Mîms Klage / The Complaint of Mim the Dwarf

[Val Balmer]

Originally Posted by Findegil

I see 3 possible ways out of this dilemma:

1)

I think I start to understand what you mean, but for me the most "simple" reading is as follows:

- Poem lines 1-6: Mim is 200 years old, he leaves is cave and starts to think about the past.
- Poem lines 7-15: Past event are described vividly: Mim is driven out by fire from his tunnel (a former den)
- Poem lines 16-26: Back in the present (the sand connects the lines): he starts his complaint... he is in a haste to rebuild his treasure.

- Prose §1 [Alle Dinge, die meine....viel ubrig von ihm.]: Mim speaks about the past and the treasures he produced.
- Prose §2 [So sann ich...verwehter Jahre.]: Still in the past, Mim builds a chest for his treasures
- Prose §3 [Schlief ich...an öden Orten.]: Same event as in the poem 7-15; Mim is smoked out of his cave and left with a few tools and a poisoned blade
- Prose §4&&5 [So nahmen sie...Tranen zerspellt + Was früher ich...Zeit zum Denken!]: A link between past and present. Mim was left bitter from the robbery and he has lost the inspiration to create.

So in the poem we have [Present] + [Past] + [Present] and in the prose fragment [Past] + [Present]

In my interpretation sentences like "His clouded Eyes blinked, still reddened from the smoke" are there to trasmit the urgency of the action and not the fact poem lines 7-15 are immediately after 16-26.

On the other hand the whole discussion leads me to re-evaluate the chronology I have proposed in the pdf I shared some time ago: he was not 200 years old when driven out of his caves (Nulukkizdîn?) --> he was 200 years when he rethinks about the past in his new den (Sharbund?).