The Book of Lost Tales, Part One by J. R. R. Tolkien
In The Silmarillion (p. 48) is described the second star-making of Varda before and in preparation for the coming of the Elves:
Then Varda went forth from the council, and she looked out from the height of Taniquetil, and beheld the darkness of Middle-earth beneath the innumerable stars, faint and far. Then she began a great labour, greatest of all the works of the Valar since their coming into Arda. She took the silver dews from the vats of Telperion, and therewith she made new stars and brighter against the coming of the First-born…
In the earliest version we see the conception already present that the stars were created in two separate acts—that a new star-making by Varda celebrated the coming of the Elves, even though here the Elves were already awakened; and that the new stars were derived from the liquid light fallen from the Moon-tree, Silpion. The passage just cited from The Silmarillion goes on to tell that it was at the time of the second star-making that Varda ‘high in the north as a challenge to Melkor set the crown of seven mighty stars to swing, Valacirca, the Sickle of the Valar and sign of doom’ but here this is denied, and a special origin is claimed for the Great Bear, whose stars were not of Varda’s contriving but were sparks that escaped from Aulë’s forge. In the little notebook mentioned on p. 23, which is full of disjointed jottings and hastily noted projects, a different form of this myth appears:
The Silver Sickle
The seven butterflies
Aulë was making a silver sickle. Melko interrupted his work telling him a lie concerning the lady Palúrien. Aulë so wroth that he broke the sickle with a blow. Seven sparks leapt up and winged into the heavens. Varda caught them and gave them a place in the heavens as a sign of Palúrien’s honour. They fly now ever in the shape of a sickle round and round the pole.
There can be no doubt, I think, that this note is earlier than the present text.
The star Morwinyon, ‘who blazes above the world’s edge in the west’, is Arcturus; see the Appendix on Names. It is nowhere explained why Morwinyon-Arcturus is mythically conceived to be always in the west.
Turning now to the Great March and the crossing of the ocean, the origin of Tol Eressëa in the island on which Ossë drew the Gods to the western lands at the time of the fall of the Lamps (see p. 70) was necessarily lost afterwards with the loss of that story, and Ossë ceased to have any proprietary right upon it. The idea that the Eldar came to the shores of the Great Lands in three large and separated companies (in the order Teleri—Noldori—Solosimpi, as later Vanyar—Noldor—Teleri) goes back to the beginning; but here the first people and the second people each crossed the ocean alone, whereas afterwards they crossed together.
In The Silmarillion (p. 58) ‘many years’ elapsed before Ulmo returned for the last of the three kindreds, the Teleri, so long a time that they came to love the coasts of Middle-earth, and Ossë was able to persuade some of them to remain (Círdan the Shipwright and the Elves of the Falas, with their havens at Brithombar and Eglarest). Of this there is no trace in the earliest account, though the germ of the idea of the long wait of the lastcomers for Ulmo’s return is present. In the published version the cause of Ossë’s rage against the transportation of the Eldar on the floating island has disappeared, and his motive for anchoring the island in the ocean is wholly different: indeed he did this at the bidding of Ulmo (ibid. p. 59), who was opposed to the summoning of the Eldar to Valinor in any case. But the anchoring of Tol Eressëa as a rebellious act of Ossë’s long remained an element in the story. It is not made clear what other ‘scattered islands of his domain’ (p. 121) Ossë anchored to the sea-bottom; but since on the drawing of the World-Ship the Lonely Isle, the Magic Isles, and the Twilit Isles are all shown in the same way as ‘standing like pinnacles from the weedy depths’ (see pp. 84–6) it was probably these that Ossë now established (though Rúmil and Meril still speak of the Twilit Isles as ‘floating’ on the Shadowy Seas, pp. 68, 125).
