"To these words did Eriol's mind so lean, for it seemed to him that a new world and very fair was opening to him, that he heard naught else till he was bidden by Vairë to be seated."
And as Eriol gets his first introduction to the world of the Lost Tales (not yet called known as Middle-earth), so do we, and his reaction reminds me of my first forays into Middle-earth in
The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings: a new world and very fair opening to me. Mind you, even to the Middle-earth veteran, coming to the Book of Lost Tales can be a bit like coming on a new world, so different yet similar is it to what would come later.
At the meta-level, "The Cottage of Lost Play" establishes the forms that will be the norm through Volumes I & II of the HoME: Tolkien's original text, with a brief introduction, followed by footnotes, followed by a list of name-changes, followed by Christopher Tolkien's commentary on the text, then ending with related poetry. I feel that this last point should be highlighted somewhat. Properly speaking, the poems included with
The Book of Lost Tales are not part of the Lost Tales; rather, they are CT's first steps towards the HoME as a comprehensive series of ALL the materials related to Middle-earth (even if he will fall slightly short--the Osanwë Kenta, for example, and sundry philological notes would not make it into the HoME).
Unlike all the chapters of the Book of Lost Tales that will follow, "The Cottage of Lost Play" has no direct correlative part in the published
Silmarillion, because it fulfills the function that Christopher Tolkien thinks to have been the chief mistake in his handling of the later Silm: it fulfills the role of the framing device. Eriol is the interlocutor between us and the tales of the ancient world, and this chapter shows how the device will be used: all the stories shall be TOLD to Eriol. This is a familiar trope from the LotR, where Aragorn tells the tale of Beren and Lúthien, where Bilbo tells the tale of Eärendil, where Legolas tells the tale of Amroth and Nimrodel, and where Sam and Frodo look forward to when we shall hear their tale (from Tolkien, as it will happen).
There are other tropes in this chapter that immediately--and perhaps more obviously--recall The LotR. For example, the Cottage of Lost Play itself seems very much like a type of Rivendell. It is easy to read the description of Rivendell in
The Hobbit as applying to the Cottage: the "house was perfect whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all." In particular, the routine of the household, which we see in "Many Meetings" after Frodo finally wakes, seems familiar. In the LotR, Elrond's household goes to the Hall of Fire to hear tales told after a great feast, while in the Cottage, Lindo and Vairë's household goes to the Room of Logs (again, the idea of fire) to hear tales after a great feast.
The Lonely Isle itself seems familiar, which is not what you would necessarily expect coming from the 1977 Silm--very little action is set there and what little there is told very perfunctorily; the reader is left to imagine the isle as desired or, if you're me, to imagine it hardly at all. But the Lonely Isle of the BoLT is quite the opposite: rather than a periphery location of little concern in the tales, it is literally and figuratively at the centre of the tales. Not only is this where the Tales are told, but the Isle seemed destined to play a role in the future of the tales (as did Eriol himself). Regarding the centrality of the isle, here is what is said of Kortirion, its capital:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien
Know then that today, or more like 'twas yesterday, you crossed the borders of that region that is called Alalminórë or the "Land of Elms," which the Gnomes call Gar Lossion, or the "Place of Flowers." Now this region is accounted the centre of the island, and its fairest realm: but above all the towns and villages of Alalminórë is held Koromas, or as some call it, Kortirion, and this city is the one wherein you find yourself. Both because it stands at the heart of the island, and from the height of its mighty tower, do those that speak of it with love call it the Citadel of the Island, or of the world itself.
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--emphasis added
It is hard to imagine the later Tol Eressëa, land of the resettled Exiles, as containing "the Citadel... of the world itself"--and equally hard for me to imagine the Elves of the later legendarium claiming it as such! But the Elves here do, and we are given such a more in-depth picture of the island that it seems quite a bit more possible. And as far as that picture goes--and the reason I say it seems familiar--the Lonely Isle reminds me a lot of the Shire. No doubt this is because both the Shire and the Lonely Isle are written by Tolkien as Englands, of a sort. This is part of the whole purpose of the Lost Tales, at least at one point in its history: Eriol (from Heligoland, the European homeland of the later Angles) is a proto-Anglo-Saxon, coming on England--and faërie, for it is faërie--for the first time.
