The Book of Lost Tales, Part One

by J. R. R. Tolkien

  10 ‘truce’: earlier reading ‘compromise’. It is notable how Manwë is portrayed as primus inter pares rather than as ruler over the other Valar.

  11 On the Trees of Kôr see p. 123, 135.

  12 See p. 200.

  13 Sári is here (and subsequently) the name as written, not an emendation from Kalavénë, the name in the draft texts of The Sun and Moon and The Hiding of Valinor (see p. 198). The reading of the draft in this place is ‘the Sunship’, itself an alteration from ‘the ships’, for my father first wrote that neither ship could safely be drawn beneath the Earth.

  14 The Sleeper in the Tower of Pearl is named in The Cottage of Lost Play, p. 15. The song of the sleeper is virtually certainly the poem The Happy Mariners, originally written in 1915 and published in 1923 (see Humphrey Carpenter, Biography, Appendix C, p. 269); this will be given in two versions in connection with the materials for the Tale of Eärendel in the second part of the Lost Tales. The poem contains a reference to the boats that pass the Tower of Pearl, piled ‘with hoarded sparks of orient fire / that divers won in waters of the unknown Sun’.

  15 The original draft has here: ‘but that is the tale of Qorinómi and I dare not tell it here, for friend Ailios is watching me’ (see p. 197, notes 19 and 20).

  16 The draft text had here at first: ‘and the galleon of the Sun goes out into the dark, and coming behind the world finds the East again, but there there is no door and the Wall of Things is lower; and filled with the lightness of the morning Kalavénë rides above it and dawn is split upon the Eastern hills and falls upon the eyes of Men.’ Part of this, from ‘but there there is no door’, was bracketed, and the passage about the great arch in the East and the Gates of Morn introduced. In the following sentence, the draft had ‘back over the Eastern Wall’, changed to the reading of the second text, ‘back unto the Eastern Wall’. For the name Kalavénë see p. 198.

  17 I.e., until the Sunship issues forth, through the Door of Night, into the outer dark; as the Sunship leaves, the shooting stars pass back into the sky.

  18 The second version of this part of Vairë’s tale, ‘The Haven of the Sun’, follows the original draft (as emended) fairly closely, with no differences of any substance; but the part of her tale that now follows, ‘The Weaving of the Days and Months and Years’, is wholly absent from the draft text.

  19 This concluding passage differs in several points from the original version. In that, Ailios appears again, for Gilfanon; the ‘great foreboding’ was spoken among the Gods ‘when they designed first to build the Door of Night’ and when Ilinsor has followed Urwendi through the Gates ‘Melko will destroy the Gates and raise the Eastern Wall beyond the [?skies] and Urwendi and Ilinsor shall be lost’.

  Changes made to names in

  The Hiding of Valinor

  Vansamírin < Samirien’s road (Samírien occurs as the name of the Feast of Double Mirth, p. 143–4).

  Kôr < Kortirion (p. 207). Afterwards, though Kôr was not struck out, my father wrote above it Tûn, with a query, and the same at the occurrence of Kôr on p. 210. This is the first appearance in the text of the Lost Tales of this name, which ultimately gave rise to Túna (the hill on which Tirion was built).

  Ainairos
  Moritarnon, Tarn Fui The original draft of the tale has ‘Móritar or Tarna Fui’.

  Sári The original draft has Kalavénë (see p. 198 and note 13 above). At the first occurrence of the names of the three Sons of Time the sequence of forms was:

  Danuin < Danos < an illegible form Dan..

  Ranuin < Ranos < Ranoth < Rôn

  Fanuin < Lathos < Lathweg

  Throughout the remainder of the passage: Danuin < Dana; Ranuin < Ranoth; Fanuin < Lathweg.

  Aluin < Lúmin.

  Commentary on

  The Hiding of Valinor

  The account of the Council of the Valar and Eldar in the opening of this tale (greatly developed from the preliminary draft given in note 2) is remarkable and important in the history of my father’s ideas concerning the Valar and their motives. In The Silmarillion (p. 102) the Hiding of Valinor sprang from the assault of Melkor on the steersman of the Moon:

  But seeing the assault upon Tilion the Valar were in doubt, fearing what the malice and cunning of Morgoth might yet contrive against them. Being unwilling to make war upon him in Middle-earth, they remembered nonetheless the ruin of Almaren; and they resolved that the like should not befall Valinor.

