J.R.R. Tolkien - The History of Middle-Earth - 01

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THE COMING OF THE VALAR.

Now this was the manner of the Earth in those

days, nor has it since changed save by the

labours of the Valar of old. Mightiest of regions

are the Great Lands where Men do dwell and

wander now, and the Lost Elves sing and dance

upon the hills. But beyond their westernmost

limits lie the Great Seas, whose waves whisper

about the Magic Isles. Further even than this,

and few are the boats of mortal men that have

dared so far, are set the Shadowy Seas, whereon

there float the Twilit Isles and the Tower of Pearl

rises pale upon their most western cape. But as

yet it was not built, and the Shadowy Seas

stretched dark away till their utmost shore...

By J. R. R. Tolkien

Published by Ballandne Books:

The Hobbit

THE LORD OF THE RINGS

The Fellowship of the Ring

The Two Towers

The Return of the King

The Silmarillion

Unfinished Tales

The Book of Lost Tales Part I

The Book of Lost Tales Part II

The Tolkien Reader

Sir Gawain & The Green Knight

Smith of Wootton Major & Farmer Giles of Ham

By Humphrey Carpenter:

Tolkien: The Authorized Biography

By Paul H. Kocher:

Master of Middle-earth:

The Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien

By Robert Foster:

The Complete Guide to Middle-earth:

From The Hobbit to The Silmarillion

CONTENTS

Foreword

I THE COTTAGE OF LOST PLAY

Notes and Commentary

II THE MUSIC OF THE AINUR

Notes and Commentaries

III

THE COMING OF THE VALAR AND

THE BUILDING OF VALINOR

Notes and Commentary

THE CHAINING OF MELKO

Notes and Commentary

THE COMING OF THE ELVES AND

THE MAKING OF KOR

Notes and Commentary

THE THEFT OF MELKO AND

THE DARKENING OF VALINOR

Notes and Commentary

VII

THE FLIGHT OF THE NOLDOLI

Notes and Commentary

VIII

THE TALE OF THE SUN AND MOON

Notes and Commentary

THE HIDING OF VALINOR

Vll

45, 58

114

121

140

154

171

180

188

194

219

Notes and Commentary

233

248

X GILFANON'S TALE: THE TRAVAIL OF

THE NOLDOLI AND THE COMING

OF MANKIND

Notes

Appendix: Names in the Lost Tales -- Part I

Short Glossary of Obsolete, Archaic, and Rare Words

Index

259

278

280

319

322

THE BOOK

LOST

TALES

Part I

J. R. R. Tolkien

Edited by Christopher Tolkien

A Del Rey Book

BALLANTINE BOOKS ' NEW YORK

FOREWORD.

The Book of Lost Tales, written between sixty and seventy

years ago, was the first substantial work of imaginative lit-

erature by J. R. R. Tolkien, and the first emergence in nar-

rative of the Valar, of the Children of Iluvatar, Elves and

Men, of the Dwarves and the Orcs, and of the lands in which

their history is set, Valinor beyond the western ocean, and

Middle-earth, the 'Great Lands' between the seas of east and

west. Some fifty-seven years after my father ceased to work

on the Lost Tales, The Silmarillion,* profoundly transformed

from its distant forerunner, was published; and six years have

passed since then. This Foreword seems a suitable opportu-

nity to remark on some aspects of both works.

The Silmarillion is commonly said to be a 'difficult' book,

needing explanation and guidance on how to 'approach' it;

and in this it is contrasted' to The Lord of the Rings. In Chap-

ter 7 of his book The Road to Middle-earth Professor T. A.

Shippey accepts that this is so ('The Silmarillion could never

be anything but hard to read', p. 201), and expounds his view

of why it should be. A complex discussion is not treated

justly when it is extracted, but in his view the reasons an:

essentially two (p. 185). In the first place, them is in The

Silmarillion no 'mediation' of the kind provided by the hob-

bits (so, in The Hobbit, 'Bilbo acts as the link between mod-

ern times and the archaic world of dwarves and dragons').

* When the name is printed in italics, I refer to the work as published;

when in inverted commas, to the work in a mom general way, in any

or all of its forms.

My father was himself well aware that the absence of hobbits

would be felt as a lack, were 'The Silmarillion' to be pub-

lished -- and not only by readers with a particular liking for

them. In a letter written in 1956 (The Letters of J. R. R.

Tolkien, p. 238), soon after the publication of The Lord of

the Rings, he said:

I do not think it would have the appeal of the L.R. -- no

hobbits! Full of mythology, and elvishness, and all that 'heigh

stile' (as Chaucer might say), which has been so little to the

taste of many reviewers.

In 'The Silmarillion' the draught is pure and unmixed; and

the reader is worlds away from such 'mediation', such a

deliberate collison (far more than a matter of styles) as that

produced in the meeting between King Theoden and Pippin

and Merry in the ruins of Iseagard:

'Farewell, my hobbits! May we meet again in my house!

There you shall sit beside me and tell me all that your

hearts desire: the deeds of your grandsires, as far as you

can reckon them...'

