* * Revised Fall of Gondolin pt.5 -- >end [the remaining sections] * *

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Firstly I'd like to thank those who have replied for the welcome. You would have been quite within your rights to be offended at some Johnny-come-lately pulling to pieces the result of months of work. I'm not sure how much of a contribution I'll be able to make, since I don't have a lot of time on my hands, and in any case don't really know enough to make informed comments on many aspects of the project. However, I'll stick my oar in where it's long enough to make it worth everyone's while.

That would mean to skip out all the content of the "The Lays of Beleriand". It might be that we have to do that, but I hesitate to agree completely with you. Nevertheless in view of the two particular poems under discussion it might be the solution. The much longer lays might be dealt with more freely, as we couldn't use them completely anyway.

I've been thinking about this issue lately, and I think I may have a solution. It seems to me that an amalgam of poetry and prose might not flow as well as would be desirable, so I think that it might be interesting to consider treating the Lays as a divergent mythical tradition along the lines of the Pelagian, Orphic and Homeric creation myths in natural mythology. By treating them as completely separate sections of the work and taking up Tolkien's latest amendments they could retain their more poetic qualities without interfering with the continuity of the prose. Alterations to names could be considered on their merits as has clearly been done heretofore in any case. If it then seemed desirable to insert brief passages from them into the prose sections where they give details not elaborated on elsewhere (and where they agree with the primary tradition), this could be done without large sections being discarded from the overall work. I'll leave off there, since it's a subject for another thread, and is in any case getting ahead of matters.

I agree with you, Aiwendil, that the problems presented by changes to the verse are present in prose revisions as well, but it seems to me that the very nature of poetry is what brings it so starkly into relief in the examples above. A poem is a highly structured piece of writing, designed to evoke a very specific emotional response. If that response is changed or even lost it can change a great poem into some catchy verses, and what worries me about the alterations to The Horns of Ylmir is that they will do just that, with the addition only of a verse version of a scene that is described in detail elsewhere in a more up-to-date prose form. Although it would be nice to hear Tuor's exact song, the poem given above is clearly not it, since as you so rightly point out it simply did not happen that way. To my mind the only way around this is to treat the poem as a version handed down orally among Men and thus adapted over the years to suit poets' own purposes. Since the revised Silmarillion is clearly supposed to be "a body and a whole entire" I can't see how that would be acceptable, so I'm against the inclusion of this poem at all. Of course this is not my project, so my opinion is really quite irrelevant to the proceedings.

I have only one comment regarding the counter-comments to my comments.

FG-LE-07: I've used 'thwarted moons' in the same sense as one might use 'weary days'. I've applied the forces imposing on the characters to the time in which this happens. Obviously the lack of an agent is not ideal, but this requires the least amendment to the text and preserves the same alliterative stress in the same place as Tolkien's original. Tolkien's translation of Beowulf contains a passage that reads:

On went the hours: on
ocean afloat
under cliff was their craft.
Now climb blithely
brave man aboard; breakers
pounding
ground the shingle. Gleaming
harness
they hove to the bosom of the
bark, armour
with cunning forged then cast
her forth
to voyage triumphant,
valiant-timbered
fleet foam twisted.

I draw your attention to the last line, bearing in mind that it refers to the ship.

My comments about metre and the number of syllables were really in response to my feel for the rhythm that Tolkien was adopting in these pieces. The alliterative form is inflexible in that it demands alliteration on particular stresses, but once a particular rhythm has been adopted to break it even by a single syllable can spoil the fall of the piece. It seems to me that since Tolkien knew more about this than any of us, it would be preferable to preserve the rhythm as he wrote it. Then again, the verses could simply be collected into a separate appendix or chapter, in which case they would become works and entities in their own right, as they were written.

Anyway, this is holding up your final revisions. Don't let me do that. I have offered comments where I thought it might be useful, but there's no need to bandy words with me about an issue if you want to do things differently.