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It is important to see, then, that (if my general interpretation is correct) in The Cottage of Lost Play Eriol comes to Tol Eressëa in the time after the Fall of Gondolin and the march of the Elves of Kôr into the Great Lands for the defeat of Melko, when the Elves who had taken part in it had returned over the sea to dwell in Tol Eressëa; but before the time of the ‘Faring Forth’ and the removal of Tol Eressëa to the geographical position of England. This latter element was soon lost in its entirety from the developing mythology.

Of the ‘Cottage’ itself it must be said at once that very little light can be cast on it from other writings of my father’s; for the entire conception of the Children who went to Valinor was to be abandoned almost without further trace. Later in the Lost Tales, however, there are again references to Olóre Mallë. After the description of the Hiding of Valinor, it is told that at the bidding of Manwë (who looked on the event with sorrow) the Valar Oromë and Lórien devised strange paths from the Great Lands to Valinor, and the way of Lórien’s devising was Olórë Mallë the Path of Dreams; by this road, when ‘Men were yet but new-wakened on the earth’, ‘the children of the fathers of the fathers of Men’ came to Valinor in their sleep (pp. 211, 213). There are two further mentions in tales to be given in Part II: the teller of the Tale of Tinúviel (a child of Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva) says that she saw Tinúviel and her mother with her own eyes ‘when journeying by the Way of Dreams in long past days’, and the teller of the Tale of Turambar says that he ‘trod Olórë Mallë in the days before the fall of Gondolin’.

There is also a poem on the subject of the Cottage of Lost Play, which has many of the details of the description in the prose text. This poem, according to my father’s notes, was composed at 59 St John’s Street, Oxford, his undergraduate lodgings, on 27–28 April 1915 (when he was 23). It exists (as is constantly the case with the poems) in several versions, each modified in detail from the preceding one, and the end of the poem was twice entirely rewritten. I give it here first in the earliest form, with changes made to this in notes at the foot of the page, and then in the final version, the date of which cannot be certainly determined. I suspect that it was very much later—and may indeed have been one of the revisions made to old poems when the collection The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962) was being prepared, though it is not mentioned in my father’s correspondence on that subject.

The original title was: You and Me / and the Cottage of Lost Play (with an Old English rendering Pæt húsincel gamenes), which was changed to Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva, The Cottage of Lost Play; in the final version it is The Little House of Lost Play: Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva. The verse-lines are indented as in the original texts.

You & Me

and the Cottage of Lost Play

You and me*—we know that land

And often have been there

In the long old days, old nursery days,*

A dark child and a fair.

5

Was it down the paths of firelight dreams

In winter cold and white,

Or in the blue-spun twilit hours

Of little early tucked-up beds

In drowsy summer night,

10

That You and I got lost in Sleep

And met each other there—

Your dark hair on your white nightgown,

And mine was tangled fair?

We wandered shyly hand in hand,

15

Or rollicked in the fairy sand*

And gathered pearls and shells in pails,

While all about the nightingales

Were singing in the trees.

We dug for silver with our spades

20

By little inland sparkling seas,

Then ran ashore through sleepy glades

And down a warm and winding lane

We never never found again*

Between high whispering trees.

25

The air was neither night or day,*

But faintly dark with softest light,

When first there glimmered into sight

The Cottage of Lost Play.

’Twas builded very very old*

30

White, and thatched with straws of gold,

And pierced with peeping lattices

That looked toward the