The Book of Lost Tales 2. Christopher Tolkien
43, 46).
There have been earlier references in the Lost Tales to Tinwelint and the place of his dwelling. In a passage added to, but then rejected from, the tale of The Chaining of Melko (I. 106, note 1) it is said that he was lost in Hisilómë and met Wendelin there; ‘loving her he was content to leave his folk and dance for ever in the shadows’. In The Coming of the Elves (I. 115) ‘Tinwë abode not long with his people, and yet ’tis said lives still lord of the scattered Elves of Hisilómë’ and in the same tale (I. 118–19) the ‘Lost Elves’ were still there ‘long after when Men were shut in Hisilómë by Melko’, and Men called them the Shadow Folk, and feared them. But in the Tale of Tinúviel the conception has changed. Tinwelint is now a king r’uling, not in Hisilómë, but in Artanor.* (It is not said where it was that he came upon Gwendeling.)
In the account (manuscript version only, see pp. 9, 42) of Tinwelint’s people there is mention of Elves ‘who remained in the dark’ and this obviously refers to Elves who never left the Waters of Awakening. (Of course those who were lost on the march from Palisor also never left ‘the dark’ (i.e. they never came to the light of the Trees), but the distinction made in this sentence is not between the darkness and the light but between those who remained and those who set out). On the emergence of this idea in the course of the writing of the Lost Tales see I. 234. Of Tinwelint’s subjects ‘the most were Ilkorindi’, and they must be those who ‘had been lost upon the march from Palisor’ (earlier, ‘the Lost Elves of Hisilómë’).
Here, a major difference in essential conception between the old legend and the form in The Silmarillion is apparent. These Ilkorindi of Tinwelint’s following (‘eerie and strange beings’ whose ‘dark songs and chantings…faded in the wooded places or echoed in deep caves’) are described in terms applicable to the wild Avari (‘the Unwilling’) of The Silmarillion; but they are of course actually the precursors of the Grey-elves of Doriath. The term Eldar is here equivalent to Elves (‘all the Eldar both those who remained in the dark or had been lost upon the march from Palisor’) and is not restricted to those who made, or at least embarked on, the Great Journey; all were Ilkorindi—Dark Elves—if they never passed over the Sea. The later significance of the Great Journey in conferring ‘Eldarin’ status was an aspect of the elevation of the Grey-elves of Beleriand, bringing about a distinction of the utmost importance within the category of the Moriquendi or ‘Elves of the Darkness’—the Avari (who were not Eldar) and the Úmanyar (the Eldar who were ‘not of Aman’): see the table ‘The Sundering of the Elves’ given in The Silmarillion. Thus:
Lost Tales
Eldar: of Kôr
Eldar: of the Great Lands (the Darkness): Ilkorindi
Silmarillion
Avari
Eldar (of the Great Journey): of Aman
Eldar (of the Great Journey): of Middle-earth (Úmanyar)
But among Tinwelint’s subjects there were also Noldoli, Gnomes. This matter is somewhat obscure, but at least it may be observed that the manuscript and typescript versions of the Tale of Tinúviel do not envisage precisely the same situation.
The manuscript text is perhaps not perfectly explicit on the subject, but it is said (p. 9) that of Tinwelint’s subjects ‘the most were Ilkorindi’, and that before the rising of the Sun ‘already were their numbers mingled with a many wandering Gnomes’. Yet Dairon fled from the apparition of Beren in the forest because ‘all the Elves of the woodland thought of the Gnomes of Dor Lómin as treacherous creatures, cruel and faithless’ (p. 11); and ‘Dread and suspicion was between the Eldar and those of their kindred that had tasted the slavery of Melko, and in this did the evil deeds of the Gnomes at the Haven of the Swans revenge itself’ (p. 11). The hostility of the Elves of Artanor to Gnomes was, then, specifically a hostility to the Gnomes of Hisilómë (Dor Lómin), who were suspected of being under the will of Melko (and this is probably a foreshadowing of the suspicion and rejection of Elves escaped from Angband described in The Silmarillion p. 156). In the manuscript it is said (p. 9) that all the Elves of the Great Lands (those who remained in Palisor, those who were lost on the march, and the Noldoli returned from Valinor) fell beneath the power of Melko, though many escaped and wandered in the wild; and as the manuscript text was first written (see p. 11 and note 3) Beren was ‘son of a thrall of Melko’s…that laboured in the darker places in the north of Hisilómë’. This conception seems reasonably clear, so far as it goes.
In the typescript version it is expressly stated that there were Gnomes ‘in Tinwelint’s service’ (p. 43): the bridge over the forest river, leading to Tinwelint’s door, was hung by them. It is not now stated that all the Elves of the Great Lands fell beneath Melko; rather there are named several centres of resistance to his power, in addition to Tinwelint/Thingol in Artanor: Turgon of Gondolin, the Sons of Fëanor, and Egnor of Hisilómë (Beren’s father)—one of the chiefest foes of Melko ‘in all the kin of the Gnomes that still were free’ (p. 44). Presumably this led to the exclusion in the typescript of the passage telling that the woodland Elves thought of the Gnomes of Dor Lómin as treacherous and faithless (see p. 43), while that concerning the distrust of those who had been Melko’s slaves was retained. The passage concerning Hisilómë ‘where dwelt Men, and thrall-Noldoli laboured, and few free-Eldar went’ (p.10) was also retained; but Hisilómë, in Beren’s wish that he had never strayed out of it, becomes ‘the wild free places of Hisilómë’ (pp. 17, 45).
This leads to an altogether baffling question, that of the references to the Battle of Unnumbered Tears; and several of the passages just cited bear on it.
The story of ‘The Travail of the Noldoli and the Coming of Mankind’ that was to have been told by Gilfanon, but which after its opening pages most unhappily never got beyond the stage of outline projections, was to be followed by that of Beren and Tinúviel (see I. 241). After the Battle of Unnumbered Tears there is mention of the Thraldom of the Noldoli, the Mines of Melko, the Spell of Bottomless Dread, the shutting of Men in Hisilómë, and then ‘Beren son of Egnor wandered out of Dor Lómin into Artanor…’ (In The Silmarillion the deeds of Beren and Lúthien preceded the Battle of Unnumbered Tears.)
Now in the Tale of Tinúviel there is a reference, in both versions, to the ‘thrall-Noldoli’ who laboured in Hisilómë and of Men dwelling there; and as the passage introducing Beren was first written in the manuscript his father was one of these slaves. It is said, again in both versions, that neither Tinwelint nor the most part of his people went to the battle, but that his lordship was greatly increased by fugitives from it (p. 9); and to the following statement that his dwelling was hidden by the magic of Gwendeling/Melian the typescript adds the word ‘thereafter’ (p. 43), i.e. after the Battle of Unnumbered Tears. In the changed passage