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Commentary on

The Tale of the Sun and Moon

The effect of the opening of this tale is undoubtedly to emphasize more strongly than in the later accounts the horror aroused by the deeds of the Noldoli (notable is Aulë’s bitterness against them, of which nothing is said afterwards), and also the finality and absoluteness of their exclusion from Valinor. But the idea that some Gnomes remained in Valinor (the Aulenossë, p. 176) survived; cf. The Silmarillion p. 84:

And of all the Noldor in Valinor, who were grown now to a great people, but one tithe refused to take the road: some for the love that they bore to the Valar (and to Aulë not least), some for the love of Tirion and the many things that they had made; none for fear of peril by the way.

Sorontur’s mission and the tidings that he brought back were to be abandoned. Very striking is his account of the empty ships drifting, of which ‘some were burning with bright fires’: the origin of Fëanor’s burning of the ships of the Teleri at Losgar in The Silmarillion (p. 90), where however there is a more evident reason for doing so. That Melko’s second dwelling-place in the Great Lands was distinct from Utumna is here expressly stated, as also that it was in the Iron Mountains (cf. p. 149, 158); the name Angamandi ‘Hells of Iron’ has occurred once in the Lost Tales, in the very strange account of the fate of Men after death (p. 77). In later accounts Angband was built on the site of Utumno, but finally they were separated again, and in The Silmarillion Angband had existed from ancient days before the captivity of Melkor (p. 47). It is not explained in the present tale why ‘never more will Utumna open to him’ (p. 176), but doubtless it was because Tulkas and Ulmo broke its gates and piled hills of stone upon them (p. 104).

In the next part of the tale (p. 177 ff.) much light is cast on my father’s early conception of the powers and limitations of the great Valar. Thus Yavanna and Manwë (brought to this realization by Yavanna?) are shown to believe that the Valar have done ill, or at least failed to achieve the wider designs of Ilúvatar (‘I have it in mind that this [time of darkness] is not without the desire of Ilúvatar’): the idea of ‘selfish’, inward-looking Gods is plainly expressed, Gods content to tend their gardens and devise their devisings behind their mountains, leaving ‘the world’ to shape itself as it may. And this realization is an essential element in their conceiving the making of the Sun and Moon, which are to be such bodies as may light not only ‘the blessed realms’ (an expression which occurs here for the first time, p. 182) but all the rest of the dark Earth. Of all this there is only a trace in The Silmarillion (p. 99):

These things the Valar did, recalling in their twilight the darkness of the lands of Arda; and they resolved now to illumine Middle-earth and with light to hinder the deeds of Melkor.

Of much interest also is the ‘theological’ statement in the early narrative concerning the binding of the Valar to the World as the condition of their entering it (p. 182); cf. The Silmarillion p. 20:

But this condition Ilúvatar made, or it is the necessity of their love, that their power should thenceforward be contained and bounded in the World, to be within it for ever, until it is complete, so that they are its life and it is theirs.

In the tale this condition is an express physical limitation: none of the Valar, save Manwë and Varda and their attendant spirits, could pass into the higher airs above Vilna, though they could move at great speed within the lowest air.

From the passage on p. 178, where it is said that Ulmo, despite his love for the Solosimpi and grief at the Kinslaying, was yet not filled with anger against the Noldoli, for he ‘was foreknowing more than all the Gods, even than great Manwë’, it is seen that Ulmo’s peculiar concern for the exiled Eldar—which plays such an important if mysterious part in the development of the story—was there from the beginning; as also was Yavanna’s thought, expressed in The Silmarillion p. 78:

Even