The Book of Lost Tales, Part 1, Page 4

  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 < Tulkassë < Turenbor.

  Solosimpi < Solosimpë at each occurrence.

  Lindelos < Lindeloksë < Lindeloktë Singing Cluster (Glingol).

  Telelli < Telellë.

  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 Eressëa, the Lonely Isle, where Elves dwelt; and from them he learned ‘The Lost Tales of Elfinesse’. But his rôle 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 Eressëa. 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 Eressëa, and of the original significance of the Lonely Isle.

  The ‘Eriol-story’ is in fact among the knottiest and most obscure matters in the whole history of Middle-earth and Aman. My father abandoned the writing of the Lost Tales before he reached their end, and when he abandoned them he had also abandoned his original ideas for their conclusion. Those ideas can indeed be discerned from his notes; but the notes were for the most part pencilled at furious speed, the writing now rubbed and faint and in places after long study scarcely decipherable, on little slips of paper, disordered and dateless, or in a little notebook in which, during the years when he was composing the Lost Tales, he jotted down thoughts and suggestions (see p. 171). The common form of these notes on the ‘Eriol’ or ‘English’ element is that of short outlines, in which salient narrative features, often without clear connection between them, are set down in the manner of a list; and they vary constantly among themselves.

  In what must be, at any rate, among the very earliest of these outlines, found in this little pocket-book, and headed ‘Story of Eriol’s Life’, the mariner who came to Tol Eressëa is brought into relation with the tradition of the invasion of Britain by Hengest and Horsa in the fifth century A.D. This was a matter to which my father gave much time and thought; he lectured on it at Oxford and developed certain original theories, especially in connection with the appearance of Hengest in Beowulf.*

  From these jottings we learn that Eriol’s original name was Ottor, but that he called himself Wfre (an Old English word meaning ‘restless, wandering’) and lived a life on the waters. His father was named Eoh (a word of the Old English poetic vocabulary meaning ‘horse’); and Eoh was slain by his brother Beorn (in Old English ‘warrior’, but originally meaning ‘bear’, as does the cognate word björn in Old Norse; cf. Beorn the shape-changer in The Hobbit). Eoh and Beorn were the sons of Heden ‘the leather and fur clad’, and Heden (like many heroes of Northern legend) traced his ancestry to the god Wóden. In other notes there are other connections and combinations, and since none of this story was written as a coherent narrative these names are only of significance as showing the direction of my father’s thought at that time.

  Ottor Wfre settled on the island of Heligoland in the North Sea, and he wedded a woman named Cwén (Old English: ‘woman’, ‘wife’); they had two sons named ‘after his father’ Hengest and Horsa ‘to avenge Eoh’ (hengest is another Old English word for ‘horse’).

  Then sea-longing gripped Ottor Wfre: he was a son of Eärendel, born under his beam. If a beam from Eärendel fall on a child new-born he becomes ‘a child of Eärendel’ and a wanderer. (So also in The Cottage of Lost Play Eriol is called both by the author and by Lindo a ‘son of Eärendel’.) After the death of Cwén Ottor left his young children. Hengest and Horsa avenged Eoh and became great chieftains; but Ottor Wæfre set out to seek, and find, Tol Eressëa, here called in Old English se uncú þa holm, ‘the unknown island’.

  Various things are told in these notes about Eriol’s sojourn in Tol Eressëa which do not appear in The Book of Lost Tales, but of these I need here only refer to the statements that ‘Eriol adopted the name of Angol’ and that he was named by the Gnomes (the later Noldor, see below p. 43) Angol ‘after the regions of his home’. This certainly refers to the ancient homeland of the ‘English’ before their migration across the North Sea to Britain: Old English Angel, Angul, modern German Angeln, the region of the Danish peninsula between the Flensburg fjord and the river Schlei, south of the modern Danish frontier. From the west coast of the peninsula it is no very great distance to the island of Heligoland.

  In another place Angol is given as the Gnomish equivalent of Eriollo, which names are said to be those of ‘the region of the northern part of the Great Lands, “between the seas”, whence Eriol came’. (On these names see further under Eriol in the Appendix on Names.)

  It is not to be thought that these notes represent in all respects the story of Eriol as my father conceived it when he wrote The Cottage of Lost Play—in any case, it is said expressly there that Eriol means ‘One who dreams alone’, and that ‘of his former names the story nowhere tells’ (p. 14). But what is important is that (according to the view that I have formed of the earliest conceptions, apparently the best explanation of the very difficult evidence) this was still the leading idea when it was written: Eriol came to Tol Eressëa from the lands to the East of the North Sea. He belongs to the period preceding the Anglo-Saxon invasions of Britain (as my father, for his purposes, wished to represent it).

