The Book of Lost Tales - J. R. Tolkien [237]
* The idea that Morgoth disposed of a ‘host’ of Balrogs endured long, but in a late note my father said that only very few ever existed—‘at most seven’.
† This element in the story was in fact still present in the 1930 ‘Silmarillion’ (see footnote on p. 208), but I excluded it from the published work on account of evidence in a much later text that the old entrance to Gondolin had by this time been blocked up—a fact which was then written into the text in chapter 23 of The Silmarillion.
* It also seems to be at variance with the story that all Men were shut in Hithlum by Melko’s decree after the Battle of Unnumbered Tears; but ‘wanderings’ is a strange word in the context, since the next words are ‘for Melko ringeth them in the Land of Shadows’.
* In the margin of the manuscript is written: Fangluin: Bluebeard.
* It is said in the Gnomish dictionary that the curse of Mîm was ‘appeased’ when the Nauglafring was lost in the sea; see the Appendix on Names, entry Nauglafring.
* For ‘Notebook C’ see p. 254.
* The words in this passage (‘Tree-men, Sun-dwellers…’) are clear but the punctuation is not, and the arrangement here may not be that intended.
* This preface is found in all the texts of the poem save the earliest, and the versions of it differ only in name-forms: Wingelot/Vingelot and Eglamar/Eldamar (varying in the same ways as in the accompanying versions of the poem, see textual notes p. 272), and Kôr > Tûn in the third text, Tûn in the fourth. For Egla = Elda see I.251 and II.338, and for Tûn see p. 292.
* From the Old English poem Crist: éalá! éarendel engla beorhtast ofer mid-dangeard monnum sended.
* From the Old English poem Crist: éalá! éarendel engla beorhtast ofer mid-dangeard monnum sended.
* A Northern Venture: see I.204, footnote. Mr Douglas A. Anderson has kindly supplied me with a copy of the poem in this version, which had been very slightly altered from that published in The Stapeldon Magazine (Exeter College, Oxford), June 1920 (Carpenter, p. 268).—Twilight in line 5 of the Leeds version is almost certainly an error, for Twilit, the reading of all the original texts.
* The term ‘Faring Forth’ is used here in a prophetic sense, not as it is in (18) and (20).
* Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians.
* In the sense of the March of the Elves from Kôr, as in (18) and (20).
* There is no external evidence for this, but it can hardly be doubted. In this case it might be thought that since the African Kôr was a city built on the top of a great mountain standing in isolation the relationship was more than purely ‘phonetic’.