Free Sauron Defeated by J. R. R. Tolkien Page A

and thus there follows in the original text 'Five days had passed since they escaped the orcs' (i.e. March 18 - 22), where RK has 'Four'.
    V.

    THE FIELD OF KORMALLEN.

    In the first draft of this chapter my father again achieved for most of its length an extraordinarily close approach to the final form, and this is the more remarkable when one considers that he had no plan or outline before him. There had been many mentions of a great feast to follow the final victory (VII.212, 345, 448; VIII.275, 397), but nothing had ever been said of it beyond the fact that it was to take place in Minas Tirith.(1) That this text ('A') was indeed the first setting down on paper of the story and that nothing preceded it seems obvious from the nature of the manuscript itself, which has all the marks of primary composition.(2) It was followed by a fair copy manuscript ('B'), bearing the number and title 'LV The Field of Kormallen', which was also pencilled in later on A.
    Not until the end of the minstrel's song of Frodo of the Nine Fingers and the Ring of Doom did the first text A diverge in any narrative point, and little even in expression, from the form in RK. There are however several interesting details.
    One of these concerns the Eagles. As the passage (RK p. 226) describing their coming above the Morannon was first written it read: There came Gwaihir, the Wind-lord, and Lhandroval his brother, greatest of all the eagles of the north, mightiest of the descendants of [added: Great > old] Thorondor who built his eyries in the immeasurable peaks of Thangorodrim [changed immediately to the Encircling Mountains] when Middle-earth was young.

    In the Quenta $15 (IV.137) it is told that after the Battle of Unnumbered Tears 'Thorndor King of Eagles removed his eyries from Thangorodrim to the northward heights of the Encircling Mountains
    [about the plain of Gondolin], and there he kept watch, sitting upon the cairn of King Fingolfin.' In the Quenta Silmarillion of 1937 there is no mention of the Eagles dwelling on Thangorodrim, and at the time of the fall of Fingolfin in his duel with Morgoth, before the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, Thorondor came for the rescue of the king's body
    'from his eyrie among the peaks of Gochressiel' (i.e. the Encircling Mountains; V.285, $147). On the other hand, in the abandoned story
    'Of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin' given in Unfinished Tales, a story that I believe to have been written in 1951, Voronwe speaks to Tuor of
    'the folk of Thorondor, who dwelt once even on Thangorodrim ere Morgoth grew so mighty, and dwell now in the Mountains of Turgon since the fall of Fingolfin' (p. 43).
    Gwaihir the Windlord had of course appeared often before this in The Lord of the Rings (for long Gwaewar, but becoming Gwaihir in the course of the writing of 'The White Rider', VII.430). In the Quenta Silmarillion (see V.301) Gwaewar had been one of the three eagles that came to Angband for the rescue of Beren and Luthien; the earliest form of that passage reads:

    Thorondor led them, and the others were Lhandroval (Wide-wing) and Gwaewar his vassal.

    The following text (also belonging to 1937) has:

    Thorondor was their leader; and with him were his mightiest vassals, wide-winged Lhandroval, and Gwaewar lord of the wind.

    In a revision of the passage which can be dated to 1951 Gwaewar was changed to Gwaihir. As I have noticed in V.301, the names of the vassals of Thorondor were suppressed in the published Silmarillion (p. 182) on account of the present passage in RK, but this was certainly mistaken: it is clear that my father deliberately repeated the names. As in so many other cases in The Lord of the Rings, he took the name Gwaewar for the great eagle, friend of Gandalf, from The Silmarillion, and when Gwaihir replaced Gwaewar in The Lord of the Rings he made the same change to the eagle's name in The Silmarillion. Now he took also Lhandroval (3) to be the name of Gwaihir's brother; and added a new name, Meneldor (RK p.