in drowsy summer night, 10
that you and I in Sleep went down
to meet each other there, your dark hair on your white nightgown
and mine was tangled fair?
We wandered shyly hand in hand,
15
small footprints in the golden 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
and caught the sparkle of the seas,
then ran ashore to greenlit glades,
and found the warm and winding lane
that now we cannot find again,
between tall whispering trees.
25
The air was neither night nor day,
an ever-eve of gloaming light,
when first there glimmered into sight
the Little House of Play. New-built it was, yet 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 radishes for tea. There all the borders, trimmed with box,
were filled with favourite flowers, with phlox,
with lupins, pinks, and hollyhocks,
40
beneath a red may-tree; and all the gardens full of folk
that their own little language spoke,
but not to You and Me.
For some had silver watering-cans
45
and watered all their gowns, or sprayed each other; some laid plans
to build their houses, little towns
and dwellings in the trees. And some were clambering on the roof;
50
some crooning lonely and aloof;
some dancing round the fairy-rings
all garlanded in daisy-strings,
while some upon their knees before a little white-robed king
55
crowned with marigold would sing
their rhymes of long ago. But side by side a little pair
with heads together, mingled hair,
went walking to and fro 60
still hand in hand; and what they said,
ere Waking far apart them led,
that only we now know.
It is notable that the poem was called The Cottage, or The Little House of Lost Play, whereas what is described is the Cottage of the Children in Valinor, near the city of Kфr; but this, according to Vairл (p. 19), ‘the Cottage of the Play of Sleep’, was ‘not of Lost Play, as has wrongly been said in song among Men’.
I shall not attempt any analysis or offer any elucidation of the ideas embodied in the ‘Cottages of the Children’. The reader, however he interprets them, will in any case not need to be assisted in his perception of the personal and particular emotions in which all was still anchored.
As I have said, the conception of the coming of mortal children in sleep to the gardens of Valinor was soon to be abandoned in its entirety, and in the developed mythology there would be no place for it—still less for the idea that in some possible future day ‘the roads through Arvalin to Valinor shall be thronged with the sons and daughters of Men’.
Likewise, all the ‘elfin’ diminutiveness soon disappeared. The idea of the Cottage of the Children was already in being in 1915, as the poem You and Me shows; and it was in the same year, indeed on the same days of April, that Goblin Feet (or Cumaю юб Ni1htielfas) was written, concerning which my father said in 1971: ‘I wish the unhappy little thing, representing all that I came (so soon after) to fervently dislike, could be buried for ever.’* Yet it is to be observed that in early notes Elves and Men are said to have been ‘of a size’ in former days, and the smallness (and filminess and transparency) of the ‘fairies’ is an aspect of their ‘fading’, and directly related to the domination of Men in the Great Lands. To this matter I shall return later. In this connection, the diminutiveness of the Cottage is very strange, since it seems to be a diminutiveness peculiar to itself: Eriol, who has travelled for many days through Tol Eressлa, is astonished that the dwelling can hold so many, and he is told that all who enter it must be, or must become, very small. But Tol Eressлa is an island inhabited by Elves.
I give now three texts of the poem Kortirion among the Trees (later The Trees of Kortirion). The very earliest workings (November 1915) of this poem are extant,† and there are many subsequent texts. The prose introduction to the early form has been cited on pp. 25–6. A major revision was made in 1937, and another much later; by this time it was almost a different poem. Since my father sent it to Rayner Unwin in February 1962 as a possible candidate for inclusion in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, it seems virtually certain that the final version dates from that time.‡
I give the poem first in its pre-1937 form, when only slight changes had yet been made. In one of the earliest copies it bears a title in Old English: Cor Tirion p
Kortirion among the Trees
The First Verses
O fading town upon a little hill,
Old memory is waning in thine ancient gates, The robe gone gray, thine old heart almost still;
The castle only, frowning, ever waits 5
And ponders how among the towering elms
The Gliding Water leaves these inland realms
And slips between long meadows to the western sea— Still bearing downward over murmurous falls
One year and then another to the sea; 10
And slowly thither have a many gone
Since first the fairies built Kortirion.
O spiry town upon a windy hill
With sudden-winding alleys shady-walled (Where even now the peacocks pace a stately drill,
15
Majestic, sapphirine, and emerald), Behold thy girdle of a wide champain
Sunlit, and watered with a silver rain,
And richly wooded with a thousand whispering trees That cast long shadows in many a bygone noon,
20
And murmured many centuries in the breeze. Thou art the city of the Land of Elms,
Alalminуrл in the Faery Realms.
Sing of thy trees, old, old Kortirion! Thine oaks, and maples with their tassels on, 25
Thy singing poplars; and the splendid yews That crown thine agйd walls and muse Of sombre grandeur all the day— Until the twinkle of the early stars Is tangled palely in their sable bars; 30
Until the seven lampads of the Silver Bear Swing slowly in their shrouded hair And diadem the fallen day. O tower and citadel of the world! When bannered summer is unfurled 35
Most full of music are thine elms— A gathered sound that overwhelms The voices of all other trees. Sing then of elms, belov’d Kortirion, How summer crowds their full sails on, 40
Like clothйd masts of verdurous ships, A fleet of galleons that proudly slips Across long sunlit seas. The Second Verses
Thou art the inmost province of the fading isle
Where linger yet the Lonely Companies. 45
Still, undespairing, do they sometimes slowly file
Along thy paths with plaintive harmonies: The holy fairies and immortal elves
That dance among the trees and sing themselves
A wistful song of things that were, and could be yet. 50
They pass and vanish in a sudden breeze,
A wave of bowing grass—and we forget Their tender voices like wind-shaken bells
Of flowers, their gleaming hair like golden asphodels.
Spring still hath joy: thy spring is ever fair
55
Among the trees; but drowsy summer by thy streams Already stoops to hear the secret player
Pipe out beyond the tangle of her forest dreams The long thin tune that still do sing
The elvish harebells nodding in a jacinth ring
60
Upon the castle walls; Already stoops to listen to the clear cold spell