20 From this point the second version diverges sharply from the first. The first reads as follows:
And that is all, methinks,’ said Lindo, ‘that I know to tell of those fairest works of the Gods’ but Ailios said: ‘Little doth it cost thee to spin the tale, an it be of Valinor; it is a while since ye offered us a…..tale concerning the rising of the Sun and Moon in the East, and a flow of speech has poured from thee since then, but now art thou minded to [?tease], and no word of that promise.’ Of a truth Ailios beneath his roughness liked the words of Lindo as well as any, and he was eager to learn of the matter.
‘That is easy told,’ said Lindo…
What follows in the original version relates to the matter of the next chapter (see p. 220 note 2).
Ailios here claims that a promise made by Lindo has not been fulfilled, just as does Eriol, more politely, in the second version. The beginning of the tale in the first version is not extant, and perhaps as it was originally written Lindo did make this promise; but in the second he says no such thing (indeed Eriol’s question was ‘Whence be the Sun and Moon?’), and at the end of his tale denies that he had done so, when Eriol asserts it.
Changes made to names in
The Tale of the Sun and Moon
Amnor < Amnos (Amnos is the form in The Flight of the Noldoli, < Emnon; the form Amnon also occurs, see p. 172).
For changes in the passage on the names of the Sun see notes 12 and 13.
Gilfanon < Ailios (p. 189, at the first occurrence only, see note 19).
Minethlos < Mainlos.
Uolл Kъvion < Uolл Mikъmi, only at the second occurrence on p. 193; at the first occurrence, Uolл Mikъmi was left unchanged, though I have given Uolл Kъvion in the text.
Ship of Morning < Kalaventл (p. 190; i · Kalaventл ‘the Ship of Light’ occurs unemended in the text on p. 188).
the Sunship’s flames < the flames of Kalaventл (p. 193).
Sбri < Kalavйnл (p. 193, 195. Kalavйnл is the form in the original version, see note 19).
Commentary on
The Tale of the Sun and Moon
The effect of the opening of this tale is undoubtedly to emphasize more strongly than in the later accounts the horror aroused by the deeds of the Noldoli (notable is Aulл’s bitterness against them, of which nothing is said afterwards), and also the finality and 1absoluteness of their exclusion from Valinor. But the idea that some Gnomes remained in Valinor (the Aulenossл, p. 176) survived; cf. The Silmarillion p. 84:
And of all the Noldor in Valinor, who were grown now to a great people, but one tithe refused to take the road: some for the love that they bore to the Valar (and to Aulл not least), some for the love of Tirion and the many things that they had made; none for fear of peril by the way.
Sorontur’s mission and the tidings that he brought back were to be abandoned. Very striking is his account of the empty ships drifting, of which ‘some were burning with bright fires’: the origin of Fлanor’s burning of the ships of the Teleri at Losgar in The Silmarillion (p. 90), where however there is a more evident reason for doing so. That Melko’s second dwelling-place in the Great Lands was distinct from Utumna is here expressly stated, as also that it was in the Iron Mountains (cf. p. 149, 158); the name Angamandi ‘Hells of Iron’ has occurred once in the Lost Tales, in the very strange account of the fate of Men after death (p. 77). In later accounts Angband was built on the site of Utumno, but finally they were separated again, and in The Silmarillion Angband had existed from ancient days before the captivity of Melkor (p. 47). It is not explained in the present tale why ‘never more will Utumna open to him’ (p. 176), but doubtless it was because Tulkas and Ulmo broke its gates and piled hills of stone upon them (p. 104).
In the next part of the tale (p. 177 ff.) much light is cast on my father’s early conception of the powers and limitations of the great Valar. Thus Yavanna and Manwл (brought to this realization by Yavanna?) are shown to believe that the Valar have done ill, or at least failed to achieve the wider designs of Ilъvatar (‘I have it in mind that this [time of darkness] is not without the desire of Ilъvatar’): the idea of ‘selfish’, inward-looking Gods is plainly expressed, Gods content to tend their gardens and devise their devisings behind their mountains, leaving ‘the world’ to shape itself as it may. And this realization is an essential element in their conceiving the making of the Sun and Moon, which are to be such bodies as may light not only ‘the blessed realms’ (an expression which occurs here for the first time, p. 182) but all the rest of the dark Earth. Of all this there is only a trace in The Silmarillion (p. 99):
These things the Valar did, recalling in their twilight the darkness of the lands of Arda; and they resolved now to illumine Middle-earth and with light to hinder the deeds of Melkor.
Of much interest also is the ‘theological’ statement in the early narrative concerning the binding of the Valar to the World as the condition of their entering it (p. 182); cf. The Silmarillion p. 20:
But this condition Ilъvatar made, or it is the necessity of their love, that their power should thenceforward be contained and bounded in the World, to be within it for ever, until it is complete, so that they are its life and it is theirs.
In the tale this condition is an express physical1 limitation: none of the Valar, save Manwл and Varda and their attendant spirits, could pass into the higher airs above Vilna, though they could move at great speed within the lowest air.
From the passage on p. 178, where it is said that Ulmo, despite his love for the Solosimpi and grief at the Kinslaying, was yet not filled with anger against the Noldoli, for he ‘was foreknowing more than all the Gods, even than great Manwл’, it is seen that Ulmo’s peculiar concern for the exiled Eldar—which plays such an important if mysterious part in the development of the story—was there from the beginning; as also was Yavanna’s thought, expressed in The Silmarillion p. 78:
Even for those who are mightiest under Ilъvatar there is some work that they may accomplish once, and once only. The Light of the Trees I brought into being, and within Eд I can do so never again.
Yavanna’s reference to the Magic Sun and its relighting (which has appeared in the toast drunk in the evening in the Cottage of Lost Play, p. 17, 65) is obviously intended to be obscure at this stage.
There is no later reference to the story of the wastage of light by Lуrien and Vбna, pouring it over the roots of the Trees unavailingly.
Turning to Lindo’s account of the stars (p. 181–2), Morwinyon has appeared in an earlier tale (p. 114), with the story that Varda dropped it ‘as she fared in great haste back to Valinor’, and that it ‘blazes above the world’s edge in the west’ in the present tale Morwinyon (which according to both the Qenya and Gnomish word-lists is Arcturus) is again strangely represented as being a luminary always of the western sky. It is said here that while some of the stars were guided by the Mбnir and the Sъruli ‘on mazy courses’, others, including Morwinyon and Nielluin, ‘abode where they hung and moved not’. Is the explanation of this that in the ancient myths of the Elves there was a time when the regular apparent movement of all the heavenly bodies from East to West had not yet begun? This movement is nowhere explained mythically in my father’s cosmology.
Nielluin (‘Blue Bee’) is Sirius (in The Silmarillion called Helluin), and this star had a place in the legend of Telimektar son of Tulkas, though the story of his conversion into the constellation of Orion was never clearly told (cf. Telumehtar ‘Orion’ in The Lord of the Rings Appendix E, I). Nielluin was Inwл’s son Ingil, who followed Telimektar ‘in the likeness of a great bee bearing honey of flame’ (see the Appendix on Names under Ingil and Telimektar).