The Book of Lost Tales, Part 1 - J. R. R. Tolkien [136]
because of the Eldar that were faithful, and in the city of Tirion upon the green hill Finarfin yet ruled the remnant of the Noldor in the deep cleft of the mountains. For all those of elven-race, even the Vanyar and Ingwë their lord, must breathe at times the outer air and the wind that comes over the sea from the lands of their birth; and the Valar would not sunder the Teleri wholly from their kin.
The old motive of the Solosimpi (> Teleri) wishing this to be done (sufficiently strange, for did the Shoreland Pipers wish to abandon the shores?) disappeared in the general excision of their bitter resentment against the Noldoli, as did Ulmo’s refusal to aid them, and Ossë’s willingness to do so in Ulmo’s despite. The passage concerning the Magic Isles, made by Osse, is the origin of the conclusion of Chapter XI of The Silmarillion:
And in that time, which songs call Nurtalë Valinoréva, the Hiding of Valinor, the Enchanted Isles were set, and all the seas about them were filled with shadows and bewilderment. And these isles were strung as a net in the Shadowy Seas from the north to the south, before Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle, is reached by one sailing west. Hardly might any vessel pass between them, for in the dangerous sounds the waves sighed for ever upon dark rocks shrouded in mist. And in the twilight a great weariness came upon mariners and a loathing of the sea; but all that ever set foot upon the islands were there entrapped, and slept until the Change of the World.
It is clear from this passage in the tale that the Magic Isles were set to the east of the Shadowy Seas, though ‘the huge glooms…. stretched forth tongues of darkness towards them’ while in an earlier passage (p. 125) it is said that beyond Tol Eressëa (which was itself beyond the Magic Isles) ‘is the misty wall and those great sea-glooms beneath which lie the Shadowy Seas’. The later ‘Enchanted Isles’ certainly owe much as a conception to the Magic Isles, but in the passage just cited from The Silmarillion they were set in the Shadowy Seas and were in twilight. It is possible therefore that the Enchanted Isles derive also from the Twilit Isles (p. 68, 125).
The account of the works of Tulkas and Aulë in the northern regions (p. 210) does not read as perfectly in accord with what has been said previously, though a real contradiction is unlikely. On p. 166–7 it is plainly stated that there was a strip of water (Qerkaringa, the Chill Gulf) between the tip of the ‘Icefang’ (Helkaraksë) and the Great Lands at the time of the crossing of the Noldoli. In this same passage the Icefang is referred to as ‘a narrow neck, which the Gods after destroyed’. The Noldoli were able to cross over to the Great Lands despite ‘that gap at the far end’ (p. 168) because in the great cold the sound had become filled with unmoving ice. The meaning of the present passage may be, however, that by the destruction of the Icefang a much wider gap was made, so that there was now no possibility of any crossing by that route.
Of the three ‘roads’ made by Lórien, Oromë, and Mandos there is no vestige in my father’s later writing. The Rainbow is never mentioned, nor is there ever any hint of an explanation of how Men and Elves pass to the halls of Mandos. But it is difficult to interpret this conception of the ‘roads’—to know to what extent there was a purely figurative content in the idea.
For the road of Lórien, Olóre Mallë the Path of Dreams, which is described by Vairë in The Cottage of Lost Play, see p. 18, 27 ff. There Vairë told that Olóre Mallë came from the lands of Men, that it was ‘a lane of deep banks and great overhanging hedges, beyond which stood many tall trees wherein a perpetual whisper seemed to live’, and that from this lane a high gate led