‘Now when the fairies left Kфr that lane was blocked for ever with great impassable rocks, and there stands of a surety the cottage empty and the garden bare to this day, and will do until long after the Faring Forth, when if all goes well the roads through Arvalin to Valinor shall be thronged with the sons and daughters of Men. But seeing that no children came there for refreshment and delight, sorrow and greyness spread amongst them and Men ceased almost to believe in, or think of, the beauty of the Eldar and the glory of the Valar, till one came from the Great Lands and besought us to relieve the darkness.

‘Now there is alas no safe way for children from the Great Lands hither, but Meril-i-Turinqi hearkened to his boon and chose Lindo my husband to devise some plan of good. Now Lindo and I, Vairл, had taken under our care the children—the remainder of those who found Kфr and remained with the Eldar for ever: and so here we builded of good magic this Cottage of Lost Play: and here old tales, old songs, and elfin music are treasured and rehearsed. Ever and anon our children fare forth again to find the Great Lands, and go about among the lonely children and whisper to them at dusk in early bed by night-light and candle-flame, or comfort those that weep. Some I am told listen to the complaints of those that are punished or chidden, and hear their tales and feign to take their part, and this seems to me a quaint and merry service.

‘Yet all whom we send return not and that is great grief to us, for it is by no means out of small love that the Eldar held children from Kфr, but rather of thought for the homes of Men; yet in the Great Lands, as you know well, there are fair places and lovely regions of much allurement, wherefore it is only for the great necessity that we adventure any of the children that are with us. Yet the most come back hither and tell us many stories and many sad things of their journeys—and now I have told most of what is to tell of the Cottage of Lost Play.’

Then Eriol said: ‘Now these are tidings sad and yet good to hear, and I remember me of certain words that my father spake in my early boyhood. It had long, said he, been a tradition in our kindred that one of our father’s fathers would1 speak of a fair house and magic gardens, of a wondrous town, and of a music full of all beauty and longing—and these things he said he had seen and heard as a child, though how and where was not told. Now all his life was he restless, as if a longing half-expressed for unknown things dwelt within him; and ’tis said that he died among rocks on a lonely coast on a night of storm—and moreover that most of his children and their children since have been of a restless mind—and methinks I know now the truth of the matter.’

And Vairл said that ’twas like to be that one of his kindred had found the rocks of Eldamar in those old days.

NOTES

1 Gnomes: the Second Kindred, the Noldoli (later Noldor). For the use of the word Gnomes see p. 43; and for the linguistic distinction made here see pp. 50–1.

2 The ‘Great Lands’ are the lands East of the Great Sea. The term ‘Middle-earth’ is never used in the Lost Tales, and in fact does not appear until writings of the 1930s.

3 In both MSS the words ‘of all the Eldar’ are followed by: ‘for of most noble there were none, seeing that to be of the blood of the Eldar is equal and sufficient’ but this was struck out in the second MS.

4 The original reading was ‘the great Tirion’, changed to ‘the great tower’.

5 This sentence, from ‘a son meseems…’, replaced in the original MS an earlier reading: ‘shall it be of Eдrendel the wanderer, who alone of the sons of Men has had great traffic with the Valar and Elves, who alone of their kindred has seen beyond Taniquetil, even he who sails for ever in the firmament?’

6 The original reading was ‘before the days of’, changed to ‘in the first days of’, and then to the reading given.

7 This last phrase was an addition to the second MS.

Changes made to names in

The Cottage of Lost Play

The names were at this time in a very fluid state, reflecting in part the rapid development of the languages that was then taking place. Changes were made to the original text, and further changes, at different times, to the second text, but it seems unnecessary in the following notes to go into the detail of when and where the changes were made. The names are given in the order of their occurrence in the tale. The signs > and < are used to mean ‘changed to’ and ‘changed from’.

Dor Faidwen The Gnomish name of Tol Eressлa was changed many times: Gar Eglos > Dor Edloth > Dor Usgwen > Dor Uswen > Dor Faidwen.

Mar Vanwa Tyaliйva In the original text a space was left for the Elvish name, subsequently filled in as Mar Vanwa Taliйva.

Great Lands Throughout the tale Great Lands is an emendation of Outer Lands, when the latter was given a different meaning (lands West of the Great Sea).

Wingilot < Wingelot.

Gar Lossion < Losgar.

Koromas < Kormas.

Meril-i-Turinqi The first text has only Turinqi, with in one place a space left for a personal name.

Inwл < Ing at each occurrence.

Inwithiel < Gim Githil, which was in turn < Githil.

Ingil < Ingilmo.

Valwл < Manwл. It seems possible that Manwл as the name of Lindo’s father was a mere slip.

Noldorin The original reading was Noldorin whom the Gnomes name Goldriel; Goldriel was changed to Golthadriel, and then the reference to the Gnomish name was struck out, leaving only Noldorin.

Tulkastor < Tulkassл < Turenbor.

Solosimpi < Solosimpл at each occurrence.

Lindelos < Lindeloksл < Lindeloktл Singing Cluster (Glingol).

Telelli < Telellл.

Arvalin < Harmalin < Harwalin.

Commentary on

The Cottage of Lost Play

The story of Eriol the mariner was central to my father’s original conception of the mythology. In those days, as he recounted long after in a letter to his friend Milton Waldman,* the primary intention of his work was to satisfy his desire for a specifically and recognizably English literature of ‘faerie’:

I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff.

In his earliest writings the mythology was anchored in the ancient legendary history of England; and more than that, it was peculiarly associated with certain places in England.

Eriol, himself close kin of famous figures in the legends of North-western Europe, came at last on a voyage westward over the ocean to Tol Eressлa, the Lonely Isle, where Elves dwelt; and from them he learned ‘The Lost Tales of Elfinesse’. But his rфle was at first to be more important in the structure of the work than (what it afterwards became) simply that of a man of later days who came to ‘the land of the Fairies’ and there acquired lost or hidden knowledge, which he afterwards reported in his own tongue: at first, Eriol was to be an important element in the fairy-history itself—the witness of the ruin of Elvish Tol Eressлa. The element of ancient English history or ‘historical legend’ was at first not merely a framework, isolated from the great tales that afterwards constituted ‘The Silmarillion’, but an integral part of their ending. The elucidation of all this (so far as elucidation is possible) must necessarily be postponed to the end of the Tales; but here something at least must be said of the history of Eriol up to the time of his coming to Tol Eressлa, and of the original significance of the Lonely Isle.