The Book of Lost Tales, Part One

The Book of Lost Tales, Part One is an edition rather than a narrative in its own right: Christopher Tolkien's presentation, with full editorial apparatus, of the earliest connected form his father gave to the mythology of the Elder Days. It opens the long series in which the written development of that mythology was set out volume by volume, and it is a book of moderate bulk carrying a heavy freight of secondary matter. A foreword sets out the aim of the undertaking, the state of the papers, and the practical difficulty of texts written in pencil and later overwritten in ink, sometimes over erasures that cannot be recovered. Part One and Part Two are one work divided for length; the second volume continues the sequence directly rather than beginning anything new.

The arrangement is regular throughout. Ten tales are printed in order, each followed by numbered textual notes and then by a commentary in which the editor sets the tale beside the forms the same matter took in later decades, marking what survived, what was abandoned, and what changed beyond recognition. A concluding appendix treats the names, drawing on the early lexicons of the invented languages to explain their formation and sense. The tales themselves are told, not chronicled: a traveller from the sea reaches an island of the Elves and hears them recounted by named speakers in a named house, so that the narrating voice belongs to characters within the fiction and keeps an ornate, deliberately archaic manner far removed from the compressed annalistic tone of the later published Silmarillion.

The book therefore addresses a reader who already knows the mythology in its later shape and wants to see where it began. Its interest lies in distance: the geography, the divisions of the Elves, the names of the Valar and of Melko all stand in forms that were afterwards revised or discarded, and much of the framework that surrounds the tales was abandoned altogether. Within the legendarium it occupies the lowest stratum, the writings undertaken while the author was a young man, and it claims no authority over the versions that displaced it. It documents rather than supersedes, and is best read as evidence of how a mythology was made.

The writing of the Lost Tales belongs to the First World War and the years immediately after it. Tolkien traced the first impulse behind his invented legends to his interest in the name Eärendel, taken from Old English verse and worked up into a poem before he went into the army, and he placed the earliest of the tales themselves in the months after he was invalided home from France. Writing to W. H. Auden in 1955, he dated the story of the fall of the hidden city to sick leave at the end of 1916, composed in hospital and on leave rather than in a study. A much fuller account went to Christopher Bretherton in 1964, in which he recalled the beginnings of the scheme, including the device of a seafarer who reaches the isle of the Elves and hears the legends told there. The greater part of the sequence followed in 1917 and the two or three years after.

The sequence was never finished. Several of its tales were left in outline or broken off, and by about 1920 Tolkien had ceased to add to it, though he read the Gondolin story aloud to a college society at Oxford in the spring of that year, its first hearing outside his own household. What followed was not completion but replacement: he returned to the same legends repeatedly in other forms and at other lengths, so that the matter was recast over some fifty years and remained unfinished at his death in 1973. Christopher Tolkien set out this pattern of continuous rewriting when introducing the posthumous editions of the 1970s, and his father had described the same long growth to Milton Waldman in the letter that accompanied his attempt to place the mythology with a publisher.

Publication came in stages and late. The Silmarillion appeared in 1977 in a form assembled by Christopher Tolkien from the later manuscripts, and Unfinished Tales followed in 1980, printing longer narratives with editorial notes and demonstrating that an audience existed for texts left in a raw state. Only then did the earliest stratum reach print: The Book of Lost Tales, Part One was published in 1983 by George Allen & Unwin, with Part Two following in 1984. The two volumes opened a series that ran on under the same editor for a further ten volumes and closed in 1996, and later reprints of Part One appeared under the HarperCollins imprint, both singly and within collected reissues of the series.

Translation began quickly. The German edition was issued by Klett-Cotta in the rendering of Hans J. Schütz, the first part in 1983 and the second in 1984, under a title that keeps the sense of tales lost rather than merely forgotten. The early texts also had a second life after the series was complete. In the last books he edited, Christopher Tolkien returned to the oldest versions and printed them beside their successors, so that the 1917 tale of Beren and Lúthien appeared in 2017 and the earliest Gondolin narrative in 2018, in each case reprinted from the second of the two Lost Tales volumes rather than the first. Part One itself was not revised in substance after 1983; its later editions correct and reset rather than rewrite, and the text of the tales it prints has stood as Christopher Tolkien established it.

The ten tales stand in a fixed order that carries the reader from the making of the world to the threshold of the wars in the north. The first, The Cottage of Lost Play, is a frame chapter rather than a legend; it is followed by The Music of the Ainur, ascribed to Rúmil, in which the world is sung before it is made. Three tales then treat the ordering of the earth and the first captivity of Melko: The Coming of the Valar and the Building of Valinor, The Chaining of Melko, and The Coming of the Elves and the Making of Kôr. The catastrophe occupies the next pair, The Theft of Melko and the Darkening of Valinor and The Flight of the Noldoli, after which The Tale of the Sun and Moon and The Hiding of Valinor turn back to the Blessed Realm and its defences. The tenth, Gilfanon's Tale, reaches the waking of Men and the eastward march of the exiles, then breaks down and survives only as outline and plot-scheme.

