Foalókë & The Digital Tolkien Project -- How it Helps my Work, part 2

At the end of last year I shared a post on how The Digital Tolkien Project helps my work, in particular in studying the story of Túrin as told in The Book of Lost Tales. I now have a little more to show on the same subject, picking up more or less where I left off.

Parallel to this use of Turambar is that of Foalókë, the other name in the title. Tolkien employs Foalókë eighteen times in this story (Tauber, “‘Foalókë’ in The Book of Lost Tales. ”). The first two times come when the narrator is giving the title at the beginning (LT II.70). The last sixteen all occur after Túrin has met the dragon and the dragon has won his hoard (91, 94-99, 103-04, 105-06, 108, 108). Significantly, for according to the “Qenya Lexicon” Foalókë designates a lókë, a dragon, who guards a foa, a hoard (“The Qenya Lexicon” 38).[1] The single use of just lókë, moreover, is found precisely at the narrator’s transition from characterizing lust for gold as a trait common to all dragons to identifying and explaining the actions taken by Glaurung in pursuit of his lust: “Thus it was that this lókë….” (LT II.85). Túrin becomes Turambar and Glaurung becomes Foalókë in the same scene.

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[1] With foalókë Tolkien is likely thinking of OE hordweard, “guardian of the hoard,” a poetical word used several times of dragons in Beowulf (Fulk et al. 2293, 2302, 2554, 2593; “DOE: Hord-Weard”). It’s not impossible that Tolkien intends lókë to remind the reader of the treacherous and deceptive Norse god, Loki. He thus implies to the reader the untrustworthiness of a dragon through the similarity of the sounds.

Túrin's "tide of ill" in The Book of Lost Tales (LT II.87)

In The Book of Lost Tales the narrator of Túrin's story says of his choosing to pursue the orcs who had taken Failivrin (Finduilas) captive says that his life could have turned out differently if he had done so. As the last clause of sentence indicates, the dragon, Glomund (Glaurung), was of the same opinion and refused to let that happen.

Maybe in that desperate venture [Túrin] had found* a kindly and swift death or perchance an ill one, and maybe he had rescued* [Finduilas] and found* happiness, yet not thus was he fated to earn the name he had taken anew, and the drake reading his mind suffered him not thus lightly to escape his tide of ill. 

(LT II.87)

That last phrase--“to escape his tide of ill”--is quite lovely, but as enigmatic as it is evocative. Does tide here allude to the unstoppable tides of the ocean, or does it mean time or season as in yuletide? The latter meaning is older by far. Old English tid** appears in the Old English version of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England, in the gospel of Matthew in the Lindisfarne Gospels, and in Beowulf (147). The former is not found before the 14^th Century. 

In The Book of Lost Tales Tolkien uses tide in both senses, but mostly in reference to the sea. The context, however, normally contains one or more other words that establish the connection to the natural phenomenon. 

So, for example:

"but the Ainur put it into [Tuor's] heart to climb from the gully when he did, or had he been whelmed in the incoming tide" (LT II.151).

"The went the Man of the Sea out when the tide began to creep in slow and shallow over the long flats" (LT II.317)

"When that tide again forsook the Hungry Sands..." (LT II.318).

But there are examples where it refers to time. Thus, high-tide*** in the first example below refers not to the sea but to a high-time, that is, a time of celebration or festival, like Christmas. And day-tide**** in the second means simply daytime.

"this year you will celebrate the death of Karkaras with a high-tide greater than even before, O King" (LT II.231).

Of this converse of Eriol and Vairë upon the lawn that fair day-tide came it that Eriol set out not many days thereafter (LT I.95).

Some of the poetry from the war years, which Christopher Tolkien includes in The Book of Lost Tales, also signifies time by tid:

Still their old heart unmoved nor weeps nor grieves, 
Uncomprehending of this evil tide, 
Today’s great sadness, or Tomorrow’s fear 

(LT II.296)

So, again, which meaning of tide is Tolkien using here? While it could be a figurative use of tide to suggest the overpowering, irresistible force of evil, as it is at LT II.232--"valiantly they warded the palace of the king until the tide of numbers bore them back"--the "tide of ill" which the dragon has in mind is the calamitous life of woe and sorrow to which Melkor had cursed Túrin and his family. As the narrator indicates earlier in the sentence by saying that Túrin and Finduilas might have "found happiness," he is thinking about a span of time, not being swept away by the force of a moment. Tolkien being Tolkien, however, he might mean both (as a reader rightly commented below).

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*In less archaic English we would say "would have found" for "had found," and "would have rescued" for "had rescued" and "would have ... found" for "had ... found."

** “Tide, N., Sense I.1.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, December 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/5003698957.

*** “Day Tide, N., Sense 1.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, September 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9829095802.

**** “High Tide, N., Sense I.1.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, September 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1021614943.

