Even for those who are mightiest under Ilúvatar there is some work that they may accomplish once, and once only. The Light of the Trees I brought into being, and within Eä I can do so never again.
Yavanna’s reference to the Magic Sun and its relighting (which has appeared in the toast drunk in the evening in the Cottage of Lost Play, p. 17, 65) is obviously intended to be obscure at this stage.
There is no later reference to the story of the wastage of light by Lórien and Vána, pouring it over the roots of the Trees unavailingly.
Turning to Lindo’s account of the stars (p. 181–2), Morwinyon has appeared in an earlier tale (p. 114), with the story that Varda dropped it ‘as she fared in great haste back to Valinor’, and that it ‘blazes above the world’s edge in the west’ in the present tale Morwinyon (which according to both the Qenya and Gnomish word-lists is Arcturus) is again strangely represented as being a luminary always of the western sky. It is said here that while some of the stars were guided by the Mánir and the Súruli ‘on mazy courses’, others, including Morwinyon and Nielluin, ‘abode where they hung and moved not’. Is the explanation of this that in the ancient myths of the Elves there was a time when the regular apparent movement of all the heavenly bodies from East to West had not yet begun? This movement is nowhere explained mythically in my father’s cosmology.
Nielluin (‘Blue Bee’) is Sirius (in The Silmarillion called Helluin), and this star had a place in the legend of Telimektar son of Tulkas, though the story of his conversion into the constellation of Orion was never clearly told (cf. Telumehtar ‘Orion’ in The Lord of the Rings Appendix E, I). Nielluin was Inwë’s son Ingil, who followed Telimektar ‘in the likeness of a great bee bearing honey of flame’ (see the Appendix on Names under Ingil and Telimektar).
The course of the Sun and Moon between East and West (rather than in some other direction) is here given a rationale, and the reason for avoiding the South is Ungweliant’s presence there. This seems to give Ungweliant a great importance and also a vast area subject to her power of absorbing light. It is not made clear in the tale of The Darkening of Valinor where her dwelling was. It is said (p. 151) that Melko wandered ‘the dark plains of Eruman, and farther south than anyone yet had penetrated he found a region of the deepest gloom’—the region where he found the cavern of Ungweliant, which had ‘a subterranean outlet on the sea’ and after the destruction of the Trees Ungweliant ‘gets her gone southward and over the mountains to her home’ (p. 154). It is impossible to tell from the vague lines on the little map (p. 81) what was at this time the configuration of the southern lands and seas.
In comparison with the last part of the tale, concerning the last fruit of Laurelin and the last flower of Silpion, the making from them of the Sun and Moon, and the launching of their vessels (p. 183–95), Chapter XI of The Silmarillion (constituted from two later versions not greatly dissimilar the one from the other) is extremely brief. Despite many differences the later versions read in places almost as summaries of the early story, but it is often hard to say whether the shortening depends rather on my father’s feeling (certainly present, see p. 174) that the description was too long, was taking too large a place in the total structure, or an actual rejection of some of the ideas it contains, and a desire to diminish the extreme ‘concreteness’ of its images. Certainly there is here a revelling in materials of ‘magic’ property, gold, silver, crystal, glass, and above all light conceived as a liquid element, or as dew, as honey, an element that can be bathed in and gathered into vessels, that has quite largely disappeared from The Silmarillion (although, of course, the idea of light as liquid, dripping down, poured and hoarded, sucked up by Ungoliant, remained essential to the conception of the Trees, this idea becomes in the later writing less palpable and the divine operations are given less ‘physical’ explanation and justification).
As a result of this fullness and intensity of description, the origin of the Sun and Moon in the last fruit and last flower of the Trees has less of mystery than in the succinct and beautiful language of The Silmarillion; but also much is said here to emphasize the great size of the ‘Fruit of Noon’, and the increase in the heat and brilliance of the Sunship after its launching, so that the reflection rises less readily that if the Sun that brilliantly illumines the whole Earth was but one fruit of Laurelin then Valinor must have been painfully bright and hot in the days of the Trees. In the early story the last outpourings of life from the dying Trees are utterly strange and ‘enormous’, those of Laurelin portentous, even ominous; the Sun is astoundingly bright and hot even to the Valar, who are awestruck and disquieted by what has been done (the Gods knew ‘that they had done a greater thing than they at first knew’, p. 190); and the anger and distress of certain of the Valar at the burning light of the Sun enforces the feeling that in the last fruit of Laurelin a terrible and unforeseen power has been released. This distress does indeed survive in The Silmarillion (p. 100), in the reference to ‘the prayers of Lórien and Estë, who said that sleep and rest had been banished from the Earth, and the stars were hidden’ but in the tale the blasting power of the new Sun is intensely conveyed in the images of ‘the heat dancing above the trees’ in the gardens of Lórien, the silent nightingales, the withered poppies and the drooping evening flowers.
