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By Root 1105 0

to the Cottage of the Children or of the Play of Sleep. This was not far from Kôr, and to it came ‘the children of the fathers of the fathers of Men’ the Eldar guided them into the Cottage and its garden if they could, ‘lest they strayed into Kór and became enamoured of the glory of Valinor’. The accounts in the two tales seem to be in general agreement, though it is difficult to understand the words in the present passage ‘it ran past the Cottage of the Children of the Earth and thence down the “lane of whispering elms” until it reached the sea’. It is very notable that still at this stage in the development of the mythology, when so much more had been written since the coming of Eriol to Tol Eressëa, the conception of the children of Men coming in sleep by a mysterious ‘road’ to a cottage in Valinor had by no means fallen away.

In the account of Oromë’s making of the Rainbow-bridge, the noose that he cast caught on the summit of the great mountain Kalormë (‘Sunrising-hill’) in the remotest East. This mountain is seen on the ‘World-Ship’ drawing, p. 84.

The story that Vairë named ‘The Haven of the Sun’ (p. 213 ff.) provides the fullest picture of the structure of the world that is to be found in the earliest phase of the mythology. The Valar, to be sure, seem strangely ignorant on this subject—the nature of the world that came into being so largely from their own devising, if they needed Ulmo to acquaint them with such fundamental truths. A possible explanation of this ignorance may be found in the radical difference in the treatment of the Creation of the World between the early and later forms of The Music of the Ainur. I have remarked earlier (p. 62) that originally the Ainur’s first sight of the world was already in its actuality, and Ilúvatar said to them: ‘even now the world unfolds and its history begins’ whereas in the developed form it was a vision that was taken away from them, and only given existence in the word of Ilúvatar: Eä! Let these things Be! It is said in The Silmarillion (p. 20) that

when the Valar entered into Eä they were at first astounded and at a loss, for it was as if naught was yet made which they had seen in vision, and all was but on point to begin and yet unshaped…

and there follows (p. 21–2) an account of the vast labours of the Valar in the actual ‘construction’ of the world:

They built lands and Melkor destroyed them; valleys they delved and Melkor raised them up; mountains they carved and Melkor threw them down; seas they hollowed and Melkor spilled them…

In the old version there is none of this, and one gains the impression (though nothing is explicit) that the Valar came into a world that was already ‘made’, and unknown to them (‘the Gods stalked north and south and could see little; indeed in the deepest of these regions they found great cold and solitude…’, p. 69). Although the conception of the world was indeed derived in large measure from their own playing in the Music, its reality came from the creative act of Ilúvatar (‘We would have the guarding of those fair things of our dreams, which of thy might have now attained to reality’, p. 57); and the knowledge possessed by the Valar of the actual properties and dimensions of their habitation was correspondingly smaller (so we may perhaps assume) than it was afterwards conceived to be.

But this is to lean rather heavily on the matter. More probably, the ignorance of the Valar is to be attributed to their curious collective isolation and indifference to the world beyond their mountains that is so much emphasized in this tale.

However this may be, Ulmo at this time informed the Valar that the whole world is an Ocean, Vai, on which the Earth floats, ‘upheld by the word of Ilúvatar’ and all the seas of the Earth, even that which divides Valinor from the Great Lands, are hollows in the Earth’s surface, and are thus distinct from Vai, which is of another nature. All this we have already seen (p. 84 ff.); and in an earlier tale something has been said (p. 68) of the nature of the upholding waters:

Beyond Valinor I have never seen