Beren and Lúthien. Alan Lee
of the First Age (which I hope to publish as The Silmarillion), though as ‘The Children of Húrin’ it is entirely changed except in the tragic ending. The second point was the writing, ‘out of my head’, of ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, the story of Idril and Earendel, during sick-leave from the army in 1917; and by the original version of the ‘Tale of Lúthien Tinúviel and Beren’ later in the same year. That was founded on a small wood with a great undergrowth of ‘hemlock’ (no doubt many other related plants were also there) near Roos in Holderness, where I was for a while on the Humber Garrison.
My father and mother were married in March 1916, when he was twenty-four and she was twenty-seven. They lived at first in the village of Great Haywood in Staffordshire; but he embarked for France and the Battle of the Somme early in June of that year. Taken ill, he was sent back to England at the beginning of November 1916; and in the spring of 1917 he was posted to Yorkshire.
This primary version of The Tale of Tinúviel, as he called it, written in 1917, does not exist – or more precisely, exists only in the ghostly form of a manuscript in pencil that he all but entirely erased for most of its length; over this he wrote the text that is for us the earliest version. The Tale of Tinúviel was one of the constituent stories of my father’s major early work of his ‘mythology’, The Book of Lost Tales, an exceedingly complex work which I edited in the first two volumes of The History of Middle-earth, 1983–4. But since the present book is expressly devoted to the evolution of the legend of Beren and Lúthien I will here very largely pass by the strange setting and audience of the Lost Tales, for The Tale of Tinúviel is in itself almost entirely independent of that setting.
Central to The Book of Lost Tales was the story of an English mariner of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ period named Eriol or Ælfwine who, sailing far westwards over the ocean, came at last to Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle, where dwelt Elves who had departed from ‘the Great Lands’, afterwards ‘Middle-Earth’ (a term not used in the Lost Tales). During his sojourn in Tol Eressëa he learned from them the true and ancient history of the Creation, of the Gods, of the Elves, and of England. This history is ‘The Lost Tales of Elfinesse’.
The work is extant in a number of battered little ‘exercise books’ in ink and pencil, often formidably difficult to read, though after many hours of peering at the manuscript with a lens I was able, many years ago, to elucidate all the texts with only occasional unsolved words. The Tale of Tinúviel is one of the stories that was told to Eriol by the Elves in the Lonely Isle, in this case by a maiden named Vëannë: there were many children present at these story-tellings. Sharply observant of detail (a striking feature), it is told in an extremely individual style, with some archaisms of word and construction, altogether unlike my father’s later styles, intense, poetic, at times deeply ‘elvish-mysterious’. There is also an undercurrent of sardonic humour in the expression here and there (in the terrible confrontation with the demonic wolf Karkaras as she fled with Beren from Melko’s hall Tinúviel enquires ‘Wherefore this surliness, Karkaras?’).
Rather than awaiting the conclusion of the Tale I think it may be helpful to draw attention here to certain aspects of this earliest version of the legend, and to give brief explanations of some names important in the narrative (which are also to be found in the List of Names at the end of the book).
The Tale of Tinúviel in its rewritten form, which is the earliest form for us, was by no means the earliest of the Lost Tales, and light is shed on it by features in other Tales. To speak only of narrative structure, some of them, such as the tale of Túrin, are not very far removed from the version in the published Silmarillion; some, notably the Fall of Gondolin, the first to be written, is present in the published work only in a severely compressed form; and some, most remarkably the present Tale, are strikingly different in certain aspects.
A fundamental change in the evolution of the legend of Beren and Tinúviel (Lúthien) was the entry into it later of the story of Felagund of Nargothrond and the sons of Fëanor; but equally significant, in a different aspect, was the alteration in the identity of Beren. In the later versions of the legend it was an altogether essential element that Beren was a mortal man, whereas Lúthien was an immortal Elf; but this was not present in the Lost Tale: Beren, also, was an Elf. (It is seen, however, from my father’s notes to other Tales, that he was originally a Man; and it is clear that this was true also in the erased manuscript of The Tale of Tinúviel.) Beren the Elf was of the Elvish people named the Noldoli (later Noldor), which in the Lost Tales (and later) is translated ‘Gnomes’: Beren was a Gnome. This translation later became a problem for my father. He was using another word Gnome, wholly distinct in origin and meaning from those Gnomes who nowadays are small figures specially associated with gardens. This other Gnome was derived from a Greek word gnōmē ‘thought, intelligence’; it barely survives in modern English, with the meaning ‘aphorism, maxim’, together with the adjective gnomic.
In a draft for Appendix F of The Lord of the Rings he wrote:
I have sometimes (not in this book) used ‘Gnomes’ for Noldor and ‘Gnomish’ for Noldorin. This I did, for to some ‘Gnome’ will still suggest knowledge. Now the High-elven name of this people, Noldor, signifies Those who Know; for of the three kindreds of the Eldar from their beginning the Noldor were ever distinguished, both by their knowledge of the things that are and were in this world, and by their desire to know more. Yet they in no way resembled the Gnomes either of learned theory or popular fancy; and I have now abandoned this rendering as too misleading.
(In passing, I would mention that he said also [in a letter of 1954] that he greatly regretted having used the word ‘Elves’, which has become ‘overloaded with regrettable tones’ that are ‘too much to overcome’.)
The hostility shown to Beren, as an Elf, is explained thus in the old Tale (p. 42): ‘all the Elves of the woodland thought of the Gnomes of Dor-lómin as treacherous creatures, cruel and faithless’.
It may well seem somewhat puzzling that the word ‘fairy, fairies’ is frequently used of Elves. Thus, of the white moths that flew in the woods ‘Tinúviel being a fairy minded them not’ (p. 41); she names herself ‘Princess of Fairies’ (p. 64); it is said of her (p. 72) that she ‘put forth her skill and fairy-magic’. In the first place, the word fairies in the Lost Tales is synonymous with Elves; and in those tales there are several references to the relative physical stature of Men and Elves. In those early days my father’s conceptions on such matters were somewhat fluctuating, but it is clear that he conceived a changing relation as the ages passed. Thus he wrote:
Men were almost of a stature at first with Elves, the fairies being far greater and Men smaller than now.
But the evolution of Elves was greatly influenced by the coming of Men:
Ever as Men wax more powerful and numerous so the fairies fade and grow small and tenuous, filmy and transparent, but Men larger and more dense and gross. At last Men, or almost all, can no longer see the fairies.
There is thus no need to suppose, on account of the word, that my father thought of the ‘Fairies’ of this tale as filmy and transparent; and of course years later, when the Elves of the Third Age had entered the history of Middle-earth, there was nothing ‘fairylike’, in the modern sense, about them.
The word fay is more obscure. In The Tale of Tinúviel it is used frequently of Melian (the mother of Lúthien), who came from Valinor (and is called [p. 40] ‘a daughter of the Gods’), but also of Tevildo, who was said to be ‘an evil fay in beastlike shape’ (p. 69). Elsewhere in the Tales there are references to ‘the wisdom of fays and of Eldar’, to ‘Orcs and dragons and evil fays’, and to ‘a fay of the woods and dells’. Most notable perhaps is the following