In the old story it is made very clear that Tol Eressëa was made fast far out in the mid-ocean, and ‘no land may be seen for many leagues’ sail from its cliffs’. That was indeed the reason for its name, which was diminished when the Lonely Isle came to be set in the Bay of Eldamar. But the words used of Tol Eressëa, ‘the Lonely Isle, that looks both west and east’, in the last chapter of The Silmarillion (relatively very little worked on and revised), undoubtedly derive from the old story; in the tale of Ælfwine of England is seen the origin of this phrase: ‘the Lonely Island looking East to the Magic Archipelago and to the lands of Men beyond it, and West into the Shadows beyond which afar off is glimpsed the Outer Land, the kingdom of the Gods’. The deep sundering of the speech of the Solosimpi from that of the other kindreds, referred to in this tale (p. 121), is preserved in The Silmarillion, but the idea arose in the days when Tol Eressëa was far further removed from Valinor.
As is very often to be observed in the evolution of these myths, an early idea survived in a wholly altered context: here, the growth of trees and plants on the westward slopes of the floating island began with its twice lying in the Bay of Faëry and catching the light of the Trees when the Teleri and Noldoli disembarked, and its greater beauty and fertility remained from those times after it was anchored far away from Valinor in the midst of the ocean; afterwards, this idea survived in the context of the light of the Trees passing through the Calacirya and falling on Tol Eressëa near at hand in the Bay of Eldamar. Similarly, it seems that Ulmo’s instruction of the Solosimpi in music and sea-lore while sitting ‘upon a headland’ of Tol Eressëa after its binding to the sea-bottom was shifted to Ossë’s instruction of the Teleri ‘in all manner of sea-lore and sea-music’ sitting on a rock off the coast of Middle-earth (The Silmarillion p. 58).
Very noteworthy is the account given here of the gap in the Mountains of Valinor. In The Silmarillion the Valar made this gap, the Calacirya or Pass of Light, only after the coming of the Eldar to Aman, for ‘even among the radiant flowers of the Tree-lit gardens of Valinor they [the Vanyar and Noldor] longed still at times to see the stars’ (p. 59); whereas in this tale it was a ‘natural’ feature, associated with a long creek thrust in from the sea.
From the account of the coming of the Elves to the shores of the Great Lands it is seen (p. 118) that Hisilómë was a region bordering the Great Sea, agreeing with its identification as the region marked g on the earliest map, see pp. 81, 112; and most remarkably we meet here the idea that Men were shut in Hisilómë by Melko, an idea that survived right through to the final form in which the Easterling Men were rewarded after the Nirnaeth Arnoediad for their treacherous service to Morgoth by being confined in Hithlum (The Silmarillion p. 195).
In the description of the hill and city of Kôr appear several features that were never lost in the later accounts of Tirion upon Túna. Cf. The Silmarillion p. 59:
Upon the crown of Túna the city of the Elves was built, the white walls and terraces of Tirion; and the highest of the towers of that city was the Tower of Ingwë, Mindon Eldaliéva, whose silver lamp shone far out into the mists of the sea.
The dust of gold and ‘magic metals’ that Aulë piled about the feet of Kôr powdered the shoes and clothing of Eärendil when he climbed the ‘long white stairs’ of Tirion (ibid. p. 248).
It is not said here whether the shoots of Laurelin and Silpion that the Gods gave to Inwë and Nólemë, which ‘blossomed both eternally without abating’, were also givers of light, but later in the Lost Tales (p. 213), after the Flight of the Noldoli, the Trees of Kôr are again referred to, and there the trees given to Inwë ‘shone still’, while the trees given to Nólemë had been uprooted and ‘were gone no one knew whither.’ In The Silmarillion it is said that Yavanna made for the Vanyar and the Noldor ‘a tree like to a lesser image of Telperion, save that it did not give light of its own being’ it was ‘planted in the courts beneath the Mindon and there flourished, and its seedlings were many in Eldamar’. Thence came the Tree of Tol Eressëa.
