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The quarrel of the Noldorin princes has as yet none of the complexity and subtlety that entered into it afterwards with the history of Míriel, the first wife of Finwë and mother of Fëanor; the quarrel is in any case treated with great brevity.

It is said here that ‘Fëanor has cursed for ever anyone, God or Elf or mortal that shall come hereafter, who touches [the Silmarils]’. In §5, by a later interpolation, the oath is taken by Fëanor and his sons at the time of the torchlit concourse in Tûn, but the statement in §4 my father allowed to stand, clearly because he overlooked it. In the alliterative fragment The Flight of the Noldoli, however, which on general grounds I assume to belong to the earlier part of 1925 (III. 131), the oath is sworn by Fëanor and his sons as in the interpolation in S §5, ‘in the mighty square upon the crown of Côr’ (see III. 136). I incline to think that the statement here in §4 was a slip of memory.

The events immediately following the council of the Gods in which Morgoth’s lies were disclosed and Fëanor banished from Tûn (in S the banishment is not said to be limited to a term of years) are not yet given the form they have in The Silmarillion. The entire story of Morgoth’s going to Formenos (not yet so named) and his speech with Fëanor before the doors (The Silmarillion pp. 71–2) has yet to appear. Morgoth’s northward movement up the coast in feint is also absent; rather he comes at once to Arvalin ‘where the shadow is thickest in all the world’, as is said in The Silmarillion (p. 73) of Avathar.

In the story of Morgoth’s encounter with Ungoliant and the destruction of the Trees details of the final version appear, as Ungoliant’s ascent of the great mountain (later named Hyarmentir) ‘from pinnacle to pinnacle’, and the ladder made for Morgoth to climb. There is no mention of the great festival, but it appears in §5: it looks as if my father omitted to include it earlier and brought it in a bit further on as an afterthought.

In the tale of The Theft of Melko Ungoliant fled south at once after the destruction of the Trees (I. 154), and of Melko’s subsequent movements after his crossing of the Ice it is only told (by Sorontur to Manwë, I. 176) that he was busy building himself a new dwelling-place in the region of the Iron Mountains. But in S the story of ‘the Thieves’ Quarrel’ and Morgoth’s rescue by the Balrogs emerges suddenly fully-formed.