The Book of Lost Tales - J. R. Tolkien [177]
Also noteworthy are the references to Eriol’s drinking limpë at Gilfanon’s ‘house of a hundred chimneys’. In The Cottage of Lost Play (I.17) Lindo told Eriol that he could not give him limpë to drink:
Turinqi only may give it to those not of the Eldar race, and those that drink must dwell always with the Eldar of the Island until such time as they fare forth to find the lost families of the kindred.
Meril-i-Turinqi herself, when Eriol besought her for a drink of limpë, was severe (I.98):
If you drink this drink…even at the Faring Forth, should Eldar and Men fall into war at the last, still must you stand by us against the children of your kith and kin, but until then never may you fare away home though longings gnaw you…
In the text described in I.229ff. Eriol bemoans to Lindo the refusal to grant him his desire, and Lindo, while warning him against ‘thinking to overpass the bounds that Ilúvatar hath set’, tells him that Meril has not irrevocably refused him. In a note to this text my father wrote: ‘…Eriol fares to Tavrobel—after Tavrobel he drinks of limpë.’
The statement in this passage of outline C that Eriol ‘in his last days is consumed with longing for the black cliffs of his shores, even as Meril said’ clearly refers to the passage in The Chaining of Melko from which I have cited above:
On a day of autumn will come the winds and a driven gull, maybe, will wail overhead, and lo! you will be filled with desire, remembering the black coasts of your home. (I.96).
Lindo’s reference, in the passage from The Cottage of Lost Play cited above, to the faring forth of the Eldar of Tol Eressëa ‘to find the lost families of the kindred’ must likewise relate to the mentions in (5) of the Faring Forth (though the time was not ripe), of the ‘rising of the Lost Elves against the Orcs and Nautar’, and of ‘the Island-elves and the Lost Elves’ at the Battle of Rôs. Precisely who are to be understood by the ‘Lost Elves’ is not clear; but in Gilfanon’s Tale (I.231) all Elves of the Great Lands ‘that never saw the light at Kôr’ (Ilkorins), whether or not they left the Waters of Awakening, are called ‘the lost fairies of the world’, and this seems likely to be the meaning here. It must then be supposed that there dwelt on Tol Eressëa only the Eldar of Kôr (the ‘Exiles’) and the Noldoli released from thraldom under Melko; the Faring Forth was to be the great expedition from Tol Eressëa for the rescue of those who had never departed from the Great Lands.
In (5) we meet the conception of the dragging of Tol Eressëa back eastwards across the Ocean to the geographical position of England—it becomes England (see I. 26); that the part which was torn off by Ossë, the Isle of Íverin, is Ireland is explicitly stated in the Qenya dictionary. The promontory of Rôs is perhaps Brittany.
Here also there is a clear definition of the ‘fading’ of the Elves, their physical diminution and increasing tenuity and transparency, so that they become invisible (and finally incredible) to gross Mankind. This is a central concept of the early mythology: the ‘fairies’, as now conceived by Men (in so far as they are rightly conceived), have become so. They were not always so. And perhaps most remarkable in this remarkable passage, there is the final and virtually complete withdrawal of the Gods (to whom the Eldar are ‘most like in nature’, I. 57) from the concerns of ‘the world’, the Great Lands across the Sea. They watch, it seems, since they grieve, and are therefore not wholly indifferent to what passes in the lands of Men; but they are henceforward utterly remote, hidden in the West.
Other features of (5), the Golden Book of Tavrobel, and the Battle