The Book Of Lost Tales: Part I Part 2

50.

Some crooning lonely and aloof; And some were dancing fairy-rings And weaving pearly daisy-strings, Or chasing golden bees; But here and there a little pair

55.

With rosy cheeks and tangled hair Debated quaint old childish things*-*

And we were one of these.

Lines 5865 (p. 30) were subsequently rewritten: But why it was there came a time When we could take the road no more, Though long we looked, and high would climb, Or gaze from many a seaward sh.o.r.e To find the path between sea and sky To those old gardens of delight; And how it goes now in that land, If there the house and gardens stand, Still filled with children clad in white- We know not, You and I.

And why it was Tomorrow came And with his grey hand led us back;

60.

And why we never found the same Old cottage, or the magic track That leads between a silver sea*

And those old sh.o.r.es* and gardens fair Where all things are, that ever were-

65.

We know not, You and Me.*

This is the final version of the poem: The Little House of Lost Play

Mar Vanwa Tyalieva

We knew that land once, You and I, and once we wandered there in the long days now long gone by, a dark child and a fair.

5.

Was it on the paths of firelight thought 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 in Sleep went down to meet each other there, your dark hair on your white nightgown and mine was tangled fair?

We wandered shyly hand in hand,

15.

small footprints in the golden sand, and gathered pearls and sh.e.l.ls in pails, while all about the nightingales were singing in the trees.

We dug for silver with our spades,

20.

and caught the sparkle of the seas, then ran ash.o.r.e to greenlit glades, and found the warm and winding lane that now we cannot find again, between tall whispering trees.

25.

The air was neither night nor day, an ever-eve of gloaming light, when first there glimmered into sight the Little House of Play.

New-built it was, yet very old,

30.

white, and thatched with straws of gold, and pierced with peeping lattices that looked toward the sea; and our own children's garden-plots were there: our own forgetmenots,

35.

red daisies, cress and mustard, and radishes for tea.

There all the borders, trimmed with box, were filled with favourite flowers, with phlox, with lupins, pinks, and hollyhocks,

40.

beneath a red may-tree; and all the gardens full of folk that their own little language spoke, but not to You and Me.

For some had silver watering-cans

45.

and watered all their gowns, or sprayed each other; some laid plans to build their houses, little towns and dwellings in the trees.

And some were clambering on the roof;

50.

some crooning lonely and aloof; some dancing round the fairy-rings all garlanded in daisy-strings, while some upon their knees before a little white-robed king

55.

crowned with marigold would sing their rhymes of long ago.

But side by side a little pair with heads together, mingled hair, went walking to and fro

60.

still hand in hand; and what they said, ere Waking far apart them led, that only we now know.

It is notable that the poem was called The Cottage, or The Little House of Lost Play, whereas what is described is the Cottage of the Children in Valinor, near the city of Kr; but this, according to Vair (p. 19), 'the Cottage of the Play of Sleep', was 'not of Lost Play, as has wrongly been said in song among Men'.

I shall not attempt any a.n.a.lysis or offer any elucidation of the ideas embodied in the 'Cottages of the Children'. The reader, however he interprets them, will in any case not need to be a.s.sisted in his perception of the personal and particular emotions in which all was still anch.o.r.ed.

As I have said, the conception of the coming of mortal children in sleep to the gardens of Valinor was soon to be abandoned in its entirety, and in the developed mythology there would be no place for it-still less for the idea that in some possible future day 'the roads through Arvalin to Valinor shall be thronged with the sons and daughters of Men'.

Likewise, all the 'elfin' diminutiveness soon disappeared. The idea of the Cottage of the Children was already in being in 1915, as the poem You and Me shows; and it was in the same year, indeed on the same days of April, that Goblin Feet (or c.u.ma Nihtielfas) was written, concerning which my father said in 1971: 'I wish the unhappy little thing, representing all that I came (so soon after) to fervently dislike, could be buried for ever.'* Yet it is to be observed that in early notes Elves and Men are said to have been 'of a size' in former days, and the smallness (and filminess and transparency) of the 'fairies' is an aspect of their 'fading', and directly related to the domination of Men in the Great Lands. To this matter I shall return later. In this connection, the diminutiveness of the Cottage is very strange, since it seems to be a diminutiveness peculiar to itself: Eriol, who has travelled for many days through Tol Eressa, is astonished that the dwelling can hold so many, and he is told that all who enter it must be, or must become, very small. But Tol Eressa is an island inhabited by Elves.