The War of the Jewels Read online

  J. R. R. TOLKIEN

  The War of the Jewels

  The Later Silmarillion

  PART TWO

  The Legend of Beleriand

  Christopher Tolkien

  COPYRIGHT

  HarperCollinsPublishers

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  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1994

  Copyright © The Tolkien Estate Limited and C.R. Tolkien 1994

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  Source ISBN: 9780261103245

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  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Note on Accessibility

  Foreword

  PART ONE

  THE GREY ANNALS

  PART TWO

  THE LATER QUENTA SILMARILLION

  9Of Men

  10Of the Siege of Angband

  11Of Beleriand and its Realms

  12Of Turgon and the Building of Gondolin

  13Concerning the Dwarves

  14Of the Coming of Men into the West

  15Of the Ruin of Beleriand and the Fall of Fingolfin

  The Last Chapters of the Quenta Silmarillion

  PART THREE

  THE WANDERINGS OF HÚRIN AND OTHER WRITINGS NOT FORMING PART OF THE QUENTA SILMARILLION

  IThe Wanderings of Húrin

  IIÆlfwine and Dírhaval

  IIIMaeglin

  IVOf the Ents and the Eagles

  VThe Tale of Years

  PART FOUR

  QUENDI AND ELDAR

  Searchable Terms

  Other Books by J.R.R. Tolkien

  About the Publisher

  NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY

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  FOREWORD

  The War of the Jewels is a companion to and continuation of Morgoth’s Ring, Volume 10 in The History of Middle-earth. As I explained in that book, the two together contain virtually all of my father’s narrative writing on the subject of the Elder Days in the years after The Lord of the Rings, but the division into two is made ‘transversely’: between the first part of The Silmarillion’ (‘the Legends of Aman’) and the second (‘the Legends of Beleriand’). I use the term ‘Silmarillion’, of course, in a very wide sense: this though potentially confusing is imposed by the extremely complex relationship of the different ‘works’ – especially but not only that of the Quenta Silmarillion and the Annals; and my father himself employed the name in this way. The division of the whole corpus into two parts is indeed a natural one: the Great Sea divides them. The title of this second part, The War of the Jewels, is an expression that my father often used of the last six centuries of the First Age: the history of Beleriand after the return of Morgoth to Middle-earth and the coming of the Noldor, until its end.

  In the foreword to Morgoth’s Ring I emphasised the distinction between the first period of writing that followed in the early 1950s the actual completion of The Lord of the Rings, and the later work that followed its publication; in this book also, therefore, two distinct ‘phases’ are documented.

  The number of new works that my father embarked upon in that first ‘phase’, highly creative but all too brief, is astonishing. There were the new Lay of Leithian, of which all that he wrote before he abandoned it was published in The Lays of Beleriand; the Annals of Aman and new versions of the Ainulindalë; the Grey Annals, abandoned at the end of the tale of Túrin; the new Tale of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin (published in Unfinished Tales), abandoned before Tuor actually entered the city; and all the new tale of Túrin and Niënor from Túrin’s return to Dor-lómin to their deaths in Brethil (see p. 144 in this book). There were also an abandoned prose saga of Beren and Lúthien (see V.295); the story of Maeglin; and an extensive revision of the Quenta Silmarillion, the central work of the last period before The Lord of the Rings, interrupted near the beginning of the tale of Túrin in 1937 and never concluded.

  I expressed the view in the foreword to Morgoth’s Ring that ‘despair of publication, at least in the form that he regarded as essential’ (i.e. the conjunction of The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings in a single work) was the fundamental cause of the collapse of this new endeavour; and that this break destroyed all prospect that what may be called ‘the older Silmarillion’ would ever be completed. In Morgoth’s Ring I have documented the massive upheaval, in the years that followed, in his conception of the old myths: an upheaval that never issued in new and secure form. But we come now to the last epoch of the Elder Days, when the scene shifts to Middle-earth and the mythical element recedes: the High-elves return across the Great Sea to make war upon Morgoth, Dwarves and Men come over the mountains into Beleriand, and bound up with this history of the movement of peoples, of the policies of kingdoms, of momentous battles and ruinous defeats, are the heroic tales of Beren One-hand and Túrin Turambar. Yet in The War of the Jewels the record is completed of all my father’s further work on that history in the years following the publication of The Lord of the Rings; and even with all the labour that went into the elaboration of parts of ‘the Saga of Túrin’ it is obvious that this bears no comparison with his aims or indeed his achievements in the early 1950s.

