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PREFACE

It is undeniable that there are a very great ends of the Elder Days (as previously published in varying forms in The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and The History of Middle-earth) are altogether unknown, unless by their repute as strange and inaccessible in mode andti version of the legend of the Children of Húrin as an independent work, between its own covers, with a minimum of editorial presence, and above all in continuous narrative without gaps or interruptions, if this could be done without distortion or invention, despite the unfinished state in which he left some parts of it

I have thought that if the story of the fate of Túrin and Niënor, the children of Húrin and Morwen, could be presented in this way, aht be opened onto a scene and a story set in an unknown Middle-earth that are vivid and ies: the drowned lands in the west beyond the Blue Mountains where Treebeard walked in his youth, and the life of Túrin Turaothrond, and the Forest of Brethil

This book is thus primarily addressed to such readers as may perhaps recall that the hide of Shelob was so horrendously hard that it ‘could not be pierced by any strength of e the steel or the the children of húrin hand of Beren or of Túrin wield it’, or that Elrond nahty Elf-friends of old’; but know no more of him

Whenthe years of the First World War and long before there was any inkling of the tales that were to foran the writing of a collection of stories that he called The Book of Lost Tales That was his first work of ih it was left unfinished there are fourteen completed tales It was in The Book of Lost Tales that there first appeared in narrative the Gods, or Valar; Elves and Men as the Children of Ilúvatar (the Creator); Melkor-Morgoth the great Enes and Orcs; and the lands in which the Tales are set, Valinor ‘land of the Gods’ beyond the western ocean, and the ‘Great Lands’ (afterwards called ‘Middle-earth’, between the seas of east and west)

Ath and fullness, and all three are concerned with Men as well as Elves: they are The Tale of Tinúviel (which appears in brief fors as the story of Beren and Lúthien that Aragorn told to the hobbits on Weathertop; this my father wrote in 1917), Turaon, certainly in existence by 1919, if not before), and The Fall of Gondolin (1916–17) In an often-quoted passage of a long letter describing his work that my father wrote in 1951, three years before the publication of TheFellowship of the Ring, he told of his early a since fallen) I had afroonic, to the level of roer founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour froreat tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched’

It is seen from this reminiscence that from far back it was a part of his conception of what came to be called The Silmarillion that some of the ‘Tales’ should be told in much fuller form; and indeed in that same letter of 1951 he referred expressly to the three stories which I have est in The Book of Lost Tales Here he called the tale of Beren and Lúthien ‘the chief of the stories of The Silmarillion’, and of it he said: ‘the story is (I think a beautiful and powerful) heroic-fairy-roue knowledge of the background But it is also a fundanificance out of its place therein’ ‘There are other stories almost equally full in treatment,’ he went on, ‘and equally independent, and yet linked to the general history’: these are The Children of Húrin and The Fall of Gondolin

It thus seems unquestionable, from my father’s oords, that if he could achieve final and finished narratives on the scale he desired, he saw the three ‘Great Tales’ of the Elder Days (Beren and Lúthien, the Children of Húrin, and the Fall of Gondolin) as works sufficiently coreat body of legend known as The Silmarillion On the other hand, as my father observed in the saral to the history of Elves and Men in the Elder Days, and there are necessarily a good er story

It would be altogether contrary to the conception of this book to burden its reading with an abundance of notes giving information about persons and events that are in any case seldom of real importance to the immediate narrative However, it may be found helpful here and there if soiven in the Introduction a very brief sketch of Beleriand and its peoples near the end of the Elder Days, when Túrin and Niënor were born; and, as well as a map of Beleriand and the lands to the North, I have included a list of all na in the text with very concise indications concerning each, and siies

At the end of the book is an Appendix in two parts: the first concerned with my father’s attempts to achieve a final form for the three tales, and the second with the composition of the text in this book, which differs in many respects from that in Unfinished Tales

I arateful to ement and presentation of thethe book into the (toworld of electronic transmission

INTRODUCTION

Middle-earth in the Elder Days

The character of Túrin was of deep significance to ue of directness and inant portrait of his boyhood, essential to the whole: his severity and lack of gaiety, his sense of justice and his couine, and of Morwen his eous, and proud; and of the life of the household in the cold country of Dor-lóoth broke the Siege of Angband, before Túrin was born