The Book of Lost Tales, Part 1 - J. R. R. Tolkien [183]
‡ In his letter my father said: ‘The Trees is too long and too ambitious, and even if considered good enough would probably upset the boat.’
* With the name Narquelion (which appears also in the title in Elvish of the original poem, see p. 32) cf. Narquelië ‘Sun-fading’, name of the tenth month in Quenya (The Lord of the Rings, Appendix D).
* Cf. hrívë ‘winter’, The Lord of the Rings, Appendix D.
* Mettanyë contains metta ‘ending’, as in Ambar-metta, the ending of the world (The Return of the King, VI.5).
† In Chapter 3, A Short Rest, ‘swords of the High Elves of the West’ replaced ‘swords of the elves that are now called Gnomes’; and in Chapter 8, Flies and Spiders, the phrase ‘There the Light-elves and the Deep-elves and the Sea-elves went and lived for ages’ replaced ‘There the Light-elves and the Deep-elves (or Gnomes) and the Sea-elves lived for ages’.
* Two words are in question: (1) Greek gnm ‘thought, intelligence’ (and in the plural ‘maxims, sayings’, whence the English word gnome, a maxim or aphorism, and adjective gnomic); and (2) the word gnome used by the 16th-century writer Paracelsus as a synonym of pygmaeus. Paracelsus ‘says that the beings so called have the earth as their element…through which they move unobstructed as fish do through water, or birds and land animals through air’ (Oxford English Dictionary s.v. Gnome2). The O.E.D. suggests that whether Paracelsus invented the word himself or not it was intended to mean ‘earth-dweller’, and discounts any connection with the other word Gnome. (This note is repeated from that in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, p. 449; see the letter (no. 239) to which it refers.)
† The name Finrod in the passage at the end of Appendix F is now in error: Finarfin was Finrod, and Finrod was Inglor, until the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, and in this instance the change was overlooked.
* The actual title of this tale is Tuor and the Exiles of Gondolin, but my father referred to it as The Fall of Gondolin and I do likewise.
* On the other hand it is possible that by ‘the lost bands’ he did in fact mean the Elves who were lost on the journey from the Waters of Awakening (see p. 118); i.e. the implication is: ‘if the sundering of the speech of the Noldoli from that of the Eldar who remained in Valinor is very deep, how much more so must be the speech of those who never crossed the sea’.
* For comparison with the published text in The Silmarillion it should be noted that some of the matter of the early version does not appear in the Ainulindalë itself but at the end of Chapter 1, Of the Beginning of Days (pp. 39–42).
* Cf. The Silmarillion p. 30: ‘With the Valar came other spirits whose being also began before the world, of the same order as the Valar but of less degree. These are the Maiar, the people of the Valar, and their servants and helpers. Their number is not known to the Elves, and few have names in any of the tongues of the Children of Ilúvatar.’ An earlier version of this passage reads: ‘Many lesser spirits they [the Valar] brought in their train, both great and small, and some of these Men have confused with the Eldar or Elves; but wrongly, for they were before the world, but Elves and Men awoke first in the world after the coming of the Valar.’
* In The Silmarillion (p. 28) the halls of Mandos stood ‘westward in Valinor’. The final text of the Valaquenta actually has ‘northward’, but I changed this to ‘westward’ in the published work (and similarly ‘north’ to ‘west’ on p. 52) on the basis of the statement in the same passage that Nienna’s halls are ‘west of West, upon the borders of the world’, but are near to those of Mandos. In other passages it is clear that Mandos’ halls were conceived as standing on the shores of the Outer Sea; cf. The Silmarillion