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In this ‘Tale’, also, many specific features of less general import make their appearance; and many of them were to survive. Manwë, called ‘lord of Gods and Elves and Men’, is surnamed Súlimo, ‘ruler of the airs and wind’ he is clad in sapphires, and hawks of penetrating sight fly from his dwelling on Taniquetil (The Silmarillion p. 40); he loves especially the Teleri (the later Vanyar), and from him they received their gifts of poetry and song; and his spouse is Varda, Queen of the Stars.

Manwë, Melko, Ulmo, and Aulë are marked out as ‘the four great ones’ ultimately the great Valar, the Aratar, came to be numbered nine, but there was much shifting in the membership of the hierarchy before this was reached. The characteristic concerns of Aulë, and his particular association with the Noldoli, emerge here as they were to remain, though there is attributed to him a delight in ‘tongues and alphabets’, whereas in The Silmarillion (p. 39), while this is not denied, it seems to be implied that this was rather the peculiar endowment and skill of the Noldorin Elves; later in the Lost Tales (p. 141) it is said that Aulë himself ‘aided by the Gnomes contrived alphabets and scripts’. Ulmo, specially associated with the Solosimpi (the later Teleri), is here presented as more ‘fain of his honour and jealous of his power’ than Manwë and he dwells in Vai. Vai is an emendation of Ulmonan; but this is not simply a replacement of one name by another: Ulmonan was the name of Ulmo’s halls, which were in Vai, the Outer Ocean. The significance of Vai, an important element in the original cosmology, will emerge in the next chapter.

Other divine beings now appear. Manwë and Varda have offspring, Fionwë-Úrion and Erinti. Erinti later became Ilmarë ‘handmaid of Varda’ (The Silmarillion p. 30), but nothing was ever told of her (see p. 202). Fionwë, his name long afterwards changed to Eönwë, endured to become the Herald of Manwë, when the idea of ‘the Children of the Valar’ was abandoned. Beings subordinate to Ulmo, Salmar, Ossë, and Ónen (later Uinen) appear; though these all survived in the pantheon, the conception of Maiar did not emerge for many years, and Ossë was long numbered among the Valar. The Valar are here referred to as ‘Gods’ (indeed when Eriol asked ‘are they the Gods?’ Lindo replied that they were, p. 45), and this usage survived until far on in the development of the mythology.

The idea of Elvish rebirth in their own children is here formally stated, and the different fates of Elves and Men. In this connection, the following curious matter may be mentioned. Early in the text just given (p. 53) occurs the sentence: ‘It is said that a mightier [music] far shall be woven before the seat of Ilúvatar by the choirs of both Ainur and the sons of Men after the Great End’ and in the concluding sentence of the text: ‘Yet while the sons of Men will after the passing of things of a certainty join in the Second Music of the Ainur, what Ilúvatar has devised for the Eldar beyond the world’s end he has not revealed even to the Valar, and Melko has not discovered it.’ Now in the first revision of the Ainulindalë (which dates from the 1930s) the first of these sentences was changed to read: ‘…by the choirs of the Ainur and the Children of Ilúvatar after the end of days’ whereas the second remained, in this essential, unchanged. This remained the case right through to the final version. It is possible that the change in the first passage was unintentional, the substitution of another common phrase, and that this was never subsequently picked up. However, in the published work (pp. 15, 42) I left the two passages as they stand.

III

THE COMING OF THE VALAR AND THE BUILDING OF VALINOR

As I have already noticed, the next tale is linked to The Music of the Ainur without narrative break; and it has no title in the text. It is contained in three separate books (the Lost Tales were written in the most bewildering fashion, with sections from different tales interleaved with each other); and on the cover