The Book of Lost Tales - J. R. Tolkien [203]
I have commented earlier (I.32) on the oddity of the idea that the Cottage and its inhabitants were peculiarly small, in an island entirely inhabited by Elves. But my father, if he had ever rewritten The Cottage of Lost Play, would doubtless have abandoned this; and it may well be that he was in any case turning away already at the time of Ælfwine II from the idea that the ‘faded’ Elves were diminutive, as is suggested by his rejection of the word ‘little’ in ‘little folk’, ‘little ships’ (see note 27).
Ultimately, of course, the Elves shed all associations and qualities that would be now commonly considered ‘fairylike’, and those who remained in the Great Lands in Ages of the world at this time unconceived were to grow greatly in stature and in power: there was nothing filmy or transparent about the heroic or majestic Eldar of the Third Age of Middle-earth. Long afterwards my father would write, in a wrathful comment on a ‘pretty’ or ‘ladylike’ pictorial rendering of Legolas:
He was tall as a young tree, lithe, immensely strong, able swiftly to draw a great war-bow and shoot down a Nazgûl, endowed with the tremendous vitality of Elvish bodies, so hard and resistant to hurt that he went only in light shoes over rock or through snow, the most tireless of all the Fellowship.
This brings to an end my rendering and analysis of the early writings bearing on the story of the mariner who came to the Lonely Isle and learned there the true history of the Elves. I have shown, convincingly as I hope, the curious and complex way in which my father’s vision of the significance of Tol Eressëa changed. When he jotted down the synopsis (10), the idea of the mariner’s voyage to the Island of the Elves was of course already present; but he journeyed out of the East and the Lonely Isle of his seeking was—England (though not yet the land of the English and not yet lying in the seas where England lies). When later the entire concept was shifted, England, as ‘Luthany’ or ‘Lúthien’, remained preeminently the Elvish land; and Tol Eressëa, with its meads and coppices, its rooks’ nests in the elm-trees of Alalminórë, seemed to the English mariner to be remade in the likeness of his own land, which the Elves had lost at the coming of Men: for it was indeed a re-embodiment of Elvish Luthany far over the sea.
All this was to fall away afterwards from the developing mythology; but Ælfwine left many marks on its pages before he too finally disappeared.
Much in this chapter is necessarily inconclusive and uncertain; but I believe that these very early notes and projections are rightly disinterred. Although, as ‘plots’, abandoned and doubtless forgotten, they bear witness to truths of my father’s heart and mind that he never abandoned. But these notes were scribbled down in his youth, when for him Elvish magic ‘lingered yet mightily in the woods and hills of Luthany’ in his old age all was gone West-over-sea, and an end was indeed come for the Eldar of story and of song.
NOTES
1 On this statement about the stature of Elves and Men see pp. 326–7.
2 For the form Taimonto (Taimondo) see I.268, entry Telimektar.
3 Belaurin is the Gnomish equivalent of Palúrien (see I. 264).
4 A side-note here suggests that perhaps the Pine should not be in Tol Eressëa.—For Ilwë, the middle air, that is ‘blue and clear and flows among the stars’, see I. 65, 73.
5 Gil = Ingil. At the first occurrence of Ingil in this passage the name was written Ingil (Gil), but (Gil) was struck out.
6 The word Nautar occurs in a rejected outline for the Tale of the Nauglafring (p. 136), where it is equated with Nauglath (Dwarves).
7 Uin: ‘the mightiest and most ancient of whales’, chief among those whales and fishes that drew the ‘island-car’ (afterwards Tol Eressëa) on which Ulmo ferried the Elves to Valinor (I.118–20).
8 Gongs: these are evil beings obscurely related to Orcs: see I. 245 note 10, and the rejected outlines for the Tale of the Nauglafring given on pp. 136–7.
9 A large query is written against this passage.
10 The likeness of this