The Lost Road Page 3

  §14But there remains still a legend of Beleriand: for that land in the West of the Old World, although changed and broken, held still in ancient days to the name it had in the days of the Gnomes. And it is said that Amroth was King of Beleriand; and he took counsel with Elrond son of Eärendel, and with such of the Elves as remained in the West; and they passed the mountains and came into inner lands far from the sea, and they assailed the fortress of Thû. And Amroth wrestled with Thû and was slain; but Thû was brought to his knees, and his servants were dispelled; and the peoples of Beleriand destroyed his dwellings, and drove him forth, and he fled to a dark forest, and hid himself. And it is said that the war with Thû hastened the fading of the Eldar, for he had power beyond their measure, as Felagund King of Nargothrond had found in the earliest days; and they expended their strength and substance in the assault upon him. And this was the last of the services of the older race to Men, and it is held the last of the deeds of alliance before the fading of the Elves and the estrangement of the Two Kindreds. And here the tale of the ancient world, as the Elves keep it, comes to an end.

  Commentary on the first version of The Fall of Númenor

  §1As Q §18 was first written (IV. 158), it was permitted by Fionwë that ‘with the Elves should those of the race of Hador and Bëor alone be suffered to depart, if they would. But of these only Elrond was now left …’ On this extremely puzzling passage see the commentary, IV. 200, where I suggested that obscure as it is it represents ‘the first germ of the story of the departure of the Elf-friends to Númenor.’ It was removed in the rewriting, Q II §18, where there appears a reference to Men of Hithlum who ‘repentant of their evil servitude did deeds of valour, and many beside of Men new come out of the East’, but now no mention of the Elf-friends. A final hasty revision of the passage (IV. 163, notes 2 and 3) gave:

  And it is said that all that were left of the three Houses of the Fathers of Men fought for Fionwë, and to them were joined some of the Men of Hithlum who repenting of their evil servitude did deeds of valour … But most Men, and especially those new come out of the East, were on the side of the Enemy.

  This is very close to, and no doubt belongs in fact to the same time as, the corresponding passage in the following version of ‘The Silmarillion’ (QS*, p. 328 §16), which however omits the reference to the Men of Hithlum. I have little doubt that this development came in with the emergence of Númenor.

  §2Here first appear the names Andúnië (but as a name of the island, translated ‘the Sunsetland’), and Númenor itself (which does not occur in the preliminary outline, though the people are there called Númenórië and Númenóreans). The chief city is called Númar or Númenos, which in the outline were the names of the land. The name Belegar was emended later, here and in §7, to Belegaer.

  After the words enriched by Yavanna the passage concerning names was early replaced as follows:

  It was called by the Gods Andor, the Land of Gift, but by its own folk Vinya, the Young; but when the men of that land spake of it to the men of Middle-earth they named it Númenor, that is Westernesse, for it lay west of all lands inhabited by mortals. Yet it was not in the true West, for there was the land of the Gods. The chief city of Númenor was in the midmost of its western coasts, and in the days of its might it was called Andúnië, because it faced the sunset; but after its fall it was named in the legends of those that fled from it Atalantë the Downfall.

  Here first appears Andor, Land of Gift, and also the name given to the land by the Númenóreans, Vinya, the Young, which did not survive in the later legend (cf. Vinyamar, Vinyalondë, Index to Unfinished Tales); Andúnië now becomes the name of the chief city. In the text as originally written the name Atalantë could refer either to the land or the city, but in the rewriting it can only refer to the city. It seems unlikely that my father intended this; see the corresponding passage in FN II and commentary.

  §3The permission given to the Númenóreans to sail as far west as Tol-eressëa, found already in the original outline, contrasts with the Akallabêth (pp. 262–3), where it is told that they were forbidden ‘to sail so far westward that the coasts of Númenor could no longer be seen’, and only the most keen-sighted among them could descry far off the tower of Avallónë on the Lonely Isle.

  The Gates of Morning reappear, remarkably, from the Lost Tales (I. 216). In the original astronomical myth the Sun passed into the Outer Dark by the Door of Night and re-entered by the Gates of Morn; but with the radical transformation of the myth that entered with the Sketch of the Mythology (see IV. 49), and is found in the Quenta and Ambarkanta, whereby the Sun is drawn by the servants of Ulmo beneath the roots of the Earth, the Door of Night was given a different significance and the Gates of Morn no longer appear (see IV. 252, 255). How the reference to them here (which survives in the Akallabêth, p. 263) is to be understood I am unable to say.

