It is said in the tale (p. 68) that ‘in that vast water of the West are many smaller lands and isles, ere the lonely seas are found whose waves whisper about the Magic Isles’. The little circles on the map (marked k) are evidently a schematic representation of these archipelagoes (of the Magic Isles more will be told later). The Shadowy Seas, as will emerge more clearly later, were a region of the Great Sea west of Tol Eressлa. The other letters on the map refer to features that have not yet entered the narrative.

In this tale we meet the important cosmological idea of the Three Airs, Vaitya, Ilwл, and Vilna, and of the Outer Ocean, tideless, cold, and ‘thin’. It has been said in The Music of the Ainur (p. 58) that Ulmo dwells in the Outer Ocean and that he gave to Ossл and Onen ‘control of the waves and lesser seas’ he is there called ‘the ancient one of Vai’ (emended from Ulmonan). It is now seen that Ulmonan is the name of his halls in the Outer Ocean, and also that the ‘lesser seas’ controlled by Ossл and Уnen include the Great Sea (p. 68).

There exists a very early and very remarkable drawing, in which the world is seen in section, and is presented as a huge ‘Viking’ ship, with mast arising from the highest point of the Great Lands, single sail on which are the Sun and Moon, sailropes fastened to Taniquetil and to a great mountain in the extreme East, and curved prow (the black marks on the sail are an ink-blot). This drawing was done fairly rapidly in soft pencil on a small sheet; and it is closely associated with the cosmology of the Lost Tales.

I give here a list of the names and words written on the drawing with, so far as possible, their meanings (but without any etymological detail, for which see the Appendix on Names, where names and words occurring only on this drawing are given separate entries).

I Vene Kemen This is clearly the title of the drawing; it might mean ‘The Shape of the Earth’ or ‘The Vessel of the Earth’ (see the Appendix on Names, entry Glorvent).

N

Valinor; Taniquetil (The vast height of Taniquetil, even granting the formalisation of this drawing, is noteworthy: it is described in the tale as being so high that ‘the throngs about westward havens in the lands of Men could be seen therefrom’ (p. 68). Its fantastic height is conveyed in my father’s painting, dating from 1927–8 (Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien, no. 31).)

Harmalin Earlier name of Arvalin (see p. 79).

i aldas ‘The Trees’ (standing to the west of Taniquetil).

Toros valinoriva Toros is obscure, but in any case the first letter of the first word, if it is a T, is a very uncharacteristic one. The reference seems to be to the Mountains of Valinor.

Tolli Kimpelear These must be the Twilit Isles, but I have found no other occurrence of Kimpelear or anything similar.

Tol Eressлa ‘The Lo1nely Isle’.

I Tolli Kuruvar ‘The Magic Isles’.

Haloisi Velike ‘The Great Sea’.

Ф ‘The Sea’. (What is the structure at the sea-bottom shown below the name Ф? It must surely be the dwelling of Ossл beneath the Great Sea that is referred to in the next tale (p. 106.)

I Nori Landar Probably means ‘The Great Lands’.

Koivienйni The precursor of Cuiviйnen, the Waters of Awakening.

Palisor The land where the Elves awoke.

Sil ‘Moon’.

Ыr ‘Sun’.

Luvier ‘Clouds’.

Oronto ‘East’.

Vaitya, Ilwл, and Vilna appear in the three layers described in the tale (p. 65), and Vilna reappears in the bottom right-hand corner of the drawing. There is nothing said in the Lost Tales to explain this last feature, nor is it at all evident what is represented by the curled lines in the same place (see p. 86).

Ulmonan The halls of Ulmo.

Uin The Great Whale, who appears later in the Tales.

Vai The Outer Ocean.

Neni Erщmear ‘Outermost Waters’= Vai.

It is seen from the drawing that the world floats in and upon Vai. This is indeed how Ulmo himself describes it to the Valar in a later tale (p. 214):

Lo, there is but one Ocean, and that is Vai, for those that Ossл esteemeth as oceans are but seas, waters that lie in the hollows of the rock…In this vast water floateth the wide Earth upheld by the word of Ilъvatar…

In the same passage Ulmo speaks of the islands in the seas, and says that (‘save some few that swim still unfettered’) they ‘stand now like pinnacles from their weedy depths’, as is also well seen in the drawing.

It might seem a plausible idea that there was some connection (physical as well as etymological) between Vai and Vaitya, the outermost of the Three Airs, ‘wrapped dark and sluggish about the world and without it’ (at a later point in the Tales, p. 181, there is a reference to ‘the dark and tenuous realm of Vaitya that is outside a1ll’). In the next ‘phase’ of the mythical cosmology (dating from the 1930s, and very clearly and fully documented and illustrated in a work called Ambarkanta, The Shape of the World) the whole world is contained within Vaiya, a word meaning ‘fold, envelope’ Vaiya ‘is more like to sea below the Earth and more like to air above the Earth’ (which chimes with the description of the waters of Vai (p. 68) as very ‘thin’, so that no boat can sail on them nor fish swim in them, save the enchanted fish of Ulmo and his car); and in Vaiya below the Earth dwells Ulmo. Thus Vaiya is partly a development of Vaitya and partly of Vai.

Now since in the earliest word-list of the Qenya tongue (see the Appendix on Names) both Vaitya (‘the outermost air beyond the world’) and Vai (‘the outer ocean’) are derived from a root vaya- ‘enfold’, and since Vaitya in the present tale is said to be ‘wrapped about the world and without it’, one might think that Vaitya-Vai already in the early cosmology was a continuous enfolding substance, and that the later cosmology, in this point, only makes explicit what was present but unexpressed in the Lost Tales. But there is certainly no actual suggestion of this idea in any early writing; and when we look again at the drawing it seems untenable. For Vai is obviously not continuous with Vaitya; and if the appearance of Vilna in the bottom of the drawing is taken to mean that the Earth, and the ocean Vai in and on which it floats, were contained within the Three Airs, of which we see the reappearance of the innermost (Vilna) below the earth and Vai, then the suggestion that Vaitya—Vai were continuous is still more emphatically confounded.

There remains the baffling question of the representation of the world as a ship. In only one place is there a suggestion that my father conceived the world in such a way: the passage that I have cited above, in which Ulmo addresses the Valar on the subject of Vai, concludes:

O Valar, ye know not all wonders, and many secret things are there beneath the Earth’s dark keel, even where I have my mighty halls of Ulmonan, that ye have never dreamed on.

But in the drawing Ulmonan is not beneath the ship’s keel, it is within the ship’s hull; and I am inclined to think that Ulmo’s words ‘beneath the Earth’s dark keel’ refer to the shape of the Earth itself, which is certainly ship-like. Moreover, close examination of the original drawing strongly suggests to me that the mast and sail, and still more clearly the curved prow, were added afterwards. Can it be that the shape of the Earth and of Vai as he had drawn them—with the appearance of a ship’s hull—prompted my father to add mast, sail, and prow as a jeu d’esprit, without deeper significance? That seems uncharacteristic and unlikely, but I have no other explanation to offer.*