  In Part Two of this book it will be seen that in this later phase of his work the Quenta Silmarillion underwent scarcely any further significant rewriting or addition, other than the introduction of the new chapter Of the Coming of Men into the West with the radically altered earlier history of the Edain in Beleriand; and that (the most remarkable fact in the whole history of The Silmarillion) the last chapters (the tale of Húrin and the dragon-gold of Nargothrond, the Necklace of the Dwarves, the ruin of Doriath, the fall of Gondolin, the Kinslayings) remained in the form of the Quenta Noldori
nwa of 1930 and were never touched again. Only some meagre hints are found in later writings.

  For this there can be no simple explanation, but it seems to me that an important element was the centrality that my father accorded to the story of Húrin and Morwen and their children, Túrin Turambar and Niënor Níniel. This became for him, I believe, the dominant and absorbing story of the end of the Elder Days, in which complexity of motive and character, trapped in the mysterious workings of Morgoth’s curse, sets it altogether apart. He never finally achieved important passages of Túrin’s life; but he extended the ‘great saga’ (as he justly called it) into ‘the Wanderings of Húrin’, following the old story that Húrin was released by Morgoth from his imprisonment in Angband after the deaths of his children, and went first to the ruined halls of Nargothrond. The dominance of the underlying theme led to a new story, a new dimension to the ruin that Húrin’s release would bring: his catastrophic entry into the land of the People of Haleth, the Forest of Brethil. There were no antecedents whatsoever to this tale; but antecedents to the manner of its telling are found in parts of the prose ‘saga’ of the Children of Húrin (Narn i Chîn Húrin, given in Unfinished Tales), of which ‘Húrin in Brethil’ is a further extension. That ‘saga’ went back to the foundations in The Book of Lost Tales, but its great elaboration belongs largely to the period after the publication of The Lord of the Rings; and in its later development there entered an immediacy in the telling and a fullness in the recording of event and dialogue that must be described as a new narrative impulse: in relation to the mode of the ‘Quenta’, it is as if the focus of the glass by which the remote ages were viewed had been sharply changed.

  But with Húrin’s grim and even it may seem sardonic departure from the ruin of Brethil and dying Manthor this impulse ceased – as it appears. Húrin never came back to Nargothrond and Doriath; and we are denied an account, in this mode of story-telling, of what should be the culminating moment of the saga after the deaths of his children and his wife – his confrontation of Thingol and Melian in the Thousand Caves.

  It might be, then, that my father had no inclination to return to the Quenta Silmarillion, and its characteristic mode, until he had told on an ample scale, and with the same immediacy as that of his sojourn in Brethil, the full tale of Húrin’s tragic and destructive ‘wanderings’ – and their aftermath also: for it is to be remembered that his bringing of the treasure of Nargothrond to Doriath would lead to the slaying of Thingol by the Dwarves, the sack of Menegroth, and all the train of events that issued in the attack of the Fëanorians on Dior Thingol’s heir in Doriath and, at the last, the destruction of the Havens of Sirion. If my father had done this, then out of it might have come, I suppose, new chapters of the Quenta Silmarillion, and a return to that quality in the older writing that I attempted to describe in my foreword to The Book of Lost Tales: ‘The compendious or epitomising form and manner of The Silmarillion, with its suggestion of ages of poetry and “lore” behind it, strongly evokes a sense of “untold tales”, even in the telling of them … There is no narrative urgency, the pressure and fear of the immediate and unknown event. We do not actually see the Silmarils as we see the Ring.’

  But this is entirely speculative, because none of it came about: neither the ‘great saga’ nor the Quenta Silmarillion were concluded. Freely as my father often wrote of his work, he never so much as hinted at his larger intentions for the structure of the whole. I think that it must be said that we are left, finally, in the dark.

  ‘The Silmarillion’, again in the widest sense, is very evidently a literary entity of a singular nature. I would say that it can only be defined in terms of its history; and that history is with this book largely completed (‘largely’, because I have not entered further into the complexities of the tale of Túrin in those parts that my father left in confusion and uncertainty, as explained in Unfinished Tales, p. 6). It is indeed the only ‘completion’ possible, because it was always ‘in progress’; the published work is not in any way a completion, but a construction devised out of the existing materials. Those materials are now made available, save only in a few details and in the matter of ‘Túrin’ just mentioned; and with them a criticism of the ‘constructed’ Silmarillion becomes possible. I shall not enter into that question; although it will be apparent in this book that there are aspects of the work that I view with regret.

