Читать книгу The Shaping of Middle-earth онлайн | страница 55

With the later interpolations in S enters the idea of the Siege of Angband as an epoch, ‘a time of growth and birth and flowering’; and also the disposition of the Gnomish princes, with the essentials of the later history already present – Fingolfin in Hithlum, the Fëanorians in the East (where they afterwards warred with Dwarves, Orcs, and Men), and Felagund guarding the entry into the lands of Sirion. (The reference to Broseliand in this passage is noteworthy: the form of the name spelt with -s- first appears in the A-text of Canto IV of the Lay of Leithian – probably early 1928; III. 195, 197). ‘ssss1 when Morgoth breaks the leaguer’ may or may not imply the story of his duel with Morgoth before Angband.

Gumlin father of Húrin has appeared in the second version of the Lay of the Children of Húrin (III. 115, 126); but Huor, named as Húrin’s brother in the rewriting of S, here makes his first appearance in the legends.

The complexities of the history of Barahir and Beren and the founding of Nargothrond are best discussed together with what is said in §10; see the commentary on the next section.

ssss1

In §9 as first written Barahir already appears as the father of Beren, replacing Egnor; and they are here Ilkorin Elves, not Men, though this was changed when the passage was revised. In the first version of the Lay of the Children of Húrin Beren was still an Elf, while in the second version my father shifted back and forth between Man and Elf (III. 124–5); the opening cantos of the A-text of the Lay of Leithian (in being by the autumn of 1925) Egnor and his son were Men (III. 171); now here in S (early 1926) they are again Elves, though Egnor has become Barahir. Perplexingly, in §10 as first written, while Barahir is ‘a famous chieftain of Ilkorindi’, on the same page of the manuscript and quite certainly written at the same time Beren ‘alone of mortals came back from Mandos’. It may well be that the statements in S that Barahir and Beren were Ilkorins were an inadvertent return to the former idea, after the decision that they were Men (seen in the A-text of the Lay of Leithian) had been made. (Later in the original text of S, §14, Beren is a mortal.)