The War of the Jewels (62 page)

'geographical' papers is the following note:

Celon is too hackneyed a river-name. Limhir (the clear / sparkling river) - repeated in L.R. as were not unnaturally other names from Beleriand - is more suitable for the river, a tributary of the Aros and a clear slender stream coming down from the Hill of Himring.

The name Limhir does not occur in The Lord of the Rings, unless my father was referring to the Limlight, of which he said in Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings (A Tolkien Compass, ed. Lobdell, p. 188): 'The spelling -light indicates that this is a Common Speech name; but leave the obscured element lim- unchanged and translate

-light: the adjective light here means "bright, clear".'

Lastly, it remains to mention the etymology of Maeglin found among these papers.

mik pierce: *mikra sharp-pointed (Q mixa, S *megr): strong adjective' maika sharp, penetrating, going deep in - often in transferred sense (as Q hendumaika sharp-eye, S maegheneb > maecheneb).

glim gleam, glint (usually of fine slender but bright shafts of light}.

Particularly applied to light of eyes; not Q. S glintha- glance (at), glinn.

From these two is derived the name Maeglin, since Maeglin had, even more than his father, very bright eyes, and was both physically very keen-sighted and mentally very penetrant, and quick to interpret the looks and gestures of people, and perceive their thoughts and purposes. The name was only given to him in boyhood, when these characteristics were recognized. His father till then was contented to call him Ion, son. (His mother secretly gave him a N. Quenya name Lomion 'son of twilight'; and taught Maeglin the Quenya tongue, though Eol had forbidden it.) This development of the story of Maeglin from the form in which he had written it twenty years before seems to have been the last concentrated work that my father did on the actual narratives of the Elder Days. Why he should have turned to this legend in particular I do not know; but one sees, in his minute consideration of the possibilities of the story, from the motives of the actors to the detail of the terrain, of roads, of the speed and endurance of riders, how the focus of his vision of the old tales had changed.

NOTES.

1. The words 'read (71) Dor-na-Daerachas' were added to the primary map later: see p. 187, $30, and note 6 below.

2. In another passage among these papers the Ford(s) of Aros are called Arossiach; this name was adopted on the map accompanying The Silmarillion and introduced into the text.

3. The text has 'at the S.W. corner', but this was a slip of the pen. It is stated elsewhere in these papers that the dwelling of Curufin and Celegorm was on a low hill at the S.E. corner of the Pass of Aglond, and on the photocopy map Curufin is marked with a circle on the most westerly of the lower heights about the Hill of Himring (p. 331, square D 11). - The form Aglond occurs in the discussion of the motives of Celegorm and Curufin (p. 328), beside Aglon in the interpolated narrative of Eol's encounter with Curufin. On the map the name is written Aglon(d, which I retained on my redrawing (V.409) of the map as first made and lettered, in the belief that the variant lond was an original element. Although it looks to be so, it may be that the (d was added much later.

4. My father noted here: 'In spite of what Eol said, it had in fact not been inhabited by Sindar before the coming of the Noldor'; and also that the name 'cool-plain' derived from the fact that 'it was higher in its middle part and felt often the chill northern airs through Aglon. It had no trees except in its southern part near the rivers.' In another place it is said that 'Himlad rose to a swelling highland at its centre (some 300 feet high at its flat top)'.

5. For the first mention of Dor Dinen (so spelt, as also on the map, not Dor Dhinen) see p. 194.

6. The primary map had no crossing marked on the Aros when the photocopy was made. The word Ford was put in after, or at the same time as, Fords of Aros was entered on the photocopy.

7. The name Iant Iaur was adopted from this text in The Silmarillion, both on the map and in a mention of 'the stone bridge of Iant Iaur' in Chapter 14, Of Beleriand and its Realms, p. 121 (for the original passage see p. 194).

8. The falls in Gelion below Sarn Athrad have not been referred to before, and indeed in QS Chapter 9 Of Beleriand and its Realms (V.262-3, $113; The Silmarillion p. 122) their existence is denied:

'Gelion had neither fall nor rapids throughout his course'.

9. On another page the following names are proposed as replacements for Sarn Athrad: 'Athrad i-Nogoth [> Negyth] or Athrad Dhaer, "Ford of the Dwarves" or "Great Ford" '.

10. The fact that the note on the primary map (p. 191) saying that the names Celon and Gelion need to be changed bears (like the addition of Dor-na-Daerachas, p. 187, $30) the number '71', clearly meaning the year 1971, suggests that all the late work on Maeglin belongs to that year. My father died two years later.

IV.

OF THE ENTS AND THE EAGLES.

This brief text belongs to the late, or last, period of my father's work, and must be dated at the earliest to 1958-9, but may well be later than that. The original draft is extant, a manuscript on two sides of a single sheet, written at great speed with very little correction in a script that is just legible. It is titled Anaxartamel.

This was followed by a text made on my father's later typewriter (see X.300) that expanded the first draft, but from which scarcely anything of any significance in that draft was excluded. It bears no title. In the published Silmarillion it was used to form the second part of Chapter 2 Of Aule and Yavanna, pp. 44-6, beginning at the words

'Now when Aule laboured in the making of the Dwarves...' This was of course a purely editorial combination.

The published text followed the typescript with very little deviation, except in the matter of 'thou' and 'you' forms, about which my father was initially uncertain, as he was also in the text concerning Aule and the Dwarves which forms the first part of the chapter in the published Silmarillion (see p. 210). In the manuscript draft he used 'you'

throughout; in the typescript he used both 'you' and 'thy, hast' in the opening paragraphs, but then 'you, your' exclusively, subsequently correcting the inconsistencies. As in the first part of the chapter 'thou, thee, thy' forms were adopted in the published work.

