Mîms Klage / The Complaint of Mim the Dwarf

[Huinesoron]

Taking a break from work-translating to do some fun-translating instead, I took a stab at the rest of the poem:

Originally Posted by The Complaint of Mim the Dwarf, Part 1

Under a mountain, in an impassable land
lay a deep hole, all filled with sand.
One evening Mim stood before his house
His back was bent, and his beard was grey.
Long paths he had wandered, homeless and cold
the petty-dwarf Mim, two hundred years old.
All he had made, the work of his hands,
of stylus and chisel, of labour unending,
stolen by fiends; only his life and some few pieces
of his crafts were left to him, and a long blade
in a sheath under tattered mantle, venom-smeared.
His clouded eyes had squinted, still reddened from smoke
when amid thorns and bracken he had found
his passage at last amidst the flames.
And thus came he here, choking and sickened.
Mim spat in the sand, and so began to speak:

Tink-tink-tink, tink-tonk, tonk-tonk, tink!
No time to eat, no time to drink, tonk-tink!
Tink-tonk, no time, tonk-tink, no time to waste!
No time to sleep! No night and no day, just haste!
Only silver and gold, hammered and formed and shaped
and small, hard stones, glittering and cold
Tink-tink, green and gold, tink-tink, blue and white
Under my hands quietly sprout and grow
long leaves and flowers, and red eyes glowing
of beasts and birds between branches and blossoms.

I think this has to be just after Mim's betrayal of Turin; the CoH version reads:

Now the Orcs, finding the issue of the secret stair, left the summit and entered Bar-en-Danwedh, which they defiled and ravaged. They did not find Mim, lurking in his caves, and when they had departed from Amon Rudh Mim appeared on the summit, and going to where Beleg lay prostrate and unmoving he gloated over him while he sharpened a knife.

The fiends/monsters who stole Mim's stuff are the Orcs; the pit of sand is the caves he hid in; and we even have a mention of the knife. Or perhaps the scene is a little later, after Androg drives him off "shrieking in fear... to the brink of the cliff and... down a steep and difficult goat's path that was known to him". That would certainly offer more opportunity for smithying than while he was waiting to go and stab Beleg, and the vague summaries I've seen of the prose section say that Mim thinks about his inability to forgive, which would link to having just gone after Beleg.

I'm sure the answers, at least by implication, lie in the prose, but I'm not getting into that right now.

hS