The Lays of Beleriand. Christopher Tolkien
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Название: The Lays of Beleriand
Автор: Christopher Tolkien
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Ужасы и Мистика
Серия: The History of Middle-earth
isbn: 9780007348206
isbn:
though Men were of mould less mighty builded
ere the earth’s goodness from the Elves they drew
(1157–8)
are to be related to the statements cited in II. 326: ‘As Men’s stature grows [the Elves’] diminishes’, and ‘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’. The mention here (1164) of the ten races of Hithlum occurs nowhere else, and it is not clear whether it refers to all the peoples of Men and Elves who in one place or another in the Lost Tales are set in Hithlum, which as I have remarked ‘seems to have been in danger of having too many inhabitants’ (see II. 249, 251).
The Tale has it that it was Beleg’s knife that had slipped from him as he crept into the camp; in the poem it is Flinding’s (1142 ff.). In the Tale Beleg returned to fetch his sword from the place where he had left it, since they could carry Túrin no further; in the poem they carried Túrin all the way up to the dark thicket in a dell whence they had set out (1110, 1202). The ‘whetting spell’ of Beleg over his (still unnamed) sword is an entirely new element (and without trace later); it arises in association with line 1141, No blade would bite on the bonds he wore. In style it is reminiscent of Lúthien’s ‘lengthening spell’ in Canto V of the Lay of Leithian; but of the names in the spell, of Ogbar, Gaurin, Rodrim, Saithnar, Nargil, Celeg Aithorn, there seems to be now no other trace.
There now occurs in the poem the mysterious leering laugh (1224), to which it seems that the ghostly laughter of grim phantom in line 1286 refers, and which is mentioned again in the next part of the poem (1488–90). The narrative purpose of this is evidently to cause the covering of the lamp and to cause Beleg to work too quickly in the darkness at the cutting of the bonds. It may be also that the wounding of Beleg’s hand when he put it on the point of Dailir his arrow (1187) accounts for his clumsiness; for every aspect of this powerful scene had been pondered and refined.
In the poem the great storm is introduced: first presaged in lines 1064 ff., when Beleg and Flinding were at the edge of the dell (as it is in The Silmarillion):
Lo! black cloud-drifts
surged up like smoke from the sable North,
and the sheen was shrouded of the shivering moon;
the wind came wailing from the woeful mountains,
and the heath unhappy hissed and whispered
and bursting at last after Beleg’s death (1301 ff.), to last all through the following day, during which Túrin and Flinding crouched on the hillside (1320, 1330–1). On account of the storm the Orcs were unable to find Túrin, and departed, as in The Silmarillion; in the Tale Flinding roused Túrin to flee as soon as the shouts of discovery were heard from the Orc-camp, and nothing more is said of the matter. But in the poem it is still, as in the Tale, the sudden uncovering of Flinding’s lamp as he fell back from Túrin’s assault that illumined Beleg’s face; in the last account that my father wrote of this episode he was undecided whether it was the cover falling off the lamp or a great flash of lightning that gave the light, and in the published work I chose the latter.
There remain a few isolated points, mostly concerning names. In this part of the poem we meet for the first time:
Nargothrond 821, 904;
Taur-na-Fuin (for Taur Fuin of the Lost Tales) 766, 828; called also Deadly Nightshade 767, 837, 1317, and Forest of Night 896;
Dor-na-Fauglith 946, 1035, 1326, called also the Plains of Drouth 826, the Thirsty Plain 947 (and in A, note to 826, the Blasted Plain). The name Dor-na-Fauglith arose during the composition of the poem (see note to 946). By this time the story of the blasting of the great northern plain, so that it became a dusty desert, in the battle that ended the Siege of Angband, must have been conceived, though it does not appear in writing for several years.
Here also is the first reference to the triple peaks of Thangorodrim (1000), called the thunderous towers (951), though in the ‘Prologue’ to the poem it is said that Húrin was set on its steepest peak (96); and from lines 713–14 (as rewritten in the B-text) we learn that Angband was wrought at the roots of the great mountain.
The name Fangros (631; Fangair A) occurs once elsewhere, in a very obscure note, where it is apparently connected with the burning of the ships of the Noldoli.
Melian’s name Mablui – by the hands enchanted of Melian Mablui, 731 – clearly contains mab ‘hand’, as in Mablung, Ermabwed (see II. 339).
That the Dwarves were said in A and originally in B to dwell in the South (1147, emended in B to East) is perhaps to be related to the statement in the Tale of the Nauglafring that Nogrod lay ‘a very long journey southward beyond the wide forest on the borders of those great heaths nigh Umboth-muilin the Pools of Twilight’ (II. 225).
I cannot explain the reference in line 1006 to the wild wheatfields of the wargod’s realm; nor that in the lines concerning Beleg’s fate after death to the long waiting of the dead in the halls of the Moon (1284).
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