Narn i Chîn Húrin 3: The End of the Narn

[Aiwendil]

Plus the goal of this project from my understanding is to eliminate footnotes by incorporating them as well as all other sources that can be inserted without altering the text too much, or at all, with our own words or altering to our knowledge Tolkien’s latest and or final plans and decisions for his histories of middle earth.

This is more or less the problem I have always had with footnotes in this project, though I can see how they might be justifiable in principle.

Anyway, in this instance, I agree that a footnote is not the way to go.

It's not entirely clear to me what the best course is in this passage. If I understand Christopher's discussion correctly, the final text by JRRT seems to contain a contradiction: on the one hand, they stop climbing up before they reach the top (suggesting they would go back down) and later they are said to clamber along the water's edge to reach the spot where Glaurung crosses. On the other hand, Turin still has a dream 'in which all his strength is given to clinging'.

If we must choose one or the other alternative, I suppose we must go with the story that they climb down and then go along the water's edge. That leaves two questions: first, whether we must delete the dream; second, whether it is necessary to add something to the text to indicate that they climbed down.

I'm inclined to answer the second question in the negative. Their climbing down can be seen as implicit in the statement that they stopped halfway up. In any case, Tolkien seems not to have felt anything more necessary. As for the dream, I suppose it should probably go. One could suppose that Turin climbed back down and still then had a dream in which he was clinging to the cliff - but I am inclined to agree with Christopher here that this was an artifact of the previous version.

So my suggestion is to delete the dream but otherwise retain JRRT's final version of the text. And sorry for my accustomed long-windedness.