Quote:
Originally Posted by Belegorn
The rising of the Sun was the start of the 1st Age, into which Men were come. There were Ages before that, but this was before the Sun was made.
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This is true in the
Silmarillion as first written and also in the
Silmarillion as published by Christopher Tolkien. However when setting up the
Silmarillion material when writing
The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien changed this. See the first four lines of the poem “The World was young, the mountains green” on page 315:
The world was young, the mountains green,
No stain yet on the Moon was seen,
No words were laid on stream or stone
When Durin woke and walked alone.
In the standard
Silmarillion chronology these events occurred long before Sun and Moon were created from the last fruit and flower of the Two Trees.
Gandalf later sings a short poem about the Ents (emphasis mine) on page 544:
Ere iron was found or tree was hewn,
When young was mountain under moon;
Ere ring was made, or wrought was woe,
It walked the forests long ago.
Here the moon predates the first hewing of trees, presumably by Elves.
Tolkien had originally written in
The Hobbit:
In the Wide World the Wood-elves lingered in the twilight before the raising of the Sun and Moon; and afterwards they wandered in the forests that grew beneath the sunrise.
In the revision of 1966 this was changed, removing all mention of a “raising of the Sun and Moon”:
In the Wide World the Wood-elves lingered in the twilight of our Sun and Moon, but loved best the stars; and they wandered in the great forests that grew tall in lands that are now lost.
In the last three volumes of the HoME series the Sun and Moon are in existence in all accounts if Middle-earth from earliest times, save in accounts attributed to the “Quenta Silmarillion” or the “Grey Annals”. The
Silmarillion is here imagined as a partially inaccurate mythology partially invented by Men.
In
Morgoth’s Ring (HoME X), Christopher Tolkien writes as Note 19:
In other scribbled notes (written at the same time as text II and constituting a part of that manuscript) my father wrote that Varda gave the holy light received in gift from Ilúvatar (see p. 380) not only to the Sun and to the Two Trees but also to ‘the significant Star’. The meaning of this is nowhere explained. Beside it he wrote Signifier, and many experimental Elvish names, as Taengyl, Tengyl, Tannacolli or Tankol, Tainacolli; also a verbal root tana ‘show, indicate’; tanna ‘sign’; and kolla ‘borne, worn especially a vestment or cloak’, with the note ‘Sindikoll-o is masculinized’.
It seems to me that this “significant Star” was likely intended by Tolkien to have been the planet Venus, the brightest regularly seen object in the sky next to the Sun and Moon. The story that Eärendil became with his ship the planet Venus was intended to become a further mythical inaccuracy in the
Silmarillion account of Eärendil’s fate, similar to the mythical account that the Sun and Moon were in origin the last fruit and flower of the Two Trees.
Note that in all
Silmarillion accounts Eärendil’s heavenly ship is identical with his earthly ship Vingilot in which Eärendil “was lifted up even into the oceans of heaven” and which he sails through the air to his battle with the dragon Ancalagon the Black. However in Bilbo’s poem “Eärendel was a mariner”:
A ship then new they built for him
of mithril and of elven-glass
with shining prow; no shaven oar
nor sail she bore on silver mast:
the Silmaril as lantern light
and banner bright with living flame
to gleam thereon by Elbereth
herself was set, who thither came
and wings immortal made for him,
and laid on him undying doom,
to sail the shoreless skies and come
behind the Sun and light of Moon.