And of all the Noldor in Valinor, who were grown now to a great people, but one tithe refused to take the road: some for the love that they bore to the Valar (and to Aulл not least), some for the love of Tirion and the many things that they had made; none for fear of peril by the way.

Sorontur’s mission and the tidings that he brought back were to be abandoned. Very striking is his account of the empty ships drifting, of which ‘some were burning with bright fires’: the origin of Fлanor’s burning of the ships of the Teleri at Losgar in The Silmarillion (p. 90), where however there is a more evident reason for doing so. That Melko’s second dwelling-place in the Great Lands was distinct from Utumna is here expressly stated, as also that it was in the Iron Mountains (cf. p. 149, 158); the name Angamandi ‘Hells of Iron’ has occurred once in the Lost Tales, in the very strange account of the fate of Men after death (p. 77). In later accounts Angband was built on the site of Utumno, but finally they were separated again, and in The Silmarillion Angband had existed from ancient days before the captivity of Melkor (p. 47). It is not explained in the present tale why ‘never more will Utumna open to him’ (p. 176), but doubtless it was because Tulkas and Ulmo broke its gates and piled hills of stone upon them (p. 104).

In the next part of the tale (p. 177 ff.) much light is cast on my father’s early conception of the powers and limitations of the great Valar. Thus Yavanna and Manwл (brought to this realization by Yavanna?) are shown to believe that the Valar have done ill, or at least failed to achieve the wider designs of Ilъvatar (‘I have it in mind that this [time of darkness] is not without the desire of Ilъvatar’): the idea of ‘selfish’, inward-looking Gods is plainly expressed, Gods content to tend their gardens and devise their devisings behind their mountains, leaving ‘the world’ to shape itself as it may. And this realization is an essential element in their conceiving the making of the Sun and Moon, which are to be such bodies as may light not only ‘the blessed realms’ (an expression which occurs here for the first time, p. 182) but all the rest of the dark Earth. Of all this there is only a trace in The Silmarillion (p. 99):

These things the Valar did, recalling in their twilight the darkness of the lands of Arda; and they resolved now to illumine Middle-earth and with light to hinder the deeds of Melkor.

Of much interest also is the ‘theological’ statement in the early narrative concerning the binding of the Valar to the World as the condition of their entering it (p. 182); cf. The Silmarillion p. 20:

But this condition Ilъvatar made, or it is the necessity of their love, that their power should thenceforward be contained and bounded in the World, to be within it for ever, until it is complete, so that they are its life and it is theirs.

In the tale this condition is an express physical1 limitation: none of the Valar, save Manwл and Varda and their attendant spirits, could pass into the higher airs above Vilna, though they could move at great speed within the lowest air.

From the passage on p. 178, where it is said that Ulmo, despite his love for the Solosimpi and grief at the Kinslaying, was yet not filled with anger against the Noldoli, for he ‘was foreknowing more than all the Gods, even than great Manwл’, it is seen that Ulmo’s peculiar concern for the exiled Eldar—which plays such an important if mysterious part in the development of the story—was there from the beginning; as also was Yavanna’s thought, expressed in The Silmarillion p. 78:

Even for those who are mightiest under Ilъvatar there is some work that they may accomplish once, and once only. The Light of the Trees I brought into being, and within Eд 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 Lуrien and Vбna, 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 Mбnir and the Sъruli ‘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 Inwл’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 Un1gweliant, 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 Lуrien and Estл, 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 Lуrien, the silent nightingales, the withered poppies and the drooping evening flowers.