  In this paragraph is the first occurrence of the expression The Lords of the West.

  §4The words save their kings (once in each life before he was crowned) were early placed in square brackets. In the conclusion of QS (p. 326 §§8–9) the prohibition appears to be absolute, not to be set aside for any mortal; there Mandos says of Eärendel ‘Now he shall surely die, for he has trodden the forbidden shores’, and Manwë says ‘To Eärendel I remit the ban, and the peril that he took upon himself.’ Later (as noted under §3 above) the Ban extended also, and inevitably, to Tol-eressëa (‘easternmost of the Undying Lands’, the Akallabêth, p. 263).

  The ascription of the longevity of the Númenóreans to the light of Valinor appeared already in the original outline, and I cited (p. 13) the passage from the Quenta where it is said that the light of Valinor was greater and fairer than in the other lands ‘because there the Sun and Moon together rest a while.’ But the wording here, ‘the radiance of the Gods that came faintly to Tol-eressëa’, surely implies a light of a different nature from that of the Sun and Moon (which illumine the whole world). Conceivably, the further idea that appears in the corresponding passage in QS (§79) is present here: ‘moreover the Valar store the radiance of the Sun in many vessels, and in vats and pools for their comfort in times of dark.’ The passage was later enclosed in brackets, and it does not appear in FN II; but at a subsequent point in the narrative (§6) the Elves of Tol-eressëa mourned ‘for the light of Valinor was cut off by the cloud of the Númenóreans’, and this was not rejected. Cf. the Akallabêth (p. 278): ‘the Eldar mourned, for the light of the setting sun was cut off by the cloud of the Númenóreans.’

  §5With what is said here of Morgoth’s not returning ‘in person’, for he was shut beyond the Walls of the World, ‘but only in spirit and as a shadow upon the mind and heart’, cf. the Quenta (IV. 164): ‘Some say also that Morgoth at whiles secretly as a cloud that cannot be seen or felt … creeps back surmounting the Walls and visiteth the world’ (a passage that survived in QS, pp. 332–3 §30).

  §7The concluding sentence concerning the Elves of Tol-eressëa was an addition, but one that looks as if it belongs with the writing of the text. It is very hard to interpret. The rift in the Great Sea appeared east of Tol-eressëa, but the ships that were west of the isle were drawn down into the abyss; and it might be concluded from this that Tol-eressëa also was swallowed up and disappeared: so the Elves who dwelt there ‘passed through the gates of death, and were gathered to their kindred in the land of the Gods’, and ‘the Lonely Isle remained only as a shape of the past.’ But this would be very strange, for it would imply the abandonment of the entire story of Ælfwine’s voyage to Tol-eressëa in ages after; yet Ælfwine as recorder and pupil was still present in my father’s writings after the completion of The Lord of the Rings. On the diagram of the World Made Round accompanying the Ambarkanta (IV. 247) Tol-eressëa is marked as a point on the Straight Path. Moreover, much later, in the Akallabêth (pp. 278–9), the same is told of the great chasm: it opened ‘between Númenor and the Deathless Lands’, and all the fleets of the Númenóreans (which had passed
on to Aman and so were west of Tol-eressëa) were drawn down into it; but ‘Valinor and Eressëa were taken from [the world] into the realm of hidden things.’

  §8The concluding sentence (‘Thus also the heavy air …’) is a marginal addition which seems certainly to belong with the original text. It has no mark for insertion, but must surely be placed here.

  §10The desire to prolong life was already a mark of the Númenóreans (§4), but the dark picture in the Akallabêth (p. 266) of a land of tombs and embalming, of a people obsessed with death, was not present. At this stage in the evolution of the legend, as already in the preliminary outline, the tomb-culture arose among the Númenóreans who escaped the Downfall and founded kingdoms in the ‘Old World’: whether of good or evil disposition ‘all alike were filled with desire of long life upon earth, and the thought of Death was heavy upon them’; and it was the life-span of the Exiles, as it appears, that slowly dwindled. There are echoes of the present passage in the Akallabêth account of Númenor after the Shadow fell upon it in the days of Tar-Atanamir (cf. Unfinished Tales p. 221); but in the very different context of the original story, when this culture arose among those who survived the Cataclysm and their descendants, other elements were present: for the Gods were now removed into the realm of the unknown and unseen, and they became the ‘explanation’ of the mystery of death, their dwelling-place in the far West the region to which the dead passed with their possessions.

