The Book of Lost Tales - J. R. Tolkien [170]
And thousands of miles was his ship from those wrought her 15
A petrel, a sea-bird, a white-wingéd gem,
Gallantly bent on measureless faring
Ere she came homing in sea-laden flight,
Circuitous, lingering, restlessly daring,
Coming to haven unlooked for, at night.’ 20
‘But the music is broken, the words half-forgotten,
The sunlight has faded, the moon is grown old,
The Elven ships foundered or weed-swathed and rotten,
The fire and the wonder of hearts is acold.
Who now can tell, and what harp can accompany 25
With melodies strange enough, rich enough tunes,
Pale with the magic of cavernous harmony,
Loud with shore-music of beaches and dunes,
How slender his boat; of what glimmering timber;
How her sails were all silvern and taper her mast, 30
And silver her throat with foam and her limber
Flanks as she swanlike floated past!
The song I can sing is but shreds one remembers
Of golden imaginings fashioned in sleep,
A whispered tale told by the withering embers 35
Of old things far off that but few hearts keep.’
III
The Shores of Faëry
This poem is given in its earliest form by Humphrey Carpenter, Biography, pp. 76–7.11 It exists in four versions each as usual incorporating slight changes; my father wrote the date of its composition on three of the copies, viz. ‘July 8–9, 1915’; ‘Moseley and Edgbaston, Birmingham July 1915 (walking and on bus). Retouched often since—esp. 1924’ and ‘First poem of my mythology, Valinor……….1910’. This last cannot have been intended for the date of composition, and the illegible words preceding it may possibly be read as ‘thought of about’. But it does not in any case appear to have been ‘the first poem of the mythology’: that, I believe, was Éalá Éarendel Engla Beorhtast—and my father’s mention of this poem in his letter of 1967 (see p. 266) seems to suggest this also.
The Old English title was Ielfalandes Strand (The Shores of Elfland). It is preceded by a short prose preface which has been given above, p. 262. I give it here in the latest version (undateable), with all readings from the earliest in footnotes.
East of the Moon, west of the Sun
There stands a lonely hill;
Its feet are in the pale green sea,
Its towers are white and still,
Beyond Taniquetil 5
In Valinor.
Comes never there but one lone star
That fled before the moon;
And there the Two Trees naked are
That bore Night’s silver bloom, 10
That bore the globéd fruit of Noon
In Valinor.
There are the shores of Faëry
Readings of the earliest version:
1 East…..west] West….. East
7 No stars come there but one alone
8 fled before] hunted with
9 For there the Two Trees naked grow
10 bore] bear 11 bore] bear
With their moonlit pebbled strand
Whose foam is silver music 15
On the opalescent floor
Beyond the great sea-shadows
On the marches of the sand
That stretches on for ever
To the dragonheaded door, 20
The gateway of the Moon,
Beyond Taniquetil
In Valinor.
West of the Sun, east of the Moon
Lies the haven of the star, 25
The white town of the Wanderer
And the rocks of Eglamar.
There Wingelot is harboured,
While Eärendel looks afar
O’er the darkness of the waters 30
Between here and Eglamar—
Out, out, beyond Taniquetil
In Valinor afar.
There are some interesting connections between this poem and the tale of The Coming of the Elves and the Making of Kôr. The ‘lonely hill’ of line 2 is the hill of Kôr (cf. the tale, I.122: ‘at the head of this long creek there stands a lonely hill which gazes at the loftier mountains’), while ‘the golden feet of Kôr’ (a line replaced in the later versions of the poem) and very probably ‘the sand That stretches on for ever’ are explained by the passage that follows in the tale:
Thither [i.e. to Kôr] did Aulë bring all the dust of magic metals that his great works had made and gathered, and he piled it about the foot of that hill, and most of this dust was