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That Beren and Húrin were friends and fellows-in-arms is stated in the Lay of the Children of Húrin, and earlier (see III. 25), but it has not been said before that this relationship arose during the time of Beren’s outlawry.

For the use of ‘Shadowy Mountains’ to mean the Mountains of Terror see III. 170–1.

In the rewritten passage (pp. 25–6) the story is seen at an earlier stage than that in the ‘Synopsis II’ for Cantos VI and VII of the Lay of Leithian (1928), the text of which is given in III. 221, 233. Celegorm has been displaced by Felagoth (not yet Felagund); but Celegorm ‘discovered what was the secret mission of Felagoth and Beren’ after their departure from Nargothrond, and thus the element of the intervention of Celegorm and Curufin, turning the Elves of Nargothrond against their king, was not yet present. Moreover in the northward journey of Beren and his companions from Nargothrond there is a battle with Orcs, from which only a small band of the Elves escapes, afterwards returning to the battlefield to despoil the dead and disguise themselves as Orcs. These two elements are clearly interconnected: Celegorm (and Curufin) do not know why Beren and Felagoth are setting out, and thus there is no reason why the king should not set out with a strong force. When my father wrote ‘Synopsis II’ he had brought in the element of the intervention of the Fëanorian brothers against Felagund and Beren, and with it the small band that was all they had as companions from their first departure from Nargothrond.

The sequence is thus clearly: S – Synopsis I – interpolation in S – Synopsis II; and in the revision of S here we have an interesting stage in which Felagund (Felagoth) has emerged as the lord of Nargothrond, but the ‘Fëanorian intervention’ has not, and Celegorm still ‘offers redress’ to Lúthien, as he did in Synopsis I (III. 244) – for his dog Huan had hurt her.

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The earliest form of this part of the story (apart from that which relates to Húrin) is extant only in the compressed outlines for Gilfanon’s Tale. In my comparison of those early outlines with the narrative of The Silmarillion I noted (I. 242) as essential features of the story that were to survive: