The course of the Sun and Moon between East and West (rather than in some other direction) is here given a rationale, and the reason for avoiding the South is Ungweliant’s presence there. This seems to give Ungweliant a great importance and also a vast area subject to her power of absorbing light. It is not made clear in the tale of The Darkening of Valinor where her dwelling was. It is said (p. 151) that Melko wandered ‘the dark plains of Eruman, and farther south than anyone yet had penetrated he found a region of the deepest gloom’—the region where he found the cavern of Un1gweliant, which had ‘a subterranean outlet on the sea’ and after the destruction of the Trees Ungweliant ‘gets her gone southward and over the mountains to her home’ (p. 154). It is impossible to tell from the vague lines on the little map (p. 81) what was at this time the configuration of the southern lands and seas.
In comparison with the last part of the tale, concerning the last fruit of Laurelin and the last flower of Silpion, the making from them of the Sun and Moon, and the launching of their vessels (p. 183–95), Chapter XI of The Silmarillion (constituted from two later versions not greatly dissimilar the one from the other) is extremely brief. Despite many differences the later versions read in places almost as summaries of the early story, but it is often hard to say whether the shortening depends rather on my father’s feeling (certainly present, see p. 174) that the description was too long, was taking too large a place in the total structure, or an actual rejection of some of the ideas it contains, and a desire to diminish the extreme ‘concreteness’ of its images. Certainly there is here a revelling in materials of ‘magic’ property, gold, silver, crystal, glass, and above all light conceived as a liquid element, or as dew, as honey, an element that can be bathed in and gathered into vessels, that has quite largely disappeared from The Silmarillion (although, of course, the idea of light as liquid, dripping down, poured and hoarded, sucked up by Ungoliant, remained essential to the conception of the Trees, this idea becomes in the later writing less palpable and the divine operations are given less ‘physical’ explanation and justification).
As a result of this fullness and intensity of description, the origin of the Sun and Moon in the last fruit and last flower of the Trees has less of mystery than in the succinct and beautiful language of The Silmarillion; but also much is said here to emphasize the great size of the ‘Fruit of Noon’, and the increase in the heat and brilliance of the Sunship after its launching, so that the reflection rises less readily that if the Sun that brilliantly illumines the whole Earth was but one fruit of Laurelin then Valinor must have been painfully bright and hot in the days of the Trees. In the early story the last outpourings of life from the dying Trees are utterly strange and ‘enormous’, those of Laurelin portentous, even ominous; the Sun is astoundingly bright and hot even to the Valar, who are awestruck and disquieted by what has been done (the Gods knew ‘that they had done a greater thing than they at first knew’, p. 190); and the anger and distress of certain of the Valar at the burning light of the Sun enforces the feeling that in the last fruit of Laurelin a terrible and unforeseen power has been released. This distress does indeed survive in The Silmarillion (p. 100), in the reference to ‘the prayers of Lуrien and Estл, who said that sleep and rest had been banished from the Earth, and the stars were hidden’ but in the tale the blasting power of the new Sun is intensely conveyed in the images of ‘the heat dancing above the trees’ in the gardens of Lуrien, the silent nightingales, the withered poppies and the drooping evening flowers.
In the old story there is a mythical explanation of the Moon’s phases (though not of eclipses), and of the markings on its face through the story of the breaking of the withered bough of Silpion and the fall of the Moonflower—a story altogether at variance with the explanation given in The Silmarillion (1ibid.). In the tale the fruit of Laurelin also fell to the ground, when Aulл stumbled and its weight was too great for Tulkas to bear alone: the significance of this event is not made perfectly clear, but it seems that, had the Fruit of Noon not burst asunder, Aulл would not have understood its structure and conceived that of the Sunship.
To whatever extent the great differences between the versions in this part of the Mythology may be due to later compression, there remain a good many actual contradictions, of which I note here only some of the more important, in addition to that concerning the markings on the Moon already mentioned. Thus in The Silmarillion the Moon rose first, ‘and was the elder of the new lights as was Telperion of the Trees’ (ibid.); in the old story the reverse is true both of the Trees and of the new lights. Again, in The Silmarillion it is Varda who decides their motions, and she changes these from her first plan at the plea of Lуrien and Estл, whereas here it is Lуrien’s very distress at the coming of Sunlight that leads to the last blossoming of Silpion and the making of the Moon. The Valar indeed play different roles throughout; and here far greater importance attaches to the acts of Vбna and Lуrien, whose relations with the Sun and Moon are at once deeper and more explicit than they afterwards became, as they had been with the Trees (see p. 71); in The Silmarillion it was Nienna who watered the Trees with her tears (p. 98). In The Silmarillion the Sun and Moon move nearer to Arda than ‘the ancient stars’ (p. 99), but here they move at quite different levels in the firmament.
But a feature in which later compression can be certainly discerned is the elaborate description in the tale of the Moon as ‘an island of pure glass’, ‘a shimmering isle’, with little lakes of the light from Telimpл bordered with shining flowers and a crystalline cup amidmost in which was set the Moonflower; only from this is explicable the reference in The Silmarillion to Tilion’s steering ‘the island of the Moon’. The aged Elf Uolл Kъvion (whom ‘some indeed have named the Man in the Moon’) seems almost to have strayed in from another conception; his presence gives difficulty in any case, since we have just been told (p. 192) that Silmo could not sail in the Moonship because he was not of the children of the air and could not ‘cleanse his being of its earthwardness’.—An isolated heading ‘Uolл and Erinti’ in the little pocket-book used among things for suggestions of stories to be told (see p. 171) no doubt implies that a tale was preparing on the subject of Uolл cf. the Tale of Qorinуrmi concerning Urwendi and Erinti’s brother Fionwл (p. 215). No traces of these tales are to be found and they were presumably never written. Another note in the pocket-book calls Uolл Mikъmi (the earlier name of Uolл Kъvion, see p. 198) ‘King of the Moon’ and a third refers to a poem ‘The Man in the Moon’ which is to be sung by Eriol, ‘who says he will sing them a song of a legend touching Uolл Mikъmi as Men have it’. My father wrote a poem about the Man in the Moon in March 1915, but if it was this that he was thinking of including it would have startled the company of Mar Vanwa Tyaliйva—and he would have had to change its references to places in England which were not yet in existence. Although it is very probable that he had something quite different in mind, I think it may be of interest to give this poem in an early form (see p. 204).
As the mythology evolved and changed, the Making of the Sun and Moon became the element of greatest difficulty; and in the published Silmarillion this chapter does not seem of a piece with much of the rest of the work, and could not be made to be so. Towards the end of his life my father was indeed prepared to dismantle much of what he had built, in the attempt to solve what he undoubtedly felt to be a fundamental problem.
Note on the order of the Tales
The development of the Lost Tales is here in fact extremely complex. After the concluding words of The Flight of the Noldoli, ‘the story of the darkening of Valinor was at an end’ (p. 169), my father wrote: ‘See on beyond in other books’, but in fact he added subsequently the short dialogue between Lindo and Eriol (‘Great was the power of Melko for ill…’) which is given at the end of The Flight of the Noldoli.