Dir avosaith a gwaew hinar

!

The title of this article is conjectural. While the content of this article is based on official information, the actual name of the subject is conjectural, and is yet to or cannot be officially named.

!

"Dir avosaith a gwaew hinar" is the first line of a poem that was written by J.R.R. Tolkien to be part of his lecture A Secret Vice.

Though Tolkien never gave the poem a name, it is referred to by some people as the Nebrachar poem, a term first used by Paul Nolan Hyde in 1992.

Poem

Dir avosaith a gwaew hinar
engluid eryd argenaid,
dir Tumledin hin Nebrachar
Yrch methail maethon magradhaid.
Damrod dir hanach dalath benn
ven Sirion gar meilien,
gail Luithien heb Eglavar
dir avosaith han Nebrachar.

Translation

Like a wind, dark through gloomy places
the Stonefaces searched the mountains,
over Tumledin (the Smooth Valley) from Nebrachar,
orcs snuffling smelt out footsteps.
Damrod (a hunter) through the vale,
down mountain slopes, towards (the river)
Sirion went laughing. Lúthien he saw, as a star from Elfland
shining over the gloomy places, above Nebrachar.

Background

Tolkien originally wrote a preliminary draft of the poem along with a modern English translation in the autumn of 1931, but sometime later revised the poem and its translation.

Tolkien later used his revised poem and translation as an example of language invention in his lecture A Secret Vice.

In 1983, the poem was posthumously published by Christopher Tolkien in The Essays of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays.

"Damrod" is identified by Dimitra Fimi and Andrew Higgins as the son of the Fëanor later called Amrod.

In 2024, the preliminary draft of the poem was published for the first time in The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull added line divisions to the translations that correspond with the poem.