  Later, his name changed to Ælfwine (‘Elf-friend’), the mariner became an Englishman of the ‘Anglo-Saxon period’ of English history, who sailed west over sea to Tol Eressëa—he sailed from England out into the Atlantic Ocean; and from this later conception comes the very remarkable story of Ælfwine of England, which will be given at the end of the Lost Tales. But in the earliest conception he was not an Englishman of England: England in the sense of the land of the English did not yet exist; for the cardinal fact (made quite explicit in extant notes) of this conception is that the Elvish isle to which Eriol came was England—that is to say, Tol Eressëa would become England, the land of the English, at the end of the story. Koromas or Kortirion, the town in the centre of Tol Eressëa to which Eriol comes in The Cottage of Lost Play, would become in after days Warwick (and the elements Kor- and War- were etymologically connected);* Alalminórë, the Land of Elms, would be Warwickshire; and Tavrobel, where Eriol sojourned for a while in Tol Eressëa, would afterwards be the Staffordshire village of Great Haywood.

  None of this is explicit in the written Tales, and is only found in notes independent of them; but it
seems certain that it was still present when The Cottage of Lost Play was written (and indeed, as I shall try to show later, underlies all the Tales). The fair copy that my mother made of it was dated February 1917. From 1913 until her marriage in March 1916 she lived in Warwick and my father visited her there from Oxford; after their marriage she lived for a while at Great Haywood (east of Stafford), since it was near the camp where my father was stationed, and after his return from France he was at Great Haywood in the winter of 1916–17. Thus the identification of Tol Eressëan Tavrobel with Great Haywood cannot be earlier than 1916, and the fair copy of The Cottage of Lost Play (and quite possibly the original composition of it) was actually done there.

  In November 1915 my father wrote a poem entitled Kortirion among the Trees which was dedicated to Warwick.† To the first fair copy of the poem there is appended a prose introduction, as follows:

  Now on a time the fairies dwelt in the Lonely Isle after the great wars with Melko and the ruin of Gondolin; and they builded a fair city amid-most of that island, and it was girt with trees. Now this city they called Kortirion, both in memory of their ancient dwelling of Kôr in Valinor, and because this city stood also upon a hill and had a great tower tall and grey that Ingil son of Inwë their lord let raise.

  Very beautiful was Kortirion and the fairies loved it, and it became rich in song and poesy and the light of laughter; but on a time the great Faring Forth was made, and the fairies had rekindled once more the Magic Sun of Valinor but for the treason and faint hearts of Men. But so it is that the Magic Sun is dead and the Lonely Isle drawn back unto the confines of the Great Lands, and the fairies are scattered through all the wide unfriendly pathways of the world; and now Men dwell even on this faded isle, and care nought or know nought of its ancient days. Yet still there be some of the Eldar and the Noldoli‡ of old who linger in the island, and their songs are heard about the shores of the land that once was the fairest dwelling of the immortal folk.

  And it seems to the fairies and it seems to me who know that town and have often trodden its disfigured ways that autumn and the falling of the leaf is the season of the year when maybe here or there a heart among Men may be open, and an eye perceive how is the world’s estate fallen from the laughter and the loveliness of old. Think on Kortirion and be sad—yet is there not hope?

  Both here and in The Cottage of Lost Play there are allusions to events still in the future when Eriol came to Tol Eressëa; and though the full exposition and discussion of them must wait until the end of the Tales it needs to be explained here that ‘the Faring Forth’ was a great expedition made from Tol Eressëa for the rescue of the Elves who were still wandering in the Great Lands—cf. Lindo’s words (p. 17): ‘until such time as they fare forth to find the lost families of the kindred’. At that time Tol Eressëa was uprooted, by the aid of Ulmo, from the sea-bottom and dragged near to the western shores of the Great Lands. In the battle that followed the Elves were defeated, and fled into hiding in Tol Eressëa; Men entered the isle, and the fading of the Elves began. The subsequent history of Tol Eressëa is the history of England; and Warwick is ‘disfigured Kortirion’, itself a memory of ancient Kôr (the later Tirion upon Túna, city of the Elves in Aman; in the Lost Tales the name Kôr is used both of the city and the hill).

  Inwë, referred to in The Cottage of Lost Play as ‘King of all the Eldar when they dwelt in Kôr’, is the forerunner of Ingwë King of the Vanyar Elves in The Silmarillion. In a story told later to Eriol in Tol Eressëa Inwë reappears as one of the three Elves who went first to Valinor after the Awakening, as was Ingwë in The Silmarillion; his kindred and descendants were the Inwir, of whom came Meril-i-Turinqi, the Lady of Tol Eressëa (see p. 50). Lindo’s references to Inwë’s hearing ‘the lament of the world’ (i.e. of the Great Lands) and to his leading the Eldar forth to the lands of Men (p. 16) are the germ of the story of the coming of the Hosts of the West to the assault on Thangorodrim: ‘The host of the Valar prepared for battle; and beneath their white banners marched the Vanyar, the people of Ingwë…’ (The Silmarillion, p. 251). Later in the Tales it is said to Eriol by Meril-i-Turinqi that ‘Inwë was the eldest of the Elves, and had lived yet in majesty had he not perished in that march into the world; but Ingil his son went long ago back to Valinor and is with Manwë’. In The Silmarillion, on the other hand, it is said of Ingwë that ‘he entered into Valinor [in the beginning of the days of the Elves] and sits at the feet of the Powers, and all Elves revere his name; but he came never back, nor looked again upon Middle-earth’ (p. 53).

