In the old story it is made very clear that Tol Eressлa 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 Eressлa, ‘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 Жlfwine 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 whic1h 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 Eressлa 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 Faлry 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 Eressлa 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 Eressлa after its binding to the sea-bottom was shifted to Ossл’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 Hisilуmл 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 Hisilуmл 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 Kфr appear several features that were never lost in the later accounts of Tirion upon Tъna. Cf. The Silmarillion p. 59:

Upon the crown of Tъna 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 Ingwл, Mindon Eldaliйva, whose silver lamp shone far out into the mists of the sea.

The dust of gold and ‘magic metals’ that Aulл piled about the feet of Kфr powdered the shoes and clothing of Eдrendil 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 Inwл and Nуlemл, 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 Kфr are again referred to, and there the trees given to Inwл ‘shone still’, while the trees given to Nуlemл had been uprooted and ‘were gone no one knew whither.’ In The Si1lmarillion 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 Eressлa.

In connection with this description of the city of the Elves in Valinor I give here a poem entitled Kфr. It was written on April 30th, 1915 (two days after Goblin Feet and You and Me, see pp. 27, 32), and two texts of it are extant: the first, in manuscript, has a subtitle ‘In a City Lost and Dead’. The second, a typescript, was apparently first entitled Kфr, but this was changed to The City of the Gods, and the subtitle erased; and with this title the poem was published at Leeds in 1923.* No changes were made to the text except that in the penultimate line ‘no bird sings’ was altered already in the manuscript to ‘no voice stirs’. It seems possible, especially in view of the original subtitle, that the poem described Kфr after the Elves had left it.

K ф r

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 Ossл, and of how the Solosimpi went at last to Valinor in ships of swan-shape drawn by gulls, to the chagrin of Ossл, is greatly at variance with the account in The Silmarillion (p. 61):

Through a long age they [the Teleri] dwelt in Tol Eressлa; 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 Ossл, 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 Ossл to the Elves of Tol Eressлa, and the ships of the Teleri retained the form of the ships built by Aulл for the Solosimpi: they1 ‘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 Eressлa. It is now made clear that the Shadowy Seas were a region of the Great Sea west of Tol Eressлa. In The Silmarillion (p. 102) the conception had changed, with the change in the anchorage of Tol Eressлa: at the time of the Hiding of Valinor