The first star has shown
And its lamp is blown
to a flame of flickering blue.
He pipes not to me,
He pipes not to thee,
He whistles for none of you.
His music is his own,
The tunes of Tinfang Warble!
In the earliest version Tinfang is called a ‘leprawn’, and in the early glossary of the Gnomish speech he is a ‘fay’.
The second poem is entitled Over Old Hills and Far Away. This exists in five texts, of which the earliest bears an Old English title as well (of the same meaning):
Over Old Hills and Far Away
It was early and still in the night of June,
And few were the stars, and far was the moon,
The drowsy trees drooping, and silently creeping
Shadows woke under them while they were sleeping.
5
I stole to the window with stealthy tread
Leaving my white and unpressed bed;
And something allurin1g, aloof and queer,
Like perfume of flowers from the shores of the mere
That in Elvenhome lies, and in starlit rains
10
Twinkles and flashes, came up to the panes
Of my high lattice-window. Or was it a sound?
I listened and marvelled with eyes on the ground.
For there came from afar a filtered note
Enchanting sweet, now clear, now remote,
15
As clear as a star in a pool by the reeds,
As faint as the glimmer of dew on the weeds.
Then I left the window and followed the call
Down the creaking stairs and across the hall
Out through a door that swung tall and grey,
20
And over the lawn, and away, away!
It was Tinfang Warble that was dancing there,
Fluting and tossing his old white hair,
Till it sparkled like frost in a winter moon;
And the stars were about him, and blinked to his tune
25
Shimmering blue like sparks in a haze,
As always they shimmer and shake when he plays.
My feet only made there the ghost of a sound
On the shining white pebbles that ringed him round,
Where his little feet flashed on a circle of sand,
30
And the fingers were white on his flickering hand.
In the wink of a star he had leapt in the air
With his fluttering cap and his glistening hair;
And had cast his long flute right over his back,
Where it hung by a ribbon of silver and black.
35
His slim little body went fine as a shade,
And he slipped through the reeds like a mist in the glade;
And he laughed like thin silver, and piped a thin note,
As he flapped in the shadows his shadowy coat.
O! the toes of his slippers were twisted and curled,
40
But he danced like a wind out into the world.
He is gone, and the valley is empty and bare
Where lonely I stand and lonely I stare.
Then suddenly out in the meadows beyond,
Then back in the reeds by the shimmering pond,
45 Then afar from a copse where the mosses are thick
A few little notes came trillaping quick.
I leapt o’er the stream and I sped from the glade,
For Tinfang Warble it was that played;
I must follow the hoot of his twilight flute
50
Over reed, over rush, under branch, over root,
And over dim fields, and through rustling grasses
That murmur and nod as the old elf passes,
Over old hills and far away
Where the harps of the Elvenfolk softly play.
Earlier readings:
1–2 ’Twas a very quiet evening once in June—
And I thought that stars had grown bright too soon—
Cf. the prose text, p. 94: ‘The Noldoli say that [the stars] come out too soon if Tinfang Warble plays’.
8 from the shores of the mere] by the fairies’ mere
9 Elvenhome] emendation made on the text of the final version, replacing ‘Fairyland’.
24 Till the stars came out, as it seemed, too soon.
Cf. the note to line 2.
25–6 They always come out when he warbles and plays,
And they shine bright blue as long as he stays.
Cf. the prose text, p. 95: ‘or will he play beneath a goodly moon and the stars go bright and blue.’
54 Elvenfolk] emend1ation made on the text of the final version, replacing ‘fairies’.
The first part of this story of The Chaining of Melko came to have a very different form in later versions, where (The Silmarillion p. 35) it was during the sojourn of the Valar on the Isle of Almaren, under the light of the Two Lamps, that ‘the seeds that Yavanna had sown began swiftly to sprout and to burgeon, and there arose a multitude of growing things great and small, mosses and grasses and great ferns, and trees whose tops were crowned with cloud’ and that ‘beasts came forth and dwelt in the grassy plains, or in the rivers and the lakes, or walked in the shadows of the woods’. This was the Spring of Arda; but after the coming of Melkor and the delving of Utumno ‘green things fell sick and rotted, and rivers were choked with weeds and slime, and fens were made, rank and poisonous, the breeding place of flies; and forests grew dark and perilous, the haunts of fear; and beasts became monsters of horn and ivory and dyed the earth with blood’. Then came the fall of the Lamps, and ‘thus ended the Spring of Arda’ (p. 37). After the building of Valinor and the arising of the Two Trees ‘Middle-earth lay in a twilight beneath the stars’ (p. 39), and Yavanna and Oromл alone of the Valar returned there at times: ‘Yavanna would walk there in the shadows, grieving because the growth and promise of the Spring of Arda was stayed. And she set a sleep upon many things that had arisen in the Spring, so that they should not age, but should wait for a time of awakening that yet should be’ (p. 47). ‘But already the oldest living things had arisen: in the seas the great weeds, and on earth the shadow of great trees; and in the valleys of the night-clad hills there were dark creatures old and strong.’
In this earliest narrative, on the other hand, there is no mention of the beginning of growth during the time when the Lamps shone (see p. 69), and the first trees and low plants appeared under Yavanna’s spells in the twilight after their overthrow. Moreover in the last sentence of this tale ‘seeds were sown’, in that time of ‘quiet dusk’ while Melko was chained, ‘that waited only for the light to come’. Thus in the early story Yavanna sows in the dark with a view (it seems) to growth and flowering in later days of sunlight, whereas in all the subsequent versions the goddess in the time of darkness sows no more, but rather lays a sleep on many things that had arisen beneath the light of the Lamps in the Spring of Arda. But both in the early tale and in The Silmarillion there is a suggestion that Yavanna foresees that light will come in the end to the Great Lands, to Middle-earth.
The conception of a flowing, liquid light in the airs of Earth is again very marked, and it seems that in the original idea the twilight ages of the world east of the sea were still illumined by the traces of this light (‘Seldom now falls the shimmering rain as it was used, and there reigns a gloom lit with pale streaks’, p. 98) as well as by the stars of Varda, even though ‘the Gods have gathered so much of that light that had before flowed about the airs’ (ibid.).
The renewed cosmic violence is conceivably the precursor of the great Battle of the Powers in the later mythology (The Silmarillion p. 51); but in this earliest tale Melko’s upheavals are the cause of the Valar’s visitation, whereas the Battle of the Powers, in which the shape of Middle-earth was changed, resulted from it. In The Silmarillion it was the discovery of the newly-awakened Elves by Oromл that led the Valar to the assault on Utumno.