The Tale of Turambar
the earliest prose of Túrin (Book of Lost Tales, HoME 2)
Nature
The Tale of Turambar — Turambar, “master of the dark fate” — is the earliest prose telling of the doom of Túrin son of Úrin, and the longest of the original lost tales. Its hero, an outlaw under a changed name, rises to mastery only to fall through the worm Glorund and the unknowing wedlock with Nienóri his sister. It is the root-tragedy of the Narn (Narn i Chîn Húrin), and the direct ancestor of all later versions of the tale.
Contents
Túrin’s wild boyhood, the blow that exiled him, and his years of wandering and war as Turambar; His comradeship with the elf Flinding, fugitive of the northern ruin, and his life among the woods-folk; The coming of the worm Glorund, the great darkness of his passage, and the springing of the dragon’s hate; Turambar’s venture to the caverned hill where the worm kept his hoard, and the slaying of Glorund; The return to Nienóri (the “Bright Sword” of the tale) and the dreadful awakening of the truth of their kinship; The ending of the house of Úrin: the griefs and deaths that the later Narn would tell in full.
Composition
Composed c. 1919, at the height of the Lost Tales period, and published in The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two (HoME 2), with Christopher Tolkien’s commentary on its growth. It was retold in the alliterative Lay of the Children of Húrin (HoME 3) and in the Quenta, and finally expanded — left unfinished — into the prose Narn i Chîn Húrin in Unfinished Tales: the fuller account gathered under Narn i Chîn Húrin.