The Lost Road and Other Writings. Christopher Tolkien

name Atalantë could refer either to the land or the city, but in the rewriting it can only refer to the city. It seems unlikely that my father intended this; see the corresponding passage in FN II and commentary.

§3 The permission given to the Númenóreans to sail as far west as Tol-eressëa, found already in the original outline, contrasts with the Akallabêth (pp. 262–3), where it is told that they were forbidden ‘to sail so far westward that the coasts of Númenor could no longer be seen’, and only the most keen-sighted among them could descry far off the tower of Avallónë on the Lonely Isle.

      The Gates of Morning reappear, remarkably, from the Lost Tales (I. 216). In the original astronomical myth the Sun passed into the Outer Dark by the Door of Night and re-entered by the Gates of Morn; but with the radical transformation of the myth that entered with the Sketch of the Mythology (see IV. 49), and is found in the Quenta and Ambarkanta, whereby the Sun is drawn by the servants of Ulmo beneath the roots of the Earth, the Door of Night was given a different significance and the Gates of Morn no longer appear (see IV. 252, 255). How the reference to them here (which survives in the Akallabêth, p. 263) is to be understood I am unable to say.

      In this paragraph is the first occurrence of the expression The Lords of the West.

§4 The words save their kings (once in each life before he was crowned) were early placed in square brackets. In the conclusion of QS (p. 326 §§8–9) the prohibition appears to be absolute, not to be set aside for any mortal; there Mandos says of Eärendel ‘Now he shall surely die, for he has trodden the forbidden shores’, and Manwë says ‘To Eärendel I remit the ban, and the peril that he took upon himself.’ Later (as noted under §3 above) the Ban extended also, and inevitably, to Tol-eressëa (‘easternmost of the Undying Lands’, the Akallabêth, p. 263).

The ascription of the longevity of the Númenóreans to the light of Valinor appeared already in the original outline, and I cited (p. 13) the passage from the Quenta where it is said that the light of Valinor was greater and fairer than in the other lands ‘because there the Sun and Moon together rest a while.’ But the wording here, ‘the radiance of the Gods that came faintly to Tol-eressëa’, surely implies a light of a different nature from that of the Sun and Moon (which illumine the whole world). Conceivably, the further idea that appears in the corresponding passage in QS (§79) is present here: ‘moreover the Valar store the radiance of the Sun in many vessels, and in vats and pools for their comfort in times of dark.’ The passage was later enclosed in brackets, and it does not appear in FN II; but at a subsequent point in the narrative (§6) the Elves of Tol-eressëa mourned ‘for the light of Valinor was cut off by the cloud of the Númenóreans’, and this was not rejected. Cf. the Akallabêth (p. 278): ‘the Eldar mourned, for the light of the setting sun was cut off by the cloud of the Númenóreans.’

§5 With what is said here of Morgoth’s not returning ‘in person’, for he was shut beyond the Walls of the World, ‘but only in spirit and as a shadow upon the mind and heart’, cf. the Quenta (IV. 164): ‘Some say also that Morgoth at whiles secretly as a cloud that cannot be seen or felt … creeps back surmounting the Walls and visiteth the world’ (a passage that survived in QS, pp. 332–3 §30).

§7 The concluding sentence concerning the Elves of Tol-eressëa was an addition, but one that looks as if it belongs with the writing of the text. It is very hard to interpret. The rift in the Great Sea appeared east of Tol-eressëa, but the ships that were west of the isle were drawn down into the abyss; and it might be concluded from this that Tol-eressëa also was swallowed up and disappeared: so the Elves who dwelt there ‘passed through the gates of death, and were gathered to their kindred in the land of the Gods’, and ‘the Lonely Isle remained only as a shape of the past.’ But this would be very strange, for it would imply the abandonment of the entire story of Ælfwine’s voyage to Tol-eressëa in ages after; yet Ælfwine as recorder and pupil was still present in my father’s writings after the completion of The Lord of the Rings. On the diagram of the World Made Round accompanying the Ambarkanta (IV. 247) Tol-eressëa is marked as a point on the Straight Path. Moreover, much later, in the Akallabêth (pp. 278–9), the same is told of the great chasm: it opened ‘between Númenor and the Deathless Lands’, and all the fleets of the Númenóreans (which had passed on to Aman and so were west of Tol-eressëa) were drawn down into it; but ‘Valinor and Eressëa were taken from [the world] into the realm of hidden things.’

§8 The concluding sentence (‘Thus also the heavy air …’) is a marginal addition which seems certainly to belong with the original text. It has no mark for insertion, but must surely be placed here.

§10 The desire to prolong life was already a mark of the Númenóreans (§4), but the dark picture in the Akallabêth (p. 266) of a land of tombs and embalming, of a people obsessed with death, was not present. At this stage in the evolution of the legend, as already in the preliminary outline, the tomb-culture arose among the Númenóreans who escaped the Downfall and founded kingdoms in the ‘Old World’: whether of good or evil disposition ‘all alike were filled with desire of long life upon earth, and the thought of Death was heavy upon them’; and it was the life-span of the Exiles, as it appears, that slowly dwindled. There are echoes of the present passage in the Akallabêth account of Númenor after the Shadow fell upon it in the days of Tar-Atanamir (cf. Unfinished Tales p. 221); but in the very different context of the original story, when this culture arose among those who survived the Cataclysm and their descendants, other elements were present: for the Gods were now removed into the realm of the unknown and unseen, and they became the ‘explanation’ of the mystery of death, their dwelling-place in the far West the region to which the dead passed with their possessions.

      In ‘The Silmarillion’ the Gods are ‘physically’ present, because (whatever the actual mode of their own being) they inhabit the same physical world, the realm of the ‘seen’; if, after the Hiding of Valinor, they could not be reached by the voyages sent out in vain by Turgon of Gondolin, they were nonetheless reached by Eärendel, sailing from Middle-earth in his ship Wingelot, and their physical intervention of arms changed the world for ever through the physical destruction of the power of Morgoth. Thus it may be said that in ‘The Silmarillion’ there is no ‘religion’, because the Divine is present and has not been ‘displaced’; but with the physical removal of the Divine from the World Made Round a religion arose (as it had arisen in Númenor under the teachings of Thû concerning Morgoth, the banished and absent God), and the dead were despatched, for religious reasons, in burial ships on the shores of the Great Sea.

§12 ‘But upon the straight road only the Gods and the vanished Elves could walk, or such as the Gods summoned of the fading Elves of the round earth, who became diminished in substance as Men usurped the sun.’ Cf. the Quenta, IV. 100–1, as emended (a passage that goes back to the Sketch of the Mythology, IV. 21):

      In after days, when because of the triumph of Morgoth Elves and Men became estranged, as he most wished, those of the Eldalië that still lived in the world faded, and Men usurped the sunlight. Then the Eldar wandered in the lonelier places of the Outer Lands, and took to the moonlight