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By Root 1140 0

forms had been devised and discarded, Iluin the northern Lamp and Ormal the southern). In The Silmarillion Ringil (containing ring ‘cold’) survived only as the name of Fingolfin’s sword, but Helcar is that of the Inland Sea which ‘stood where aforetime the roots of the mountain of Illuin had been’ (p. 49). In the present tale Helkar was the name of the southern, not the northern, pillar. Now helkar meant ‘utter cold’ (see the Appendix on Names), which shows that Helkar was originally in the extreme south (as it is in one of the two positions given for it on the little map, p. 81), just as Ringil was in the extreme north. In the tale there is no mention of the formation of Inland Seas at the fall of the Lamps; this idea appeared later, but it seems virtually certain that it arose from the story of the melting pillars of ice.

There is no later reference to the building of the Mountains of Valinor from great rocks gathered in Eruman / Arvalin, so that the region became flat and stoneless.

(iv) The Two Trees (pp. 71–3)

This earliest account of the uprising of the Two Trees illuminates some elements of later versions more concentrated in expression. The enduring feature that the ground beneath Silpion (Telperion) was ‘dappled with the shadows of his fluttering leaves’ (The Silmarillion p. 38) is seen to have had its origin in the ‘throbbing of the tree’s heart’. The conception of light as a liquid substance that ‘splashed upon the ground’, that ran in rivers and was poured in cauldrons, though not lost in the published work (pp. 38–9), is here more strongly and physically expressed. Some features were never changed, as the clustered flowers of Laurelin and the shining edges of its leaves.

On the other hand there are notable differences between this and the later accounts: above all perhaps that Laurelin was in origin the Eldar Tree. The Two Trees had here periods of twelve hours, not as later seven;* and the preparations of the Valar for the birth of the Trees, with all their detail of physical ‘magic’, were afterwards abandoned. The two great ‘cauldrons’ Kulullin and Silindrin survived in the ‘great vats like shining lakes’ in which Varda hoarded ‘the dews of Telperion and the rain that fell from Laurelin’ (ibid. p. 39), though the names disappeared, as did the need to ‘water’ the Trees with the light gathered in the vats or cauldrons—or at any rate it is not mentioned later. Urwen (‘Sun-maiden’) was the forebear of Arien, Maia of the Sun; and Tilion, steersman of the Moon in The Silmarillion, who ‘lay in dreams by the pools of Estë [Lórien’s wife], in Telperion’s flickering beams’, perhaps owes something to the figure of Silmo, whom Lórien loved.

As I noted earlier, ‘in the later evolution of the myths Vána sank down in relation to Nienna’, and here it is Vána and (Yavanna) Palúrien who are the midwives of the birth of the Trees, not as afterwards Yavanna and Nienna.

As regards the names of the Trees, Silpion was for long the name of the White Tree; Telperion did not appear till long after, and even then Silpion was retained and is mentioned in The Silmarillion (p. 38) as one of its names. Laurelin goes back to the beginning and was never changed, but its other name in the Lost Tales, Lindeloksë and other similar forms, was not retained.

(v) The Dwellings of the Valar (pp. 73 ff.)

This account of the mansions of the Valar was very largely lost in the subsequent versions. In the published work nothing is told of Manwë’s dwelling, save the bare fact that his halls were ‘above the everlasting snow, upon Oiolossë, the uttermost tower of Taniquetil’ (p. 26). Here now appears Sorontur King of Eagles, a visitor to Manwë’s halls (cf. The Silmarillion p. 110: ‘For Manwë to whom all birds are dear, and to whom they bring news upon Taniquetil from Middle-earth, had sent forth the race of Eagles’); he had in fact appeared already in the tale of The Fall of Gondolin, as ‘Thorndor [the Gnomish name] King of Eagles whom the Eldar name Ramandur’, Ramandur being subsequently emended to Sorontur.

Of Valmar and the dwellings of the