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54 Elvenfolk] emendation made on the text of the final version, replacing ‘fairies’.

The first part of this story of The Chaining of Melko came to have a very different form in later versions, where (The Silmarillion p. 35) it was during the sojourn of the Valar on the Isle of Almaren, under the light of the Two Lamps, that ‘the seeds that Yavanna had sown began swiftly to sprout and to burgeon, and there arose a multitude of growing things great and small, mosses and grasses and great ferns, and trees whose tops were crowned with cloud’ and that ‘beasts came forth and dwelt in the grassy plains, or in the rivers and the lakes, or walked in the shadows of the woods’. This was the Spring of Arda; but after the coming of Melkor and the delving of Utumno ‘green things fell sick and rotted, and rivers were choked with weeds and slime, and fens were made, rank and poisonous, the breeding place of flies; and forests grew dark and perilous, the haunts of fear; and beasts became monsters of horn and ivory and dyed the earth with blood’. Then came the fall of the Lamps, and ‘thus ended the Spring of Arda’ (p. 37). After the building of Valinor and the arising of the Two Trees ‘Middle-earth lay in a twilight beneath the stars’ (p. 39), and Yavanna and Oromë alone of the Valar returned there at times: ‘Yavanna would walk there in the shadows, grieving because the growth and promise of the Spring of Arda was stayed. And she set a sleep upon many things that had arisen in the Spring, so that they should not age, but should wait for a time of awakening that yet should be’ (p. 47). ‘But already the oldest living things had arisen: in the seas the great weeds, and on earth the shadow of great trees; and in the valleys of the night-clad hills there were dark creatures old and strong.’

In this earliest narrative, on the other hand, there is no mention of the beginning of growth during the time when the Lamps shone (see p. 69), and the first trees and low plants appeared under Yavanna’s spells in the twilight after their overthrow. Moreover in the last sentence of this tale ‘seeds were sown’, in that time of ‘quiet dusk’ while Melko was chained, ‘that waited only for the light to come’. Thus in the early story Yavanna sows in the dark with a view (it seems) to growth and flowering in later days of sunlight, whereas in all the subsequent versions the goddess in the time of darkness sows no more, but rather lays a sleep on many things that had arisen beneath the light of the Lamps in the Spring of Arda. But both in the early tale and in The Silmarillion there is a suggestion that Yavanna foresees that light will come in the end to the Great Lands, to Middle-earth.

The conception of a flowing, liquid light in the airs of Earth is again very marked, and it seems that in the original idea the twilight ages of the world east of the sea were still illumined by the traces of this light (‘Seldom now falls the shimmering rain as it was used, and there reigns a gloom lit with pale streaks’, p. 98) as well as by the stars of Varda, even though ‘the Gods have gathered so much of that light that had before flowed about the airs’ (ibid.).

The renewed cosmic violence is conceivably the precursor of the great Battle of the Powers in the later mythology (The Silmarillion p. 51); but in this earliest tale Melko’s upheavals are the cause of the Valar’s visitation, whereas the Battle of the Powers, in which the shape of Middle-earth was changed, resulted from it. In The Silmarillion it was the discovery of the newly-awakened Elves by Oromë that led the Valar to the assault on Utumno.

In its rich narrative detail, as in its ‘primitive’ air, the tale told by Meril-i-Turinqi of the capture of Melko bears little relation to the later narrative; while the tone of the encounter at Utumna, and the treacherous shifts of the Valar to ensnare him, is foreign to it likewise. But some elements survived: the chain Angainor forged by Aulë (if not the marvellous metal tilkal with its