Silmarillion - Chapter 01 - Of the Beginning of Days

[Aiwendil]

What a lot of material the first chapter of the Quenta Silmarillion covers! Within the space of about ten pages, we learn of the fashioning of Arda by the Valar, their first war with Melkor, the coming of Tulkas, the Lamps and the first growth and flowering of life, the destruction of the lamps, the building of Valinor, and to top it all off, the “Gift of Iluvatar” to Men – death.

It is striking that all this is covered with such speed. I suppose a rationale for this is that these are events that took place before the awakening of the Elves and about which they know little.

I’ve always been intrigued by the Lamps. It is quite a strange and striking image: two huge pillars at the top of which are light sources of comparable power to the sun, shining in an endless and unchanging day. The whole Age of the Lamps is passed over very quickly and is rarely mentioned again. It’s interesting that while the Age of the Trees is eventually seen as a kind of Edenic age, a lost paradise, the Age of the Lamps is not.

The Two Trees are, I suppose, no less strange and striking than the Lamps. The idea of trees providing light is, as far as I know, unique. The idea of light as a substance, even a liquid, is present here: Telperion drops “a dew of silver light” from its leaves; Laurelin “spilled a golden rain upon the ground”; the light spilled from the trees “was taken up into the airs or sank down into the earth”; Varda hoards the light in “great vats like shining lakes”.

The final portion of the chapter, concerning Iluvatar’s gift to Men, raises again some of the metaphysical mysteries of the Ainulindale. Men are given “a virtue to shape their life, amid the powers and chances of the world, beyond the Music of the Ainur, which is as fate to all things else”. This has been interpreted as a statement that Men have free will; but what then of the Elves? Are their lives predestined, completely determined by the Music of the Ainur?

The textual history of this chapter in itself is fairly simple; the text given in the published Silmarillion traces its origins back to the “Sketch of the Mythology” of the 1920s, which was revised and expanded in several stages: the “Quenta Noldorinwa” in 1930, the “Quenta Silmarillion” of 1937, and finally the two stages of the “Later Quenta Silmarillion” in the 1950s. One point worth noting is that the final section of this chapter, concerning Iluvatar’s Gift, was actually not part of the Quenta Silmarillion in any version written by Tolkien; rather it formed the conclusion of the Ainulindale. Christopher Tolkien moved it to the position in which it stands in the published Silmarillion, presumably for aesthetic reasons.

It is also perhaps worth noting that the predecessor to this chapter in The Book of Lost Tales is of an entirely different character. It is, first of all, a longer and much “closer” account. To give but one example:

Then said Manwe: “Now will we make a dwelling speedily and a bulwark against evil.” So they fared over Arvalin and saw a wide open space beyond, reaching for unknown leagues even to the Outer Seas. There, said Aule, would be a place well suited to great building and to a fashioning of realms of delight; wherefore the Valar and all their folk first gathered the most mighty rocks and stones from Arvalin and reared therewith huge mountains between it and that plain which now they name Valinor, or the land of the Gods. Aule indeed it was himself who laboured for seven ages at Manwe’s bidding in the piling of Taniquetil . . .

An interesting deviation from the later story is that in BoLT, it is Melkor who builds the pillars on which the Lamps are to rest; but he builds them with treason out of ice, so that they melt, forming inland seas in the north and south. Though the story of the pillars made of ice was soon dropped, the inland seas survived, the northern one being named “Helcar” in the published Silmarillion.

Additional readings:
HoMe I (for the earliest, BoLT, version described above)
HoMe IV (for the “Sketch of the Mythology” and “Quenta Noldorinwa” versions)
HoMe V (for the 1937 “Quenta Silmarillion” version)
HoMe IX (for the 1950s “Later Quenta” revisions; also for projected changes in “Myths Transformed”)