  In ‘The Silmarillion’ the Gods are ‘physically’ present, because (whatever the actual mode of their own being) they inhabit the same physical world, the realm of the ‘seen’; if, after the Hiding of Valinor, they could not be reached by the voyages sent out in vain by Turgon of Gondolin, they were nonetheless reached by Eärendel, sailing from Middle-earth in his ship Wingelot, and their physical intervention of arms changed the world for ever through the physical destruction of the power of Morgoth. Thus it may be said that in ‘The Silmarillion’ there is no ‘religion’, because the Divine is present and has not been ‘displaced’; but with the physical removal of the Divine from the World Made Round a religion arose (as it had arisen in Númenor under the teachings of Thû concerning Morgoth, the banished and absent God), and the dead were despatched, for religious reasons, in burial ships on the shores of the Great Sea.

  §12‘But upon the straight road only the Gods and the vanished Elves could walk, or such as the Gods summoned of the fading Elves of the round earth, who became diminished in substance as Men usurped the sun.’ Cf. the Quenta, IV. 100–1, as emended (a passage that goes back to the Sketch of the Mythology, IV. 21):

  In after days, when because of the triumph of Morgoth Elves and Men became estranged, as he most wished, those of the Eldalië that still lived in the world faded, and Men usurped the sunlight. Then the Eldar wandered in the lonelier places of the Outer Lands, and took to the moonlight and to the starlight, and to the woods and caves, and became as shadows, wraiths and memories, such as set not sail unto the West and vanished from the world.

  This passage survived very little changed in QS (§87).

  I believe that the story of the flying ships built by the exiled Númenóreans, found already in the preliminary draft (p. 12), is the sole introduction of aerial craft in all my father’s works. No hint is given of the means by which they rose and were propelled; and the passage did not survive into the later legend.

  §13It is a curious feature of the original story of Númenor that there is no mention of what befell Thû at the Downfall (cf. the Akallabêth p. 280); but he reappears here as a master of temples (cf. the Lay of Leithian lines 2064–7), dwelling in a fortress (§14), an object of hatred to those of the survivors of Númenor who retained something of the ancient knowledge.

  §14In the Quenta (IV. 160–1) it is told that in the Great Battle

  the Northern regions of the Western world were rent and riven, and the sea roared in through many chasms, and there was confusion and great noise; and the rivers perished or found new paths, and the valleys were upheaved and the hills trod down, and Sirion was no more. Then Men fled away … and long was it ere they came back over the mountains to where Beleriand once had been.

  The last words of the earliest Annals of Beleriand (IV. 310) are ‘So ended the First Age of the World and Beleriand was no more.’ It is also said in the Quenta (IV. 162) that after the War was ended ‘there was a mighty building of ships on the shores of the Western Sea, and especially upon the great isles, which in the disruption of the Northern world were fashioned of ancient Beleriand.’

  In FN a rather different conception is suggested. Though Beleriand had been ‘changed and broken’, it is spoken of as ‘that land’, it was still called Beleriand, and it was peopled by Men and Elves, able to form an alliance against Thû. I would suggest (though hesitantly) that with the emergence, here first glimpsed, of a Second Age of Middle-earth consequent on the legend of Númenor, the utter devastation of Beleriand, suitable to the finality of the conclusion of the earlier conception, had been diminished.* Moreover it seems that at this time my father did not conceive of any further destruction of Beleriand at the time of the Downfall of Númenor, as he would do later (see p. 32).

