(iii) The Lamps (pp. 69–70)

In this part of the narrative the tale differs remarkably from the later versions. Here there is no mention of the dwelling of the Valar on the Isle of Almaren after the making of the Lamps (The Silmarillion p. 35), nor of course of the return of Melko from ‘outside’—because here Melko not only did not leave the world after entering it, but actually himself made the pillars of the Lamps. In this story, though Melko was distrusted by some, his guileful co-operation (even to the extent of co1ntributing names for the pillars) was accepted, whereas in the later story his hostility and malice were known and manifest to the Valar, even though they did not know of his return to Arda and the building of Utumno until too late. In the present tale there is a tricksiness, a low cunning, in Melko’s behaviour that could not survive (yet the story of his deceitful making of the pillars out of ice survived into the versions of the 1930s).

Later, it was the Lamps themselves that were named (ultimately, after intervening forms had been devised and discarded, Iluin the northern Lamp and Ormal the southern). In The Silmarillion Ringil (containing ring ‘cold’) survived only as the name of Fingolfin’s sword, but Helcar is that of the Inland Sea which ‘stood where aforetime the roots of the mountain of Illuin had been’ (p. 49). In the present tale Helkar was the name of the southern, not the northern, pillar. Now helkar meant ‘utter cold’ (see the Appendix on Names), which shows that Helkar was originally in the extreme south (as it is in one of the two positions given for it on the little map, p. 81), just as Ringil was in the extreme north. In the tale there is no mention of the formation of Inland Seas at the fall of the Lamps; this idea appeared later, but it seems virtually certain that it arose from the story of the melting pillars of ice.

There is no later reference to the building of the Mountains of Valinor from great rocks gathered in Eruman / Arvalin, so that the region became flat and stoneless.

(iv) The Two Trees (pp. 71–3)

This earliest account of the uprising of the Two Trees illuminates some elements of later versions more concentrated in expression. The enduring feature that the ground beneath Silpion (Telperion) was ‘dappled with the shadows of his fluttering leaves’ (The Silmarillion p. 38) is seen to have had its origin in the ‘throbbing of the tree’s heart’. The conception of light as a liquid substance that ‘splashed upon the ground’, that ran in rivers and was poured in cauldrons, though not lost in the published work (pp. 38–9), is here more strongly and physically expressed. Some features were never changed, as the clustered flowers of Laurelin and the shining edges of its leaves.

On the other hand there are notable differences between this and the later accounts: above all perhaps that Laurelin was in origin the Eldar Tree. The Two Trees had here periods of twelve hours, not as later seven;* and the preparations of the Valar for the birth of the Trees, with all their detail of physical ‘magic’, were afterwards abandoned. The two great ‘cauldrons’ Kulullin and Silindrin survived in the ‘great vats like shining lakes’ in which Varda hoarded ‘the dews of Telperion and the rain that fell from Laurelin’ (ibid. p. 39), though the names disappeared, as did the need to ‘water’ the Trees with the light gathered in the vats or cauldrons—or at any rate it is not mentioned later. Urwen (‘Sun-maiden’) was the forebear of Arien, Maia of the Sun; and Tilion, steersman of the Moon in The Silmarillion, who ‘lay in dreams by the pools of Estл [Lуrien’s wife], in Telperion’s flickering beams’, perhaps owes something to the figure of Silmo, whom Lуrien loved.

As I noted earlier, ‘in the later evolution of the myths Vбna sank down in relation to Nienna’, and here it is Vбna and (Yavanna) Palъrien who are the midwives of the birth of the Trees, not as afterwards Yavanna and Nienna.1

As regards the names of the Trees, Silpion was for long the name of the White Tree; Telperion did not appear till long after, and even then Silpion was retained and is mentioned in The Silmarillion (p. 38) as one of its names. Laurelin goes back to the beginning and was never changed, but its other name in the Lost Tales, Lindeloksл and other similar forms, was not retained.

