Other elements in the story of the battle that survived—the steadfastness of the folk of Ъrin (Hъrin), the escape of Turgon—already existed at this time in a tale that had been written (that of Tъrin).

The geographical indications are slight, and there is no map of the Great Lands for the earliest period of the legends; in any case these questions are best left until the tales that take place in those lands. The Vale (or Valley) of the Fountains, afterwards the Valley (or Vale) of Weeping Waters, is in D explicitly equated with Gorfalong, which in the earlier outlines is given as Gorfalon, and seems to be distinct; but in any case neither these, nor ‘the Tumbled Lands’, can be brought into relation with any places or names in the later geography—unless (especially since in D Turgon is said to have fled ‘south down Sirion’) it may be supposed that something like the later picture of the Pass of Sirion was already in being, and that the Vale of the Fountains, or of Weeping Waters, was a name for it.

NOTES

1 Above Turuhalmл are written Duruchalm (struck out) and Halmadhurwion.

2 This paragraph is marked with queries.

3 The word may be read equally well as ‘dim’ or ‘dun’.

4 The original reading here was: ‘and few of his folk went with him, and this Tы forbade to his folk, fearing the wrath of Ilъvatar and Manwл yet did’ (sc. curiosity overcome Nuin, etc.).

5 Earlier in the Tales, ‘the Lost Elves’ are those who were lost from the great journey and wandered in Hisilуmл (see p. 118).

6 In the tale the ‘fairies’ of Tы’s dominion (i.e. the Dark Elves) are given the name Hisildi, the twilight people; in outlines A and B, in addition to Hisildi, other names are given: Humarni, Kaliondi, Lуmлarni.

7 Cf. also Sador’s words to Tъrin in his boyhood (Unfinished Tales p. 61): ‘A darkness lies behind us, and out of it few tales have come. The fathers of our fathers may have had things to tell, but they did not tell them. Even their names are forgotten. The Mountains stand between us and the life that they came from, flying from no man now knows what.’

8 Cf. The Silmarillion p. 104: ‘It is told that ere long they met Dark Elves in many places, and were befriended by them; and Men became the companions and disciples in their childhood of these ancient folk, wanderers of the Elven-race who never set out upon the paths to Valinor, and knew of the Valar only as a rumour and a distant name.’

9 Above Ermon is written, to all appearance, the Old English word Жsc (‘ash’). It seems conceivable that this is an anglicizing of Old Norse Askr (‘ash’), in the northern mythology the name of the first man, who with the first woman (Embla) were made by the Gods out of two trees that they found on the seashore (Vцluspб strophe 17; Snorra Edda, Gylfaginning §8).

10 The text has here the bracketed word ‘(Gongs)’. This might be thought to be a name for the Kaukareldar or ‘false-fairies’, but in the Gnomish word-list Gong is defined as ‘one of a tribe of the Orcs, a goblin’.

11 The cutting out of Nуlemл’s heart by the Orcs, and its recapture by Turgon his son, is referred to in an isolated early note, which says also that Turgon encased it in gold; and the emblem of the King’s Folk in Gondolin, the Scarlet Heart, is mentioned in the tale of The Fall of Gondolin.

12 Cf. p. 167: ‘Turondo son of Nуlemл was not yet upon the Earth.’ Turgon was the Gnomish name of Turondo (p. 115). In the later story Turgon was a leader of the Noldor from Valinor.

13 After the story was changed, and the founding of Gondolin was placed far earlier, the concluding part of The Silmarillion was never brought into harmony; and this was a main source of difficulty in the preparation of the pub1lished work.

APPENDIX

NAMES IN THE LOST TALES -PART I

There exist two small books, contemporary with the Lost Tales, which contain the first ‘lexicons’ of the Elvish languages; and both of them are very difficult documents.

One is concerned with the language called, in the book, Qenya, and I shall refer to this book as ‘QL’ (Qenya Lexicon). A good proportion of the entries in the first half of the alphabet were made at one time, when the work was first begun; these were very carefully written, though the pencil is now faint. Among these original entries is this group:

Lemin ‘five’

Lempe ‘ten’Leminkainen ‘23’The choice of ‘23’ suggests that this was my father’s age at the time, and that the book was begun therefore in 1915. This is supported by some of the statements made in the first layer of entries about certain figures of the mythology, statements that are at odds with everything that is said elsewhere, and which give glimpses of a stage even earlier than the Lost Tales.

The book naturally continued in use, and many entries (virtually all of those in the second part of the alphabet) are later than this first layer, though nothing more definite can be said than that all entries belong to the period of (or not long preceding) the Lost Tales.

The words in QL are arranged according to ‘roots’, and a note at the beginning states:

Roots are in capitals, and are not words in use at all, but serve as an elucidation of the words grouped together and a connection between them.

There is a good deal of uncertainty, expressed by queries, in the formulation of the roots, and in the ascription of words to one root or another, as my father moved among different etymological ideas; and in some cases it seems clear that the word was ‘there’, so to speak, but its etymology remained to be certainly defined, and not vice versa. The roots themselves are often difficult to represent, since certain consonants carry diacritic marks that are not defined. The notes on names that follow inevitably give a slightly more positive impression than does the book itself.

The other book is a dictionary of the Gnomish language, Goldogrin, and I shall refer to this as ‘GL’ (Goldogrin, or Gnomish, Lexicon). This is not arranged historically, by roots (though occasionally roots are given), but rather, in plan at least, as a conventional dictionary; and it contains a remarkable number of words. The book is entitled i·Lam na·Ngoldathon (i.e. ‘the tongue of the Gnomes’): Goldogrin, with a date: 1917. Written beneath the title is Eriol Sarothron (i.e. ‘Eriol the Voyager’), who else is called Angol but in his own folk Ottor W

The great difficulty in this case is the intensity with which my father used this diminutive b1ook, emending, rejecting, adding, in layer upon layer, so that in places it has become very hard to interpret. Moreover later changes to the forms in one entry were not necessarily made in related entries; thus the stages of a rapidly expanding linguistic conception are very confused in their representation. These little books were working materials, by no means the setting-out of finished ideas (it is indeed quite clear that GL in particular closely accompanied the actual composition of the Tales). Further, the languages changed even while the first ‘layer’ was being entered in GL; for example, the word mф ‘sheep’ was changed later to moth, but later in the dictionary uimoth ‘sheep of the waves’ was the form first written.

It is immediately obvious that an already extremely sophisticated and phonetically intricate historical structure lies behind the languages at this stage; but it seems that (unhappily and frustratingly) very little indeed in the way of phonological or grammatical description now survives from those days. I have found nothing, for instance, that sets out even in the sketchiest way the phonological relations between the two languages. Some early phonological description does exist for Qenya, but this became through later alterations and substitutions such a baffling muddle (while the material is in any case intrinsically extremely complex) that I have been unable to make use of it.