Resilient Seeker Coaching | Ross Raymond Nunamaker

I was listening to the Tales from the Perilous Realm audiobook on my morning walk and as it came to the forward for The Adventures of Tom Bombadil I heard the reference to Turin and Mim.

Later, at home, I got the book out and item 14, referencing a possible tie to Turin and Mim was, The Hoard.

In the Collected Poems, “Iumonna Gold Galdre Bewunden” the Hoard (?1922 – 61), it notes that the first version was probably written in late 1922 and published in the Gryphon.

It is noted that he advised Pauline Baynes that she should treat The Hoard, “as a tale of the woes of successive (nameless) inheritors’ of a treasure and a tapestry of antiquity in which individual pity is not to be deeply engaged.” (page 499).

In the context of the Tom Bombadil publication, the poem was derived from the Hobbits, “Red Book of Westmarch’ and based on lore of Rivendell, Elvish and Numenorean, concerning the heroic days at the end of the First Age; it seems to contain echoes of the Numenorean tale of Turin and Mim the Dwarf’.

The poem itself does not specifically identify either Turin or Mim and it speaks more of the gold and its effect on others than it tells us anything about dragons that we didn’t already know.

We have a dwarf killed by a young dragon, an old dragon slayed by a young warrior, an old king who was overtaken, and an old hoard buried and “The old hoard the Night shall keep, while earth waits and the Elves sleep.” (Realm, p. 231)

The poem well depicts what happens to buried treasure and those who covet it, but the timing is challenging. If it is of the first age, it is after the time of Glaurung’s emergence. In the other recorded stories the dragons were led out of Angband and back to it following battles. It is only at the end of the first age when two winged dragons go east.

Could dragons have escaped the earlier battles of Beleriand, or the sack of Gondolin? Yes, but they are not mentioned. Then again, the stories we have are primarily those that concern the Elves, and dragons did not concern the Elves to the extent they did the dwarves.