"Unfey, fearless, and his fate kept him" -- Túrin and Beowulf

The Lay of the Children of Húrin exists in two versions, neither of which tells the whole story its title promises. The second version is much more detailed than the first as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far. Both versions, however, describe Túrin's earliest days in battle defending the realm of Doriath. The first version offers the following account:

Ere manhood’s measure   he met and slew
the Orcs of Angband   and evil things
that roamed and ravened   on the realm’s borders.
There hard his life,     and hurts he got him,              385
the wounds of shaft     and warfain sword,
and his prowess was proven     and his praise renowned, 

and beyond his years     he was yielded honour;

(Lays p. 16, lines 382-88)

The second version is very much the same as the first for the first four and a half lines, but then it rapidly diverges, inserting four and a half entirely new lines before returning to the same conclusion the first version offers: 

Ere manhood’s measure    he met and he slew

Orcs of Angband    and evil things                              745
that roamed and ravened    on the realm’s borders.
There hard his life,    and hurts he lacked not,
the wounds of shaft   and the wavering sheen
of the sickle scimitars,   the swords of Hell,
the bloodfain blades   on black anvils                      750
in Angband smithied,   yet ever he smote
unfey, fearless,    and his fate kept him.
Thus his prowess was proven    and his praise was noised
and beyond his years     he was yielded honour... 

            (Lays p. 116-17, lines 744-54) 

When studying Túrin, it's always a good idea to pay attention to any references to fate. So line 752-- "unfey, fearless, and his fate kept him"-- stuck out, with its two references to fate. "Fey," meaning "doomed to die," is not a word you see every day. "Unfey," meaning "not doomed to die," you see even less. The word has no entry in the OED, and though Google Ngram says it has been used it links to no books in which it is used. According to Google Ngram the word's usage peaked in 1896 -- peaked I say -- at a frequency of 0.0000000216% of all the words in all the books scanned by Google. That's 2.16 times out of every 10,000,000,000 words. For most purposes not requiring a supercollider, this is vanishingly small, quite literally. You need the Webb Telescope to find this thing.

Unless you're reading Tolkien, and you just happen to have been thinking about a line in Beowulf, where Beowulf talks about fighting sea monsters when he was young.

Ac on mergenne, mecum |wunde,                              565
be yðlafe uppe lægon,
sweordum aswefede, þæt syðþan na
ymb brontne ford brimliðende
lade ne letton. Leoht eastan com,
beorht beacen Godes, brimu swaþredon,                   570
þæt ic sænæssas geseon mihte
windige weallas. Wyrd oft nereð
unfægne eorl, þonne his ellen deah.

But in the morning [the sea monsters] lay dead
on the beach, wounded by my blade, 
slain by my sword,  so never again
did they hinder the voyages
of seamen on the deep sea.
Light had come in the east, God's bright beacon,
The sea had grown still, so I could see
the headlands and their windy walls. 
Fate often keeps an unfey man safe
when his courage avails.

The word unfægne is the masculine accusative singular of unfæge ("unfey"), an adjective which is modifying eorl ("man"), the direct object of the verb nereð ("keeps...safe"). Obviously unfæge derives from fæge ("fey"). Another, related word from elsewhere in Beowulf that should ring a bell is deaðfæge, "doomed to die/death," as in "Nine for mortal men doomed to die." It's important to recognize when reading this line from the Ring-verse that all mortal men are fated to die. That's the whole point, redundant though it may be, of the word "mortal." It is part of their nature. This is true whether we are thinking of fæge, unfæge, or deaðfæge; and this is what makes the escape from death those nine rings seem to promise "the chief bait of Sauron. It leads the small to a Gollum, and the great to a Ringwraith" (Letters #212).

So how can Beowulf speak of a man as unfæge when all men are fæge? As Beowulf himself says when explaining how he survived his fight with Grendel's mother: "Næs ic fæge ða gyt" -- "I was not doomed to die just yet" (line 2146). So fate (wyrd) and courage (ellen) can keep a man safe from dying at the wrong time. On the one hand this tells us that fate is not immutable, and on the other it does not necessarily mean that every man has a specific time to die. A man could be fated to do something he has not done just yet. It's also true that fate and courage do not save always, but merely often.

I find Tolkien's adaptation of Beowulf's words to describe Túrin here particularly interesting because I have been studying the workings of fate in the different versions of The Tale of the Children of Húrin. As I usually do, I am trying to understand this from the ground up, so to speak, looking at how it works in the story and what is said about it, rather than starting with a theory of how fate (doom, destiny, weird, etc) works and applying it to the text. 

In Tolkien's prose translation of Beowulf  he renders the phrase "Fate oft saveth a man not doomed to die, when his valour fails not" (Beowulf T&C 29). In his commentary on the lines he remarks (Beowulf T&C 256):

To go to the kernel of the matter at once: emotionally and in thought (so far as that was ever clear) this is basically an assertion not only of the worth in itself of the human will (and courage), but also of its practical effect as a possibility, that is, actually a denial of absolute Fate.

Tolkien also composed a translation in alliterative verse of the first 594 lines of Beowulf, which obviously would include lines 572-73. I would be very interested to see how closely it resembles "Unfey, fearless,   and his fate kept him" in The Lay of the Children of Húrin.