The Book of Lost Tales Part I: A Readthrough

[Formendacil]

Not so much discussion this past week--if the comparison to Hesiod's Theogony holds, that doesn't surprise me. The list of the gods is important, but not always exciting...

I am a micron shy of being absolutely certain here, but it definitely seems to me that Christopher Tolkien has abridged the text at the start of the Link here, picking up after some recap with "And a marvel of wizardry liveth...". And unless I absolutely missed it somewhere, CT does not explain why he's done it. I assume it's because the text rambles or isn't up to his father's usual standards or SOMETHING. I'm going with the theory that everything it contains will be repeated later in the same Link, which is rather long. It's an odd lacuna, regardless, given the thoroughness with which CT usually presents new texts. In later volumes, it is true, he will often omit passages or texts that are substantially the same as later or earlier versions printed elsewhere, but there's no other.

In the midst of this redacted passage, Eriol hears the music of Tinfang Warble, a character I really don't know how to introduce other than to say "he's the Book of Lost Tales' closest parallel to Tom Bombadil." It's not a perfect parallel, obviously. Tinfang Warble is not an intentional enigma, though the way Vairë describes him at first does not seem that far removed from some of theories out there about Tom:

Originally Posted by The Book of Lost Tales

"There be none," said Vairë, "not even of the Solosimpi, who can rival him therein, albeit those same pipers claim him as their kin; yet 'tis said everywhere that this same spirit is neither wholly of the Valar nor of the Eldar, but is half a fay of the woods and dells, one of the great companies of the children of Palúrien, and half a Gnome or Shoreland Piper.

This half-blood lineage sounds a lot like Thingol and Melian, and in a footnote here, CT shows that Tolkien add to the text to suggest just that--but then he struck it through, removing the reference to Tinwë Linto and Wendelin. Of course, whether Tolkien removed it because it was inconsistent with how he wanted to present the story at that time, or whether because he'd decided against Tinfang Warble being the sibling of Tinúviel, is another matter.

Tinfang Warble fascinates me because he is emblematic to me of the differences between the BoLT and the later legendarium. From his name to his improbable ability to come and go between the Lonely Isle and the Great Lands to his eerie, "fairy" quality, he is nearly impossible to imagine in the later legendarium. But that's where he reminds me of Tom Bombadil--because if you read the Silmarillion and then told me that a singing genius loci in yellow boots would make a major, three chapter contribution to the tale of the War of the Ring, it'd be equally hard to imagine.

Anyway, Tinfang's music leads to Eriol's desire to satiate the longing that music brings, by drinking limpë, and for this he has go into Kortirion and get the lady's permission.

The queen is a descendant of Ingil son of Inwë (making the Royal House of the first company of the Eldar considerably larger than it will later become), and this relation to In(g)wë is not the most important way she has parallels to the later character of Galadriel (Galadriel's father, Finarfin, was the son of Indis, a Vanya of Ingwë's family--the exact relationship is not one Tolkien expressed consistently--and the source of her golden hair.) Like Galadriel, Meril is held in deep reverence by her people and her role in the story is to probe the hearts and desires of the protagonists.

In short, Meril tells Eriol that he can never become an elf and that he doesn't even know what he's asking without knowing the history of the Elves. And thus we get another story (though in a potential revision, Tolkien was going to have Eriol return to the Cottage of Lost Play empty-handed and have Rúmil tell the story instead of Meril-i-Turinqui).

In the process, we've learned a lot about limpë and its effects. Comments?

"Melko's Chains" has the same main plot elements as the later story in the Silmarillion: the Valar decide something must be done about Melko(r), they go to war, and bring him back from Utumn(o/a) in chains--but with one major difference. In the Silmarillion, this campaign is done completely out of consideration for the Elves; in the Book of Lost Tales, the Elves aren't even mentioned in connection with the matter until Melko is being judged, when Palúrien's counsel runs, "Take heed, O Valar, that both Elves and Men be not devoid of all solace whenso the times come for them to find the Earth."