Although "The Cottage of Lost Play" is about the framework for the tales rather than the tales themselves, Tolkien does not start here--as the published Silmarillion does--from the very beginning. Instead, we get several references to events of the Tales, events we (like Eriol) are not to know the fullness of until much later. Among these I would include the references to Eärendel, especially in the backstory of Littleheart the Gong-warden: "He sailed in Wingilot with Eärendel in that last voyage wherein they sought for Kôr. It was the ringing of this Gong on the Shadowy Seas that awoke the Sleeper in the Tower of Pearl that stands far out to west in the Twilit Isles."
Kôr, mentioned in that text, is another lodestone pointing to a major element of the BoLT legendarium, and the account of the Koromas/Kortirion leads to talk of Meril-i-Turinqi and her family, which is rather more family that Ingwë is given in the later texts, and his part seems to have been larger and more rebellious in the hinted at story of "the days [when] hearing the lament of the world Inwë led them forth to the lands of Men"--our first glimpse of what would come to be called the War of Wrath.
And then of course there is
limpë, the drink of the Eldar, which Eriol does not get to drink.
Limpë will prove more important to Eriol's story (unwritten though it is) than
miruvor did to Frodo's, but other than being marvellous drinks of the Elves, the two could not be more common. Indeed, I see more similarity with [i]lembas[/b]. Both lembas and limpë are reserved to the Queen (Galadriel--or Melian rather, since this is information from the notes to the Narn-i-Chîn-Húrin--in the first case; Meril-i-Turinqi in the latter) and both have what could be called metaphysical effects. But the similarity ends there. I don't always like the comparison, but I am willing to grant that there are grounds for saying lembas is a type of the Eucharist; there is no way I can imagine to make a similar claim for limpë--unless one wants to say that it is the Forbidden Fruit of Eden and that Eriol is seeking the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Even more difficult to imagine than limpë in Rivendell or Lothlórien is the fact that the inhabitants have to shrink in order to enter the Cottage. This is a bit of whimsy (CT makes a direct comparison to "Goblin Feet" in the commentary) that would later be almost antithetical to Tolkien.
One minor question: when did Eriol learn the elf-tongue? Or, to put it another way, what language are they speaking in this tale? I assume--and I might be drawing off half-digested knowledge of later chapters--that they are speaking Elven (what would later be called Quenya), but as far as this chapter goes, there's no real evidence that I recall. For that matter, the Elves seem remarkably blasé about this human wandering around in their midst.
No doubt I should keep in mind that the history of the Lonely Isle was quite differently conceived then and that Númenor and its cataclysm had not even been conceived, but all the same, from his own complete curiosity, it does not seem to me that Eriol had ever heard anything about this isle and there is nothing to suggest that other Men are abroad--even if the barriers to their arrival are not at all as lofty as those that Gandalf brings Bilbo and Frodo through in the later conception.
What if?
There are all sorts of "what ifs" one could consider here, especially regarding what a similar framework might have looked like in a post-LotR Silm. As already noted, the Lonely Isle became much more difficult for mere mortals to reach--and even if you got there, good luck getting BACK to Middle-earth. A far more likely approach, if Tolkien wanted to preserve the mood might have been to set it at Rivendell.
A major note of what-if lingers about the poem. "The Trees of Kortirion," CT tells us, looks to have been revised nearly a half-century after its original composition, probably about 1962 for a possible inclusion in
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. And we're not talking about the ORIGINAL version here, I want to emphasize; we're talking about a version completely overhauled in the wake of the LotR, which--had it been published--would have had equal canonical stature to any of the other Bombadil poems (I give them coëval status with
The Hobbit myself).
This is astounding--to me, anyway--because the revised, ca.1962, poem is still about a city titled "Kortirion." Is this still the Elvish name for Warwick-in-England? Or is it still the central city of Tol Eressëa? What about the whole "Kor" part of its name? Kôr, we will see more fully later, was the name in the BoLT of the city that the Silmarillion calls Tirion. Did Tolkien still envision "Kor" existing, perhaps as an alternate name for Tirion? Or is it simply part of the name of this other city, with a different--and nowhere elaborated--etymological history? It's hard to imagine that Tolkien didn't at least have a private half-answer in his thoughts to this question.
I also have another question to ponder--assuming there isn't enough discussion-meat already in this post--one comes down to linguistic taste: how do you feel about the Book of Lost Tales terminology? And I don't mean the prose here (though that is far game to discuss); I'm thinking more of the vocabulary: the use of "fairies" as a synonym for "Elves," the use of "gnomes" at all. I get a huge kick out of Tombo the gong myself, though it does not "feel" very Middle-earth to me.