In the old story there is a mythical explanation of the Moon’s phases (though not of eclipses), and of the markings on its face through the story of the breaking of the withered bough of Silpion and the fall of the Moonflower—a story altogether at variance with the explanation given in The Silmarillion (ibid.). In the tale the fruit of Laurelin also fell to the ground, when Aulë stumbled and its weight was too great for Tulkas to bear alone: the significance of this event is not made perfectly clear, but it seems that, had the Fruit of Noon not burst asunder, Aulë would not have understood its structure and conceived that of the Sunship.
To whatever extent the great differences between the versions in this part of the Mythology may be due to later compression, there remain a good many actual contradictions, of which I note here only some of the more important, in addition to that concerning the markings on the Moon already mentioned. Thus in The Silmarillion the Moon rose first, ‘and was the elder of the new lights as was Telperion of the Trees’ (ibid.); in the old story the reverse is true both of the Trees and of the new lights. Again, in The Silmarillion it is Varda who decides their motions, and she changes these from her first plan at the plea of Lórien and Estë, whereas here it is Lórien’s very distress at the coming of Sunlight that leads to the last blossoming of Silpion and the making of the Moon. The Valar indeed play different roles throughout; and here far greater importance attaches to the acts of Vána and Lórien, whose relations with the Sun and Moon are at once deeper and more explicit than they afterwards became, as they had been with the Trees (see p. 71); in The Silmarillion it was Nienna who watered the Trees with her tears (p. 98). In The Silmarillion the Sun and Moon move nearer to Arda than ‘the ancient stars’ (p. 99), but here they move at quite different levels in the firmament.
But a feature in which later compression can be certainly discerned is the elaborate description in the tale of the Moon as ‘an island of pure glass’, ‘a shimmering isle’, with little lakes of the light from Telimpë bordered with shining flowers and a crystalline cup amidmost in which was set the Moonflower; only from this is explicable the reference in The Silmarillion to Tilion’s steering ‘the island of the Moon’. The aged Elf Uolë Kúvion (whom ‘some indeed have named the Man in the Moon’) seems almost to have strayed in from another conception; his presence gives difficulty in any case, since we have just been told (p. 192) that Silmo could not sail in the Moonship because he was not of the children of the air and could not ‘cleanse his being of its earthwardness’.—An isolated heading ‘Uolë and Erinti’ in the little pocket-book used among things for suggestions of stories to be told (see p. 171) no doubt implies that a tale was preparing on the subject of Uolë cf. the Tale of Qorinórmi conce
rning Urwendi and Erinti’s brother Fionwë (p. 215). No traces of these tales are to be found and they were presumably never written. Another note in the pocket-book calls Uolë Mikúmi (the earlier name of Uolë Kúvion, see p. 198) ‘King of the Moon’ and a third refers to a poem ‘The Man in the Moon’ which is to be sung by Eriol, ‘who says he will sing them a song of a legend touching Uolë Mikúmi as Men have it’. My father wrote a poem about the Man in the Moon in March 1915, but if it was this that he was thinking of including it would have startled the company of Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva—and he would have had to change its references to places in England which were not yet in existence. Although it is very probable that he had something quite different in mind, I think it may be of interest to give this poem in an early form (see p. 204).
As the mythology evolved and changed, the Making of the Sun and Moon became the element of greatest difficulty; and in the published Silmarillion this chapter does not seem of a piece with much of the rest of the work, and could not be made to be so. Towards the end of his life my father was indeed prepared to dismantle much of what he had built, in the attempt to solve what he undoubtedly felt to be a fundamental problem.
Note on the order of the Tales
The development of the Lost Tales is here in fact extremely complex. After the concluding words of The Flight of the Noldoli, ‘the story of the darkening of Valinor was at an end’ (p. 169), my father wrote: ‘See on beyond in other books’, but in fact he added subsequently the short dialogue between Lindo and Eriol (‘Great was the power of Melko for ill…’) which is given at the end of The Flight of the Noldoli.
The page-numbering of the notebooks shows that the next tale was to be the Tale of Tinúviel, which is written in another book. This long story (to be given in Part II), the oldest extant version of ‘Beren and Lúthien’, begins with a long Link passage; and the curious thing is that this Link begins with the very dialogue between Lindo and Eriol just referred to, in almost identical wording, and this can be seen to be its original place; but here it was struck through.
I have mentioned earlier (p. 45) that in a letter written by my father in 1964 he said that he wrote The Music of the Ainur while working in Oxford on the staff of the Dictionary, a post that he took up in November 1918 and relinquished in the spring of 1920. In the same letter he said that he wrote ‘“The Fall of Gondolin” during sick-leave from the army in 1917’, and ‘the original version of the “Tale of Lúthien Tinúviel and Beren” later in the same year’. There is nothing in the manuscripts to suggest that the tales that follow The Music of the Ainur to the point we have now reached were not written consecutively and continuously from The Music, while my father was still in Oxford.
