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By Root 1064 0

difficulty in any case, since we have just been told (p. 192) that Silmo could not sail in the Moonship because he was not of the children of the air and could not ‘cleanse his being of its earthwardness’.—An isolated heading ‘Uolë and Erinti’ in the little pocket-book used among things for suggestions of stories to be told (see p. 171) no doubt implies that a tale was preparing on the subject of Uolë cf. the Tale of Qorinórmi concerning Urwendi and Erinti’s brother Fionwë (p. 215). No traces of these tales are to be found and they were presumably never written. Another note in the pocket-book calls Uolë Mikúmi (the earlier name of Uolë Kúvion, see p. 198) ‘King of the Moon’ and a third refers to a poem ‘The Man in the Moon’ which is to be sung by Eriol, ‘who says he will sing them a song of a legend touching Uolë Mikúmi as Men have it’. My father wrote a poem about the Man in the Moon in March 1915, but if it was this that he was thinking of including it would have startled the company of Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva—and he would have had to change its references to places in England which were not yet in existence. Although it is very probable that he had something quite different in mind, I think it may be of interest to give this poem in an early form (see p. 204).

As the mythology evolved and changed, the Making of the Sun and Moon became the element of greatest difficulty; and in the published Silmarillion this chapter does not seem of a piece with much of the rest of the work, and could not be made to be so. Towards the end of his life my father was indeed prepared to dismantle much of what he had built, in the attempt to solve what he undoubtedly felt to be a fundamental problem.

Note on the order of the Tales

The development of the Lost Tales is here in fact extremely complex. After the concluding words of The Flight of the Noldoli, ‘the story of the darkening of Valinor was at an end’ (p. 169), my father wrote: ‘See on beyond in other books’, but in fact he added subsequently the short dialogue between Lindo and Eriol (‘Great was the power of Melko for ill…’) which is given at the end of The Flight of the Noldoli.

The page-numbering of the notebooks shows that the next tale was to be the Tale of Tinúviel, which is written in another book. This long story (to be given in Part II), the oldest extant version of ‘Beren and Lúthien’, begins with a long Link passage; and the curious thing is that this Link begins with the very dialogue between Lindo and Eriol just referred to, in almost identical wording, and this can be seen to be its original place; but here it was struck through.

I have mentioned earlier (p. 45) that in a letter written by my father in 1964 he said that he wrote The Music of the Ainur while working in Oxford on the staff of the Dictionary, a post that he took up in November 1918 and relinquished in the spring of 1920. In the same letter he said that he wrote ‘“The Fall of Gondolin” during sick-leave from the army in 1917’, and ‘the original version of the “Tale of Lúthien Tinúviel and Beren” later in the same year’. There is nothing in the manuscripts to suggest that the tales that follow The Music of the Ainur to the point we have now reached were not written consecutively and continuously from The Music, while my father was still in Oxford.

At first sight, then, there is a hopeless contradiction in the evidence: for the Link in question refers explicitly to the Darkening of Valinor, a tale written after his appointment in Oxford at the end of 1918, but is a link to the Tale of Tinúviel, which he said that he wrote in 1917. But the Tale of Tinúviel (and the Link that precedes it) is in fact a text in ink written over an erased pencilled original. It is, I think, certain that this rewriting of Tinúviel was considerably later. It was linked to The Flight of the Noldoli by the speeches of Lindo and Eriol (the link-passage is integral and continuous with the Tale of Tinúviel that follows it, and was not added afterwards). At this stage my father must have felt that the Tales need not necessarily be told