Turin the Forgetful

[Morwen]

In Children of Hurin we are told that Nellas, an Elf of Doriath, is a childhood friend and tutor of Turin. Later, Beleg tells Turin that Nellas' account of the Turin/Saeros altercation is the basis for Thingol pardoning Turin. Now Turin hears this story but can't seem to remember who Nellas is. I find this strange - because this was someone that he once walked with hand in hand and who taught him to speak Sindarin after the manner of the Elves of Doriath. So I wonder what I'm missing. I can understand that he outgrew his friendship with Nellas (who seems a bit on the Tra-la-lally side). But how can he have forgotten who she was?

[Rune Son of Bjarne]

I curse you Morwen!

Ever since I read that part in Children of Hurin I have been thinking about making a thread about this, I just had not figured out how exactly I would present the question.

Actually it has been something that has annoyed me ever since reading the UT.

In genneral it has pussled me what the function of Nellas is in the story of Turin, other than telling the truth about the slaying of Saeros.

[Morwen]

I was beginning to think I was the only one puzzled by Turin's amnesia.

So why do you think Turin acted in such an odd manner?

[Rune Son of Bjarne]

I am sorry I cannot tell you. . .because I do not know.

It seems to me as if Tolkien is trying to make a point about Turin that I simply cannot see, also I am wondering about how Nellas is feeling about all of this.

She clearly likes Turin a lot. . . but how much?

I am sorry that I can answer no questions for you, but only ask more.

[Inziladun]

It's good to bump an old thread now and then, especially since I'm curious about this also.

It seems from the Narn I Hîn Húrin in UT that he just got busy with other things, and Nellas' memory was covered by other interests.

.....so that as Túrin's boyhood passed and he turned his thoughts to the deeds of men, he saw her less and less often, and at last called for her no more.

I wonder, too, if the teenage Túrin winced inside when he thought of how he'd walked through the woods with an Elf-maiden, spending time talking of "unmanly" things. I can see Túrin, proud as he was, making a conscious effort to forget those years if he thought them unprofitable and, in hindsight, embarrassing.

[Galadriel55]

Maybe when Turin was a teen he thought that he should be worrying about more important matters than girls, and later on he did his best to forget her because he felt guilty about his treatment to her. I mean, he didn't say goodbye or anything.

[Elmo]

Nellas is a symbol of the goodness and softness inside Turin. This goodness is the thing that saves him when he slays Saeros. When he forgets Nellas he has forgotten his soft side and therefore lays the path to his ruin. Something like that anyway.

[Pitchwife]

I may be mistaken, but I've always had the impression that Nellas was, by Elvish measures, still a child, or at least a very young girl - like, if she'd been human, she'd be no older than thirteen or thereabout; her initial shyness before Thingol seems to me like she wasn't only intimidated by being in the presence of the King, in a company of strangers in a a big stone hall to which she was unaccustomed, but rather embarrassed like a child being questioned by adults. Then, once she's gathered some courage to speak, she has the naïveté to go babbling about Lúthien sitting in a tree, of all things, when every adult resident of Doriath must have known that this had to be a somewhat sensitive matter for Thingol!

No doubt she was still wise far beyond a Mannish boy of comparable age, and there was much that Túrin could learn from her; but he matured at a much faster pace than she did and so outgrew the desire for her company. And if there's one thing a teenage boy in the throes of puberty will avoid like the plague, it's being seen talking and playing with little girls! From this angle, it all makes sense to me.

[Galadriel55]

I think that both Elmo and Pitch are right. If Nellas represents goodness, and she affected Turin's childhood, it makes sense that she also represents innocence and freedom in Turin's life (I mean inner freedom; when the curse did not have as uch power over him). When he lost innocence, he lost peace, home, and many other good virtues and values. When he separated from Nellas his actions begun to turn out for the worse. Nellas tried to come back to Turin, and she was always near him, hiding in the trees, when he was in Doriath. Turin could not, or chose not to see her, as he failed to see such things for the rest of his life. Perhaps if only he would remember her and search for her before he left Doriath, Morgoth's curse would have lost its power.
Pitchwife looks at it from a logical point of view, and Elmo more from a symbolical one, and I agree with both.