Every tale is presented in the same three movements, so that the volume can be used as well as read. Numbered notes follow the text and record variant readings, rejected passages and the state of the manuscript at particular points; a separate list headed as changes made to names sets out the successive substitutions the papers show, which gives anyone tracing a single name through its revisions a fixed place to look; and the commentary then compares the tale with the later treatments of the same matter. Where an early poem bears directly on the material it is printed entire within the commentary rather than relegated to an appendix, among them the verses on the cottage that gave the opening tale its title and the poem on Kortirion among the trees. The linking passages that carry the outer story are not collected anywhere: they stand where they were written, at the openings and closes of the tales, so that a reader following the mariner from the house of the hearth to the queen of the isle and on to Tavrobel must gather that thread across the whole book.

The back matter is reference apparatus. The appendix on names, mentioned above for its use of the earliest lexicons, is arranged alphabetically and covers only those names that occur in this volume, giving derivation and sense where the papers allow and admitting silence where they do not. A short glossary explains the obsolete, archaic and rare English words the narratives employ, a necessary aid given the deliberately old-fashioned diction of the tales, and a full index of names closes the book. No map is printed, so the shape of the world in its earliest conception must be taken from the descriptions in the text and from the editor's discussion of them. A reader seeking the great hero-tales will not find them here: Tinúviel, Turambar, the fall of the hidden city, the necklace of the dwarves and Eärendel are all matter of the second volume, which also carries the frame to its late reworking and the renaming of the mariner.

Measured against the later books, the volume stands where the opening movements of the mythology were first given continuous narrative form. The cosmogony that the published Silmarillion prints as the Ainulindalë, the ordering of the world by the Valar, the binding of the Enemy in the ages before the Elves awoke, the westward journey to Aman and the destruction of the Two Trees all appear here in tellings that precede their finished counterparts by decades. Nothing in that sequence was devised afresh for the 1977 book; its early chapters retrace ground broken in these tales, in the same order and with the same turning points. What altered was the manner and the detail rather than the plan of events, and the plan is among the few things the earliest stratum handed on intact.

Divergence is heaviest in nomenclature and in the constitution of the divine order. The Enemy of the finished narrative is Melkor, named Morgoth by Fëanor after the theft of the jewels, and his opponents among the exiles are the Noldor throughout; the early tales know him as Melko and call that kindred the Noldoli, rendering the name in English as Gnomes, a usage afterwards given up. The Elvish city upon the hill in Aman is Tirion in the later account, not Kôr. More consequential than names, the Valaquenta allows the Valar spouses but no offspring, the Children of Ilúvatar being Elves and Men alone, whereas the early tales are peopled with sons and daughters of the Valar who left no trace in the published books. Even where an image survived — the last flower and fruit of the Trees becoming Moon and Sun — the machinery around it was rebuilt.

The volume also sits outside the story that made its author known. It was written before hobbits existed and presupposes nothing of them, while The Lord of the Rings presupposes the Elder Days in a shape already close to the later Silmarillion: the account rehearsed at Elrond's council reaches back to the wars against the first Dark Lord, and the appended chronicles set that age behind the events of the Third. The device by which the ancient legends were supposed to have reached a reader was likewise replaced rather than kept. In the published work the matter is Elvish lore passed to Men, and the Red Book is described as having carried three volumes of Bilbo's translations out of the Elvish, made at Rivendell in his old age.

Two editorial procedures were available once the papers began to be printed, and the standing of this volume is best fixed by which of them it follows. The Silmarillion was assembled as a single continuous narrative, its editor choosing among competing versions and leaving the choices unmarked in the text. Unfinished Tales, three years afterwards, gave its narratives as they stood and accounted for their condition in notes. The Lost Tales belong entirely to the second method, applied to the material furthest removed from the finished form. The practical consequence is plain enough: a statement found here carries no weight against the later writings on any point of fact within the story, but it is direct evidence for the history of the writing, which the 1977 volume was designed not to show.

Before the earliest legends could be received at all, they had to find a publisher, and for most of the author's life they did not. The correspondence of late 1937 shows what happened when the matter was first offered: material from the legends went to Allen & Unwin in the wake of The Hobbit, was not taken up, and the publisher's interest lay instead in a further book about hobbits, which Tolkien then began. Nothing of the mythology itself reached print in those years, and the writings from which the Lost Tales descend remained wholly private. The consequence for the volume of 1983 is that it entered a readership formed entirely by other books, none of which it had helped to shape.

The second attempt was made on the author's own terms and failed as well. Writing to his publisher in 1950, Tolkien argued that the legends and the newly finished long romance were parts of one connected work and pressed for them to appear together, an insistence he maintained through the negotiations that followed. No arrangement on that basis was reached, and the romance was issued by itself while the legendary matter stayed in manuscript. Tolkien's letters of the period record his own sense that the mythology would be unintelligible or unwanted without the framework he had built for it, a judgement that the eventual reception of the posthumous editions did not bear out.

The terms on which such texts could be published were settled after his death and by his editor rather than by him. The foreword to the 1977 volume states plainly that a book had to be made from papers left in competing and unfinished states, and that the choices were the editor's. The introduction to the 1980 collection went further and defended the printing of narratives that break off, arguing the case for giving readers the material as it stood together with an account of its condition, while conceding that some would find such a book unsatisfying. Those two statements fixed the expectations under which the earliest stratum was issued three years later: not as a story offered to the general reader, but as documentation offered to a readership that had already asked for it.