Читать книгу The Shaping of Middle-earth онлайн | страница 67

It may be noted that the words ‘as Men grew strong and took the goodness of earth’ derive from the Lay of the Children of Húrin (III. 44, 54):

for in days long gone

… Men were of mould less mighty builded

ere the earth’s goodness from the Elves they drew.

Cf. The Silmarillion, p. 105: ‘In after days, when because of the triumph of Morgoth Elves and Men became estranged, as he most wished, those of the Elven-race that lived still in Middle-earth waned and faded, and Men usurped the sunlight.’

Lastly, in the story of Dior and the ruin of Doriath as told in S, there are various developments. The son of Dior, Auredhir (II. 240) has disappeared. The ‘vain bargaining’ between Dior and the Sons of Fëanor perhaps refers to the passage in the Tale (II. 241) where Dior asserts that to return the Silmaril the Nauglafring must be broken, and Curufin (the messenger of the Fëanorians) retorts that in that case the Nauglafring must be given to them unbroken. In the Tale Maglor, Díriel, Celegorm, and Cranthir (or the earlier equivalents of their names) were killed in the battle (which there took place in Hithlum, where Dior ruled after his father); but in S, as first written, the story takes a very strange turn, in that the Fëanorians did get their hands on the Nauglafring, but then so quarrelled over it that in the end ‘only Maglor was left’. How the story would have gone in this case is impossible to discern.

ssss1 and ssss1

The two sections describing Gondolin and its fall are discussed together in the following commentary.

At the beginning of §15 the brief reference to the story of Isfin and Eöl shows development from what was said in the Lay of the Fall of Gondolin (III. 146): for in the poem Isfin was seeking, together with her mother, for her father Fingolfin when she was entrapped by Eöl in the dark forest. The larger history has evolved since then, and now Isfin ‘was lost in Taur-na-Fuin after the Battle of Unnumbered Tears’. We can only surmise how she came to be there. Either she left Gondolin soon after its settlement bent on some purpose unrecorded, or else she was lost in the retreat from the battle. (It is, incidentally, a curious aspect of the earlier conception of Gondolin’s foundation that there were women and children to people it as well as warriors; for one would suppose that Turgon had left the old men, the women, and the children of his people in Hithlum – why should he do otherwise? But in the outlines for Gilfanon’s Tale there are references to Turgon’s having ‘rescued a part of the women and children’, and having ‘gathered women and children from the camps’ as he fled south down Sirion (I. 239, 241).) Meglin is still, as in the poem, ‘sent by his mother to Gondolin’, while she remained with her captor.