death on a foray at an age sufficiently ripe to be remarked on) to Túrin’s; for the events after the destruction of the Rodothlim, culminating in Túrin’s rescue of Níniel after her first encounter with Glorund, cannot cover any great length of time. What is clear and certain is that in the old story Túrin died when still a very young man. According to the precise dating provided in much later writing, he was 35 years old at his death.

(vi) The stature of Elves and Men

The Elves are conceived to be of slighter build and stature than Men: so Beleg ‘was of great stature and girth as such was among that folk’ (p. 73), and Túrin ‘was a Man and of greater stature than they’, i.e. Beleg and Flinding (p. 80)—this sentence being an emendation from ‘he was a Man of great size’ (note 8). See on this matter I.32, 235.

(vii) Winged Dragons

At the end of The Silmarillion (p. 252) Morgoth ‘loosed upon his foes the last desperate assault that he had prepared, and out of the pits of Angband there issued the