N
Valinor; Taniquetil (The vast height of Taniquetil, even granting the formalisation of this drawing, is noteworthy: it is described in the tale as being so high that ‘the throngs about westward havens in the lands of Men could be seen therefrom’ (p. 68). Its fantastic height is conveyed in my father’s painting, dating from 1927–8 (Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien, no. 31).)
Harmalin Earlier name of Arvalin (see p. 79).
i aldas ‘The Trees’ (standing to the west of Taniquetil).
Toros valinoriva Toros is obscure, but in any case the first letter of the first word, if it is a T, is a very uncharacteristic one. The reference seems to be to the Mountains of Valinor.
Tolli Kimpelear These must be the Twilit Isles, but I have found no other occurrence of Kimpelear or anything similar.
Tol Eressлa ‘The Lo1nely Isle’.
I Tolli Kuruvar ‘The Magic Isles’.
Haloisi Velike ‘The Great Sea’.
Ф ‘The Sea’. (What is the structure at the sea-bottom shown below the name Ф? It must surely be the dwelling of Ossл beneath the Great Sea that is referred to in the next tale (p. 106.)
I Nori Landar Probably means ‘The Great Lands’.
Koivienйni The precursor of Cuiviйnen, the Waters of Awakening.
Palisor The land where the Elves awoke.
Sil ‘Moon’.
Ыr ‘Sun’.
Luvier ‘Clouds’.
Oronto ‘East’.
Vaitya, Ilwл, and Vilna appear in the three layers described in the tale (p. 65), and Vilna reappears in the bottom right-hand corner of the drawing. There is nothing said in the Lost Tales to explain this last feature, nor is it at all evident what is represented by the curled lines in the same place (see p. 86).
Ulmonan The halls of Ulmo.
Uin The Great Whale, who appears later in the Tales.
Vai The Outer Ocean.
Neni Erщmear ‘Outermost Waters’= Vai.
It is seen from the drawing that the world floats in and upon Vai. This is indeed how Ulmo himself describes it to the Valar in a later tale (p. 214):
Lo, there is but one Ocean, and that is Vai, for those that Ossл esteemeth as oceans are but seas, waters that lie in the hollows of the rock…In this vast water floateth the wide Earth upheld by the word of Ilъvatar…
In the same passage Ulmo speaks of the islands in the seas, and says that (‘save some few that swim still unfettered’) they ‘stand now like pinnacles from their weedy depths’, as is also well seen in the drawing.
It might seem a plausible idea that there was some connection (physical as well as etymological) between Vai and Vaitya, the outermost of the Three Airs, ‘wrapped dark and sluggish about the world and without it’ (at a later point in the Tales, p. 181, there is a reference to ‘the dark and tenuous realm of Vaitya that is outside a1ll’). In the next ‘phase’ of the mythical cosmology (dating from the 1930s, and very clearly and fully documented and illustrated in a work called Ambarkanta, The Shape of the World) the whole world is contained within Vaiya, a word meaning ‘fold, envelope’ Vaiya ‘is more like to sea below the Earth and more like to air above the Earth’ (which chimes with the description of the waters of Vai (p. 68) as very ‘thin’, so that no boat can sail on them nor fish swim in them, save the enchanted fish of Ulmo and his car); and in Vaiya below the Earth dwells Ulmo. Thus Vaiya is partly a development of Vaitya and partly of Vai.
Now since in the earliest word-list of the Qenya tongue (see the Appendix on Names) both Vaitya (‘the outermost air beyond the world’) and Vai (‘the outer ocean’) are derived from a root vaya- ‘enfold’, and since Vaitya in the present tale is said to be ‘wrapped about the world and without it’, one might think that Vaitya-Vai already in the early cosmology was a continuous enfolding substance, and that the later cosmology, in this point, only makes explicit what was present but unexpressed in the Lost Tales. But there is certainly no actual suggestion of this idea in any early writing; and when we look again at the drawing it seems untenable. For Vai is obviously not continuous with Vaitya; and if the appearance of Vilna in the bottom of the drawing is taken to mean that the Earth, and the ocean Vai in and on which it floats, were contained within the Three Airs, of which we see the reappearance of the innermost (Vilna) below the earth and Vai, then the suggestion that Vaitya—Vai were continuous is still more emphatically confounded.
There remains the baffling question of the representation of the world as a ship. In only one place is there a suggestion that my father conceived the world in such a way: the passage that I have cited above, in which Ulmo addresses the Valar on the subject of Vai, concludes:
O Valar, ye know not all wonders, and many secret things are there beneath the Earth’s dark keel, even where I have my mighty halls of Ulmonan, that ye have never dreamed on.
But in the drawing Ulmonan is not beneath the ship’s keel, it is within the ship’s hull; and I am inclined to think that Ulmo’s words ‘beneath the Earth’s dark keel’ refer to the shape of the Earth itself, which is certainly ship-like. Moreover, close examination of the original drawing strongly suggests to me that the mast and sail, and still more clearly the curved prow, were added afterwards. Can it be that the shape of the Earth and of Vai as he had drawn them—with the appearance of a ship’s hull—prompted my father to add mast, sail, and prow as a jeu d’esprit, without deeper significance? That seems uncharacteristic and unlikely, but I have no other explanation to offer.*
(iii) The Lamps (pp. 69–70)
In this part of the narrative the tale differs remarkably from the later versions. Here there is no mention of the dwelling of the Valar on the Isle of Almaren after the making of the Lamps (The Silmarillion p. 35), nor of course of the return of Melko from ‘outside’—because here Melko not only did not leave the world after entering it, but actually himself made the pillars of the Lamps. In this story, though Melko was distrusted by some, his guileful co-operation (even to the extent of co1ntributing names for the pillars) was accepted, whereas in the later story his hostility and malice were known and manifest to the Valar, even though they did not know of his return to Arda and the building of Utumno until too late. In the present tale there is a tricksiness, a low cunning, in Melko’s behaviour that could not survive (yet the story of his deceitful making of the pillars out of ice survived into the versions of the 1930s).
Later, it was the Lamps themselves that were named (ultimately, after intervening forms had been devised and discarded, Iluin the northern Lamp and Ormal the southern). In The Silmarillion Ringil (containing ring ‘cold’) survived only as the name of Fingolfin’s sword, but Helcar is that of the Inland Sea which ‘stood where aforetime the roots of the mountain of Illuin had been’ (p. 49). In the present tale Helkar was the name of the southern, not the northern, pillar. Now helkar meant ‘utter cold’ (see the Appendix on Names), which shows that Helkar was originally in the extreme south (as it is in one of the two positions given for it on the little map, p. 81), just as Ringil was in the extreme north. In the tale there is no mention of the formation of Inland Seas at the fall of the Lamps; this idea appeared later, but it seems virtually certain that it arose from the story of the melting pillars of ice.
There is no later reference to the building of the Mountains of Valinor from great rocks gathered in Eruman / Arvalin, so that the region became flat and stoneless.