And indeed there is already precedent for ambiguity over Thingol’s fate (or Tinwë
Lintö/Tinwelint as he was then called) within The Book of Lost Tales itself. The
story of the Nauglafring near the end of the collection recounts his violent death
(offstage in the narrative, while on one of the hunts so beloved of the wood-elves –
BLT II.231–2), yet in the section of The Book of Lost Tales that describes the origins
of the elves and their coming to Valinor (‘The Coming of the Elves and the Making
of Kôr’), we are told ‘yet ’tis said [Tinwë] lives still lord of the scattered Elves
of Hisilómë [Hithlum, later a region in northwest Beleriand], dancing in its twilight
places with Wendelin [Melian] his spouse’ (BLT I.115) – that is, that according to
this version of the story Tinwelint/Thingol is still alive at the time Eriol the narrator
is being told the story in the early fifth century AD.
Unfortunately, none of the later versions of the legendarium recount the story of
Thingol’s death and the fall of Doriath, all breaking off incomplete before this point
(see Note 39). So what evidence we have for Tolkien’s intentions regarding the latter
parts of the Silmarillion cycle must derive from sources such as the ‘(Later) Annals
of Beleriand’ [c. 1937] and ‘The Tale of Years’ ([c. 1951]; cf. HME XI.345),
which recount the old story of Thingol’s death at the hands of the dwarves in almost
the same terms as in the the ‘(Earliest) Annals of Beleriand’ [c. 1931]. In essence,
then, between the time The Hobbit is drafted and its unexpected publication, and
indeed well into the drafting of The Lord of the Rings,41 we seem to have two competing
traditions: one in which Thingol dies as in the old story (the Annals) and one
in which the issue is left open (The Hobbit). Since both existed at that time only in
unpublished manuscripts, it’s impossible to say which of the parallel traditions was
more definitive; The Hobbit’s version was certainly the first to reach print and might
thus be thought to be more authoritative, yet it was at least partly superseded by the
later account of the elvenking in The Lord of the Rings.
The second disconnect is an absence rather than a presence: namely, that there is
no Faërie Queen at the Elvenking’s side in Mirkwood. As great a figure as Thingol
himself is in the legendarium, he is just as famous for his wife (and daughter) as
for his own deeds, just as King Arthur is ultimately more famous for the deeds of
the knights of his Round Table than for his own exploits (aside from the realm-establishing
feat of drawing the sword from the stone). Thingol’s daughter Lúthien
Tinúviel is the fairest creature that ever walked the earth, and his wife Melian of
Valinor (Wendelin/Gwendeling/Tindriel the fay in the earliest versions of the story)
of another order of being altogether, as high above Thingol as Lúthien is above Beren
(or Arwen above Aragorn). It is Melian’s power that protects the woodland realm
of Doriath from its enemies, just as Galadriel later protects Lothlórien in The Lord
of the Rings. Such a figure could hardly escape Bilbo’s notice during the weeks
and months he was forced to lurk within the wood-elves’ halls and ‘go on burglaring’,
yet no queen is mentioned, either by the side of the woodland king in Bombur’s
visions and the description of the third great feast that followed in the Enchanted
Stream interpolation, nor anywhere in this chapter’s account of the woodelves’
halls. We can only infer her existence indirectly from much later evidence,
long after the time of our book: the fact that in The Lord of the Rings we are told the
Elvenking has a son, Legolas, who becomes one of the Fellowship of the Ring. If
Tolkien’s projected rewriting of our story in 1960 had proceeded as far as the Mirkwood
chapters, we might have been able to discover whether he intended to bring
Legolas into Mr. Baggins’ story (after all, in the light of later knowledge we can say
he would almost certainly have been present at the Battle of Five Armies); there is
no sign of it in the admittedly sketchy notes that survive. But even this would hardly
have resolved the question of what was in Tolkien’s mind almost thirty years earlier
when he wrote The Hobbit, since by that later date he was committed to the decision
that Thingol and the Elvenking were two different characters.
The only possibility that would unite both traditions would be if Thingol did indeed
die in the fall of Doriath but then later returned to Middle-earth after a suitable
time in the Halls of Mandos.42 Since elves experience serial immortality, it is
quite possible in Tolkien’s metaphysics for us to encounter in The Hobbit or The
Lord of the Rings an elf who died during events in the First Age, spent time in the
Halls of Mandos, was re-incarnated with the same personality and memories, and
then returned to Middle-earth during the Second or Third Age. In fact, we have one
specific example in the person of Glorfindel, Elrond’s chief advisor in Rivendell,
who dies fighting a balrog during the retreat from Gondolin near the end of the
First Age (‘The Fall of Gondolin’, BLT II.194; Silm.243) yet re-appears in Middleearth
before the end of the second millennium of the Third Age (LotR.225–6; HME
VI.214–5 & HME XII.377ff).
It might be argued that if the Elvenking in The Hobbit were indeed a figure returned
from death then Tolkien would have drawn attention to this fact in some way,
but the example of Glorfindel shows this is not necessarily the case; the same could
be true of any elf we meet in The Hobbit. However, while entirely possible in terms
of what we know to be true of the elves, one nonetheless cannot help feeling that
it would be a coming down in the world for Thingol Greycloak, one of the most
renowned elves of the First Age, to return to a diminished realm, sans wife and
daughter, his original home sunk beneath the waves in lost Beleriand, his kingdom
reduced to the wood-elf realm in Mirkwood. Glorfindel clearly had unfinished business
drawing him back into the mortal world.43 Thingol has no such motive; having
only stayed in Middle-earth originally because of Melian, it seems unlikely that
he would have left Valinor a second time without her. Instead, this sense of diminishment
may be part of the very reason Thingol and the Elvenking ultimately did
become separate characters. As Thingol grew in majesty and wisdom and stature
during the long evolution of the legendarium – a process reaching its apotheosis in
Narn i Hîn Húrin (cf. Unfinished Tales, page 83) but already well underway in ‘The
Lay of Leithian’ (cf. Note 34) – the simple wood-elf king that had been Tinwelint
became buried under the weight of glory; re-creating him in the person of the Elvenking
enabled Tolkien to recapture something much more like the original character,
regaining a quality that had been lost in the ennoblement of Thingol and one which
made him much more suited to the role he was to play in The Hobbit.
In the end it seems clear that when he wrote The Hobbit Tolkien drew on the old
story (which was, after all, unpublished and likely to remain so), changing it as he
did so, to make the material more suited to his new purpose. But he left his options
open as to whether the Elvenking was a new character or an old familiar character
appearing in a new story, slightly altered to fit his new surroundings. In time he decided
that the Elvenking was indeed a new character and gave him a name (see part
iv below) and (sketchy) history of his own, but this decision postdated the publication
of The Hobbit, probably by more than a decade, and he never went back and
re-wrote the key passage in The Hobbit to distinguish what was now the analogue
from the original. Thus to this day we are left with two contradictory accounts of
which elvenking was responsible for provoking the elf–dwarf war, the one in the
Silmarillion tradition and the other within The Hobbit.