The Book of Lost Tales, Part 1 Read online

  O! all the borders* trimmed with box

  Were full of favourite flowers—of phlox,

  Of larkspur, pinks, and hollyhocks

  40

  Beneath a red may-tree:

  And all the paths were full of shapes,

  Of tumbling happy white-clad shapes,

  And with them You and Me.*

  And some had silver watering-cans

  45

  And watered all their gowns,

  Or sprayed each other; some laid plans

  To build them houses, fairy towns,*

  Or dwellings in the trees;

  And some were clambering on the roof;

  50

  Some crooning lonely and aloof;

  And some were dancing fairy-rings

  And weaving pearly daisy-strings,

  Or chasing golden bees;

  But here and there a little pair

  55

  With rosy cheeks and tangled hair

  Debated quaint old childish things*—*

  And we were one of these.

  Lines 58–65 (p. 30) were subsequently rewritten:

  But why it was there came a time

  When we could take the road no more,

  Though long we looked, and high would climb,

  Or gaze from many a seaward shore

  To find the path between sea and sky

  To those old gardens of delight;

  And how it goes now in that land,

  If there the house and gardens stand,

  Still filled with children clad in white—

  We know not, You and I.

  And why it was Tomorrow came

  And with his grey hand led us back;

  60

  And why we never found the same

  Old cottage, or the magic track

  That leads between a silver sea*

  And those old shores* and gardens fair

  Where all things are, that ever were—

  65

  We know not, You and Me.*

  This is the final version of the poem:

  The Little House of Lost Play

  Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva

  We knew that land once, You and I,

  and once we wandered there

  in the long days now long gone by,

  a dark child and a fair.

  5

  Was it on the paths of firelight thought

  in winter cold and white,

  or in the blue-spun twilit hours

  of little early tucked-up beds

  in drowsy summer night,

  10

  that you and I in Sleep went down

  to meet each other there,

  your dark hair on your white nightgown

  and mine was tangled fair?

  We wandered shyly hand in hand,

  15

  small footprints in the golden sand,

  and gathered pearls and shells in pails,

  while all about the nightingales

  were singing in the trees.

  We dug for silver with our spades,

  20

  and caught the sparkle of the seas,

  then ran ashore to greenlit glades,

  and found the warm and winding lane

  that now we cannot find again,

  between tall whispering trees.

  25

  The air was neither night nor day,

  an ever-eve of gloaming light,

  when first there glimmered into sight

  the Little House of Play.

  New-built it was, yet very old,

  30

  white, and thatched with straws of gold,

  and pierced with peeping lattices

  that looked toward the sea;

  and our own children’s garden-plots

  were there: our own forgetmenots,

  35

  red daisies, cress and mustard,

  and radishes for tea.

  There all the borders, trimmed with box,

  were filled with favourite flowers, with phlox,

  with lupins, pinks, and hollyhocks,

  40

  beneath a red may-tree;

  and all the gardens full of folk

  that their own little language spoke,

  but not to You and Me.

  For some had silver watering-cans

  45

  and watered all their gowns,

  or sprayed each other; some laid plans

  to build their houses, little towns

  and dwellings in the trees.

  And some were clambering on the roof;

  50

  some crooning lonely and aloof;

  some dancing round the fairy-rings

  all garlanded in daisy-strings,

  while some upon their knees

  before a little white-robed king

  55

  crowned with marigold would sing

  their rhymes of long ago.

  But side by side a little pair

  with heads together, mingled hair,

  went walking to and fro

  60

  still hand in hand; and what they said,

  ere Waking far apart them led,

  that only we now know.

  It is notable that the poem was called The Cottage, or The Little House of Lost Play, whereas what is described is the Cottage of the Children in Valinor, near the city of Kôr; but this, according to Vairë (p. 19), ‘the Cottage of the Play of Sleep’, was ‘not of Lost Play, as has wrongly been said in song among Men’.