  A little earlier in The Silmarillion (p. 99) reasons are given for the unwillingness of the Valar to make war:

  It is said indeed that, even as the Valar made war upon Melkor for the sake of the Quendi, so now for that time they forbore for the sake of the Hildor, the Aftercomers, the younger Children of Ilúvatar. For so grievous had been the hurts of Middle-earth in the war upon Utumno that the Valar feared lest even worse should now befall; whereas the Hildor should be mortal, and weaker than the Quendi to withstand fear and tumult. Moreover it was not revealed to Manwë where the beginning of Men should be, north, south, or east. Therefore the Valar sent forth light, but made strong the land of their dwelling.

  In The Silmarillion there is no vestige of the tumultuous council, no suggestion of a disagreement among the Valar, with Manwë, Varda and Ulmo actively disapproving the work and holding aloof from it; no mention, equally, of any pleading for pity on the Noldor by Ulmo, nor of Manwë’s disgust. In the old story it was the hostility of some of the Eldar towards the Noldoli, led by an Elf of Kópas (Alqualondë)—who likewise disappeared utterly: in the later account there is never a word about the feelings of the Elves of Valinor for the exiled Noldor—that was the starting-point of the Hiding of Valinor; and it is most curious to observe that the action of the Valar here sprang essentially from indolence mixed with fear. Nowhere does my father’s early conception of the fainéant Gods appear more clearly. He held moreover quite explicitly that their failure to make war upon Melko then and there was a deep error, diminishing themselves, and (as it appears) irreparable. In his later writing the Hiding of Valinor remained indeed, but only as a great fact of mythological antiquity; there is no whisper of its condemnation.

  The blocking-up and utter isolation of Valinor from the world without is perhaps even more strongly emphasized in the early narrative. The cast-off webs of Ungweliant and the use to which the Valar put them disappeared in the later story. Most notable is the different explanation of the fact that the gap in the encircling heights (later named the Calacirya) was not blocked up. In The Silmarillion (p. 102) it is said that the pass was not closed

  because of the Eldar that were faithful, and in the city of Tirion upon the green hill Finarfin yet ruled the remnant of the Noldor in the deep cleft of the mountains. For all those of elven-race, even the Vanyar and Ingwë their lord, must breathe at times the outer air and the wind that comes over the sea from the lands of their birth; and the Valar would not sunder the Teleri wholly from their kin.

  The old motive of the Solosimpi (> Teleri) wishing this to be done (sufficiently strange, for did the Shoreland Pipers wish to abandon the shores?) disappeared in the general excision of their bitter resentment against the Noldoli, as did Ulmo’s refusal to aid them, and Ossë’s willingness to do so in Ulmo’s despite. The passage concerning the Magic Isles, made by Osse, is the origin of the conclusion of Chapter XI of The Silmarillion:

  And in that time, which songs call Nurtalë Valinoréva, the Hiding of Valinor, the Enchanted Isles were set, and all the seas about them were filled with shadows and bewilderment. And these isles were strung as a net in the Shadowy Seas from the north to the south, before Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle, is reached by one sailing west. Hardly might any vessel pass between them, for in the dangerous sounds the waves sighed for ever upon dark rocks shrouded in mist. And in the twilight a great weariness came upon mariners and a loathing of the sea; but all that ever set foot upon the islands were there entrapped, and slept until the Change of the World.

  It is clear from this
passage in the tale that the Magic Isles were set to the east of the Shadowy Seas, though ‘the huge glooms…. stretched forth tongues of darkness towards them’ while in an earlier passage (p. 125) it is said that beyond Tol Eressëa (which was itself beyond the Magic Isles) ‘is the misty wall and those great sea-glooms beneath which lie the Shadowy Seas’. The later ‘Enchanted Isles’ certainly owe much as a conception to the Magic Isles, but in the passage just cited from The Silmarillion they were set in the Shadowy Seas and were in twilight. It is possible therefore that the Enchanted Isles derive also from the Twilit Isles (p. 68, 125).

  The account of the works of Tulkas and Aulë in the northern regions (p. 210) does not read as perfectly in accord with what has been said previously, though a real contradiction is unlikely. On p. 166–7 it is plainly stated that there was a strip of water (Qerkaringa, the Chill Gulf) between the tip of the ‘Icefang’ (Helkaraksë) and the Great Lands at the time of the crossing of the Noldoli. In this same passage the Icefang is referred to as ‘a narrow neck, which the Gods after destroyed’. The Noldoli were able to cross over to the Great Lands despite ‘that gap at the far end’ (p. 168) because in the great cold the sound had become filled with unmoving ice. The meaning of the present passage may be, however, that by the destruction of the Icefang a much wider gap was made, so that there was now no possibility of any crossing by that route.

