The Lays of Beleriand. Christopher Tolkien

story of the blasting of the great northern plain, so that it became a dusty desert, in the battle that ended the Siege of Angband, must have been conceived, though it does not appear in writing for several years.

      Here also is the first reference to the triple peaks of Thangorodrim (1000), called the thunderous towers (951), though in the ‘Prologue’ to the poem it is said that Húrin was set on its steepest peak (96); and from lines 713–14 (as rewritten in the B-text) we learn that Angband was wrought at the roots of the great mountain.

      The name Fangros (631; Fangair A) occurs once elsewhere, in a very obscure note, where it is apparently connected with the burning of the ships of the Noldoli.

      Melian’s name Mablui – by the hands enchanted of Melian Mablui, 731 – clearly contains mab ‘hand’, as in Mablung, Ermabwed (see II. 339).

      That the Dwarves were said in A and originally in B to dwell in the South (1147, emended in B to East) is perhaps to be related to the statement in the Tale of the Nauglafring that Nogrod lay ‘a very long journey southward beyond the wide forest on the borders of those great heaths nigh Umboth-muilin the Pools of Twilight’ (II. 225).

      I cannot explain the reference in line 1006 to the wild wheatfields of the wargod’s realm; nor that in the lines concerning Beleg’s fate after death to the long waiting of the dead in the halls of the Moon (1284).