The Dwarf-city of Nogrod is said in the tale to lie ‘a very long journey southward beyond the wide forest on the borders of those great heaths nigh Umboth-muilin the Pools of Twilight, on the marches of Tasarinan’ (p. 225). This could be interpreted to mean that Nogrod was itself ‘on the borders of those great heaths nigh Umboth-muilin’ but I think that this is out of the question. It would be a most improbable place for Dwarves, who ‘dwell beneath the earth in caves and tunnelled towns, and aforetime Nogrod was the mightiest of these’ (p. 224). Though mountains are not specifically mentioned here in connection with Dwarves, I think it extremely likely that my father at this time conceived their cities to be in the mountains, as they were afterwards. Further, there seems nothing to contradict the view that the configuration of the lands in the Lost Tales was essentially similar to that of the earliest and later ‘Silmarillion’ maps; and on them, ‘a very long journey southward’ is totally inappropriate to that between the Thousand Caves and the Pools of Twilight.

The meaning must therefore be, simply, ‘a very long journey southward beyond the wide forest’, and what follows places the wide forest, not Nogrod; the forest being, in fact, the Forest of Artanor.

The Pools of Twilight are described in The Fall of Gondolin, but the Elvish name does not there appear (see pp. 195–6, 217).

Whether Belegost was near to or far from Nogrod is not made plain; it is said in this passage that the gold should be borne away ‘to Nogrod and the dwellings of the Dwarves’, but later (p. 230) the Indrafangs are ‘a kindred of the Dwarves that dwelt in other realms’.

In his association with the Dwarves Ufedhin is reminiscent of Eцl, Maeglin’s father, of whom it is said in The Silmarillion (p. 133) that ‘for the Dwarves he had more liking than any other of the Elvenfolk of old’ cf. ibid. p. 92: ‘Few of the Eldar went ever to Nogrod or Belegost, save Eцl of Nan Elmoth and Maeglin his son.’ In the early forms of the story of Eцl and Isfin (referred to in The Fall of Gondolin, p. 165) Eцl has no association with Dwarves. In the present tale there is mention (p. 224) of ‘great traffic’ carried on by the Dwarves ‘with the free Noldoli’ (with Melko’s servants also) in those days: we may wonder who these free Noldoli were, since the Rodothlim had been destroyed, and Gondolin was hidden. Perhaps the sons of Fлanor are meant, or Egnor Beren’s father (see p. 65).

The idea that it was the Dwarves of Nogrod who were primarily involved survived into the later narrative, but they became exclusively so, and those of Belegost specifically denied all aid to them (The Silmarillion p. 233).

Turning now to the Elves, Beren is here of course still an Elf (see p. 139), and in his second span of life he is the ruler, in Hithlum—Hisilуmл, of an Elvish people so numerous that ‘not even Beren knew the tale of those myriad folk’ (p. 234); they are called ‘the green Elves’ and ‘the brown Elves and the green’, for they were ‘clad in green and brown’, and Dior ruled them in Hithlum after the final departure of Beren and Tinъviel. Who were they? It is far from clear how they are to be set into the conception of the Elves of the Great Lands as it appears in other Tales. We may compare the passage in The Coming of the Elves (I.118–19):

Long after the joy of Valinor had washed its memory faint [i.e., the memory of the journey through Hisilуmл] the Elves sang still sadly of it, and told tales of many of their folk whom they said and say were lost in those old forests and ever wandered there in sorrow. Still were they there long after when Men were shut in Hisilуmл by Melko, and still do they dance there when Men have wandered far over the lighter places of the Earth. Hisilуmл did Men name Aryador, and the Lost Elves did they call the Shadow Folk, and feared them.

But in that tale the conception still was that Tinwelint ruled ‘the scattered Elves of Hisilomл’, and in the outlines for Gilfanon’s Tale the ‘Shadow Folk’ of Hisilуmл had ceased to be Elves (see p. 64). In any case, the expression ‘green Elves’, coupled with the fact that it was the Green-elves of Ossiriand whom Beren led to the ambush of the Dwarves at Sarn Athrad in the later story (The Silmarillion p. 235), shows which Elvish people they were to become, even though there is as yet no trace of Ossiriand beyond the river Gelion and the story of the origin of the Laiquendi (ibid. pp. 94, 96).

It was inevitable that ‘the land of the dead that live’ should cease to be in Hisilуmл (which seems to have been in danger of having too many inhabitants), and a note on the manuscript of the Tale of the Nauglafring says: ‘Beren must be in “Doriath beyond Sirion” on a…..not in Hithlum.’ Doriath beyond Sirion was the region called in The Silmarillion (p. 122) Nivrim, the West March, the woods on the west bank of the river between the confluence of Teiglin and Sirion and Aelin-uial, the Meres of Twilight. In the Tale of Tinъviel Beren and Tinъviel, called i.Cuilwarthon, ‘became mighty fairies in the lands about the north of Sirion’ (p. 41).

Gwendelin/Gwenniel appears a somewhat faint and ineffective figure by comparison with the Melian of The Silmarillion. Conceivably, an aspect of this is the far slighter protection afforded to the realm of Artanor by her magic than that of the impenetrable wall and deluding mazes of the Girdle of Melian (see p. 63). But the nature of the protection in the old conception is very unclear. In the Tale of the Nauglafring the coming of the Dwarves from Nogrod is only known when they approach the bridge before Tinwelint’s caves (p. 226); on the other hand, it is said (p. 230) that the ‘woven magic’ of the queen was a defence against ‘men of hostile heart’, who could never make their way through the woods unless aided by treachery from within. Perhaps this provides an explanation of a sort of how the Dwarves bringing treasure from Nogrod were able to penetrate to the halls of Tinwelint without hindrance and apparently undetected (cf. also the coming of Ъrin’s band in the Tale of Turambar, p. 114). In the event, the protective magic was easily—too easily—overthrown by the simple device of a single treacherous Elf of Artanor who ‘offered to lead the host through the magics of Gwendelin’. This was evidently unsatisfactory; but I shall not enter further into this question here. Extraordinary difficulties of narrative structure were caused by this element of the inviolability of Doriath, as I hope to describe at a future date.

It might be thought that the story of the drowning of the treasure at the Stony Ford (falling into the waters of the river with the Dwarves who bore it) was evolved from that in the rejected conclusion of the Tale of Turambar (p. 136)—Tinwelint ‘hearing that curse [set on the treasure by Ъrin] caused the gold to be cast into a deep pool of the river before his doors’. In the Tale of the Nauglafring, however, Tinwelint, influenced by the queen’s foreboding words, still has the intention of doing this, but does not fulfil his intention (p. 223).

The account of the second departure of Beren and Tinъviel (p. 240) raises again the extremely difficult question of the peculiar fate that was decreed for them by the edict of Mandos, which I have discussed on pp. 59–60. There I have suggested that

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 in their own persons—yet now ‘mortal even as Men’.

Here however Tinъviel ‘faded’, and vanished in the woods; and Beren searched all Hithium and Artanor for her, until he too ‘faded from life’. Since this fading is here quite explicitly the mode in which ‘that doom of mortality that Mandos had spoken’ came upon them (p. 240), it is very notable that it is likened to, and even it seems identified with, the fading of ‘the Elves of later days throughout the world’—as though in the original idea Elvish fading was a form of mortality. This is in fact made explicit in a later version.