The Lays of Beleriand

The Lays of Beleriand is a documentary edition rather than a work of narrative prose: a scholarly presentation of manuscript material, prepared and annotated by Christopher Tolkien and issued in 1985 as the third instalment of the series that traces the growth of his father's mythology. Within that sequence it follows the two volumes given to the early prose tales, and it is the one volume of the series devoted entirely to verse. Its subject is therefore a mode rather than a period: the years in which Tolkien tried to carry the central stories of the Elder Days in long poetic form instead of in prose, and the drafts, revisions and abandonments that attended the attempt.

The shape of the book follows from that subject. Two long unfinished poems take up the greater part of it, each printed continuously with numbered lines, each introduced by an account of the manuscripts and their dating, and each followed by commentary keyed to those line numbers; shorter pieces and fragments are gathered around them. Variant readings are reported rather than silently resolved, so that a passage may be given in more than one state, and the editorial notes distinguish what stands in the manuscripts from what has been inferred. The result is a volume in which text and apparatus are interleaved throughout, and in which the reader is expected to move between the verse and the discussion of it.

The editorial voice is deliberately plain and speaks in the first person, dating papers, weighing evidence and marking conjecture as conjecture. It assumes a reader already acquainted with the published narrative of the First Age and interested in how that narrative came to be, and it does not pause to introduce the legendarium from the beginning. The volume accordingly occupies a documentary rather than a narrative position: what it prints is evidence for the development of the stories, not a rival account of them, and its readings stand beside the published prose without displacing it.

Nearly all the verse gathered in the volume belongs to a single stretch of Tolkien's working life, the decade after the First World War in which he was establishing himself as a philologist. The alliterative poem on Túrin son of Húrin was begun during his years at Leeds in the earlier 1920s, in the metre of the Old English poetry he was then teaching, and it was carried forward in two separate attempts, the second reworking the opening at greater length and in a slower manner than the first. Neither attempt came near the end of the story: the poem was laid aside long before the fall of Nargothrond had been reached, and the tale it was to have told waited another lifetime for its prose completion. Tolkien's own later remarks show that he continued to regard the Túrin material as one of the three great tales of the Elder Days, whatever the fate of the verse in which he first tried to set it down.

In the summer of 1925 he abandoned the alliterative measure and began the tale of Beren and Lúthien again in rhyming couplets, divided into cantos rather than into chapters. He worked at this poem intermittently for six years and gave it up in September 1931, having reached some four thousand lines and broken off in the fourteenth canto, at the point where the great wolf seizes the hand in which the Silmaril was held. What remained unwritten was a substantial part of the story, including its close and the fates of the two lovers, so that the poem ends not at a resting place but in mid-course. The corresponding prose narrative published in 1977 therefore carries the tale over ground the verse never covered, and the two accounts diverge in detail as well as in extent.

The poem was not simply forgotten after 1931. When his publishers asked for further work following the success of The Hobbit, Tolkien sent the unfinished Lay in with the prose Silmarillion material in the autumn of 1937, and the verse in particular found no favour; the submission came back, and neither poem nor prose was taken. His long letter of 1951 to a prospective publisher shows the mythology still unpublished twenty years after the poem was set aside, with the tale of Beren and Lúthien standing at its centre. Once The Lord of the Rings was finished he returned to the Lay around 1950 and began it afresh from the opening, in a manner considerably changed from that of the 1920s, but this recommenced version was carried only a short way before it too was left. He also went back over parts of the old manuscript with corrections that reflect the altered state of the legends, so that the papers preserve work separated by a quarter of a century.

None of this verse was published while Tolkien lived, and the shorter pieces gathered beside the two long poems — among them the alliterative fragments on the flight of the Noldor, on Eärendel and on the fall of Gondolin — had likewise been broken off early and left among his papers. Christopher Tolkien dated and edited the manuscripts in the years following his father's death and issued them in 1985 through George Allen & Unwin in Britain, with an American edition from Houghton Mifflin in the same year; the volume has since been reprinted under the HarperCollins imprint and reissued together with the two preceding volumes in a single collected book. The series to which it belongs was continued until 1996, when its twelfth and final volume appeared. No German translation exists: only the two volumes of the early prose tales were rendered into German, so that for German readers the English title remains the correct form of citation for this volume.