The hobbits bowed low. 'So that is the King of Rohan! ' said

Pippin in an undertone. 'A fine old fellow. Very polite.'

In the second place, '

Where TheSilmarillion differs from Tolkien's earlier works is

in its refusal to accept novelistic convention. Most novels (in-

cluding The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings) pick a char-

acter to put in the foreground, like Frodo and Bilbo, and then

tell the story as it happens to him. The novelist of course is

inventing the story, and so retains omniscience: he can ex-

plain, or show, what is 'really' happening and contrast it with

the limited perception of his character.

These is, then, and very evidently, a question of literary

'taste' (or literary 'habituation') involved; and also a question

of literary 'disappointment' -- the '(mistaken) disappoint-

ment in those who wanted a second Lord of the Rings' to

which Professor Shippey refers. This has even produced a

sense of outrage -- in one case formulated to me in the words

'It's like the Old Testament!': a dire condemnation against

which, clearly, there can be no appeal (though this reader

cannot have got very far before being overcome by the com-

parison). Of course, 'The Silmarillion' was intended to move

the heart and the imagination, directly, and without peculiar

effort or the possession of unusual faculties; but its mode is

inherent, and it may be doubted whether any 'approach' to

it can greatly aid those who find it unapproachable.

There is a third consideration (which Professor Shippey

does not indeed advance in the same context):

One quality which [The Lord of the Rings] has in abundance

is the Beowulfian 'impression of depth', created just as in the

old epic by songs and digressions like Aragorn's lay of Tinu-

viel, Sam Gamgee's allusions to the Silmaril and the Iron

Crown, Elrond's account of Celebrimbor, and dozens more.

This, however, is a quality of The Lord of the Rings, not of

the inset stories. To tell these in their own right and expect

them to retain the charm they got from their larger setting

would be a terrible error, an error to which Tolkien would be

more sensitive than any man alive. As he wrote in a revealing

letter dated 20 September 1963:

I am doubtful myself about the undertaking [to write The

Silmarillion]. Part of the attraction of The L.R. is, I think,

due to the glimpses of a large history in the background:

an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island,

or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit

mist. To go them is to destroy the magic, unless new un-

attainable vistas are again revealed. (Letters, p. 333)

To go there is to destroy the magic. As for the revealing of

'new unattainable vistas', the problem there -- as Tolkien

must have thought many times -- was that in The Lord of the

Rings Middle-earth was already old, with a vast weight of

history behind it. The Silmarillion, though, in its longer form,

was bound to begin at the beginning. How could 'depth' be

created when you had nothing to reach further back to?

The letter quoted here certainly shows that my father felt

this, or perhaps rather one should say, at times felt this, to

be a problem. Nor was it a new thought: while he was writing

The Lord of the Rings, in 1945, he said in a letter to me

(Letters, p. 110):

A story must be told or there'll be no story, yet it is the untold

stories that are most moving. I think you are moved by Ce-

lebrimbor because it conveys a sudden sense of endless untold

stories: mountains seen far away, never to be climbed, distant

trees (like Niggle's) never to be approached -- or if so only

to become 'near trees'...

This matter is perfectly illustrated for me by Gimli's song in

Moria, where great names out of the ancient world appear

utterly remote:

The world was fair, the mountains tall

In Elder Days before the fall

Of mighty kings in Nargothrond

And Gondolin, who now beyond

The Western Seas have passed away...

'I like that! ' said Sam. 'I should like to learn it. In Moria,

in Khazad-dum. But it makes the darkness seem heavier,

thinking of all those lamps.' By his enthusiastic 'I like that! '

Sam not only 'mediates' (and engagingly 'Gamgifies') the

'high', the mighty kings of Nargothrond and Gondolin, Durin

on his carven throne, but places them at once at an even

remoter distance, a magical distance that it might well seem

(at that moment) destructive to traverse.

Professor Shippey says that 'to tell [the stories that are only

alluded to in The Lord of the Rings] in their own right and

expect them to retain the charm they got from their larger

setting would be a terrible error'. The 'error' presumably

lies in the holding of such an expectation, if the stories were

told, not in the telling of the stories at all; and it is apparent

that Professor Shippey sees my father as wondering, in 1963,

whether he should or should not put pen to paper, for he

expands the words of the letter, 'I am doubtful myself about

the undertaking', to mean 'the undertaking to write The Sil-

marillion'. But when my father said this he was not -- most

emphatically not -- referring to the work itself, which was

in any case already written, and much of it many times over

(the allusions in The Lord of the Rings are not illusory): what

was in question for him, as he said earlier in this same letter,

was its presentation, in a publication, after the appearance

of The Lord of the Rings, when, as he thought, the right time

to make it known was already gone.

I am afraid all the same that the presentation will need a lot

of work, and I work so slowly. The legends have to be worked

over (they were written at different times, some many years

ago) and made consistent; and they have to be integrated with

The L.R.; and they have to be given some progressive shape.

No simple device, like a journey and a quest, is available.

I am doubtful myself about the undertaking...

