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It's All in the Family: The Elweans and Ingweans - Page 4

© Michael Martinez

Although this story little resembles Christopher Tolkien's account of how Thingol came to be slain, Christopher's account does not resmble his father's brief notes. In an extended note explaining what material he had available for "The Ruin of Doriath" ("The War of the Jewels", pp. 354-6), Christopher says that "in The Tale of Years [composed for the First Age] my father seems not to have considered the problem of the passage of the Dwarvish host into Doriath despite the Girdle of Melian, but in writing the word 'cannot' against the D version (p. 352) he showed that he regarded the story he had outlined as impossible, for that reason. In another place, he sketched a possible solution (ibid.): 'Somehow it must be contrived that Thingol is lured outside or induced to go to war beyond his borders and is there slain by the Dwarves. Then Melian departs, and the girdle being removed Doriath is ravaged by the Dwarves." Christopher adds:

In the story that appears in The Silmarillion the outlaws who went with Hurin to Nargothrond were removed, as also was the curse of Mim; and the treasure that Hurin took from Nargothrond was the Nauglamir -- which was here supposed to have been made by the Dwarves for Finrod Felagund, and to have been the most prized by him of all the hoard of Nargothrond. Hurin was represented as being at last freed from the delusions inspired by Morgoth in his encounter with Melian in Menegroth. The Dwarves who set the Silmaril in the Nauglamir were already in Menegroth engaged on other works, and it was they who slew Thingol; at that time Melian's power was withdrawn from Neldoreth and Region, and she vanished out of Middle-earth, leaving Doriath unprotected. The ambush and destruction of the Dwarves at Sarn Athrad was given again to beren and the Green Elves (following my father's letter of 1963 quoted on p. 353, where however he said that 'Beren had no army'), and from the same source the Ents, 'Sheperds of the Trees', were introduced.

This story was not lightly or easily conceived, but was the outcome of long experimentation among alternative conceptions. In this work Guy Kay took a major part, and the chapter that I finally wrote owes much to my discussions with him. It is, and was, obvious that a step was being taken of a different order from any other 'manipulation' of my father's own writing in the course of the book: even in the case of the story of the Fall of Gondolin, to which my father had never returned, something could be contrived without introducing radical changes in the narrative. It seemed at that time that there were elements in the story of the Ruin of Doriath as it stood that were radically incompatible with 'The Silmarillion' as projected, and that there was here an inescapable choice: either to abandon that conception, or else to alter the story. I think now that this was a mistaken view, and that the undoubted difficulties could have been, and should have been, surmounted without so far overstepping the bounds of the editorial function.

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