This is a major difference in motivation and plotting, but it seems like an almost trivial difference to me, compared with the drastic stylistic differences between the earlier and later versions.

Some notes I made as I was reading:

1. "But Meril said, 'friendship is possible, maybe, but kinship not so.'" It's worth noting, in the Lost Tales, that Beren is an Elf and there's no suggestion that Tuor would share Idril's fate. The changes-of-fate Lúthien and Tuor undergo is a product of the later legendarium.

2. " 'Nay,' said she, 'on a day of autumn will come the winds and a driven gull, maybe, will wail overhead, and lo! you will be filled with desire, remembering the black coasts of your home.' " Ironically, since Meril is trying to argue Eriol away from tying himself to the fate of the Elves, this longing of his Mannish heritage as a son of Eárendel sounds a lot like the doom of Eldar that Legolas suffers in The Lord of the Rings.

3. To continue with one of my points from last chapter, Oromë's participation in the creation of the first forests with his mother, a participation he lacks in the later legendarium, sheds light on the later tales nonetheless--we are told, after all, that one of his names is "Tauron"--lord of the forests. It makes even more sense in this context, where the first hunter is the son of the mother of the forests.

4. "Full of evil and unwholesome were they; luring and restlessness and horror they brought, turning the dark into an ill and fearful thing, which it was not before." This is one of Tolkien's favourite themes with the Elves, right down to Midsummer Eve in Minas Tirith after the War of the Ring.

5. "Tilkal." It's improbable name aside, its existence puts mithril into a tradition of invented metals. Also, the footnote calls ilsa and laurë the "magic names" of gold and silver. I don't know about "magic," but I'm reminded of "argent" and "or" as heraldic names of the same.

6. Telimektar son of Tulkas gets his first mention.

7. Mandos and Lórien riding together on the same chariot, in addition to being a more evocative image than the later text provides, is another reminder they are brethren.

8. Aulë and his long-handled war-hammer. Shades of mjölnir, anyone? (He's really more of a Hephaestion/Vulcan, but still...)

9. "In sooth Manwë hoped even to end for peace and amity." Is Manwë to be considered super-naïve or is he a paragon of goodness?

10. "yet the shellfish and oysters no-one of the Valar or of Elves knows whence they are, for they gaped in the silent waters or ever Melko lunged therein from on high, and pearls there were before the Eldar thought or dreamed of any gem." Forget Tinfang Warble! Here's the real parallel to Tom Bombadil. Is Bombadil an oyster?


There are two poems in the Commentary, both included for their connection to Tinfang Warble. The first, called "Tinfang Warble," reached its centenary this year (so you can drink to that if you're lacking in Tolkien toasts) and I'd be lying if I said that it didn't remind me of "tra-la-la-lally." "Over the Hills and Far Away" is, to my mind, much the better of the two. Both were still around in 1927--well past the Lost Tales era and into the beginning of the Silmarillion tradition (though not necessarily connected with it--but a reminder nonetheless that the Silm began and essentially remained an annalistic compendium of the stories in the BoLT). That was the year "Tinfang Warble" saw publication and "Over the Hills and Far Away" was rewritten.

Finally, CT admits he's taken advantage of an interjection by Eriol and reminder of him and Meril-i-Turinqui to separate "Melko's Chains" from the following chapter. Perhaps moreso than the foregoing chapters, we have an artificial division here, one that seems all the more natural given the division of this same section of the Silmarillion into multiple chapters.

[jallanite]

Tinfang Warble also has a vague origin, being either, in a crossed-out passage, the son of the Elfin King Tinwelint by the twilight spirit Wendelin and brother to Lúthen Tinúviel or son of an unidentified Gnome or Shoreland Piper by an unidentified fay who was one of the followers of Palúrien.

