The Book of Lost Tales, Part 1 - J. R. R. Tolkien [121]
Yavanna’s reference to the Magic Sun and its relighting (which has appeared in the toast drunk in the evening in the Cottage of Lost Play, p. 17, 65) is obviously intended to be obscure at this stage.
There is no later reference to the story of the wastage of light by Lórien and Vána, pouring it over the roots of the Trees unavailingly.
Turning to Lindo’s account of the stars (p. 181–2), Morwinyon has appeared in an earlier tale (p. 114), with the story that Varda dropped it ‘as she fared in great haste back to Valinor’, and that it ‘blazes above the world’s edge in the west’ in the present tale Morwinyon (which according to both the Qenya and Gnomish word-lists is Arcturus) is again strangely represented as being a luminary always of the western sky. It is said here that while some of the stars were guided by the Mánir and the Súruli ‘on mazy courses’, others, including Morwinyon and Nielluin, ‘abode where they hung and moved not’. Is the explanation of this that in the ancient myths of the Elves there was a time when the regular apparent movement of all the heavenly bodies from East to West had not yet begun? This movement is nowhere explained mythically in my father’s cosmology.
Nielluin (‘Blue Bee’) is Sirius (in The Silmarillion called Helluin), and this star had a place in the legend of Telimektar son of Tulkas, though the story of his conversion into the constellation of Orion was never clearly told (cf. Telumehtar ‘Orion’ in The Lord of the Rings Appendix E, I). Nielluin was Inwë’s son Ingil, who followed Telimektar ‘in the likeness of a great bee bearing honey of flame’ (see the Appendix on Names under Ingil and Telimektar).
The course of the Sun and Moon between East and West (rather than in some other direction) is here given a rationale, and the reason for avoiding the South is Ungweliant’s presence there. This seems to give Ungweliant a great importance and also a vast area subject to her power of absorbing light. It is not made clear in the tale of The Darkening of Valinor where her dwelling was. It is said (p. 151) that Melko wandered ‘the dark plains of Eruman, and farther south than anyone yet had penetrated he found a region of the deepest gloom’—the region where he found the cavern of Ungweliant, which had ‘a subterranean outlet on the sea’ and after the destruction of the Trees Ungweliant ‘gets her gone southward and over the mountains to her home’ (p. 154). It is impossible to tell from the vague lines on the little map (p. 81) what was at this time the configuration of the southern lands and seas.
In comparison with the last part of the tale, concerning the last fruit of Laurelin and the last flower of Silpion, the making from them of the Sun and Moon, and the launching of their vessels (p. 183–95), Chapter XI of The Silmarillion (constituted from two later versions not greatly dissimilar the one from the other) is extremely brief. Despite many differences the later versions read in places almost as summaries of the early story, but it is often hard to say whether the shortening depends rather on my father’s feeling (certainly present, see p. 174) that the description was too long, was taking too large a place in the total structure, or an actual rejection of some of the ideas it contains, and a desire to diminish the extreme ‘concreteness’ of its images. Certainly there is here a revelling in materials of ‘magic’ property, gold, silver, crystal, glass, and above all light conceived as a liquid element, or as dew, as honey, an element that can be bathed in and gathered into vessels, that has quite largely disappeared from The Silmarillion (although, of course, the idea of light as liquid, dripping down, poured and hoarded, sucked up by Ungoliant, remained essential to the conception of the Trees, this idea becomes in the later writing less palpable and the divine operations are given less ‘physical’ explanation