  Of the three ‘roads’ made by Lórien, Oromë, and Mandos there is no vestige in my father’s later writing. The Rainbow is never mentioned, nor is there ever any hint of an explanation of how Men and Elves pass to the halls of Mandos. But it is difficult to interpret this conception of the ‘roads’—to know to what extent there was a purely figurative content in the idea.

  For the road of Lórien, Olóre Mallë the Path of Dreams, which is described by Vairë in The Cottage of Lost Play, see p. 18, 27 ff. There Vairë told that Olóre Mallë came from the lands of Men, that it was ‘a lane of deep banks and great overhanging hedges, beyond which stood many tall trees wherein a perpetual whisper seemed to live’, and that from this lane a high gate led to the Cottage of the Children or of the Play of Sleep. This was not far from Kôr, and to it came ‘the children of the fathers of the fathers of Men’ the Eldar guided them into the Cottage and its garden if they could, ‘lest they strayed into Kór and became enamoured of the glory of Valinor’. The accounts in the two tales seem to be in general agreement, though it is difficult to understand the words in the present passage ‘it ran past the Cottage of the Children of the Earth and thence down the “lane of whispering elms” until it reached the sea’. It is very notable that still at this stage in the development of the mythology, when so much more had been written since the coming of Eriol to Tol Eressëa, the conception of the children of Men coming in sleep by a mysterious ‘road’ to a cottage in Valinor had by no means fallen away.

  In the account of Oromë’s making of the Rainbow-bridge, the noose that he cast caught on the summit of the great mountain Kalormë (‘Sunrising-hill’) in the remotest East. This mountain is seen on the ‘World-Ship’ drawing, p. 84.

  The story that Vairë named ‘The Haven of the Sun’ (p. 213 ff.) provides the fullest picture of the structure of the world that is to be found in the earliest phase of the mythology. The Valar, to be sure, seem strangely ignorant on this subject—the nature of the world that came into being so largely from their own devising, if they needed Ulmo to acquaint them with such fundamental truths. A possible explanation of this ignorance may be found in the radical difference in the treatment of the Creation of the World between the early and later forms of The Music of the Ainur. I have remarked earlier (p. 62) that originally the Ainur’s first sight of the world was already in its actuality, and Ilúvatar said to them: ‘even now the world unfolds and its history begins’ whereas in the developed form it was a vision that was taken away from them, and only given existence in the word of Ilúvatar: Eä! Let these things Be! It is said in The Silmarillion (p. 20) that

  when the Valar entered into Eä they were at first astounded and at a loss, for it was as if naught was yet made which they had seen in vision, and all was but on point to begin and yet unshaped…

  and there follows (p. 21–2) an account of the vast labours of the Valar in the actual ‘construction’ of the world:

  They built lands and Melkor destroyed them; valleys they delved and Melkor raised them up; mountains they carved and Melkor threw them down; seas they hollowed and Melkor spilled them…

  In the old version there is none of this, and one gains the impression (though nothing is explicit) that the Valar came into a world that was already ‘made’, and unknown to them (‘the Gods stalked north and south and could see little; indeed in the deepest of these regions they found great cold and solitude…’, p. 69). Although the conception of the world was indeed derived in large measure from their own playing in the Music, its reality came from the creative act of Ilúvatar (‘We would have the guarding of those fair things of our dreams, which of thy might have now attained to reality’, p. 57); and the knowledge possessed by the Valar of the actual properties and dimensions of their habitation was correspondingly smaller (so we may perhaps assume) than it was afterwards conceived to be.

  But this is to lean rather heavily on the matter. More probably, the ignorance of the Valar is to be attributed to their curious collective isolation and indifference to the world beyond their mountains that is so much emphasized in this tale.

  However this may be, Ulmo at this time informed the Valar that the whole world is an Ocean, Vai, on which the Earth floats, ‘upheld by the word of Ilúvatar’ and all the seas of the Earth, even that which divides Valinor from the Great Lands, are hollows in the Earth’s surface, and are thus distinct from Vai, which is of another nature. All this we have already seen (p. 84 ff.); and in an earlier tale something has been said (p. 68) of the nature of the upholding waters:

  Beyond Valinor I have never seen or heard, save that of a surety there are the dark waters of the Outer Seas, that have no tides, and they are very cool and thin, that no boat can sail upon their bosom or fish swim within their depths, save the enchanted fish of Ulmo and his magic car.

  So here Ulmo says that neither fish nor boat will swim in its waters ‘to whom I have not spoken the great word that Ilúvatar said to me and bound them with the spell’.

