The same idea occurs in the tale of The Music of the Ainur (I. 59). The peculiar dispensation of Mandos in the case of Beren and Tinъviel as here conceived is therefore that their whole ‘natural’ destiny as Elves was changed: having died as Elves might die (from wounds or from grief) they were not reborn as new beings, but returned from Mandos in their own persons—yet now ‘mortal even as Men’. The earliest eschatology is too unclear to allow of a satisfactory interpretation of this ‘mortality’, and the passage in The Building of Valinor on the fates of Men (I. 77) is particularly hard to understand (see the commentary on it, I. 90ff.). But it seems possible that the words ‘even as Men’ in the address of Mandos to Beren and Tinъviel were included to stress the finality of whatever second deaths they might undergo; their departure would be as final as that of Men, there would be no second return in their own persons, and no reincarnation. They will remain in Mandos (‘when ye fare hither again it will be for ever’)—unless they are summoned by the Gods to dwell in Valinor. These last words should probably be related to the passage in The Building of Valinor concerning the fate of certain Men (I. 77):

Few are they and happy indeed for whom at a season doth Nornorл the herald of the Gods set out. Then ride they with him in chariots or upon good horses down into the vale of Valinor and feast in the halls of Valmar, dwelling in the houses of the Gods until the Great End come.

§ 2. Places and peoples in the Tale of Tinъvie l

To consider first what can be learned of the geography of the Great Lands from this tale: the early ‘dictionary’ of the Gnomish language makes it clear that the meaning of Artanor was ‘the Land Beyond’, as it is interpreted in the text (p. 9). Several passages in the Lost Tales cast light on this expression. In an outline for Gilfanon’s untold tale (I. 240) the Noldoli exiled from Valinor

now fought for the first time with the Ores and captured the pass of the Bitter Hills; thus they escaped from the Land of Shadows…They entered the Forest of Artanor and the Region of the Great Plains…

(which latter, I suggested, may be the forerunner of the later Talath Dirnen, the Guarded Plain of Nargothrond). The tale to follow Gilfanon’s, according to the projected scheme (I. 241), was to be that of Tinъviel, and this outline begins: ‘Beren son of Egnor wandered out of Dor Lуmin [i.e. Hisilуmл, see I. 112] into Artanor…’ In the present tale, it is said that Beren came ‘through the terrors of the Iron Mountains until he reached the Lands Beyond’ (p. 11), and also (p. 21) that some of the Dogs ‘roamed the woods of Hisilуmл or passing the mountainous places fared even at times into the region of Artanor and the lands beyond and to the south’. And finally, in the Tale of Turambar (p. 72) there is a reference to ‘the road over the dark hills of Hithlum into the great forests of the Land Beyond where in those days Tinwelint the hidden king had his abode’.

It is quite clear, then, that Artanor, afterwards called Doriath (which appears in the title to the typescript text of the Tale of Tinъviel, together with an earlier form Dor Athro, p. 41), lay in the original conception in much the same relation to Hisilуmл (the Land of Shadow(s), Dor Lуmin, Aryador) as does Doriath to Hithlum (Hisilуmл) in The Silmarillion: to the south, and divided from it by a mountain-range, the Iron Mountains or Bitter Hills.

In commenting on the tale of The Theft of Melko and the Darkening of Valinor I have noticed (I. 158–9) that whereas in the Lost Tales Hisilуmл is declared to be beyond the Iron Mountains, it is also said (in the Tale of Turambar, p. 77) that these mountains were so named from Angband, the Hells of Iron, which lay beneath ‘their northernmost fastnesses’, and that therefore there seems to be a contradictory usage of the term ‘Iron Mountains’ within the Lost Tales—‘unless it can be supposed that these mountains were conceived as a continuous range, the southerly extension (the later Mountains of Shadow) forming the southern fence of Hisilуmл, while the northern peaks, being above Angband, gave the range its name’.

Now in the Tale of Tinъviel Beren, journeying north from Artanor, ‘drew nigh to the lower hills and treeless lands that warned of the approach of the bleak Iron Mountains’ (p. 14). These he had previously traversed, coming out of Hisilуmл but now ‘he followed the Iron Mountains till he drew nigh to the terrible regions of Melko’s abode’. This seems to support the suggestion that the mountains fencing Hisilуmл from the Lands Beyond were continuous with those above Angband; and we may compare the little primitive map (I. 81), where the mountain range f isolates Hisilуmл (g): see I. 112, 135. The implication is that ‘dim’ or ‘black’ Hisilуmл had no defence against Melko.

There appear now also the Mountains of Night (pp. 20, 46–7), and it seems clear that the great pinewoods of Taurfuin, the Forest of Night, grew upon those heights (in The Silmarillion Dorthonion ‘Land of Pines’, afterwards named Taur-nu-Fuin). Dairon was lost there, but Tinъviel, though she passed near, did not enter ‘that dark region’. There is nothing to show that it was not placed then as it was later—to the east of Ered Wethrin, the Mountains of Shadow. It is also at least possible that the description (in the manuscript version only, p. 23) of Tinъviel, on departing from Huan, leaving ‘the shelter of the trees’ and coming to ‘a region of long grass’ is a first intimation of the great plain of Ard-galen (called after its desolation Anfauglith and Dor-nu-Fauglith), especially if this is related to the passage in the typescript version telling of Tinъviel’s meeting with Huan ‘in a little glade nigh to the forest’s borders, where the first grasslands begin that are nourished by the upper waters of the river Sirion’ (p. 47).

After their escape from Angamandi Huan found Beren and Tinъviel ‘in that northward region of Artanor that was called afterward Nan Dumgorthin, the land of the dark idols’ (p. 35). In the Gnomish dictionary Nan Dumgorthin is defined as ‘a land of dark forest east of Artanor where on a wooded mountain were hidden idols sacrificed to by some evil tribes of renegade men’ (dum ‘secret, not to be spoken’, dumgort, dungort ‘an (evil) idol’). In the Lay of the Children of Hъrin in alliterative verse Tъrin and his companion Flinding (later Gwindor), fleeing after the death of Beleg Strongbow, came to this land:

There the twain enfolded phantom twilight

and dim mazes dark, unholy,

in Nan Dungorthin where nameless gods

have shrouded shrines in shadows secret,

more old than Morgoth or the ancient lords

the golden Gods of the guarded West.

But the ghostly dwellers of that grey valley

hindered nor hurt them, and they held their course

with creeping flesh and quaking limb.

Yet laughter at whiles with lingering echo,

as distant mockery of demon voices

there harsh and hollow in the hushed twilight

Flinding fancied, fell, unwholesome…

There are, I believe, no other references to the gods of Nan Dumgorthin. In the poem the land was placed west of Sirion; and finally, as Nan Dungortheb ‘the Valley of Dreadful Death’, it becomes in The Silmarillion (pp. 81, 121) a ‘no-land’ between the Girdle of Melian and Ered Gorgoroth, the Mountains of Terror. But the description of it in the Tale of Tinъviel as a ‘northward region of Artanor’ clearly does not imply that it lay within the protective magic of Gwendeling, and it seems that this ‘zone’ was originally less distinctly bounded, and less extensive, than ‘the Girdle of Melian’ afterwards became. Probably Artanor was conceived at this time as a great region of forest in the heart of which was Tinwelint’s cavern, and only his immediate domain was protected by the power of the queen: