Lindo’s words about the sojourn of Ingil in Tol Eressлa ‘after many days’, and the interpretation of the name of his town Koromas as ‘the Resting of the Exiles of Kфr’, refer to the return of the Eldar from the Great Lands after the war on Melko (Melkor, Morgoth) for the deliverance of the enslaved Noldoli. His words about his father Valwл ‘who went with Noldorin to find the Gnomes’ refer to an element in this story of the expedition from Kфr.*
It is important to see, then, that (if my general interpretation is correct) in The Cottage of Lost Play Eriol comes to Tol Eressлa in the time after the Fall of Gondolin and the march of the Elves of Kфr into the Great Lands for the defeat of Melko, when the Elves who had taken part in it had returned over the sea to dwell in Tol Eressлa; but before the time of the ‘Faring Forth’ and the removal of Tol Eressлa to the geographical position of England. This latter element was soon lost in its entirety from the developing mythology.
1 Of the ‘Cottage’ itself it must be said at once that very little light can be cast on it from other writings of my father’s; for the entire conception of the Children who went to Valinor was to be abandoned almost without further trace. Later in the Lost Tales, however, there are again references to Olуre Mallл. After the description of the Hiding of Valinor, it is told that at the bidding of Manwл (who looked on the event with sorrow) the Valar Oromл and Lуrien devised strange paths from the Great Lands to Valinor, and the way of Lуrien’s devising was Olуrл Mallл the Path of Dreams; by this road, when ‘Men were yet but new-wakened on the earth’, ‘the children of the fathers of the fathers of Men’ came to Valinor in their sleep (pp. 211, 213). There are two further mentions in tales to be given in Part II: the teller of the Tale of Tinъviel (a child of Mar Vanwa Tyaliйva) says that she saw Tinъviel and her mother with her own eyes ‘when journeying by the Way of Dreams in long past days’, and the teller of the Tale of Turambar says that he ‘trod Olуrл Mallл in the days before the fall of Gondolin’.
There is also a poem on the subject of the Cottage of Lost Play, which has many of the details of the description in the prose text. This poem, according to my father’s notes, was composed at 59 St John’s Street, Oxford, his undergraduate lodgings, on 27–28 April 1915 (when he was 23). It exists (as is constantly the case with the poems) in several versions, each modified in detail from the preceding one, and the end of the poem was twice entirely rewritten. I give it here first in the earliest form, with changes made to this in notes at the foot of the page, and then in the final version, the date of which cannot be certainly determined. I suspect that it was very much later—and may indeed have been one of the revisions made to old poems when the collection The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962) was being prepared, though it is not mentioned in my father’s correspondence on that subject.
The original title was: You and Me / and the Cottage of Lost Play (with an Old English rendering Pжt hъsincel
You & Me
and the Cottage of Lost Play
You and me*—we know that land
And often have been there In the long old days, old nursery days,*
A dark child and a fair. 5
Was it down the paths of firelight dreams
In winter cold and white, Or in the blue-spun twilit hours
Of little early tucked-up beds
In drowsy summer night, 10
That You and I got lost in Sleep
And met each other there— Your dark hair on your white nightgown,
And mine was tangled fair? We wandered shyly hand in hand,
15
Or rollicked in the fairy sand* And gathered pearls and shells in pails,
While all about the nightingales Were singing in the trees. We dug for silver with our spades
20
By little inland sparkling seas, Then ran ashore through sleepy glades
And down a warm and winding lane We never never found again* Between high whispering trees. 25
The air was neither night or day,*
But faintly dark with softest light, When first there glimmered into sight
The Cottage of Lost Play. ’Twas builded very very old*
30
White, and thatched with straws of gold, And pierced with peeping lattices That looked toward the sea;
And our own children’s garden-plots
Were there—our own forgetmenots,
35
Red daisies, cress and mustard, And blue nemophilл. O! all the borders* trimmed with box
Were full of favourite flowers—of phlox,
Of larkspur, pinks, and hollyhocks
40
Beneath a red may-tree: And all the paths were full of shapes,
Of tumbling happy white-clad shapes,
And with them You and Me.* And some had silver watering-cans
45
And watered all their gowns, Or sprayed each other; some laid plans
To build them houses, fairy towns,* Or dwellings in the trees; And some were clambering on the roof;
50
Some crooning lonely and aloof; And some were dancing fairy-rings
And weaving pearly daisy-strings, Or chasing golden bees; But here and there a little pair
55
With rosy cheeks and tangled hair
Debated quaint old childish things*—* And we were one of these.
Lines 58–65 (p. 30) were subsequently rewritten:
But why it was there came a time
When we could take the road no more,
Though long we looked, and high would climb, Or gaze from many a seaward shore To find the path between sea and sky
To those old gardens of delight; And how it goes now in that land,
If there the house and gardens stand, Still filled with children clad in white— We know not, You and I. And why it was Tomorrow came
And with his grey hand led us back; 60
And why we never found the same
Old cottage, or the magic track That leads between a silver sea*1 And those old shores* and gardens fair
Where all things are, that ever were—
65
We know not, You and Me.*
This is the final version of the poem:
The Little House of Lost Play
Mar Vanwa Tyali й va
We knew that land once, You and I,
and once we wandered there in the long days now long gone by,
a dark child and a fair. 5
Was it on the paths of firelight thought
in winter cold and white, or in the blue-spun twilit hours
of little early tucked-up beds
in drowsy summer night, 10
that you and I in Sleep went down
to meet each other there, your dark hair on your white nightgown
and mine was tangled fair?