When after his death the question arose of publishing 'The

Silmarillion' in some form, I attached no importance to this

doubt. The effect that 'the glimpses of a large history in the

background' have in The Lord of the Rings is incontestable

and of the utmost importance, but I did not think that the

'glimpses' used there with such art should preclude all fur-

ther knowledge of the 'large history'.

The literary 'impression of depth... created by songs

and digressions' cannot be made a criterion by which a work

in a wholly different mode is measured: this would be to treat

the history of the Elder Days as of value primarily or even

solely in the artistic use made of it in The Lord of the Rings.

Nor should the device of a backward movement in imagined

time to dimly apprehended events, whose attraction lies in

their very dimness, be understood mechanically, as if a fuller

account of the mighty kings of Nargothrond and Gondolin

would imply a dangerously near approach to the bottom of

the well, while an account of the Creation would signify the

striking of the bottom and a definitive running-out of

'depth' -- 'nothing to reach further back to'.

This, surely, is not how things work, or at least not how

they need work. 'Depth' in this sense implies a relation be-

tween different temporal layers or levels within the same

world. Provided that the reader has a place, a point of van-

tage, in the imagined time from which to look back, the ex-

treme oldness of the extremely old can be made apparent and

made to be felt continuously. And the very fact that The Lord

of the Rings establishes such a powerful sense of areal time-

structure (far more powerful than can be done by mere

chronological assertion, tables of dates) provides this nec-

essary vantage-point. To read The Silmarillion one must place

oneself imaginatively at the time of the ending of the Third

Age -- within Middle-earth, looking back: at the temporal

point of Sam Gamgee's 'I like that! ' -- adding, 'I should like

to know more about it'. Moreover the compendious or epi-

tomising form and manner of The Silmarillion, with its sug-

gestion of ages of poetry and 'lore' behind it, strongly evokes

a sense of 'untold tales', even in the telling of them; 'dis-

tance' is never lost. There is no narrative urgency, the pres-

sure and fear of the immediate and unknown event. We do

not actually see the Silmarils as we see the Ring. The maker

of 'The Silmarillion', as he himself said of the author of

Beowulf, 'was telling of things already old and weighted with

regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch

upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant

and remote'.

As has now been fully recorded, my father greatly desired

to publish 'The Silmarillion' together with The Lord of the

Rings. I say nothing of its practicability at the time, nor do I

make any guesses at the subsequent fate of such a much

longer combined work, quadrilogy or tetralogy, or at the dif-

ferent courses that my father might then have taken -- for

the further development of 'The Silmarillion' itself, the his-

tory of the Elder Days, would have been arrested. But by its

posthumous publication nearly a quarter of a century later

the natural order of presentation of the whole 'Matter of

Middle-earth' was inverted; and it is certainly debatable

whether it was wise to publish in 1977 a version of the pri-

mary 'legendarium' standing on its own and claiming, as it

were, to be self-explanatory. The published work has no

'framework', no suggestion of what it is and how (within the

imagined world) it came to be. This I now think to have been

an error.

The letter of 1963 quoted above shows my father ponder-

ing the mode in which the legends of the Elder Days might

be presented. The original mode, that of The Book of Lost

Tales, in which a Man, Eriol, comes after a great voyage

over the ocean to the island where the Elves dwell and learns

their history from their own lips, had (by degrees) fallen

away. When my father died in 1973 'The Silmarillion' was

in a characteristic state of disarray: the earlier parts much

revised or largely rewritten, the concluding parts still as he

had left them some twenty years before; but in the latest

writing there is no trace or suggestion of any 'device' or

'framework' in which it was to be set. I think that in the end

he concluded that nothing would serve, and no more would

be said beyond an explanation of how (within the imagined

world) it came to be recorded.

In the original edition of The Lord of the Rings Bilbo gave

to Frodo at Rivendell as his parting gift 'some books of lore

that he had made at various times, written in his spidery

hand, and labelled on their red backs: Translations from the

Elvish, by B.B.' In the second edition (1966) 'some books'

was changed to 'three books', and in the Note on the Shire

Records added to the Prologue in that edition my father said

that the content of 'the three large volumes bound in red

leather' was preserved in that copy of the Red Book of West-

march which was made in Gondor by the King's Writer Fin-

degil in the year 172 of the Fourth Age; and also that

These three volumes were found to be a work of great skill

and learning in which... [Bilbo] had used all the sources

available to him in Rivendell, both living and written. But

since they were little used by Frodo, being almost entirely

concerned with the Elder Days, no more is said of them here.

In The Complete Guide to Middle-earth Robert Foster says:

'Quenta Silmarillion was no doubt one of Bilbo's Transla-

tions from the Elvish preserved in the Red Book of West-

march.' So also I have assumed: the 'books of lore' that

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THECOMINGOFTHEVALAR.NowthiswasthemanneroftheEarthinthosedays,norhasitsincechangedsavebythelaboursoftheValarofold.MightiestofregionsaretheGreatLandswhereMendodwellandwandernow,andtheLostElvessinganddanceuponthehills.ButbeyondtheirwesternmostlimitslietheGreatSeas,whosewaveswhisperabouttheMagicIsles.Fu...

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