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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.