[Morwen]

People do outgrow friendships and you might forget (or perhaps "cease to think about" may be more accurate) a close friend from your early childhood. This seems normal enough.

So I do agree that Turin forgot about Nellas in part because he outgrew her, "for he grew swiftly, whereas she seemed no more than a maiden of his own age, and was so in heart for all her elven years". (With respect to the question of Nellas' age the description of her being young in heart as opposed to simply young led me to believe that though childlike, Nellas is not a child).

I had not considered the question of Turin trying to consciously suppress his memories of Nellas in part because it seemed as if his time with her is one of the happier periods in his life.

From Nellas Turin learned much concerning the ways and the wild things of Doriath, and she taught him to speak the Sindarin tongue after the manner of the ancient realm, older, and more courteous, and richer in beautiful words. Thus for a little while his mood was lightened, until he fell again under shadow, and that friendship passed like a morning of spring.

Children of Hurin - Turin in Doriath

There doesn't seem to be anything traumatic connected to the friendship that Turin would want to repress.

(In reading the last sentence of that quote though it now occurs to me that the duration of the Turin/Nellas friendship may have been much shorter than I imagined - that their "morning of spring" friendship is more akin to a real world "summer friendship", great while it lasts but then the friends go their separate ways to forget and be forgotten. )

However, what sparked my interest in this topic is the conversation between Beleg and an adult Turin. While I accept that you can outgrow friendships and cease to think of a childhood playmate, I find it odd that hearing Nellas' name in Beleg's story triggers no memory for Turin.

"... I cannot recall her" Turin tells Beleg. When Beleg looks at him strangely and reminds him that as a boy he would walk in the woods with Nellas, Turin then says:

"That must have been long ago," said Turin. "Or so my childhood now seems, and a mist is over it - save only the memory of my father's house in Dor-lomin.

Children of Hurin - Hurin among the Outlaws

This mist over his childhood, well the Doriath portion of his childhood, is intriguing and it doesn't seem like normal forgetfulness. Given that the mist lies over part of his childhood are there other things that Turin cannot recall? I also wondered whether one could link this mist to the shadow that is said to have marred Turin's youth.

[Pitchwife]

Originally Posted by Morwen

This mist over his childhood, well the Doriath portion of his childhood, is intriguing and it doesn't seem like normal forgetfulness. Given that the mist lies over part of his childhood are there other things that Turin cannot recall? I also wondered whether one could link this mist to the shadow that is said to have marred Turin's youth.

I think you're on to something here. Immediately before the last quote you give, Beleg asks him,

Originally Posted by UT, Narn i Hîn Húrin

Túrin, have you lived always with your heart and half your mind far away?

It seems he had indeed, and it takes little imagination to guess where his heart and half his mind was - in Dor-lómin, with his mother and unborn sister (and probably his friend Sador and the memory of Lalaith too). I think this was the 'shadow' mentioned in the tale - in the same place, by the way, where the corresponding passage in the 1920s Lay of the Children of Húrin more clearly names

the sundering sorrow that seared his youth

(bolding mine).
But there may be more to it. I'm reminded of another dialogue, where Beleg, when Túrin refuses to accept any 'gifts out of Doriath', tells him:

Originally Posted by UT Narn, Appendix

Then send back your sword and your arms [...] Send back also the teaching and fostering of your youth.

(Sounds like his long patience with Túrin is wearing a bit thin here, doesn't it?)
To me it looks like Túrin, in his grudge against Thingol for exiling him (when he had actually exiled himself), had sub-consciously or half-consciously repressed the memory of any positive aspects of his life in Doriath (such as his childhood friendship with Nellas)which could have contradicted his feeling that he had been wronged (cf his chosen name Neithan) through no fault of his own.