Very beautiful was Kortirion and the fairies loved it, and it became rich in song and poesy and the light of laughter; but on a time the great Faring Forth was made, and the fairies had rekindled once more the Magic Sun of Valinor but for the treason and faint hearts of Men. But so it is that the Magic Sun is dead and the Lonely Isle drawn back unto the confines of the Great Lands, and the fairies are scattered through all the wide unfriendly pathways of the world; and now Men dwell even on this faded isle, and care nought or know nought of its ancient days. Yet still there be some of the Eldar and the Noldoli‡ of old who linger in the island, and their songs are heard about the shores of the land that once was the fairest dwelling of the immortal folk.
And it seems to the fairies and it seems to me who know that town and have often trodden its disfigured ways that autumn and the falling of the leaf is the season of the year when maybe here or there a heart among Men may be open, and an eye perceive how is the world’s estate fallen from the laughter and the loveliness of old. Think on Kortirion and be sad—yet is there not hope?
Both h1ere and in The Cottage of Lost Play there are allusions to events still in the future when Eriol came to Tol Eressлa; and though the full exposition and discussion of them must wait until the end of the Tales it needs to be explained here that ‘the Faring Forth’ was a great expedition made from Tol Eressлa for the rescue of the Elves who were still wandering in the Great Lands—cf. Lindo’s words (p. 17): ‘until such time as they fare forth to find the lost families of the kindred’. At that time Tol Eressлa was uprooted, by the aid of Ulmo, from the sea-bottom and dragged near to the western shores of the Great Lands. In the battle that followed the Elves were defeated, and fled into hiding in Tol Eressлa; Men entered the isle, and the fading of the Elves began. The subsequent history of Tol Eressлa is the history of England; and Warwick is ‘disfigured Kortirion’, itself a memory of ancient Kфr (the later Tirion upon Tъna, city of the Elves in Aman; in the Lost Tales the name Kфr is used both of the city and the hill).
Inwл, referred to in The Cottage of Lost Play as ‘King of all the Eldar when they dwelt in Kфr’, is the forerunner of Ingwл King of the Vanyar Elves in The Silmarillion. In a story told later to Eriol in Tol Eressлa Inwл reappears as one of the three Elves who went first to Valinor after the Awakening, as was Ingwл in The Silmarillion; his kindred and descendants were the Inwir, of whom came Meril-i-Turinqi, the Lady of Tol Eressлa (see p. 50). Lindo’s references to Inwл’s hearing ‘the lament of the world’ (i.e. of the Great Lands) and to his leading the Eldar forth to the lands of Men (p. 16) are the germ of the story of the coming of the Hosts of the West to the assault on Thangorodrim: ‘The host of the Valar prepared for battle; and beneath their white banners marched the Vanyar, the people of Ingwл…’ (The Silmarillion, p. 251). Later in the Tales it is said to Eriol by Meril-i-Turinqi that ‘Inwл was the eldest of the Elves, and had lived yet in majesty had he not perished in that march into the world; but Ingil his son went long ago back to Valinor and is with Manwл’. In The Silmarillion, on the other hand, it is said of Ingwл that ‘he entered into Valinor [in the beginning of the days of the Elves] and sits at the feet of the Powers, and all Elves revere his name; but he came never back, nor looked again upon Middle-earth’ (p. 53).
Lindo’s words about the sojourn of Ingil in Tol Eressлa ‘after many days’, and the interpretation of the name of his town Koromas as ‘the Resting of the Exiles of Kфr’, refer to the return of the Eldar from the Great Lands after the war on Melko (Melkor, Morgoth) for the deliverance of the enslaved Noldoli. His words about his father Valwл ‘who went with Noldorin to find the Gnomes’ refer to an element in this story of the expedition from Kфr.*
It is important to see, then, that (if my general interpretation is correct) in The Cottage of Lost Play Eriol comes to Tol Eressлa in the time after the Fall of Gondolin and the march of the Elves of Kфr into the Great Lands for the defeat of Melko, when the Elves who had taken part in it had returned over the sea to dwell in Tol Eressлa; but before the time of the ‘Faring Forth’ and the removal of Tol Eressлa to the geographical position of England. This latter element was soon lost in its entirety from the developing mythology.
1Of the ‘Cottage’ itself it must be said at once that very little light can be cast on it from other writings of my father’s; for the entire conception of the Children who went to Valinor was to be abandoned almost without further trace. Later in the Lost Tales, however, there are again references to Olуre Mallл. After the description of the Hiding of Valinor, it is told that at the bidding of Manwл (who looked on the event with sorrow) the Valar Oromл and Lуrien devised strange paths from the Great Lands to Valinor, and the way of Lуrien’s devising was Olуrл Mallл the Path of Dreams; by this road, when ‘Men were yet but new-wakened on the earth’, ‘the children of the fathers of the fathers of Men’ came to Valinor in their sleep (pp. 211, 213). There are two further mentions in tales to be given in Part II: the teller of the Tale of Tinъviel (a child of Mar Vanwa Tyaliйva) says that she saw Tinъviel and her mother with her own eyes ‘when journeying by the Way of Dreams in long past days’, and the teller of the Tale of Turambar says that he ‘trod Olуrл Mallл in the days before the fall of Gondolin’.
There is also a poem on the subject of the Cottage of Lost Play, which has many of the details of the description in the prose text. This poem, according to my father’s notes, was composed at 59 St John’s Street, Oxford, his undergraduate lodgings, on 27–28 April 1915 (when he was 23). It exists (as is constantly the case with the poems) in several versions, each modified in detail from the preceding one, and the end of the poem was twice entirely rewritten. I give it here first in the earliest form, with changes made to this in notes at the foot of the page, and then in the final version, the date of which cannot be certainly determined. I suspect that it was very much later—and may indeed have been one of the revisions made to old poems when the collection The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962) was being prepared, though it is not mentioned in my father’s correspondence on that subject.
The original title was: You and Me / and the Cottage of Lost Play (with an Old English rendering Pжt hъsincel
You & Me
and the Cottage of Lost Play
You and me*—we know that land
And often have been there In the long old days, old nursery days,*
A dark child and a fair.5
Was it down the paths of firelight dreams
In winter cold and white, Or in the blue-spun twilit hours
Of little early tucked-up beds
In drowsy summer night,10
That You and I got lost in Sleep
And met each other there— Your dark hair on your white nightgown,
And mine was tangled fair? We wandered shyly hand in hand,
15
Or rollicked in the fairy sand* And gathered pearls and shells in pails,