And she said: ‘There everlastingly thy naked self shall endure the torment of his scorn, pierced by his eyes, unless thou yield to me the mastery of thy tower.’
Then Sauron yielded himself, and Lъthien took the mastery of the isle and all that was there….
Then Lъthien stood upon the bridge, and declared her power: and the spell was loosed that bound stone to stone, and the gates were thrown down, and the walls opened, and the pits laid bare.
Here again the actual matter of the narrative is totally different in the early and late forms of the legend: in The Silmarillion ‘many thralls and captives came forth in wonder and dismay…for they had lain long in the darkness of Sauron’, whereas in the tale the inmates who emerged from the shaken dwelling (other than Beren and the apparently inconsequent figure of the blind slave-Gnome Gimli) were a host of cats, reduced by the breaking of Tevildo’s spell to ‘puny size’. (If my father had used in the tale names other than Huan, Beren, and Tinъviel, and in the absence of all other knowledge, including that of authorship, it would not be easy to demonstrate from a simple comparison between this part of the Tale and the story as told in The Silmarillion that the resemblances were more than superficial and accidental.)
A more minor narrative point may be noticed here. The typescript version would presumably have treated the fight of Huan and Tevildo somewhat differently, for in the manuscript Tevildo and his companion can flee up great trees (p. 28), whereas in the typescript nothing grew in the Withered Dale (where Huan was to lie feigning sick) save ‘low bushes of scanty leaves’ (p. 48).
In the remainder of the story the congruence between early and late forms is far closer. The narrative structure in the tale may be summarised thus:
– Beren is attired for disguise in the fell of the dead cat Oikeroi.
– He and Tinъviel journey together to Angamandi.
– Tinъviel lays a spell of sleep on Karkaras the wolf-ward of Angamandi.
– They enter Angamandi, Beren slinks in his beast-shape beneath the seat of Melko, and Tinъviel dances before Melko.
– All the host of Angamandi and finally Melko himself are cast into sleep, and Melko’s iron crown rolls from his head.
– Tinъviel rouses Beren, who cuts a Silmaril from the crown, and the blade snaps.
– The sleepers stir, and Beren and Tinъviel flee back to the gates, but find Karkaras awake again.
– Karkaras bites off Beren’s outthrust hand holding the Silmaril.
– Karkaras becomes mad with the pain of the Silmaril in his belly, for the Silmaril is a holy thing and sears evil flesh.
– Karkaras goes raging south to Artanor.
– Beren and Tinъviel return to Artanor; they go before Tinwelint and Beren declares that a Silmaril is in his hand.
– The hunting of the wolf takes place, and Mablung the Heavy-handed is one of the hunters.
– Beren is slain by Karkaras, and is borne back to the cavern of Tinwelint on a bier of boughs; dying he gives the Silmaril to Tinwelint.
– Tinъviel follows Beren to Mandos, and Mandos permits them to return into the world.
Changing the catskin of Oikeroi to the wolfskin of Draugluin, and altering some other names, this would do tolerably well as a prйcis of the story in The Silmarillion! But of course it is devised as a summary of similarities. There are major differences as well as a host of minor ones that do not appear in it.
Again, most important is the absence of ‘the Nargothrond Element’. When this combined with the Beren legend it introduced Felagund as Beren’s companion, Lъthien’s imprisonment in Nargothrond by Celegorm and Curufin, her escape with Huan the hound of Celegorm, and the attack on Beren and Lъthien as they returned from Tol-in-Gaurhoth by Celegorm and Curufin, now fleeing from Nargothrond (The Silmarillion pp. 173–4, 176–8).
The narrative after the conclusion of the episode of ‘the Thraldom of Beren’ is conducted quite differently in the old story (pp. 30–1), in that here Huan is with Beren and Tinъviel; Tinъviel longs for her home, and Beren is grieved because he loves the life in the woods with the dogs, but he resolves the impasse by determining to obtain a Silmaril, and though Huan thinks their plan is folly he gives them the fell of Oikeroi, clad in which Beren sets out with Tinъviel for Angamandi. In The Silmarillion (p. 177) likewise, Beren, after long wandering in the woods with Lъthien (though not with Huan), resolves to set forth again on the quest of the Silmaril, but Lъthien’s stance in the matter is different:
‘You must choose, Beren, between these two: to relinquish the quest and your oath and seek a life of wandering upon the face of the earth; or to hold to your word and challenge the power of darkness upon its throne. But on either road I shall go with you, and our doom shall be alike.’
There then intervened the attack on Beren and Lъthein by Celegorm and Curufin, when Huan, deserting his master, joined himself to them; they returned together to Doriath, and when they got there Beren left Lъthien sleeping and went back northwards by himself, riding Curufin’s horse. He was overtaken on the edge of Anfauglith by Huan bearing Lъthien on his back and bringing from Tol-in-Gaurhoth the skins of Draugluin and of Sauron’s bat-messenger Thuringwethil (of whom in the old story there is no trace); attired in these Beren and Lъthien went to Angband. Huan is here their active counsellor.
The later legend is thus more full of movement and incident in this part than is the Tale of Tinъviel (though the final form was not achieved all at one stroke, as may be imagined); and in the Silmarillion form this is the more marked from the fact that the account is a compression and a summary of the long Lay of Leithian.*
In the Tale of Tinъviel the account of Beren’s disguise is characteristically detailed: his instruction by Tinъviel in feline behaviour, his heat and discomfort inside the skin. Tinъviel’s disguise as a bat has however not yet emerged, and whereas in The Silmarillion when confronted by Carcharoth she ‘cast back her foul raiment’ and ‘commanded him to sleep’, here she used once more the magical misty robe spun of her hair: ‘the black strands of her dark veil she cast in his eyes’ (p. 31). The indifference of Karkaras to the false Oikeroi contrasts with Carcharoth’s suspicion of the false Druagluin, of whose death he had heard tidings: in the old story it is emphasised that no news of the discomfiture of Tevildo (and the death of Oikeroi) had yet reached Angamandi.
The encounter of Tinъviel with Melko is given with far more detail than in The Silmarillion (here much compressed from its source); notable is the phrase (p. 32) ‘he leered horribly, for his dark mind pondered some evil’, forerunner of that in The Silmarillion (p. 180):
Then Morgoth looking upon her beauty conceived in his thought an evil lust, and a design more dark than any that had yet come into his heart since he fled from Valinor.
We are never told anything more explicit.
Whether Melko’s words to Tinъviel, ‘Who art thou that flittest about my halls like a bat?’, and the description of her dancing ‘noiseless as a bat’, were the germ of her later bat-disguise cannot be said, though it seems possible.