But there is also a very early poem on the subject of this region. This, according to my father’s notes, was written at Brocton Camp, Staffordshire, in December 1915 or at Йtaples in June 1916; and it is entitled Habbanan beneath the Stars. In one of the three texts (in which there are no variants) there is a title in Old English: pa
Habbanan beneath the Stars
Now Habbanan is that region where one draws nigh to the places that are not of Men. There is the air very sweet and the sky very great by reason of the broadness of the Earth. In Habbanan beneath the skies
Where all roads end however long
There is a sound of faint guitars
And distant echoes of a song,
For there men gather into rings
Round their red fires while one voice sings—
And all about is night.
Not night as ours, unhappy folk,
Where nigh the Earth in hazy bars,
A mist about the springing of the stars,
There trails a thin and wandering smoke
Obscuring with its veil half-seen
The great abysmal still Serene.
A globe of dark glass faceted with light
Wherein the splendid winds have dusky flight;
Untrodden spaces of an odorous plain
That watches for the moon that long has lain
And caught the meteors’ fiery rain—
Such there is night.
There on a sudden did my heart perceive
That they who sang about the Eve,
Who answered the bright-shining stars
With gleaming music of their strange guitars,
These were His wandering happy sons
Encamped upon those aлry leas
Wh1ere God’s unsullied garment runs
In glory down His mighty knees.
A final evidence comes from the early Qenya word-list. The original layer of entries in this list dates (as I believe, see the Appendix on Names) from 1915, and among these original entries, under a root mana (from which Manwл is derived), is given a word manimo which means a soul who is in manimuine ‘Purgatory’.
This poem, and this entry in the word-list, offer a rare and very suggestive glimpse of the mythic conception in its earliest phase; for here ideas that are drawn from Christian theology are explicitly present. It is disconcerting to perceive that they are still present in this tale. For in the tale there is an account of the fates of dead Men after judgement in the black hall of Fui Nienna. Some (‘and these are the many’) are ferried by the death-ship to (Habbanan) Eruman, where they wander in the dusk and wait in patience till the Great End; some are seized by Melko and tormented in Angamandi ‘the Hells of Iron’ and some few go to dwell with the Gods in Valinor. Taken with the poem and the evidence of the early ‘dictionaries’, can this be other than a reflection of Purgatory, Hell, and Heaven?
This becomes all the more extraordinary if we refer to the concluding passage of the tale of The Music of the Ainur (p. 59), where Ilъvatar said: ‘To Men I will give a new gift and a greater’, the gift that they might ‘fashion and design their life beyond even the original Music of the Ainur that is as fate to all things else’, and where it is said that ‘it is one with this gift of power that the Children of Men dwell only for a short time in the world alive, yet do not perish utterly for ever…’ In the final form given in The Silmarillion pp. 41–2 this passage was not very greatly changed. The early version does not, it is true, have the sentences:
But the sons of Men die indeed, and leave the world; wherefore they are called the Guests, or the Strangers. Death is their fate, the gift of Ilъvatar, which as Time wears even the Powers shall envy.
Even so, it seems clear that this central idea, the Gift of Death, was already present.
This matter I must leave, as a conundrum that I cannot solve. The most obvious explanation of the conflict of ideas within these tales would be to suppose The Music of the Ainur later than The Coming of the Valar and the Building of Valinor; but as I have said (p. 61) all the appearances are to the contrary.
Lastly may be noticed the characteristic linguistic irony whereby Eruman ultimately became Araman. For Arvalin meant simply ‘near Valinor’, and it was the other name Eruman that had associations with spirits of the dead; but Araman almost certainly simply means ‘beside Aman’. And yet the same element man- ‘good’ remains, for Aman was derived from it (‘the Unmarred State’).
Two minor matters in the conclusion of the tale remain to be noticed. Here Nornorл is the Herald of the Gods; afterwards this was Fionwл (later Eonwл), see p. 63. And in the reference to ‘that low place amid the hills where Valinor may just be glimpsed’, near to Taniquetil, we have the first mention of the gap in the Mountains of Valinor where was the hill of the city of the Elves.
On blank pages near the end of the text of this tale my father wrote a list of secondary names of the Valar (as Manwл Sъlimo, etc.). Some of these names appear in the text of the Tales; those that do not are given in the Appendix on Names under the primary names. It emerges from this list that Уmar-Amillo is the twin of Salmar-Noldorin (they are named as brothers in the tale, p. 75); that Nielнqui (p. 75) is the daughter of Oromл and Vбna; and that Melko has a son (‘by Ulbandi’) called Kosomot: this, it will emerge later, was Gothmog Lord of Balrogs, whom Ecthelion slew in Gondolin.
IV
THE CHAINING OF MELKO
Following the end of Rъmil’s tale of The Coming of the Valar and the Building of Valinor there is a long interlude before the next one, though the manuscript continues without even interrupting the paragraph. But on the cover of the notebook The Chaining of Melko is given as a separate title, and I have adopted this. The text continues in ink over an erased pencil manuscript.
That night Eriol heard again in his sleep the music that had so moved him on the first night; and the next morning he went again into the gardens early. There he met Vairл, and she called him Eriol: ‘that was the first making and uttering of that name’. Eriol told Vairл of the ‘dream-musics’ he had heard, and she said that it was no dream-music, but rather the flute of Timpinen, ‘whom those Gnomes Rъmil and Littleheart and others of my house call Tinfang’. She told him that the children called him Tinfang Warble; and that he played and danced in summer dusks for joy of the first stars: ‘at every note a new one sparkles forth and glisters. The Noldoli say that they come out too soon if Tinfang Warble plays, and they love him, and the children will watch often from the windows lest he tread the shadowy lawns unseen.’ She told Eriol that he was ‘shier than a fawn—swift to hide and dart away as any vole: a footstep on a twig and he is away, and his fluting will come mocking from afar’.
‘And a marvel of wizardry liveth in that fluting,’ said Eriol, ‘if that it be indeed which I have heard now for two nights here.’