There are two amanuensis typescripts, independent of each other, taken from the typescript after all corrections had been made. They have no textual value, except that on one of them my father pencilled the title Of the Ents and the Eagles, and on the other the title Anaxartaron Onyalie.

NOTES.

In these notes, which are largely confined to differences of reading, the original draft is called A, the typescript B, and the published text S.

When Yavanna went to Manwe (p. 45) 'she did not betray the counsel of Aule': the meaning of this is that Yavanna did not reveal anything to Manwe of the making of the Dwarves; in the first part of the chapter (p. 43) 'fearing that the other Valar might blame his work, he wrought in secret', and the intervention of Iluvatar (who 'knew what was done') was directly to Aule. The word betray in S is an editorial alteration of bewray in A and B.

'But the kelvar can flee or defend themselves, whereas the olvar that grow cannot' (p. 45): in B there is a marginal note against kelvar,

'animals, all living things that move', which was omitted in S. In A these words were not used, but a blank space was left where kelvar stands in B. Immediately following this, A has: Long in the growing, swift in the felling, and unless they pay toll with fruit upon the bough little mourned at the ending, as even among the Valar I have seen'; in B the last phrase became 'as I have seen even among the Maiar in Middle-earth', but this was at once rejected. The final text of the passage is as in S.

In Yavanna's following words beginning 'I lifted up the branches of great trees...' B has 'and some sang to Eru amid the wind and the rain and the glitter of the Sun'; the last words were omitted in S on account of the implication that the Sun existed from the beginning of Arda.

In the passage describing Manwe's experience of the renewal of the Vision of the Ainur (p. 46; entirely lacking in A) the text of B as typed read: 'but it was not now remote, for he was himself in the midst, and yet he saw that all was upheld by the hand of Eru and that too was within', subsequently changed to the reading of S (in which Eru > Iluvatar).

In the words of Eru recounted by Manwe to Yavanna on Ezellohar the sentence 'For a time: while the Firstborn are in their power, and while the Secondborn are young' was bracketed for exclusion in B, but was retained in S.

In Manwe's last speech, 'In the mountains the Eagles shall house, and hear the voices of those who call upon us' was first written in B:

'... and hear the voices of those who call upon me, and of those who gainsay me.'

At the end of a draft letter dated September 1963, of which a passage is cited on p. 353, my father added in a very rough note (given in Letters p. 335):

No one knew whence they (Ents) came or first appeared. The High Elves said that the Valar did not mention them in the 'Music'. But some (Galadriel) were [of the) opinion that when Yavanna discovered the mercy of Eru to Aule in the matter of the Dwarves, she besought Eru (through Manwe) asking him to give life to things made of living things not stone, and that the Ents were either souls sent to inhabit trees, or else that slowly took the likeness of trees owing to their inborn love of trees.

With the words 'the Ents were either souls sent to inhabit trees' cf. the words of Eru in the text (p. 46): 'When the Children awake, then the thought of Yavanna will awake also, and it will summon spirits from afar, and they will go among the kelvar and the olvar, and some will dwell therein ...' It seems likely enough that the note on the draft letter and the writing of Anaxartaron Onyalie belong to much the same time.

V.

THE TALE OF YEARS.

The Tale of Years was an evolving work that accompanied successive stages in the development of the Annals. I have given it no place hitherto in The History of Middle-earth (but see X.49), because its value to the narrative of the Elder Days is very small until towards the end of the later (post-Lord of the Rings) version, when it becomes a document of importance; but here some very brief account of it must be given.

The earliest form is a manuscript with this title that sets out in very concise form the major events of the Elder Days. The dates throughout are in all but perfect accord with those given in the pre-Lord of the Rings texts 'The Later Annals of Valinor' and 'The Later Annals of Beleriand' (AV 2 and AB 2). Since this Tale of Years was obviously written as an accompaniment to and at the same time as those versions of the Annals, adding nothing to them, I did not include it in Volume V.

Much later a new version of The Tale of Years was made, and this alone will concern us here. It very clearly belongs with the major work on the Annals carried out in 1951( - 2), issuing in the last versions, the Annals of Aman and the Grey Annals. My father subsequently made a typescript text of it, but this obviously belongs to the same period.

The manuscript of this version as originally written was a very good clear text, but it was heavily corrected, interpolated, and rewritten in many stages; and since it was my father's working chronology during that period the dates, more especially in the first or Valinorean part, were changed so often, with bewildering movements back and forth, as to make the evolution of the chronology extremely difficult to understand. The important point, so far as the Valinorean part is concerned, is that the dates in the manuscript of The Tale of Years as originally written were essentially the same as those in the Annals of Aman as originally written; while modification to that chronology went together step by step in the two texts. In the case of AAm I noted (X.47 - 8) that with so many alterations to the dates it was impractic-able to do more than give the final chronology, and in the case of The Tale of Years the evolution is even more complex. In the result, the latter work is of very little independent value in this part; there are however a small number of matters that should be recorded.

In the manuscript as it was originally written the Elder Days began with the Awakening of the Elves: Here begin the Elder Days, or the First Age of the Children of Iluvatar -, but the Elder Days was struck out and does not appear in the typescript. Further on in The Tale of Years there is recorded a difference in application of the term 'Elder Days' in respect of their ending (a difference not, to my knowledge, found elsewhere): after the entry for V.Y.1500 'Fingolfin and Inglor cross the Straits of Ice' (this being the date in the Grey Annals, p. 29) it is said in the manuscript:

Here end the Elder Days with the new reckoning of time, according to some. But most lore-masters give that name also to the years of the war with Morgoth until his overthrow and casting forth.