  At the outer edge of Vai stands the Wall of Things, which is described as ‘deep-blue’ (p. 215). Valinor is nearer to the Wall of Things than is the eastern shore of the Great Lands, which must mean that Vai is narrower in the West than in the East. In the Wall of Things the Gods at this time made two entrances, in the West the Door of Night and in the East the Gates of Morn; and what lies beyond these entrances in the Wall is called ‘the starless vast’ and ‘the outer dark’. It is not made clear how the outer air (‘the dark and tenuous realm of Vaitya that is outside all’, p. 181) is to be related to the conception of the Wall of Things or the Outer Dark. In the rejected preliminary text of this tale my father wrote at first (see note 16 above) that in the East ‘the Wall of Things is lower’, so that when the Sun returns from the Outer Dark it does not enter the eastern sky by a door but ‘rides above’ the Wall. This was then changed, and the idea of the Door in the Eastern Wall, the Gates of Morn, introduced; but the implication seems clear that the Walls were originally conceived like the walls of terrestrial cities, or gardens—walls with a top a ‘ring-fence’. In the cosmological essay of the 1930s, the Ambarkanta, the Walls are quite other:

  About the World are the Ilurambar, or Walls of the World. They are as ice and glass and steel, being above all imagination of the Children of Earth cold, transparent, and hard. They cannot be seen, nor can they be passed, save by the Door of Night.

  Within these walls the Earth is globed: above, below, and upon all sides is Vaiya, the Enfolding Ocean. But this is more like to sea below the Earth and more like to air above the Earth.

  See further p. 86.

  The Tale of
Qorinómi (p. 215) was never in fact told—in the first version of the present tale (see note 15 above) it seems that Vairë would have liked to tell it, but felt the beady eye of the captious Ailios upon her. In the early Qenya word-list Qorinómi is defined as ‘the name of the Sun’, literally ‘Drowned in the Sea’, the name being a derivative from a root meaning ‘choke, suffocate, drown’, with this explanation: ‘The Sun, after fleeing from the Moon, dived into the sea and wandered in the caverns of the Oaritsi.’ Oaritsi is not given in the word-list, but oaris = ‘mermaid’. Nothing is said in the Lost Tales of the Moon giving chase to the Sun; it was the stars of Varda that Ilinsor, ‘huntsman of the firmament’, pursued, and he was ‘jealous of the supremacy of the Sun’ (p. 195).

  The conclusion of Vairë’s tale, ‘The Weaving of Days, Months, and Years’, shows (as it seems to me) my father exploring a mode of mythical imagining that was for him a dead end. In its formal and explicit symbolism it stands quite apart from the general direction of his thought, and he excised it without trace. It raises, also, a strange question. In what possible sense were the Valar ‘outside Time’ before the weavings of Danuin, Ranuin, and Fanuin? In The Music of the Ainur (p. 55) Ilúvatar said: ‘even now the world unfolds and its history begins’ in the final version (The Silmarillion p. 20) it is said that

  The Great Music had been but the growth and flowering of thought in the Timeless Halls, and the Vision only a foreshowing; but now they had entered in at the beginning of Time…

  (It is also said in The Silmarillion (p. 39) that when the Two Trees of Valinor began to shine there began the Count of Time; this refers to the beginning of the measurement of Time from the waxing and the waning of the Trees.)

  In the present tale the works of Danuin, Ranuin, and Fanuin are said to be the cause of ‘the subjection of all things within the world to time and change’. But the very notion of a history, a consecutive story, self-evidently implies time and change; how then can Valinor be said only now to come under the necessity of change, with the ordering of the motions of the Sun and Moon, when it has undergone vast changes in the course of the story of the Lost Tales? Moreover the Gods now know ‘that hereafter even they should in counted time be subject to slow eld and their bright days to waning’. But the very statement (for instance) that Ómar-Amillo was ‘the youngest of the great Valar’ who entered the world (p. 67) is an assertion that the other Valar, older than he, were ‘subject to eld’. ‘Age’ has of course for mortal beings two aspects, which draw always closer: time passes, and the body decays. But of the ‘natural’ immortality of the Eldar it is said (p. 59): ‘nor doth eld subdue their strength, unless it may be in ten thousand centuries’. Thus they ‘age’ (so Gilfanon is ‘the most aged that now dwelt in the isle’ and is ‘one of the oldest of the fairies’, p. 175), but they do not ‘age’ (do not become enfeebled). Why then do the Gods know that ‘hereafter’ they will be ‘subject to slow eld’—which can only mean ageing in the latter sense? It may well be that there is a deeper thought here than I can fathom; but certainly I cannot explain it.