  At this stage there is no mention of a first and founder king of Númenor. Elrond was still the only child of Eärendel and Elwing; his brother Elros has appeared only in late additions to the text of Q (IV. 155), which were inserted after the Númenórean legend had begun to develop. In the oldest conception in the Sketch of the Mythology (IV. 38) Elrond ‘bound by his mortal half elects to stay on earth’ (i.e. in the Great Lands), and in Q (IV. 158) he ‘elected to remain, being bound by his mortal blood in love to those of the younger race’; see my remarks on the Choice of the Half-elven, IV. 70. Elrond is here, as it seems, a leader of the Elves of Beleriand, in alliance with Amroth, predecessor of Elendil. The Last Alliance leading to the overthrow of Thû is seen as the last intervention of the Elves in the affairs of the World of Men, in itself hastening their inevitable fading. The ‘dark forest’ to which Thû fled (cf. the ‘Iron-forest’ in the original outline) is doubtless Mirkwood. In The Hobbit all that had been told of the Necromancer was that he dwelt in a dark tower in the south of Mirkwood.†

  (iii)

  The second version of The Fall of Númenor

  FN II is a clear manuscript, made by my father with FN I before him and probably soon after it. It has many emendations made in the act of composition, and none that seem to have been made after any significant interval, apart from the title, which was inserted later in pencil, and the rejection of a sentence in §7. In contrast to my father’s common tendency to begin a new text keeping close to the antecedent but then to diverge ever more strongly as he proceeded, in this case the earlier part is much changed and expanded whereas the latter is scarcely altered, other than in very minor improvements to the run of sentences, until the end is reached. To give the whole of FN II is therefore unnecessary. Retaining the paragraph numbering of FN I, I give §§1–5 and 14 in full, and of the remainder only such short passages as were significantly altered.

  THE LAST TALE: THE FALL OF NÚMENOR

  §1In the Great Battle when Fionwë son of Manwë overthrew Morgoth and rescued the Exiles, the three houses of the Men of Beleriand fought against Morgoth. But most Men were allies of the Enemy; and after the victory of the Lords of the West those that were not destroyed fled eastward into Middle-earth; and the servants of Morgoth that escaped came to them, and enslaved them. For the Gods forsook for a time the Men of Middle-earth, because they had disobeyed their summons and hearkened to the Enemy. And Men were troubled by many evil things that Morgoth had made in the days of his dominion: demons and dragons and monsters, and Orcs, that are mockeries of the creatures of Ilúvatar; and their lot was unhappy. But Manwë put forth Morgoth, and shut him beyond the world in the Void without; and he cannot return again into the world, present and visible, while the Lords are enthroned. Yet his Will remaineth, and guideth his servants; and it moveth th
em ever to seek the overthrow of the Gods and the hurt of those that obey them.

  But when Morgoth was thrust forth, the Gods held council. The Elves were summoned to return into the West, and such as obeyed dwelt again in Eressëa, the Lonely Island, which was renamed Avallon: for it is hard by Valinor. But Men of the three faithful houses and such as had joined with them were richly rewarded. For Fionwë son of Manwë came among them and taught them; and he gave them wisdom, power, and life stronger than any others have of the mortal race.

  §2And a great land was made for them to dwell in, neither part of Middle-earth nor wholly separate from it. It was raised by Ossë out of the depths of the Great Sea, and established by Aulë and enriched by Yavanna; and the Eldar brought thither flowers and fountains out of Avallon and wrought gardens there of great beauty, in which the Gods themselves at times would walk. That land was called by the Valar Andor, the Land of Gift, and by its own folk it was at first called Vinya, the Young; but in the days of its pride they named it Númenor, that is Westernesse, for it lay west of all lands inhabited by mortals; yet it was far from the true West, for that is Valinor, the land of the Gods. But its glory fell and its name perished; for after its ruin it was named in the legends of those that fled from it Atalantë, the Downfallen. Of old its chief city and haven was in the midst of its western coasts, and it was called Andúnië, because it faced the sunset. But the high place of its king was at Númenos in the heart of the land. It was built first by Elrond son of Eärendel, whom the Gods and Elves chose to be the lord of that land; for in him the blood of the houses of Hador and Bëor was mingled, and with it some part of that of the Eldar and Valar, which he drew from Idril and from Lúthien. But Elrond and all his folk were mortal; for the Valar may not withdraw the gift of death, which cometh to Men from Ilúvatar. Yet they took on the speech of the Elves of the Blessed Realm, as it was and is in Eressëa, and held converse with the Elves, and looked afar upon Valinor; for their ships were suffered to sail to Avallon and their mariners to dwell there for a while.