The Lost Road and Other Writings. Christopher Tolkien

The Lost Road and Other Writings - Christopher  Tolkien


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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.

      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.

      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.

      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


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