In connection with this description of the city of t
Kôr
In a City Lost and Dead
A sable hill, gigantic, rampart-crowned
Stands gazing out across an azure sea
Under an azure sky, on whose dark ground
Impearled as ’gainst a floor of porphyry
Gleam marble temples white, and dazzling halls;
And tawny shadows fingered long are made
In fretted bars upon their ivory walls
By massy trees rock-rooted in the shade
Like stony chiselled pillars of the vault
With shaft and capital of black basalt.
There slow forgotten days for ever reap
The silent shadows counting out rich hours;
And no voice stirs; and all the marble towers
White, hot and soundless, ever burn and sleep.
The story of the evolution of sea-birds by Ossë, and of how the Solosimpi went at last to Valinor in ships of swan-shape drawn by gulls, to the chagrin of Ossë, is greatly at variance with the account in The Silmarillion (p. 61):
Through a long age they [the Teleri] dwelt in Tol Eressëa; but slowly their hearts were changed, and were drawn towards the light that flowed out over the sea to the Lonely Isle. They were torn between the love of the music of the waves upon their shores, and the desire to see again their kindred and to look upon the splendour of Valinor; but in the end desire of the light was the stronger. Therefore Ulmo, submitting to the will of the Valar, sent to them Ossë, their friend, and he though grieving taught them the craft of ship-building; and when their ships were built he brought them as his parting gift many strong-winged swans. Then the swans drew the white ships of the Teleri over the windless sea; and thus at last and latest they came to Aman and the shores of Eldamar.
But the swans remained as a gift of Ossë to the Elves of Tol Eressëa, and the ships of the Teleri retained the form of the ships built by Aulë for the Solosimpi: they ‘were made in the likeness of swans, with beaks of gold and eyes of gold and jet’ (ibid.).
The passage of geographical description that follows (p. 125) is curious; for it is extremely similar to (and even in some phrases identical with) that in the tale of The Coming of the Valar and the Building of Valinor, p. 68. An explanation of this repetition is suggested below. This second version gives in fact little new information, its chief difference of substance being the mention of Tol Eressëa. It is now made clear that the Shadowy Seas were a region of the Great Sea west of Tol Eressëa. In The Silmarillion (p. 102) the conception had changed, with the change in the anchorage of Tol Eressëa: at the time of 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.
There is a further element of repetition in the account of the gap in the Mountains of Valinor and the hill of Kôr at the head of the creek (p. 126), which have already been described earlier in this same tale (p. 122). The explanation of this repetition is almost certainly to be found in the two layers of composition in this tale (see note 8 above); for the first of these passages is in the revised portion and the second in the original, pencilled text. My father in his revision had, I think, simply taken in earlier the passage concerning the gap in the Mountains, the hill and the creek, and if he had continued the revision of the tale to its end the second passage would have been excised. This explanation may be suggested also for the repetition of the passage concerning the islands in the Great Sea and the coast of Valinor from the tale of The Coming of the Valar and the Building of Valinor; but in that case the implication must be that the revision in ink over the original pencilled manuscript was carried out when the latter was already far ahead in the narrative.
In The Silmarillion the entire account of the making of gem-stones by the Noldoli has become compressed into these words (p. 60):
And it came to pass that the masons of the house of Finwë, quarrying in the hills after stone (for they delighted in the building of high towers), first discovered the earth-gems, and brought them forth in countless myriads; and they devised tools for the cutting and shaping of gems, and carved them in many forms. They hoarded them not, but gave them freely, and by their labour enriched all Valinor.
Thus the rhapsodic account at the end of this tale of the making of gems out of ‘magic’ materials—starlight, and ilwë, dews and petals, glassy substances dyed with the juice of flowers—was abandoned, and the Noldor became miners, skilful indeed, but mining only what was there to be found in the rocks of Valinor. On the other hand, in an earlier passage in The Silmarillion (p. 39), the old idea is retained: ‘The Noldor also it was who first achieved the making of gems.’ It need not be said that everything was to be gained by the discretion of the later writing; in this early narrative the Silmarils are not strongly marked out from the accumulated wonder of all the rest of the gems of the Noldoli’s making.
