The Book of Lost Tales, Part 1 - J. R. R. Tolkien [138]
So here Ulmo says that neither fish nor boat will swim in its waters ‘to whom I have not spoken the great word that Ilúvatar said to me and bound them with the spell’.
At the outer edge of Vai stands the Wall of Things, which is described as ‘deep-blue’ (p. 215). Valinor is nearer to the Wall of Things than is the eastern shore of the Great Lands, which must mean that Vai is narrower in the West than in the East. In the Wall of Things the Gods at this time made two entrances, in the West the Door of Night and in the East the Gates of Morn; and what lies beyond these entrances in the Wall is called ‘the starless vast’ and ‘the outer dark’. It is not made clear how the outer air (‘the dark and tenuous realm of Vaitya that is outside all’, p. 181) is to be related to the conception of the Wall of Things or the Outer Dark. In the rejected preliminary text of this tale my father wrote at first (see note 16 above) that in the East ‘the Wall of Things is lower’, so that when the Sun returns from the Outer Dark it does not enter the eastern sky by a door but ‘rides above’ the Wall. This was then changed, and the idea of the Door in the Eastern Wall, the Gates of Morn, introduced; but the implication seems clear that the Walls were originally conceived like the walls of terrestrial cities, or gardens—walls with a top a ‘ring-fence’. In the cosmological essay of the 1930s, the Ambarkanta, the Walls are quite other:
About the World are the Ilurambar, or Walls of the World. They are as ice and glass and steel, being above all imagination of the Children of Earth cold, transparent, and hard. They cannot be seen, nor can they be passed, save by the Door of Night.
Within these walls the Earth is globed: above, below, and upon all sides is Vaiya, the Enfolding Ocean. But this is more like to sea below the Earth and more like to air above the Earth.
See further p. 86.
The Tale of Qorinómi (p. 215) was never in fact told—in the first version of the present tale (see note 15 above) it seems that Vairë would have liked to tell it, but felt the beady eye of the captious Ailios upon her. In the early Qenya word-list Qorinómi is defined as ‘the name of the Sun’, literally ‘Drowned in the Sea’, the name being a derivative from a root meaning ‘choke, suffocate, drown’, with this explanation: ‘The Sun, after fleeing from the Moon, dived into the sea and wandered in the caverns of the Oaritsi.’ Oaritsi is not given in the word-list, but oaris = ‘mermaid’. Nothing is said in the Lost Tales of the Moon giving chase to the Sun; it was the stars of Varda that Ilinsor, ‘huntsman of the firmament’, pursued, and he was ‘jealous of the supremacy of the Sun’ (p. 195).
The conclusion of Vairë’s tale, ‘The Weaving of Days, Months, and Years’, shows (as it seems to me) my father exploring a mode of mythical imagining that was for him a dead end. In its formal and explicit symbolism it stands quite apart from the general direction of his thought, and he excised it without trace. It raises, also, a strange question. In what possible sense were the Valar ‘outside Time’ before the weavings of Danuin, Ranuin, and Fanuin? In The Music of the Ainur (p. 55) Ilúvatar said: ‘even now the world unfolds and its history begins’ in the final version (The Silmarillion p. 20) it is said that
The Great Music had been but the growth and flowering of thought in the Timeless Halls, and the Vision only a foreshowing; but now they had entered in at the beginning of Time…
(It is also said in The Silmarillion (p. 39) that when the Two Trees of Valinor began to shine there began the Count of Time; this refers to the beginning of the measurement of Time from the waxing and the waning of the Trees.)
In the present tale the works of Danuin, Ranuin, and Fanuin are said to be the cause of ‘the subjection of all things within the