Narn I Tinuviel (The Tale of the Nightingale)

Narn I Tinuviel (The Tale of the Nightingale)

A prose adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic poem The Lay of Leithian

by Sam Pettus

This adaptation has been placed into the public domain under the terms of the Creative Commons License.

version 1.4 - 12/25/2009

(Original author's notes: I have removed all accent marks from the names for simplicity's sake in this online transcription. I have also made the occasional change in punctuation, capitalization, and grammatical structure from my archival text in order to aid readability. Modern pronouns such as "you" and "your" have been substituted for the archaic "thee" and "thou" whenever possible, except in cases where a lord [Thingol, Finrod] or one who thinks he is a lord [Celegorm, Curufin] addresses a person that is or is believed to be of lesser social standing. Also, the British spelling for "grey" is used throughout, as opposed to the American "gray" - personal preference.)

Introduction

It has been twelve years now since I wrote my prose adaptation of Tolkien's unfinsihed epic poem, The Lay of Leithian. In that time a lot has changed. The movie adaptations of the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings have finally brought that classic work to life, ably capturing the spirit - if not always the letter - of Tolkien's fantasy masterpiece. This time has also seen the release of The Children of Hurin, bringing in official published form that one almost-completed tale from the First Age of Middle-earth - again with some interesting divergences from the two truncated versions that had been previously published. Finally, there has been the unleashing of the Internet, which has swept Tolkien fandom up in its wake along with everything else, giving all of us the chance to see and share in each other's unique excursions into the wonderful world of Middle-earth. Each of us can now share with fandom at large our own interpretations, our own insights, even our own creations in this wonderful world that Tolkien's creativity has bequeathed us. For despite what the lawyers, purists, and canon nazis might argue, legends and myths only remain alive in the retelling, and each storyteller has their own unique spin or angle in the way they present the tale. Just look at the wide variety of illustrations of the tales of Middle-earth by various artists, many depicting the same event but in different ways, and you will see what I mean. It is the one truism of mythology, whether taken from real life or created from whole cloth. The tale as told may not always be what the original storyteller intended ("Leaf by Niggle"), but somehow, someway, the truly great tales always survive regardless of who does the telling ... and inevitably grow in the process.

Which brings us back to this manuscript. Twelve years ago, when I finally got my complete set of The History of Middle-earth, I discovered for myself that Tolkien had intended not one, but three great tales of the Men of the First Age. The Children of Hurin was but the second of these, the middle story in his next trilogy of tales from Middle-earth. What were the other two? The third was obviously a rewriting of The Fall of Gondolin, as the evidence of the later Tuor (Unfinished Tales) shows. So what was the first? If Tolkien's surviving notes are any indication, it would have been a complete rewrite of the tale of Beren and Luthien and the Quest of the Silmaril, a legend that lies at the heart of Middle-earth itself, and whose echoes still resound seven thousand years later in the War of the Ring. Unfortunately, Tolkien never got the chance to rewrite that tale. The creation of the Middle-earth mythos had been decades in the making, and Tolkien was already an old man by the time he could turn his attention back to the tales of the First Age. His own mortality caught up with him before he could complete that daunting task -- leaving us with only The Children of Hurin and the opening section of the later Tuor. Nothing was ever written down on what he planned to do when it came time to rewrite the tale of Beren and Luthien. Any ideas he might have had went to the grave with him.