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Then a great clamour broke forth in the vale and the folk of Fëanor knew full soon that here were no elfin folk, by reason of their harsh voices and unlovely cries, and many arrows came winging in the dark towards that voice, but Fëanor was no longer there. Swiftly had he gone and drawn the most of his folk before the vale’s mouth whence a stream issued forth tree-hung

Here the text ends abruptly and near the top of a new page; it is clear that no more was written.

The Noldorin house has still not emerged, but we have a king Gelmir of the Gnomes, with his sons Golfin, Delin, Lúthien (the last emended from Oleg), captains of his three armies. There is no suggestion that Fëanor and his sons were associated with these in any sort of close kinship. In the fragment of the Lay of the Fall of Gondolin (see III. 146–7) there appears – for the first time – Fingolfin, who steps into Finwë Nólemë’s place as the father of Turgon and Isfin, but is not the son of Finwë, rather of Gelmir. I have suggested there that this Gelmir, father of Golfin/Fingolfin, is to be identified with Finwë, father of Fingolfin in the alliterative poems and later; and it may be that the name Gelmir is formally connected with Fin-golma, which in the outlines for Gilfanon’s Tale is another name for Finwë Nólemë (I. 238–9, and see I. 263, entry Nólemë). It is to be remembered that Finwë Nóleme was not in the earliest legend the father of Fëanor and was not slain by Melko in Valinor, but came to the Great Lands. – Of the other sons of Gelmir named in the present text, Delin and Lúthien, there is no trace elsewhere.

It is certainly clear that Golfin here is the first appearance of Fingolfin, and by the same token that this text preceded the abandoned beginning of the Lay of the Fall of Gondolin. On the other hand, the obscure story of the death of Fëanor in the earliest outlines (I. 238–9) has disappeared, and though the present text breaks off too soon for certainty it seems extremely probable that, had my father continued it a little further, we should have learned of Fëanor’s death in battle with the Orcs whom he and his companions had aroused in the valley where they were encamped. It may be, too, that we should have had an explanation of the puzzling lines of the Lay (III. 146):