  Lindo’s words about the sojourn of Ingil in Tol Eressëa ‘after many days’, and the interpretation of the name of his town Koromas as ‘the Resting of the Exiles of Kôr’, refer to the return of the Eldar from the Great Lands after the war on Melko (Melkor, Morgoth) for the deliverance of the enslaved Noldoli. His words about his father Valwë ‘who went with Noldorin to find the Gnomes’ refer to an element in this story of the expedition from Kôr.*

  It is important to see, then, that (if my general interpretation is correct) in The Cottage of Lost Play Eriol comes to Tol Eressëa in the time after the Fall of Gondolin and the march of the Elves of Kôr into the Great Lands for the defeat of Melko, when the Elves who had taken part in it had returned over the sea to dwell in Tol Eressëa; but before the time of the ‘Faring Forth’ and the removal of Tol Eressëa to the geographical position of England. This latter element was soon lost in its entirety from the developing mythology.

  Of the ‘Cottage’ itself it must be said at once that very little light can be cast on it from other writings of my father’s; for the entire conception of the Children who went to Valinor was to be abandoned almost without further trace. Later in the Lost Tales, however, there are again references to Olóre Mallë. After the description of the Hiding of Valinor, it is told that at the bidding of Manwë (who looked on the event with sorrow) the Valar Oromë and Lórien devised strange paths from the Great Lands to Valinor, and the way of Lórien’s devising was Olórë Mallë the Path of Dreams; by this road, when ‘Men were yet but new-wakened on the earth’, ‘the children of the fathers of the fathers of Men’ came to Valinor in their sleep (pp. 211, 213). There are two further mentions in tales to be given in Part II: the teller of the Tale of Tinúviel (a child of Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva) says that she saw Tinúviel and her mother with her own eyes ‘when journeying by the Way of Dreams in long past days’, and the teller of the Tale of Turambar says that he ‘trod Olórë Mallë in the days before the fall of Gondolin’.

  There is also a poem on the subject of the Cottage of Lost Play, which has many of the details of the description in the prose text. This poem, according to my father’s notes, was composed at 59 St John’s Street, Oxford, his undergraduate lodgings, on 27–28 April 1915 (when he was 23). It exists (as is constantly the case with the poems) in several versions, each modified in detail from the preceding one, and the end of the poem was twice entirely rewritten. I give it here first in the earliest form, with changes made to this in notes at the foot of the page, and then in the final version, the date of which cannot be certainly determined. I suspect that it was very much later—and may indeed have been one of the revisions made to old poems when the collection The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962) was being prepared, though it is not mentioned in my father’s correspondence on that subject.

  The original title was: You and Me / and the Cottage of Lost Play (with an Old English rendering Pæt húsincel gamenes), which was changed to Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva, The Cottage of Lost Play; in the final version it is The Little House of Lost Play: Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva. The verse-lines are indented as in the original texts.

  You & Me

  and the Cottage of Lost Play

  You and me*—we know that land

  And often have been there

  In the long old days, old nursery days,*

  A dark child and a fair.

  5

  Was it down the paths of firelight dreams

  In winter cold and
white,

  Or in the blue-spun twilit hours

  Of little early tucked-up beds

  In drowsy summer night,

  10

  That You and I got lost in Sleep

  And met each other there—

  Your dark hair on your white nightgown,

  And mine was tangled fair?

  We wandered shyly hand in hand,

  15

  Or rollicked in the fairy sand*

  And gathered pearls and shells in pails,

  While all about the nightingales

  Were singing in the trees.

  We dug for silver with our spades

  20

  By little inland sparkling seas,

  Then ran ashore through sleepy glades

  And down a warm and winding lane

  We never never found again*

  Between high whispering trees.

  25

  The air was neither night or day,*

  But faintly dark with softest light,

  When first there glimmered into sight

  The Cottage of Lost Play.

  ’Twas builded very very old*

  30

  White, and thatched with straws of gold,

  And pierced with peeping lattices

  That looked toward the sea;

  And our own children’s garden-plots

  Were there—our own forgetmenots,

  35

  Red daisies, cress and mustard,

  And blue nemophilë.