The War of the Jewels

until his death. In Volume 10, Morgoth's Ring, the narrative was taken only so far as the natural dividing-point in the whole, when Morgoth destroyed the Trees of Light and fled from Valinor bearing the stolen Silmarils. In The War of the Jewels the story returns to Middle-earth, and the ruinous conflict of the High Elves and the Men who were their allies with the power of the Dark Lord. With the publication in this book of all J.R.R. Tolkien's later narrative writing concerned with the last centuries of the First Age, the long history of The Silmarillion, from its beginnings in The Book of Lost Tales, is completed; and the enigmatic state of the work at his death can be understood.

A chief element in The War of the Jewels is a major story of Middle-earth now published for the first time, a continuation of the great 'saga' of Turin Turambar and his sister Nienor, the children of Hurin the Steadfast: this is the tale of the disaster that overtook the forest people of Brethil when Hurin came among them after his release from long years of captivity in Angband, the fortress of Morgoth. The uncompleted text of the Grey Annals, the primary record of the War of the Jewels, is given in full; the geography of Beleriand is studied in detail, with redrawings of the final state of the map; and a long essay on the names and relations of all the peoples shows more clearly then any writing published hitherto the closeness of the connection between language and history in Tolkien's world, and provides much new information, including some knowledge of the language of the divine powers, the Valar.

J.R.R. TOLKIEN.

THE WAR OF THE JEWELS.

The Later Silmarillion.

Part Two.

The Legends of Beleriand.

Edited by Christopher Tolkien.

HarperCollinsRblishers.

HarperCollinsPublishers.

77 - 85 Fulham Palace Road,

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB.

This paperback edition 1995

987654321.

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers 1994.

Copyright (C) HarperCollinsPublishers 1994.

TM (C) 1990 Frank Richard Williamson

and Christopher Reuel Tolkien,

executors of the Estate of the late

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.

ISBN 0 261 10324 5.

Set in Sabon.

Printed in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsManufacturing Glasgow.

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CONTENTS.

Foreword. page ix PART ONE.

THE GREY ANNALS.

PART TWO.

THE LATER QUENTA SILMARILLION.

9.Of Men 173

10.Of the Siege of Angband 175

11.Of Beleriand and its Realms 180

12.Of Turgon and the Building of Gondolin 198

13.Concerning the Dwarves 201

14.Of the Coming of Men into the West 215

15.Of the Ruin of Beleriand and the Fall of Fingolfin 238

The Last Chapters 243

PART THREE.

THE WANDERINGS OF HURIN

AND OTHER WRITINGS NOT FORMING PART OF

THE QUENTA SILMARILLION.

I.The Wanderings of Hurin 251

II.AElfwine and Dirhaval 311

III.Maeglin 316

IV. Of the Enis and the Eagles 340

V. The Tale of Years 342

PART FOUR.

QUENDI AND ELDAR 357

Index 425

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 Ainulindale; the Grey Annals, abandoned at the end of the tale of Turin; 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 Turin and Nienor from Turin's return to Dor-lomin to their deaths in Brethil (see p. 144 in this book).

There were also an abandoned prose saga of Beren and Luthien (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 Turin 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 moment-ous battles and ruinous defeats, are the heroic tales of Beren One-hand and Turin 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 Turin' 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 Hurin 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 Noldorinwa 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 Hurin and Morwen and their children, Turin Turambar and Nienor Niniel. 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 Turin's life; but he extended the 'great saga' (as he justly called it) into 'the Wanderings of Hurin', following the old story that Hurin 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 Hurin'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 Hurin (Narn i Chin Hurin, given in Unfinished Tales), of which 'Hurin 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 Hurin's grim and even it may seem sardonic departure from the ruin of Brethil and dying Manthor this impulse ceased - as it appears. Hurin 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 Hurin'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 Feanorians 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.