From the account of the coming of the Elves to the shores of the Great Lands it is seen (p. 118) that Hisilуmл was a region bordering the Great Sea, agreeing with its identification as the region marked g on the earliest map, see pp. 81, 112; and most remarkably we meet here the idea that Men were shut in Hisilуmл by Melko, an idea that survived right through to the final form in which the Easterling Men were rewarded after the Nirnaeth Arnoediad for their treacherous service to Morgoth by being confined in Hithlum (The Silmarillion p. 195).
In the description of the hill and city of Kфr appear several features that were never lost in the later accounts of Tirion upon Tъna. Cf. The Silmarillion p. 59:
Upon the crown of Tъna the city of the Elves was built, the white walls and terraces of Tirion; and the highest of the towers of that city was the Tower of Ingwл, Mindon Eldaliйva, whose silver lamp shone far out into the mists of the sea.
The dust of gold and ‘magic metals’ that Aulл piled about the feet of Kфr powdered the shoes and clothing of Eдrendil when he climbed the ‘long white stairs’ of Tirion (ibid. p. 248).
It is not said here whether the shoots of Laurelin and Silpion that the Gods gave to Inwл and Nуlemл, which ‘blossomed both eternally without abating’, were also givers of light, but later in the Lost Tales (p. 213), after the Flight of the Noldoli, the Trees of Kфr are again referred to, and there the trees given to Inwл ‘shone still’, while the trees given to Nуlemл had been uprooted and ‘were gone no one knew whither.’ In The Si1lmarillion it is said that Yavanna made for the Vanyar and the Noldor ‘a tree like to a lesser image of Telperion, save that it did not give light of its own being’ it was ‘planted in the courts beneath the Mindon and there flourished, and its seedlings were many in Eldamar’. Thence came the Tree of Tol Eressлa.
In connection with this description of the city of the Elves in Valinor I give here a poem entitled Kфr. It was written on April 30th, 1915 (two days after Goblin Feet and You and Me, see pp. 27, 32), and two texts of it are extant: the first, in manuscript, has a subtitle ‘In a City Lost and Dead’. The second, a typescript, was apparently first entitled Kфr, but this was changed to The City of the Gods, and the subtitle erased; and with this title the poem was published at Leeds in 1923.* No changes were made to the text except that in the penultimate line ‘no bird sings’ was altered already in the manuscript to ‘no voice stirs’. It seems possible, especially in view of the original subtitle, that the poem described Kфr after the Elves had left it.
K ф r
In a City Lost and Dead
A sable hill, gigantic, rampart-crowned
Stands gazing out across an azure sea
Under an azure sky, on whose dark ground
Impearled as ’gainst a floor of porphyry
Gleam marble temples white, and dazzling halls;
And tawny shadows fingered long are made
In fretted bars upon their ivory walls
By massy trees rock-rooted in the shade
Like stony chiselled pillars of the vault
With shaft and capital of black basalt.
There slow forgotten days for ever reap
The silent shadows counting out rich hours;
And no voice stirs; and all the marble towers
White, hot and soundless, ever burn and sleep.
The story of the evolution of sea-birds by Ossл, and of how the Solosimpi went at last to Valinor in ships of swan-shape drawn by gulls, to the chagrin of Ossл, is greatly at variance with the account in The Silmarillion (p. 61):
Through a long age they [the Teleri] dwelt in Tol Eressлa; but slowly their hearts were changed, and were drawn towards the light that flowed out over the sea to the Lonely Isle. They were torn between the love of the music of the waves upon their shores, and the desire to see again their kindred and to look upon the splendour of Valinor; but in the end desire of the light was the stronger. Therefore Ulmo, submitting to the will of the Valar, sent to them Ossл, their friend, and he though grieving taught them the craft of ship-building; and when their ships were built he brought them as his parting gift many strong-winged swans. Then the swans drew the white ships of the Teleri over the windless sea; and thus at last and latest they came to Aman and the shores of Eldamar.
But the swans remained as a gift of Ossл to the Elves of Tol Eressлa, and the ships of the Teleri retained the form of the ships built by Aulл for the Solosimpi: they1 ‘were made in the likeness of swans, with beaks of gold and eyes of gold and jet’ (ibid.).
The passage of geographical description that follows (p. 125) is curious; for it is extremely similar to (and even in some phrases identical with) that in the tale of The Coming of the Valar and the Building of Valinor, p. 68. An explanation of this repetition is suggested below. This second version gives in fact little new information, its chief difference of substance being the mention of Tol Eressлa. It is now made clear that the Shadowy Seas were a region of the Great Sea west of Tol Eressлa. In The Silmarillion (p. 102) the conception had changed, with the change in the anchorage of Tol Eressлa: at the time of the Hiding of Valinor
the Enchanted Isles were set, and all the seas about them were filled with shadows and bewilderment. And these isles were strung as a net in the Shadowy Seas from the north to the south, before Tol Eressлa, the Lonely Isle, is reached by one sailing west.
There is a further element of repetition in the account of the gap in the Mountains of Valinor and the hill of Kфr at the head of the creek (p. 126), which have already been described earlier in this same tale (p. 122). The explanation of this repetition is almost certainly to be found in the two layers of composition in this tale (see note 8 above); for the first of these passages is in the revised portion and the second in the original, pencilled text. My father in his revision had, I think, simply taken in earlier the passage concerning the gap in the Mountains, the hill and the creek, and if he had continued the revision of the tale to its end the second passage would have been excised. This explanation may be suggested also for the repetition of the passage concerning the islands in the Great Sea and the coast of Valinor from the tale of The Coming of the Valar and the Building of Valinor; but in that case the implication must be that the revision in ink over the original pencilled manuscript was carried out when the latter was already far ahead in the narrative.
In The Silmarillion the entire account of the making of gem-stones by the Noldoli has become compressed into these words (p. 60):
And it came to pass that the masons of the house of Finwл, quarrying in the hills after stone (for they delighted in the building of high towers), first discovered the earth-gems, and brought them forth in countless myriads; and they devised tools for the cutting and shaping of gems, and carved them in many forms. They hoarded them not, but gave them freely, and by their labour enriched all Valinor.
Thus the rhapsodic account at the end of this tale of the making of gems out of ‘magic’ materials—starlight, and ilwл, dews and petals, glassy substances dyed with the juice of flowers—was abandoned, and the Noldor became miners, skilful indeed, but mining only what was there to be found in the rocks of Valinor. On the other hand, in an earlier passage in The Silmarillion (p. 39), the old idea is retained: ‘The Noldor also it was who first achieved the making of gems.’ It need not be said that everything was to be gained by the discretion of the later writing; in this early narrative the Silmarils are not strongly marked out from the accumulated wonder of all the rest of the gems of the Noldoli’s making.
Features that remained are the generosity of the Noldor i1n the giving of their gems and the scattering of them on the shores (cf. The Silmarillion p. 61: ‘Many jewels the Noldor gave them [the Teleri], opals and diamonds and pale crystals, which they strewed upon the shores and scattered in the pools’); the pearls that the Teleri got from the sea (ibid.); the sapphires that the Noldor gave to Manwл (‘His sceptre was of sapphire, which the Noldor wrought for him’, ibid. p. 40); and, of course, Fлanor as the maker of the Silmarils—although, as will be seen in the next tale, Fлanor was not yet the son of Finwл (Nуlemл).