  I shall not attempt any analysis or offer any elucidation of the ideas embodied in the ‘Cottages of the Children’. The reader, however he interprets them, will in any case not need to be assisted in his perception of the personal and particular emotions in which all was still anchored.

  As I have said, the conception of the coming of mortal children in sleep to the gardens of Valinor was soon to be abandoned in its entirety, and in the developed mythology there would be no place for it—still less for the idea that in some possible future day ‘the roads through Arvalin to Valinor shall be thronged with the sons and daughters of Men’.

  Likewise, all the ‘elfin’ diminutiveness soon disappeared. The idea of the Cottage of the Children was already in being in 1915, as the poem You and Me shows; and it was in the same year, indeed on the same days of April, that Goblin Feet (or Cumaþ þá Nihtielfas) was written, concerning which my father said in 1971: ‘I wish the unhappy little thing, representing all that I came (so soon after) to fervently dislike, could be buried for ever.’* Yet it is to be observed that in early notes Elves and Men are said to have been ‘of a size’ in former days, and the smallness (and filminess and transparency) of the ‘fairies’ is an aspect of their ‘fading’, and directly related to the domination of Men in the Great Lands. To this matter I shall return later. In this connection, the diminutiveness of the Cottage is very strange, since it seems to be a diminutiveness peculiar to itself: Eriol, who has travelled for many days through Tol Eressëa, is astonished that the dwelling can hold so many, and he is told that all who enter it must be, or must become, very small. But Tol Eressëa is an island inhabited by Elves.

  I give now three texts of the poem Kortirion among the Trees (later The Trees of Kortirion). The very earliest workings (November 1915) of this poem are extant,† and there are many subsequent texts. The prose introduction to the early form has been cited on pp. 25–6. A major revision was made in 1937, and another much later; by this time it was almost a different poem. Since my father sent it to Rayner Unwin in February 1962 as a possible candidate for inclusion in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, it seems virtually certain that the final version dates from that time.‡

  I give the poem first in its pre-1937 form, when only slight changes had yet been made. In one of the earliest copies it bears a title in Old English: Cor Tirion pra béama on middes, and is ‘dedicated to Warwick’ but in another the second title is in Elvish (the second word is not perfectly legib
le): Narquelion la..tu y aldalin Kortirionwen (i.e. ‘Autumn (among) the trees of Kortirion’).

  Kortirion among the Trees

  The First Verses

  O fading town upon a little hill,

  Old memory is waning in thine ancient gates,

  The robe gone gray, thine old heart almost still;

  The castle only, frowning, ever waits

  5

  And ponders how among the towering elms

  The Gliding Water leaves these inland realms

  And slips between long meadows to the western sea—

  Still bearing downward over murmurous falls

  One year and then another to the sea;

  10

  And slowly thither have a many gone

  Since first the fairies built Kortirion.

  O spiry town upon a windy hill

  With sudden-winding alleys shady-walled

  (Where even now the peacocks pace a stately drill,

  15

  Majestic, sapphirine, and emerald),

  Behold thy girdle of a wide champain

  Sunlit, and watered with a silver rain,

  And richly wooded with a thousand whispering trees

  That cast long shadows in many a bygone noon,

  20

  And murmured many centuries in the breeze.

  Thou art the city of the Land of Elms,

  Alalminórë in the Faery Realms.

  Sing of thy trees, old, old Kortirion!

  Thine oaks, and maples with their tassels on,

  25

  Thy singing poplars; and the splendid yews

  That crown thine agéd walls and muse

  Of sombre grandeur all the day—

  Until the twinkle of the early stars

  Is tangled palely in their sable bars;

  30

  Until the seven lampads of the Silver Bear

  Swing slowly in their shrouded hair

  And diadem the fallen day.

  O tower and citadel of the world!

  When bannered summer is unfurled

  35

  Most full of music are thine elms—

  A gathered sound that overwhelms

  The voices of all other trees.