Features that remained are the generosity of the Noldor in the giving of their gems and the scattering of them on the shores (cf. The Silmarillion p. 61: ‘Many jewels the Noldor gave them [the Teleri], opals and diamonds and pale crystals, which they strewed upon the shores and scattered in the pools’); the pearls that the Teleri got from the sea (ibid.); the sapphires that the Noldor gave to Manwë (‘His sceptre was of sapphire, which the Noldor wrought for him’, ibid. p. 40); and, of course, Fëanor as the maker of the Silmarils—although, as will be seen in the next tale, Fëanor was not yet the son of Finwë (Nólemë).
I conclude this commentary with another early poem that bears upon the matter of this tale. It is said in the tale (p. 119) that Men in Hisilómë feared the Lost Elves, calling them the Shadow Folk, and that their name for the land was Aryador. The meaning of this is given in the early Gnomish word-list as ‘land or place of shadow’ (cf. the meanings of Hisilómë and Dor Lómin, p. 112).
The poem is called A Song of Aryador, and is extant in two copies; according to notes on these it was written in an army camp near Lichfield on September 12th, 1915. It was never, to my knowledge, printed. The first copy, in manuscript, has the title also in Old English: Án léoþ Éargedores; the second, in typescript, has virtually no differences in the text, but it may be noted that the first word of the third verse, ‘She’, is an emendation from ‘He’ in both copies.
A Song of Aryador
In the vales of Aryador
By the wooded inland shore
Green the lakeward bents and meads
Sloping down to murmurous reeds
That whisper in the dusk o’er Aryador:
‘Do you hear the many bells
Of the goats upon the fells
Where the valley tumbles downward from the pines?
Do you hear the blue woods moan
When the Sun has gone alone
To hunt the mountain-shadows in the pines?
She is lost among the hills
And the upland slowly fills
With the shadow-folk that murmur in the fern;
And still there are the bells
And the voices on the fells
While Eastward a few stars begin to burn.
Men are kindling tiny gleams
Far below by mountain-streams
Where they dwell among
But the great woods on the height
Watch the waning western light
And whisper to the wind of things of yore,
When the valley was unknown,
And the waters roared alone,
And the shadow-folk danced downward all the night,
When the Sun had fared abroad
Through great forests unexplored
And the woods were full of wandering beams of light.
Then were voices on the fells
And a sound of ghostly bells
And a march of shadow-people o’er the height.
In the mountains by the shore
In forgotten Aryador
There was dancing and was ringing;
There were shadow-people singing
Ancient songs of olden gods in Aryador.’
VI
THE THEFT OF MELKO AND THE DARKENING OF VALINOR
This title is again taken from the cover of the book containing the text; the narrative, still written rapidly in pencil (see note 8 to the last chapter), with some emendations from the same time or later, continues without a break.
Now came Eriol home to the Cottage of Lost Play, and his love for all the things that he saw about him and his desire to understand them all became more deep. Continually did he thirst to know yet more of the history of the Eldar; nor did he ever fail to be among those who fared each evening to the Room of the Tale-fire; and so on a time when he had already sojourned some while as a guest of Vairë and Lindo it so passed that Lindo at his entreaty spake thus from his deep chair:
‘Listen then, O Eriol, if thou wouldst [know] how it so came that the loveliness of Valinor was abated, or the Elves might ever be constrained to leave the shores of Eldamar. It may well be that you know already that Melko dwelt in Valmar as a servant in the house of Tulkas in those days of the joy of the Eldalië there did he nurse his hatred of the Gods, and his consuming jealousy of the Eldar, but it was his lust for the beauty of the gems for all his feigned indifference that in the end overbore his patience and caused him to design deep and evilly.