The Book of Lost Tales, Part One

THE PEOPLES OF MIDDLE-EARTH

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

77–85 Fulham Palace Road,

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.tolkien.co.uk

www.tolkienestate.com

First published by George Allen & Unwin 1983

® and ’Tolkien’ ® are registered trade marks of The J.R.R. Tolkien Estate Limited

THE BOOK OF LOST TALES. Copyright © The J.R.R. Tolkien Copyright Trust and C.R. Tolkien 1983. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © February 2011 ISBN: 978-0-06-210599-8

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

About the Publisher

Australia

HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)

Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia

http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au

Canada

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

55 Avenue Road, Suite 2900

Toronto, ON, M5R, 3L2, Canada

http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca

New Zealand

HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited

P.O. Box 1

Auckland, New Zealand

http://www.harpercollins.co.nz

United Kingdom

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

77-85 Fulham Palace Road

London, W6 8JB, UK

http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk

United States

HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

10 East 53rd Street

New York, NY 10022

http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com

^* When the name is printed in italics, I refer to the work as published; when in inverted com1mas, to the work in a more general way, in any or all of its forms.

^* Only in the case of The Music of the Ainur was there a direct development, manuscript to manuscript, from The Book of Lost Tales to the later forms; for The Music of the Ainur became separated off and continued as an independent work.

^*The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter, 1981, p. 144. The letter was almost certainly written in 1951.

^* J. R. R. Tolkien, Finn and Hengest, ed. Alan Bliss, 1982.

^* The great tower or tirion that Ingil son of Inwe built (p. 16) and the great tower of Warwick Castle are not identified, but at least it is certain that Koromas had a great tower because Warwick has one.

^† This poem is given, in three different texts, on pp. 33–43.—A poem written at Йtaples in the Pas de Calais in June 1916 and entitled ‘The Lonely Isle’ is explicitly addressed to England. See Letters, p. 437, note 4 to letter 43.

^‡ For the distinction between Eldar and Noldoli see pp. 50–1.

^* A little light on Lindo’s references to the ringing of the Gong on the Shadowy Seas and the Sleeper in the Tower of Pearl will be shed when the story of Eдrendel is reached at the end of the Tales.

^* This seems to echo the lines of Francis Thompson’s poem Daisy:

Two children did we stray and talk

Wise, idle, childish things.

My father acquired the Works1 of Francis Thompson in 1913 and 1914.

^* He had been asked for his permission to include the poem in an anthology, as it had been several times previously. See Humphrey Carpenter, Biography, p. 74, where (a part only) of the poem is printed, and also his bibliography ibid. (year 1915).

^† According to my father’s notes, the original composition dates from November 21–28, 1915, and was written in Warwick on ‘a week’s leave from camp’. This is not precisely accurate, since letters to my mother survive that were written from the camp on November 25 and 26, in the second of which he says that he has ‘written out a pencil copy of “Kortirion”’.

^‡ In his letter my father said: ‘The Trees is too long and too ambitious, and even if considered good enough would probably upset the boat.’

^* With the name Narquelion (which appears also in the title in Elvish of the original poem, see p. 32) cf. Narqueliл ‘Sun-fading’, name of the tenth month in Quenya (The Lord of the Rings, Appendix D).

^* Cf. hrнvл ‘winter’, The Lord of the Rings, Appendix D.

^*Mettanyл contains metta ‘ending’, as in Ambar-metta, the ending of the world (The Return of the King, VI.5).

^† In Chapter 3, A Short Rest, ‘swords of the High Elves of the West’ replaced ‘swords of the elves that are now called Gnomes’; and in Chapter 8, Flies and Spiders, the phrase ‘There the Light-elves and the Deep-elves and the Sea-elves went and lived for ages’ replaced ‘There the Light-elves and the Deep-elves (or Gnomes) and the Sea-elves lived for ages’.

^* Two words are in1 question: (1) Greek gn m ‘thought, intelligence’ (and in the plural ‘maxims, sayings’, whence the English word gnome, a maxim or aphorism, and adjective gnomic); and (2) the word gnome used by the 16th-century writer Paracelsus as a synonym of pygmaeus. Paracelsus ‘says that the beings so called have the earth as their element…through which they move unobstructed as fish do through water, or birds and land animals through air’ (Oxford English Dictionary s.v. Gnome²). The O.E.D. suggests that whether Paracelsus invented the word himself or not it was intended to mean ‘earth-dweller’, and discounts any connection with the other word Gnome. (This note is repeated from that in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, p. 449; see the letter (no. 239) to which it refers.)

^† The name Finrod in the passage at the end of Appendix F is now in error: Finarfin was Finrod, and Finrod was Inglor, until the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, and in this instance the change was overlooked.

^* The actual title of this tale is Tuor and the Exiles of Gondolin, but my father referred to it as The Fall of Gondolin and I do likewise.

^* On the other hand it is possible that by ‘the lost bands’ he did in fact mean the Elves who were lost on the journey from the Waters of Awakening (see p. 118); i.e. the implication is: ‘if the sundering of the speech of the Noldoli from that of the Eldar who remained in Valinor is very deep, how much more so must be the speech of those who never crossed the sea’.

^* For comparison with the published text in The Silmarillion it should be noted that some of the matter of the early version does not appear in the Ainulindalл itself but at the end of Chapter 1, Of the Beginning of Days (pp. 39–42).

^* Cf. The Silmarillion p. 30: ‘With the Valar came other spirits whose being also began before the world, of the sa1me order as the Valar but of less degree. These are the Maiar, the people of the Valar, and their servants and helpers. Their number is not known to the Elves, and few have names in any of the tongues of the Children of Ilъvatar.’ An earlier version of this passage reads: ‘Many lesser spirits they [the Valar] brought in their train, both great and small, and some of these Men have confused with the Eldar or Elves; but wrongly, for they were before the world, but Elves and Men awoke first in the world after the coming of the Valar.’