Unfinished Tales - J. R. R. Tolkien [4]
This is the text that is given here. To avoid confusion I have retitled it ‘Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin’, since it tells nothing of the fall of the city. As always with my father’s writings there are variant readings, and in one short section (the approach to and passage of the river Sirion by Tuor and Voronwë) several competing forms; some minor editorial work has therefore been necessary.
It is thus the remarkable fact that the only full account that my father ever wrote of the story of Tuor’s sojourn in Gondolin, his union with Idril Celebrindal, the birth of Ea¨rendil, the treachery of Maeglin, the sack of the city, and the escape of the fugitives – a story that was a central element in his imagination of the First Age – was the narrative composed in his youth. There is no question, however, that that (most remarkable) narrative is not suitable for inclusion in this book. It is written in the extreme archaistic style that my father employed at that time, and it inevitably embodies conceptions out of keeping with the world of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion in its published form. It belongs with the rest of the earliest phase of the mythology, ‘the Book of Lost Tales’: itself a very substantial work, of the utmost interest to one concerned with the origins of Middle-earth, but requiring to be presented in a lengthy and complex study if at all.
II
The Tale of the Children of Húrin
The development of the legend of Túrin Turambar is in some respects the most tangled and complex of all the narrative elements in the story of the First Age. Like the tale of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin it goes back to the very beginnings, and is extant in an early prose narrative (one of the ‘Lost Tales’) and in a long, unfinished poem in alliterative verse. But whereas the later ‘long version’ of Tuor never proceeded very far, my father carried the later ‘long version’ of Túrin much nearer completion. This is called Narn i Hîn Húrin; and this is the narrative that is given in the present book.
There are however great differences in the course of the long Narn in the degree to which the narrative approaches a perfected or final form. The concluding section (from The Return of Túrin to Dor-lómin to The Death of Túrin) has undergone only marginal editorial alteration; while the first section (to the end of Túrin in Doriath) required a good deal of revision and selection, and in some places some slight compression, the original texts being scrappy and disconnected. But the central section of the narrative (Túrin among the outlaws, Mîm the Petty-dwarf, the land of Dor-Cúarthol, the death of Beleg at Túrin’s hand, and Túrin’s life in Nargothrond) constituted a much more difficult editorial problem. The Narn is here at its least finished, and in places diminishes to outlines of possible turns in the story. My father was still evolving this part when he ceased to work on it; and the shorter version for The Silmarillion was to wait on the final development of the Narn. In preparing the text of The Silmarillion for publication I derived, by necessity, much of this section of the tale of Túrin from these very materials, which are of quite extraordinary complexity in their variety and interrelations.
For the first part of this central section, as far as the beginning of Túrin’s sojourn in Mîm’s dwelling on Amon Rûdh, I have contrived a narrative, in scale commensurate with other parts of the Narn, out of the existing materials (with one gap, see p. 124 and note