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and some account of it, of its aftermath, and of the history of the Silmaril that Beren cut from
the iron crown of Morgoth, must be given. There are difficulties in doing so in the form that I
have chosen for this book, largely because the part played by Beren in his second life hinges
on aspects of the history of the First Age that would cast the net too widely for the purpose of
this book.
I have remarked (p. 103) of the Quenta Noldorinwa of 1930, which followed from and
was much longer than the Sketch of the Mythology, that it remained ‘a compression, a
compendious account’: it is said in the title of the work to be ‘the brief history of the Noldoli
or Gnomes, drawn from the Book of Lost Tales’. Of these ‘summarising’ texts I wrote in The
War of the Jewels (1994): ‘In these versions my father was drawing on (while also of
course continually developing and extending) long works that already existed in prose or
verse, and in the Quenta Silmarillion he perfected that characteristic tone, melodious, grave,
elegiac, burdened with a sense of loss and distance in time, which resides partly, as I
believe, in the literary fact that he was drawing down into a brief compendious history what
he could also see in far more detailed, immediate, and dramatic form. With the completion of
the great ‘intrusion’ and departure of The Lord of the Rings it seems that he returned to the
Elder Days with a desire to take up again the far more ample scale with which he had begun
long before, in The Book of Lost Tales. The completion of the Quenta Silmarillion remained
an aim; but the ‘great tales’, vastly developed from their original forms—from which its
later chapters should be derived—were never achieved.’
We are here concerned with a story that goes back to the latest written of the Lost Tales,
where it bore the title The Tale of the Nauglafring: that being the original name of the
Nauglamír, the Necklace of the Dwarves. But we come here to the furthest point in my
father’s work on the Elder Days in the time following the completion of The Lord of the
Rings: there is no new narrative. To cite my discussion in The War of the Jewels again, ‘it is
as if we come to the brink of a great cliff and look down from highlands raised in some later
age onto an ancient plain far below. For the story of the Nauglamír and the destruction of
Doriath . . . we must return through more than a quarter of a century to the Quenta
Noldorinwa or beyond.’ To the Quenta Noldorinwa (see p. 103) I will now turn, giving the
relevant text in a very slightly shortened form.
The tale begins with the further history of the great treasure of Nargothrond that was taken
by the evil dragon Glómund. After the death of Glómund, slain by Túrin Turambar, Húrin
father of Túrin came with a few outlaws of the woods to Nargothrond, which as yet none,
Orc, Elf, or Man, had dared to plunder, for dread of the spirit of Glómund and his very
memory. But they found there one Mîm the Dwarf.