At first sight, then, there is a hopeless contradiction in the evidence: for the Link in question refers explicitly to the Darkening of Valinor, a tale written after his appointment in Oxford at the end of 1918, but is a link to the Tale of Tinúviel, which he said that he wrote in 1917. But the Tale of Tinúviel (and the Link that precedes it) is in fact a text in ink written over an erased pencilled original. It is, I think, certain that this rewriting of Tinúviel was considerably later. It was linked to The Flight of the Noldoli by the speeches of Lindo and Eriol (the link-passage is integral and continuous with the Tale of Tinúviel that follows it, and was not added afterwards). At this stage my father must have felt that the Tales need not necessarily be told in the actual sequence of the narrative (for Tinúviel belongs of course to the time after the making of the Sun and Moon).
The rewritten Tinúviel was followed with no break by a first form of the ‘interlude’ introducing Gilfanon of Tavrobel as a guest in the house, and this led into the Tale of the Sun and Moon. But subsequently my father changed his mind, and so struck out the dialogue of Lindo and Eriol from the beginning of the Link to Tinúviel, which was not now to follow The Flight of the Noldoli, and wrote it out again in the other book at the end of that tale. At the same time he rewrote the Gilfanon ‘interlude’ in an extended form, and placed it at the end of The Flight of the Noldoli. Thus:
Flight of the Noldoli
Words of Lindo and Eriol
Tale of Tinúviel
Gilfanon ‘interlude’
Tale of the Sun and Moon and the Hiding of Valinor
Flight of the Noldoli
Words of Lindo and Eriol
Gilfanon ‘interlude’ (rewritten)
Tale of the Sun and Moon and the Hiding of Valinor
That the rewriting of Tinúviel was one of the latest elements in the composition of the Lost Tales seems clear from the fact that it is followed by the first form of the Gilfanon ‘interlude’, written at the same time: for Gilfanon replaced Ailios, and Ailios, not Gilfanon, is the guest in the house in the earlier versions of the Tale of the Sun and Moon and The Hiding of Valinor, and is the teller of the Tale of the Nauglafring.
The poem about the Man in the Moon exists in many texts, and was published at Leeds in 1923;* long after and much changed it was included in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962). I give it here in a form close to the earlier published version, but with a few (mostly very minor) alterations made subsequently. The 1923 version was only a little retouched from the earliest workings—where it has the title ‘Why the Man in the Moon came down too soon: an East Anglian phantasy’ in the first finished text the title is ‘A Faërie: Why the Man in the Moon came down too soon’, together with one in Old English: Se Móncyning.
Why the Man in the Moon
came down too soon
The Man in the Moon had silver shoon
And his beard was of silver thread;
He was girt with pale gold and inaureoled
With gold about his head.
4
Clad in silken robe in his great white globe
He opened an ivory door
With a crystal key, and in secrecy
He stole o’er a shadowy floor;
8
Down a filigree stair of spidery hair
He slipped in gleaming haste,
And laughing with glee to be merry and free
He swiftly earthward raced.
12
He was tired of his pearls and diamond twirls;
Of his pallid minaret
Dizzy and white at its lunar height
In a world of silver set;
16
And adventured this peril for ruby and beryl
And emerald and sapphire,
And all lustrous gems for new diadems,
Or to blazon his pale attire.
20
He was lonely too with nothing to do
But to stare at the golden world,
Or strain for the hum that would distantly come
As it gaily past him whirled;
24
And at plenilune in his argent moon
He had wearily longed for Fire—
Not the limpid lights of wan selenites,
But a red terrestrial pyre
28
With impurpurate glows of crimson and rose
And leaping orange tongue;
For great seas of blues and the passionate hues
When a dancing dawn is young;
32
For the meadowy ways like chrysoprase
By winding Yare and Nen.
How he longed for the mirth of the populous Earth
And the sanguine blood of men;
36
And coveted song and laughter long
And viands hot and wine,
Eating pearly cakes of light snowflakes
And drinking thin moonshine.
40
He twinkled his feet as he thought of the meat,
Of the punch and the peppery brew,
Till he tripped unaware on his slanting stair,
And fell like meteors do;
44
As the whickering sparks in splashing arcs
Of stars blown down like rain
From his laddery path took a foa
ming bath
In the Ocean of Almain;
48
And began to think, lest he melt and stink,
What in the moon to do,
When a Yarmouth boat found him far afloat,
To the mazement of the crew
52
Caught in their net all shimmering wet
In a phosphorescent sheen
Of bluey whites and opal lights
And delicate liquid green.
56
With the morning fish—’twas his regal wish—
They packed him to Norwich town,
To get warm on gin in a Norfolk inn,
And dry his watery gown.
60
Though Saint Peter’s knell waked many a bell
In the city’s ringing towers
To shout the news of his lunatic cruise
In the early morning hours,
64
No hearths were laid, not a breakfast made,