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In commenting on the conclusion of the mythology in S, here comprised in the three sections 17–19, I point to features that derive from or contradict those outlines and notes from an earlier period that are collected in Vol. II chapter V and the earlier part of Chapter VI. S is here an extremely abbreviated outline, composed very rapidly – my father was indeed changing his conceptions as he wrote.

For the narrative of §17 the primary extant early sources are the ‘schemes’ or plot-outlines which I have called ‘B’ and ‘C’, in the passages given in II. 253 and 254–5 respectively.

At the beginning of this section, before emendation, the survivors of Gondolin were already at the Mouths of Sirion when Elwing came there; and this goes back to B and C (‘Elwing … flees to them [i.e. Tuor and Idril] with the Nauglafring’, II. 254). But earlier in S (§15) the destruction of Dior took place before the fall of Gondolin; hence the revision here, to make Elwing ‘receive the survivors of Gondolin’. (In the Tale of the Nauglafring, II. 242, the fall of Gondolin and the attack on Dior took place on the same day.)

Following this, there is a major development in S. In the early outlines there is the story, only glimpsed, of the March of the Elves of Valinor into the Great Lands; and in B (only) there is a reference to ‘the sorrow and wrath of the Gods’, of which I said in my discussion of these outlines (II. 257): ‘the meaning can surely only be that the March of the Elves from Valinor was undertaken in direct opposition to the will of the Valar, that the Valar were bitterly opposed to the intervention of the Elves of Valinor in the affairs of the Great Lands.’ On the other hand, the bare hints of what happened when the assault on Melko took place show that greater powers than the Eldar alone were present: Noldorin (the Vala Salmar, who entered the world with Ulmo, and loved the Noldoli), and Tulkas himself, who overthrew Melko in the Battle of the Silent Pools (outline C, II. 278). The only hint in the outlines of Ulmo’s intervention is his saving of Eärendel from shipwreck, bidding him sail to Kôr with the words ‘for this hast thou been brought out of the Wrack of Gondolin’ (B, similarly in C). The March of the Eldar from Valinor was brought about by the coming of the birds from Gondolin.