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As a result of this fullness and intensity of description, the origin of the Sun and Moon in the last fruit and last flower of the Trees has less of mystery than in the succinct and beautiful language of The Silmarillion; but also much is said here to emphasize the great size of the ‘Fruit of Noon’, and the increase in the heat and brilliance of the Sunship after its launching, so that the reflection rises less readily that if the Sun that brilliantly illumines the whole Earth was but one fruit of Laurelin then Valinor must have been painfully bright and hot in the days of the Trees. In the early story the last outpourings of life from the dying Trees are utterly strange and ‘enormous’, those of Laurelin portentous, even ominous; the Sun is astoundingly bright and hot even to the Valar, who are awestruck and disquieted by what has been done (the Gods knew ‘that they had done a greater thing than they at first knew’, p. 190); and the anger and distress of certain of the Valar at the burning light of the Sun enforces the feeling that in the last fruit of Laurelin a terrible and unforeseen power has been released. This distress does indeed survive in The Silmarillion (p. 100), in the reference to ‘the prayers of Lórien and Estë, who said that sleep and rest had been banished from the Earth, and the stars were hidden’ but in the tale the blasting power of the new Sun is intensely conveyed in the images of ‘the heat dancing above the trees’ in the gardens of Lórien, the silent nightingales, the withered poppies and the drooping evening flowers.

In the old story there is a mythical explanation of the Moon’s phases (though not of eclipses), and of the markings on its face through the story of the breaking of the withered bough of Silpion and the fall of the Moonflower—a story altogether at variance with the explanation given in The Silmarillion (ibid.). In the tale the fruit of Laurelin also fell to the ground, when Aulë stumbled and its weight was too great for Tulkas to bear alone: the significance of this event is not made perfectly clear, but it seems that, had the Fruit of Noon not burst asunder, Aulë would not have understood its structure and conceived that of the Sunship.

To whatever extent the great differences between the versions in this part of the Mythology may be due to later compression, there remain a good many actual contradictions, of which I note here only some of the more important, in addition to that concerning the markings on the Moon already mentioned. Thus in The Silmarillion the Moon rose first, ‘and was the elder of the new lights as was Telperion of the Trees’ (ibid.); in the old story the reverse is true both of the Trees and of the new lights. Again, in The Silmarillion it is Varda who decides their motions, and she changes these from her first plan at the plea of Lórien and Estë, whereas here it is Lórien’s very distress at the coming of Sunlight that leads to the last blossoming of Silpion and the making of the Moon. The Valar indeed play different roles throughout; and here far greater importance attaches to the acts of Vána and Lórien, whose relations with the Sun and Moon are at once deeper and more explicit than they afterwards became, as they had been with the Trees (see p. 71); in The Silmarillion it was Nienna who watered the Trees with her tears (p. 98). In The Silmarillion the Sun and Moon move nearer to Arda than ‘the ancient stars’ (p. 99), but here they move at quite different levels in the firmament.

But a feature in which later compression can be certainly discerned is the elaborate description in the tale of the Moon as ‘an island of pure glass’, ‘a shimmering isle’, with little lakes of the light from Telimpë bordered with shining flowers and a crystalline cup amidmost in which was set the Moonflower; only from this is explicable the reference in The Silmarillion to Tilion’s steering ‘the island of the Moon’. The aged Elf Uolë Kúvion (whom ‘some indeed have named the Man in the Moon’) seems almost to have strayed in from another conception; his presence gives