  In The War of the Jewels I have included, as Part Four, a long essay of a very different nature: Quendi and Eldar. While there was no possibility of making The History of Middle-earth a history of the languages as well, I have not wished to eschew them altogether even when not essential to the narrative (as Adunaic is in The Notion Club Papers); I have wished to give at least some indication at different stages of the presence of this vital and evolving element, especially in regard to the meaning of names – thus the appendices to The Book of Lost Tales and the Etymologies in The Lost Road. Quendi and Eldar illustrates perhaps more than any other writing of my father’s the significance of names, and of linguistic change affecting names, in his histories. It gives also an account of many things found nowhere else, such as the gesture-language of the Dwarves, and all that will ever be known, I believe, of Valarin, the language of the Valar.

  I take this opportunity to give the correct text of a passage in Morgoth’s Ring. Through an error that entered at a late stage and was not observed a line was dropped and a line repeated in note 16 on page 327; the text should read:

  There have been suggestions earlier in the Athrabeth that Andreth was looking much further back in time to the awakening of Men (thus she speaks of ‘legends of days when death came less swiftly and our span was still far longer’, p. 313); in her words here, ‘a rumour that has come down through years uncounted’, a profound alteration in the conception seems plain.

  I have received a communication from Mr Patrick Wynne concerning Volume IX, Sauron Defeated, which I would like to record here. He has pointed out that several of the names in Michael Ramer’s account of his experiences to the Notion Club are ‘not just Hungarian in style but actual Hungarian words’ (Ramer was born and spent his early childhood in Hungary, and he refers to the influence of Magyar on his ‘linguistic taste’, Sauron Defeated pp. 159, 201). Thus the world of the story that he wrote and read to the Club was first named Gyönyörü (ibid. p. 214, note 28), which means ‘lovely’. His name for the planet Saturn was first given as Gyürüchill (p. 221, note 60), derived from Hungarian gyürü ‘ring’ and csillag ‘star’ (where cs is pronounced as English ch in church); Gyürüchill was then changed to Shomorú, probably from Hungarian szomorú ‘sad’ (though that is pronounced ‘somorú’), and if so, an allusion to the astrological belief in the cold and gloomy temperament of those born under the influence of that planet. Subsequently these names were replaced by others (Emberü, and Eneköl for Saturn) that cannot be so explained.

  In this connection, Mr Carl F. Hostetter has observed that the Elvish star-name Lumbar ascribed to Saturn (whether or not my father always so intended it, see Morgoth’s Ring pp. 434–5) can be explained in the same way as Ramer’s Shomorú, in view of the Quenya word lumbë, ‘gloom, shadow’ recorded in the Elvish Etymologies (The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 170).

  Mr Hostetter has also pointed out that the name Byrde given to Finwë’s first wife Míriel in the Annals of Aman (Morgoth’s Ring, pp. 92,185) is not, as I said (p. 103), an Old English word meaning ‘broideress’, for that is not found in Old English. The name actually depends on an argument advanced (on very good evidence) by my father that the word byrde ‘broideress’ must in fact have existed in the old language, and that it survived in the Middle English burde ‘lady, damsel’, its original specific sense faded and forgotten. His discussion is found in his article Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography (The Review of English Studies 1.2, April 1925).

  I am very grateful to Dr Judith Priestman for her generous help in providing me with copies of texts and maps in the Bodleian Libra
ry. The accuracy of the intricate text of this book has been much improved by the labour of Mr Charles Noad, unstintedly given and greatly appreciated. He has read the first proof with extreme care and with critical understanding, and has made many improvements; among these is an interpretation of the way in which the narrow path, followed by Túrin and afterwards by Brandir the Lame, went down through the woods above the Taeglin to Cabed-en-Aras: an interpretation that justifies expressions of my father’s that I had taken to be merely erroneous (pp. 157,159).

  There remain a number of writings of my father’s, other than those that are expressly philological, that I think should be included in this History of Middle-earth, and I hope to be able to publish a further volume in two years’ time.

  PART ONE

  THE GREY ANNALS

  THE GREY ANNALS

  The history of the Annals of Beleriand began about 1930, when my father wrote the earliest version (‘AB 1’) together with that of the Annals of Valinor (‘AV 1’). These were printed in Vol.IV, The Shaping of Middle-earth; I remarked there that ‘the Annals began, perhaps, in parallel with the Quenta as a convenient way of driving abreast, and keeping track of, the different elements in the ever more complex narrative web.’ Second versions of both sets of Annals were composed later in the 1930s, as part of a group of texts comprising also the Lhammas or Account of Tongues, a new version of the Ainulindalë, and the central work of that time: a new version of ‘The Silmarillion’ proper, the unfinished Quenta Silmarillion (‘QS’). These second versions, together with the other texts of that period, were printed in Vol.V, The Lost Road and Other Writings, under the titles The Later Annals of Valinor (‘AV 2’) and The Later Annals of Beleriand (‘AB 2’).