The book opens with a short foreword in which the editor sets out what the volume contains and how he has handled the papers, and it closes with an index of names and titles covering the verse and the commentary alike. Between these lie four numbered divisions of very unequal length. The first is given to the alliterative poem on the children of Húrin, the second to a group of shorter pieces broken off in their early stages, the third to the rhyming Lay of Leithian, and the fourth to the opening of that same poem as it was taken up again long afterwards. There are no maps, plates or genealogical tables here, and no appendix of linguistic material; unlike several later volumes of the series, this one offers nothing beyond text, commentary and index, and a reader looking for cartographic or etymological matter must go elsewhere in the sequence.

The Túrin division prints two attempts at the same poem in succession, the longer first and the shorter second, each with its own account of the manuscripts. The first is subdivided under headings that follow the movement of the story — the boy's fostering in the Hidden Kingdom, the part borne by the archer of Doriath, the sojourn among the outlaws and the coming to Nargothrond — so that a reader can locate an episode without reading through. Where the verse stops short, the editor prints the outlines and notes in which the author sketched what was to follow, and he adds a discussion of the names, many of which shifted between one stage of the work and the next. The short poems that follow occupy comparatively few pages: an alliterative treatment of the departure of the Noldor from the West, a fragment on the mariner, and the beginning of a lay on the fall of the hidden city, each introduced separately.

The Leithian division is the largest in the book and is organised canto by canto: the verse of each canto is given, and the editorial discussion of that canto follows immediately after it, so that the two alternate down the length of the poem rather than the notes being gathered at the end. Within this apparatus stands the criticism that C. S. Lewis wrote after reading the poem in 1929, cast by him in the manner of a scholarly commentary on an ancient text with an invented tradition of copyists, together with the author's answering revisions to the passages Lewis had marked. The concluding division prints the reopened version of the poem made after The Lord of the Rings, preceded by a note on its date and accompanied by a synopsis of the further course intended; it breaks off early, and the volume ends there.

The published Silmarillion tells both of the stories that fill the greater part of this volume, and in each case its prose presents itself as the shortened form of something longer. The chapter on Beren and Lúthien names a lay as the fuller telling and ranks it as the longest of the songs of the Elder Days but one; the chapter on Túrin is referred in the same manner to a long work bearing the tale of the children of Húrin. A reader coming from the 1977 book to the verse accordingly finds the fuller telling that the prose had gestured at, though not in the condition the prose implies, since the poems break off where the narrative continues. The relation between the two is thus the reverse of what the published account suggests: the prose is complete and late, the verse fragmentary and early, and the gesture toward an older song is a literary frame rather than a bibliographical fact.

Only one thread of this material reached print in Tolkien's lifetime. On the road east of Bree, Aragorn tells his companions the story of Beren and Lúthien and gives them part of it in song, adding that what they have heard is a rough rendering into the Common Speech of a poem composed in an Elvish measure which he names. The published romance thus establishes, long before any of the Elder Days material was available, that this tale was carried in verse and that what survives in the later tongue is an echo of it. The same story is invoked again in the appendices, where it stands as the pattern against which the union of Aragorn and Arwen is measured. These passages are the only points at which the substance of the Lay of Leithian touches the body of work Tolkien himself published, and they touch it as report rather than as text.

For questions of what happened in Beleriand the volume carries no authority: it holds abandoned attempts, and where its readings differ from the published narratives the later prose stands. That prose has since been separated out and issued on its own. The tale of Túrin was carried far beyond the point the verse reached, first in the long prose narrative printed among the Unfinished Tales and afterwards as a continuous book assembled from the same papers; the tale of Beren and Lúthien was likewise given a volume of its own, in which the successive forms of the single story are set out in order and the verse takes its place among them. Read against those editions, the Lays are a stage rather than a destination — the record of an attempt to give the two central stories of the Elder Days a metrical form, preserved because the attempt left its mark on everything written afterwards.