  Sing then of elms, belov’d Kortirion,

  How summer crowds their full sails on,

  40

  Like clothéd masts of verdurous ships,

  A fleet of galleons that proudly slips

  Across long sunlit seas.

  The Second Verses

  Thou art the inmost province of the fading isle

  Where linger yet the Lonely Companies.

  45

  Still, undespairing, do they sometimes slowly file

  Along thy paths with plaintive harmonies:

  The holy fairies and immortal elves

  That dance among the trees and sing themselves

  A wistful song of things that were, and could be yet.

  50

  They pass and vanish in a sudden breeze,

  A wave of bowing grass—and we forget

  Their tender voices like wind-shaken bells

  Of flowers, their gleaming hair like golden asphodels.

  Spring still hath joy: thy spring is ever fair

  55

  Among the trees; but drowsy summer by thy streams

  Already stoops to hear the secret player

  Pipe out beyond the tangle of her forest dreams

  The long thin tune that still do sing

  The elvish harebells nodding in a jacinth ring

  60

  Upon the castle walls;

  Already stoops to listen to the clear cold spell

  Come up her sunny aisles and perfumed halls:

  A sad and haunting magic note,

  A strand of silver glass remote.

  65

  Then all thy trees, old town upon a windy bent,

  Do loose a long sad whisper and lament;

  For going are the rich-hued hours, th’enchanted nights

  When flitting ghost-moths dance like satellites

  Round tapers in the moveless air;

  70

  And doomed already are the radiant dawns,

  The fingered sunlight dripping on long lawns;

  The odour and the slumbrous noise of meads,

  When all the sorrel, flowers, and pluméd weeds

  Go down before the scyther’s share.

  75

  Strange sad October robes her dewy furze

  In netted sheen of gold-shot gossamers,

  And then the wide-umbraged elm begins to fail;

  Her mourning multitudes of leaves go pale

  Seeing afar the icy shears

  80

  Of Winter, and his blue-tipped spears

  Marching unconquerable upon the sun

  Of bright All-Hallows. Then their hour is done,

  And wanly borne on wings of amber pale

  They beat the wide airs of the fading vale

  85

  And fly like birds across the misty meres.

  The Third Verses

  Yet is this season dearest to my heart,

  Most fitting to the little faded town

  With sense of splendid pomps that now depart

  In mellow sounds of sadness echoing down

  90

  The paths of stranded mists. O! gentle time

  When the late mornings are bejewelled with rime,

  And the blue shadows gather on the distant woods.

  The fairies know thy early crystal dusk

  And put in secret on their twilit hoods

  95

  Of grey and filmy purple, and long bands

  Of frosted starlight sewn by silver hands.

  They know the season of the brilliant night,

  When naked elms entwine in cloudy lace

  The Pleiades, and long-armed poplars bar the light

  100

  Of golden-rondured moons with glorious face.

  O fading fairies and most lonely elves

  Then sing ye, sing ye to yourselves

  A woven song of stars and gleaming leaves;

  Then whirl ye with the sapphire-wingéd winds;

  105

  Then do ye pipe and call with heart that grieves

  To sombre men: ‘Remember what is gone—

  The magic sun that lit Kortirion!’

  Now are thy trees, old, old Kortirion,

  Seen rising up through pallid mists and wan,

  110

  Like vessels floating vague and long afar

  Down opal seas beyond the shadowy bar

  Of cloudy ports forlorn:

  They leave behind for ever havens throng’d

  Wherein their crews a while held feasting long

  115

  And gorgeous ease, who now like windy ghosts

  Are wafted by slow airs to empty coasts;

  There are they sadly glimmering borne

  Across the plumbless ocean of oblivion.

  Bare are thy trees become, Kortirion,

  120

  And all their summer glory swiftly gone.

  The seven lampads of the Silver Bear

  Are waxen to a wondrous flare

  That flames above the fallen year.

  Though cold thy windy squares and empty streets;

  125