The metal tilkal created by Aulë is said by Tolkien to be an amalgam of six metals: copper, silver, tin, lead, iron, and gold. Traditionally there were seven metals to match the seven planets and seven days of the week, but when the metal electrum was recognized as a alloy of gold and silver, after the first centuries, electrum ceased to be considered a planetary metal. The planet Jupiter was then associated with tin and the planet Mercury, which had previously been associated with tin, was now associated instead with the metal mercury. Tolkien, limiting his metals to six, avoids including both the amalgam of electrum and the new addition of mercury.

The war against Melko is somewhat disappointing. First, the male Valar and their male children take part, but not the female Valar; not even the war goddess Méassë, so far as is told. And there is not really a war. Instead Melko is just tricked into becoming a prisoner. In The Lord of the Rings Faramir will later say:

But fear no more! I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs, Frodo son of Drogo.

In the published Silmarillion Melkor is defeated only after many untold battles and great devastation of the environment, and is defeated in a fair single combat against Tulkas, one on one. Yet Tolkien expresses a dislike of such punishment in his essay “On Fairy Stories”. Tolkien writes:

Yet it is not clear that ‘fair fight’ is less cruel than ‘fair judgement’; or that piercing a dwarf with a sword is more just than the execution of wicked kings and evil stepmothers – which Lang abjures.

On page 108 of the Book of Lost Tales, Part One, Christopher Tolkien states that the earliest version of his father’s poem on Tinfang Warble, Over Old Hills and Far Away, has a subtitle in Old English with the same meaning: Ʒeond fyrne beorgas 7 heonan feor.

The letters Ʒ and 7 are here somewhat rough, seemingly written by hand, rather than being from an italic font like the other letters. Possibly they did not have these characters in their fonts.

The letter 7 represents a capital version of the Latin word et ‘and’ in the shorthand writing system created by Cicero’s scribe Marcus Tullius Tiro. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tironian_notes . The lowercase symbol ⁊ is available in Unicode as symbol U+204A, but its rarer use as a non-standard uppercase symbol is not, and so the Arabic number 7 may be used in Unicode as a substitute when uppercase is desired. These symbols were commonly used in the Old English language approximately between the years 450 and 1150. The normal lowercase symbol ⁊ is still used in Irish and in Scots Gaelic. See https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2014...alway-ireland/ .

In Old English the letter G/g is written in what is called insular form as ᵹ, but is normally produced as a normal G/g in current style in printed editions of Old English text. The letter G/g had four distinct pronunciations in Old English:

Hard g as in get [ɡɛt]
The fricative sound [ɣ], related to [ɡ] as the Scottish ch in loch is related to k
The modern English soft sound [dʒ], as in gem [dʒɛm]
Minimal sound [j] as in the first letter in you [juː]

Usually these pronunciations are distinguished in modern spelling of Old English by using the dotted form Ġ/ġ for the latter two sounds. More rarely the Middle English letter yogh is used instead. Yogh is in origin derived from the English insular G/g written as ᵹ. Tolkien uses a capital yogh as the first letter in this subtitle.

Yogh is printed as Ȝ/ȝ or as Ʒ/ʒ, the latter form being the more modern use. But this form is also used in the International Phonetic Alphabet for the letter ezh, as in measure [mɛʒuɹ]. Unicode accordingly now distinguishes ezh, which is always printed as Ʒ/ʒ, from yogh which may be printed either as Ȝ/ȝ or as Ʒ/ʒ, but in most computer fonts appears as the distinct form Ȝ/ȝ. See the article http://www.evertype.com/standards/wynnyogh/ezhyogh.html , one of many, many articles by the amazing Michael Everson. This article led to Unicode adding yogh as a letter in Unicode version 3.0.0 in September 1999 to be differentiated from IPA ezh. Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Everson .

Michael Everson is since 2012 also publisher of the Irish translation of An Hobad (The Hobbit). See http://www.evertype.com/books/hobad.html .