The Shaping of Middle-earth. Christopher Tolkien

say also that secretly Morgoth or his black shadow and spirit in spite of the Valar creeps back over the Walls of the World in the North and East and visits the world, others that this is Thû his great chief who escaped the Last Battle and dwells still in dark places, and perverts Men to his dreadful worship. When the world is much older, and the Gods weary, Morgoth will come back through the Door, and the last battle of all will be fought. Fionwë will fight Morgoth on the plain of Valinor, and the spirit of Túrin shall be beside him; it shall be Túrin who with his black sword will slay Morgoth, and thus the children of Húrin shall be avenged.

      In those days the Silmarils shall be recovered from sea and earth and air, and Maidros shall break them and Belaurin¹ with their fire rekindle the Two Trees, and the great light shall come forth again, and the Mountains of Valinor shall be levelled so that it goes out over the world, and Gods and Elves and Men² shall grow young again, and all their dead awake.³

      And thus it was that the last Silmaril came into the air. The Gods adjudged the last Silmaril to Eärendel – ‘until many things shall come to pass’ – because of the deeds of the sons of Fëanor. Maidros is sent to Eärendel and with the aid of the Silmaril Elwing is found and restored. Eärendel’s boat is drawn over Valinor to the Outer Seas, and Eärendel launches it into the outer darkness high above Sun and Moon. There he sails with the Silmaril upon his brow and Elwing at his side, the brightest of all stars, keeping watch upon Morgoth.⁴ So he shall sail until he sees the last battle gathering upon the plains of Valinor. Then he will descend.

      And this is the last end of the tales of the days before the days, in the Northern regions of the Western World. These tales are some of those remembered and sung by the fading Elves, and most by the vanished Elves of the Lonely Isle. They have been told by Elves to Men of the race of Eärendel, and most to Eriol who alone of mortals of later days sailed to the Lonely Isle, and yet came back to Lúthien,⁵ and remembered things he had heard in Cortirion, the town of the Elves in Tol Eressëa.

      1 Against Belaurin was written Palúrien (cf. §1 note 1).

      2 and Men struck out.

      3 Added here:

      But of Men in that last Day the prophecy speaks not, save of Túrin only.

      4 Added here: and the Door of Night (late pencilled addition).

      5 Lúthien > Leithien (cf. §18 note 5).

Commentary on the ‘Sketch of the Mythology’

      While the ‘Sketch’ is a good and clear manuscript, as it had to be (since it was to be read by R. W. Reynolds), it will be apparent that my father composed it extremely rapidly: I think it quite possible and even probable that he wrote it without consulting the earlier prose tales.

      Very great advances have been made towards the form of the story as it appears in the published work; but there is no trace of a prose narrative even in fragmentary or note form that bridges the gap between the Lost Tales and this synopsis in the ‘Valinórean’ part of the mythology (i.e. to the flight of the Noldoli and the making of the Sun and Moon). This is not to say, of course, that none such ever existed, though the fact that my father did undoubtedly preserve a very high proportion of all that he ever wrote leads me to doubt it. I think it far more likely that while working on other things (during his time at Leeds) he had developed his ideas, especially on the ‘Valinórean’ part, without setting them to paper; and since the prose Tales had been set aside a good many years before, it may be that certain narrative shifts found in the ‘Sketch’ were less fully intended, less conscious, than such shifts in the later development of ‘The Silmarillion’, where he always worked on the basis of existing writings.

      It is in any case often extremely difficult, or impossible, to judge whether features in the Tales that are not present in the ‘Sketch’ were omitted simply for the sake of compression, or whether they had been definitively abandoned. Thus while Eriol – not Ælfwine, see II. 300 – is mentioned at the end, and his coming to Kortirion in Tol Eressëa, there is no trace of the Cottage of Lost Play: the entire narrative framework of the Lost Tales has disappeared. But this does not by any means demonstrate that my father had actually rejected it at this time.

      The Commentary that follows is divided according to the 19 sections into which I have divided the narrative.

      The ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ is referred to throughout the rest of this book by the abbreviation ‘S’.

1

      S (the ‘Sketch’), which makes no reference to the Creation and the Music of the Ainur, begins with the coming of the Nine Valar ‘for the governance of the world’: the Nine Valar have been referred to in the alliterative poem The Flight of the Noldoli (see III. 133, 137). There now appears the isle (later called Almaren) on which the Gods dwelt after the making of the Lamps, the origin of which is probably to be seen in the tale of The Coming of the Valar I. 69–70, where it is said that when the Lamps fell the Valar were gathered on the Twilit Isles, and that ‘that island whereon stood the Valar’ was dragged westward by Ossë. It might seem that the story of Melko’s making the pillars of the Lamps out of ice that melted had been abandoned, but it reappears again later, in the Ambarkanta (p. 238).

      The use of the word ‘plant’ of the Two Trees is curious, and might be dismissed simply as a hasty expression if it did not appear in the following version of ‘The Silmarillion’, the Quenta (p. 80). In the old tale, as in the published work, the Trees rose from the ground under the chanted spells of Yavanna. The silver undersides of the leaves of the White Tree now appear, and its flowers are likened to those of a cherry: Silpion is translated ‘Cherry-moon’ in the Name-list to The Fall of Gondolin (II. 215). The mention of the White Tree first may imply that it had now become the Elder Tree, as it is explicitly in the Quenta.

      As S was first written the Trees had periods of twelve hours, as in the Lost Tales (see I. 88 and footnote), but with emendation from ‘six’ to ‘seven’ (allowing for the time of ‘mingled light’) the period becomes fourteen hours. This was a movement towards the formulation in The Silmarillion (p. 38), where each Tree ‘waxed to full and waned again to naught’ in seven hours; but in The Silmarillion ‘each day of the Valar in Aman contained twelve hours’, whereas in S each day was double that length.

      The Gnomish name of Varda, Bridhil, occurs in the alliterative Flight of the Noldoli (changed to Bredhil), the Lay of Leithian, and the early Gnomish dictionary (I. 273, entry Varda). On Timbrenting, Tindbrenting see III. 127, 139; Tengwethil (varying with Taingwethil) is found in the Lay of the Children of Húrin. For Ifan Belaurin see I. 273, entry Yavanna; in the Gnomish dictionary the Gnomish form is Ifon, Ivon.

2

      The description in S of the ‘Outer Lands’ (now used of the Great Lands, see III. 224), where growth was checked at the downfall of the Lamps, but where there are forests of dark trees in which Oromë goes hunting at times, moves the narrative at this point in one step to its structure in The Silmarillion; of the very different account in the Lost Tales I noticed in my commentary on The Chaining of Melko (I. 111): ‘In this earliest narrative there is no mention of the beginning of growth during the time when the Lamps shone, and the first trees and low plants appeared under Yavanna’s spells in the twilight after their overthrow.’

      Whereas in the Lost Tales the star-making of Varda took place after the awakening of the Elves (I. 113), here