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It is in any case often extremely difficult, or impossible, to judge whether features in the Tales that are not present in the ‘Sketch’ were omitted simply for the sake of compression, or whether they had been definitively abandoned. Thus while Eriol – not Ælfwine, see II. 300 – is mentioned at the end, and his coming to Kortirion in Tol Eressëa, there is no trace of the ssss1: the entire narrative framework of the Lost Tales has disappeared. But this does not by any means demonstrate that my father had actually rejected it at this time.

The Commentary that follows is divided according to the 19 sections into which I have divided the narrative.

The ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ is referred to throughout the rest of this book by the abbreviation ‘S’.

ssss1

S (the ‘Sketch’), which makes no reference to the Creation and the Music of the Ainur, begins with the coming of the Nine Valar ‘for the governance of the world’: the Nine Valar have been referred to in the alliterative poem The Flight of the Noldoli (see III. 133, 137). There now appears the isle (later called Almaren) on which the Gods dwelt after the making of the Lamps, the origin of which is probably to be seen in the tale of The Coming of the Valar I. 69–70, where it is said that when the Lamps fell the Valar were gathered on the Twilit Isles, and that ‘that island whereon stood the Valar’ was dragged westward by Ossë. It might seem that the story of Melko’s making the pillars of the Lamps out of ice that melted had been abandoned, but it reappears again later, in the Ambarkanta (p. 238).

The use of the word ‘plant’ of the Two Trees is curious, and might be dismissed simply as a hasty expression if it did not appear in the following version of ‘The Silmarillion’, the Quenta (ssss1). In the old tale, as in the published work, the Trees rose from the ground under the chanted spells of Yavanna. The silver undersides of the leaves of the White Tree now appear, and its flowers are likened to those of a cherry: Silpion is translated ‘Cherry-moon’ in the Name-list to The Fall of Gondolin (II. 215). The mention of the White Tree first may imply that it had now become the Elder Tree, as it is explicitly in the Quenta.