The Book of Lost Tales, Part 1 - J. R. R. Tolkien [19]
I shall not attempt any analysis or offer any elucidation of the ideas embodied in the ‘Cottages of the Children’. The reader, however he interprets them, will in any case not need to be assisted in his perception of the personal and particular emotions in which all was still anchored.
As I have said, the conception of the coming of mortal children in sleep to the gardens of Valinor was soon to be abandoned in its entirety, and in the developed mythology there would be no place for it—still less for the idea that in some possible future day ‘the roads through Arvalin to Valinor shall be thronged with the sons and daughters of Men’.
Likewise, all the ‘elfin’ diminutiveness soon disappeared. The idea of the Cottage of the Children was already in being in 1915, as the poem You and Me shows; and it was in the same year, indeed on the same days of April, that Goblin Feet (or Cumaþ þá Nihtielfas) was written, concerning which my father said in 1971: ‘I wish the unhappy little thing, representing all that I came (so soon after) to fervently dislike, could be buried for ever.’* Yet it is to be observed that in early notes Elves and Men are said to have been ‘of a size’ in former days, and the smallness (and filminess and transparency) of the ‘fairies’ is an aspect of their ‘fading’, and directly related to the domination of Men in the Great Lands. To this matter I shall return later. In this connection, the diminutiveness of the Cottage is very strange, since it seems to be a diminutiveness peculiar to itself: Eriol, who has travelled for many days through Tol Eressëa, is astonished that the dwelling can hold so many, and he is told that all who enter it must be, or must become, very small. But Tol Eressëa is an island inhabited by Elves.
I give now three texts of the poem Kortirion among the Trees (later The Trees of Kortirion). The very earliest workings (November 1915) of this poem are extant,† and there are many subsequent texts. The prose introduction to the early form has been cited on pp. 25–6. A major revision was made in 1937, and another much later; by this time it was almost a different poem. Since my father sent it to Rayner Unwin in February 1962 as a possible candidate for inclusion in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, it seems virtually certain that the final version dates from that time.‡
I give the poem first in its pre-1937 form, when only slight changes had yet been made. In one of the earliest copies it bears a title in Old English: Cor Tirion pra béama on middes, and is ‘dedicated to Warwick’ but in another the second title is in Elvish (the second word is not perfectly legible): Narquelion la..tu y aldalin Kortirionwen (i.e. ‘Autumn (among) the trees of Kortirion’).
Kortirion among the Trees
The First Verses
O fading town upon a little hill,
Old memory is waning in thine ancient gates,
The robe gone gray, thine old heart almost still;
The castle only, frowning, ever waits
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And ponders how among the towering elms
The Gliding Water leaves these inland realms
And slips between long meadows to the western sea—
Still bearing downward over murmurous falls
One year and then another to the sea;
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And slowly thither have a many gone
Since first the fairies built Kortirion.
O spiry town upon a windy hill
With sudden-winding alleys shady-walled
(Where even now the peacocks pace a stately drill,
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Majestic, sapphirine, and emerald),
Behold thy girdle of a wide champain
Sunlit, and watered with a silver rain,
And richly wooded with a thousand whispering trees
That cast long shadows in many a bygone noon,
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And murmured many centuries in the breeze.
Thou art the city of the Land of Elms,
Alalminórë in the Faery Realms.
Sing of thy trees, old, old Kortirion!
Thine oaks, and maples with their tassels