The Lays of Beleriand. Christopher Tolkien

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СКАЧАТЬ Dragon-helm. As in the poem. Death of Orgof. Death of Orgof. Death of Saeros. Túrin leaves Doriath; a band forms round him which includes Beleg. Túrin leaves Doriath; a band of outlaws forms round him which attacks all comers. Túrin leaves Doriath and joins a band of desperate outlaws. The band captures Beleg (who knows nothing of Túrin’s leaving Doriath) and ties him to a tree. The band captures Beleg (who is searching for Túrin bearing Thingol’s pardon) (and ties him to a tree, Narn). Túrin has him set free; suffers a change of heart; Beleg joins the band; all swear an oath. Túrin has him set free; suffers a change of heart; but Beleg will not join the band and departs. (No mention of oath.) Great prowess of the band. Great prowess of the band against the Orcs. (Later Beleg returns and joins the band:) Land of Dor-Cúarthol.

      Before leaving this part of the story, it may be suggested that lines 605 ff., in which Túrin declares to Beleg that This band alone / I count as comrades, contain the germ of Túrin’s words to him in the Narn, p. 94:

      The grace of Thingol will not stretch to receive these companions of my fall, I think; but I will not part with them now, if they do not wish to part with me, &c.

      The traitor, who betrayed the band to the Orcs, now first appears. At first he is called Bauglir both in A and in B as originally typed; and it might be thought that the name had much too obviously an evil significance. The explanation is quite clearly, however, that Bauglir became Blodrin at the same time as Bauglir replaced Belcha as a name of Morgoth. (By the time my father reached line 990 Blodrin is the name as first written in both A and B; while similarly at line 1055 Bauglir is Morgoth’s name, not Belcha, both in A and B as first written.) The change of Ban (father of Blodrin) to Bor was passing; he is Ban in the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’, and so remained until, much later, he disappeared.

      Blodrin’s origin is interesting:

       trapped as a child

       he was dragged by the Dwarves to their deep mansions,

       and in Nogrod nurtured, and in nought was like,

       spite blood and birth, to the blissful Elves.

      (666–9)

      Thus Blodrin’s evil nature is explicitly ascribed to the influence of the bearded Dwarves / of troth unmindful (1148–9); and Blodrin follows Ufedhin of the Tale of the Nauglafring as an example of the sinister effect of Elvish association with Dwarves – not altogether absent in the tale of Eöl and Maeglin as it appears in The Silmarillion. Though the nature – and name – of the traitor in Túrin’s band went through Protean mutations afterwards, it is not inconceivable that recollection of the Dwarvish element in Blodrin’s history played some part in the emergence of Mîm in this rôle. On the early hostile view of the Dwarves see II. 247. The words of the poem just cited arise from the ‘betrayal’ of Flinding by his dwarvish knife, which slipped from its sheath; so later, in the Lay of Leithian, when Beren attempted to cut a second Silmaril from the Iron Crown (lines 4160–2)

       The dwarvish steel of cunning blade

       by treacherous smiths of Nogrod made

       snapped …

      The idea expressed in the Tale (II. 76) that Túrin was taken alive by Morgoth’s command ‘lest he cheat the doom that was devised for him’ reappears in the poem: lest he flee his fate (705).

      The rest of the story as told in the poem differs only in detail from that in the Tale. The survival of Beleg in the attack by Orcs and his swift recovery from his grievous wounds (II. 77), present in much changed circumstances in The Silmarillion (p. 206), is here made perhaps more comprehensible, in that Elves from Doriath, who were searching for Túrin (654–5), found Beleg and took him back to be healed by Melian in the Thousand Caves (727–31). In the account of Beleg’s meeting with Flinding in Taur-na-Fuin, led to him by his blue lamp, the poem is following the Tale very closely.^* My father’s painting of the scene (Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien no. 37) was almost certainly made a few years later, when the Elf lying under the tree was still called Flinding son of Fuilin (in the Tale bo-Dhuilin, earlier go-Dhuilin, son of Duilin; the patronymic prefix has in the poem (814, 900) reverted to the earlier form go-, see II. 119).

      In the Tale it is only said (II. 81) that Flinding was of the people of the Rodothlim ‘before the Orcs captured him’; from the poem (819–21) it seems that he was carried off, with many others, from Nargothrond, but this can scarcely be the meaning, since nought yet knew they [the Orcs] of Nargothrond (1578). The marginal note in B against these lines ‘Captured in battle at gates of Angband’ refers to the later story, first appearing in the 1930 ‘Silmarillion’.

      The poem follows the Tale in the detail of Flinding’s story to Beleg, except that in the poem he was recaptured by the Orcs in Taur-na-Fuin (846 ff.) and escaped again (crept from their clutches as a crawling worm, 879), whereas in the Tale he was not recaptured but ‘fled heedlessly’ (II. 79). The notable point in the Tale that Flinding ‘was overjoyed to have speech with a free Noldo’ reappears in the poem: Marvelling he heard / the ancient tongue of the Elves of Tûn. The detail of their encountering of the Orc-host is slightly different: in the Tale the Orcs had changed their path, in the poem it seems that Beleg and Flinding merely came more quickly than did the Orcs to the point where the Orc-road emerged from the edge of the forest. In the Tale it seems indeed that the Orcs had not left the forest when they encamped for the night: the eyes of the wolves ‘shone like points of red light among the trees’, and Beleg and Flinding laid Túrin down after his rescue ‘in the woods at no great distance from the camp’. The cup outcarven on the cold hillside of the poem (1036), where the Orcs made their bivouac, is the ‘bare dell’ of The Silmarillion.

In contrast to the Tale (see p. 26) Beleg is now frequently called Beleg the bowman, his great bow (not yet named) is fully described, and his unmatched skill as an archer (1071 ff.). There is also in the poem the feature of the arrow Dailir, unfailingly found and always unharmed (1080 ff.), until it broke when Beleg fell upon it while carrying Túrin (1189–92): of this there is never a mention later. The element of Beleg’s archery either arose from, or itself caused, the change in the story of the entry of Beleg and Flinding into the Orc-camp that now appears: in the Tale they merely ‘crept between the wolves at a point where there was a great gap between them’, whereas in the poem Beleg performed the feat of shooting seven wolves in the darkness, and only so was ‘a great gap opened’ (1097). But the words of the Tale, ‘as the luck of the Valar had it Túrin was lying nigh’, are echoed in

       till the Gods brought them

       and the craft and cunning of the keen huntsman

       to Túrin the tall where he tumbled lay

      (1130–2)

      The СКАЧАТЬ