(v) The Dwellings of the Valar (pp. 73 ff.)

This account of the mansions of the Valar was very largely lost in the subsequent versions. In the published work nothing is told of Manwл’s dwelling, save the bare fact that his halls were ‘above the everlasting snow, upon Oiolossл, the uttermost tower of Taniquetil’ (p. 26). Here now appears Sorontur King of Eagles, a visitor to Manwл’s halls (cf. The Silmarillion p. 110: ‘For Manwл to whom all birds are dear, and to whom they bring news upon Taniquetil from Middle-earth, had sent forth the race of Eagles’); he had in fact appeared already in the tale of The Fall of Gondolin, as ‘Thorndor [the Gnomish name] King of Eagles whom the Eldar name Ramandur’, Ramandur being subsequently emended to Sorontur.

Of Valmar and the dwellings of the Valar in the city scarcely anything survived in later writing, and there remain only phrases here and there (the ‘golden streets’ and ‘silver domes’ of Valmar, ‘Valmar of many bells’) to suggest the solidity of the original description, where Tulkas’ house of many storeys had a tower of bronze and Oromл’s halls were upheld by living trees with trophies and antlers hung upon their trunks. This is not to say that all such imagining was definitively abandoned: as I have said in the Foreword, the Lost Tales were followed by a version so compressed as to be no more than a rйsumй (as was its purpose), and the later development of the mythology proceeded from that—a process of re-expansion. Many things never referred to again after the Lost Tales may have continued to exist in a state of suspension, as it were. Valmar certainly remained a city, with gates, streets, and dwellings. But in the context of the later work one could hardly conceive of the tempestuous Ossл being possessed of a house in Valmar, even if its floor were of seawater and its roof of foam; and of course the hall of Makar and Meбssл (where the life described owes something to the myths of the Unending Battle in ancient Scandinavia) disappeared with the disappearance of those divinities—a ‘Melko-faction’ in Valinor that was bound to prove an embarrassment.

Several features of the original descriptions endured: the rarity of Ulmo’s visits to Valmar (cf. The Silmarillion p. 40), the frequency with which Palъrien and Oromл visit ‘the world without’ (ibid. pp. 29, 41, 47), the association of the gardens of Lуrien with Silpion and of the gardens of Vбna with Laurelin (ibid. p. 99); and much that is said here of the divine ‘characters’ can be seen to have remained, even if differently expressed. Here also appears Nessa, already as the wife of Tulkas and the sister of Oromл, excelling in the dance; and Уmar-Amillo is now named the brother of Noldorin-Salmar. It appears elsewhere (see p. 93) that Nielнqui was the daughter of Oromл and Vбna.

(vi) The Gods of Death and the Fates of Elves and Men

(pp. 76–7)

This section of the tale contains its most surp1rising and difficult elements. Mandos and his wife Nienna appear in the account of the coming of the Valar into the world at the beginning of the tale (p. 66), where they are named ‘Fantur of Death, Vefбntur Mandos’ and ‘Fui Nienna’, ‘mistress of death’. In the present passage it is said that Vefбntur named his dwelling Vк by his own name, whereas afterwards (The Silmarillion p. 28) he was called by the name of his dwelling; but in the early writing there is a distinction between the region (Mandos) and the halls (Vк and Fui) within the region. There is here no trace of Mandos as the ‘Doomsman of the Valar’, who ‘pronounces his dooms and his judgements only at the bidding of Manwл’, one of the most notable aspects of the later conception of this Vala; nor, since Nienna is the wife of Mandos, has Vairл the Weaver, his wife in the later story, appeared, with her tapestries that portray ‘all things that have ever been in Time’ and clothe the halls of Mandos ‘that ever widen as the ages pass’—in the Lost Tales the name Vairл is given to an Elf of Tol Eressлa. Tapestries ‘picturing those things that were and shall be’ are found here in the halls of Aulл (p. 74).