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In the rejected section given on p. 163, which was replaced by the account of the battle of Kópas Alqualunten, the reference to ‘those deeds which afterwards the Noldoli most bitterly rued’ must be simply to the theft of the ships of the Solosimpi, since there is no suggestion of any worse actions (in the replacement passage almost the same words are used of the Kinslaying). The actual emergence of the idea that the Noldoli were guilty of worse than theft at Kópas is seen in a note in the little book (see p. 23) that my father used to jot down thoughts and suggestions—many of these being no more than single sentences, or mere isolated names, serving as reminders of work to be done, stories to be told, or changes to be made. This note reads:

The wrath of the Gods and Elves very great—even let some Noldoli slay some Solosimpi at Kópas—and let Ulmo plead for them (? if Ulmo so fond of the Solosimpi).

This was struck through and marked ‘done’, and the recommendation here that Ulmo should plead for the Noldoli is found in the tale of The Hiding of Valinor (p. 209).

In the description of Kópas the ‘mighty arch of living stone’ survived into the ‘arch of living rock sea-carved’ in the much briefer description of Alqualondë in The Silmarillion (p. 61); and we see here the reason for the Haven’s being ‘lit with many lamps’ (ibid.)—because little light came there from the Two Trees on account of the rock-wall around it (though the darkness of Alqualondë is implied by the statement in The Silmarillion that it ‘lay upon the confines of Eldamar, north of the Calacirya, where the light of the stars was bright and clear’).

The events at the Haven were differently conceived in detail from the later story, but still with much general agreement; and though the storm raised by Uinen (ibid. p. 87) does not appear in the original version, the picture of the Noldoli journeying northward some along the shore and some in the vessels remained.

There are interesting indications of the geography of the northern regions. There is no suggestion of a great wasteland (later Araman) between the northern Mountains of Valinor and the sea, a conclusion reached earlier (p. 83), and supported incidentally by the accounts of the steep path from Mandos in the mountains down to the beaching place of the black ship Mornië (p. 77, 167). The name Helkaraksë, ‘Icefang’, first appearing in emendations to the text and given to the neck or promontory running out from the western land, was afterwards re-applied to what is here called Qerkaringa, the strait filled with ice-floes that ‘grind and crash together’ but this was when the Helcaraxë, ‘the Grinding Ice’, had come to have a quite different geographical significance in the much more sophisticated world-picture that my father evolved during the next ‘phase’ of the mythology.

In The Silmarillion (p. 87) there is a suggestion that the speaker of the Prophecy of the North was Mandos himself ‘and no lesser herald of Manwë’, and its gravity, indeed its centrality in the mythology, is far greater; here there is no suggestion of a ‘doom’ or ‘curse’, but only a foretelling. This foretelling included the dark words ‘Great is the fall of Gondolin’. In the tale of The Fall of Gondolin (but in an interpolated sentence very possibly later than the present tale) Turgon, standing upon the stairs of his palace amid the destruction of the city, uttered these same words, ‘and men shuddered, for such were the words of Amnon the prophet of old’. Here Amnon (rather than Amnos as in the present text, itself an emendation from Emnon) is not a place but a person (the servant of Vefántur who uttered the prophecy?). In the little notebook referred to above occurs the following jotting:

Prophecy of Amnon. Great is the fall of Gondolin. Lo Turgon shall not fade till the lily of the valley fadeth.

In some other notes for the Lost Tales this takes the form:

Prophecy of Amnon. ‘Great is the fall of Gondolin’ and ‘When the lily of the valley withers then shall