12/5/67
2nd day of Pennsylvanian Conference, broadly dull affair, but needs must and all. Dined with Dafydd, delightful to see him again after all this time. Showed me some drafts and notes and etc. for some book he’s collating. Not sure what to make of most of it and told him so myself, which didn’t go down terribly well. But it’s mostly perfectly charming and amusing, which rather makes the more frightening stuff all the more peculiar. Still, I daresay he knows what he’s doing.
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17/5/67
Managed to catch C.D. again before he flees back into his self-afflicted exile, poor blighter. Not that he seems to mind it much. Baffling. All wounds from Tuesday last completely smoothed over, near as I can tell. C.D. in excellent spirits, seems to have uncovered some rather interesting new material recently. I expressed interest, got into a good chinwag about Gnomish marital custom (he claims to have come into some rather interesting accounts that rather challenge the status quo, as it were), sat up till near two in the morning, suffering dreadful headache now as penance.
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2/11/72
Interesting chat with old Dafydd this afternoon, who wanted to show me some material he’s recently been examining. A poem, specifically, most odd. Neither he nor I really know what to make of the damn thing. Tone is very light, vulgar even, and is completely unremarkable aesthetically. Subject matter is striking though, tale of some Elfin lord’s role in rendering the beasts and birds of the world, clearly creationistic material and featuring the most remarkable feats. He seemed to think of it as more a curiosity, but I found the whole thing rather striking, significant even. Became a bit cagey when I asked if it was derived from the Lebennin collection…hinted that it may have come from a seperate source and been added to the collection later (perhaps by L., perhaps by someone else? Not sure).
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Dear Mr. Lyss,
Enclosed is the piece you were so very struck by the other day. On reflection, it seems rather clear to me that it does not, in fact, belong to the material of Lathron’s yellow book1, and given your clear interest in it, I thought it best to let you labour upon it further. I would, all the same, offer some words of instruction with the hopes that I might clarify why I no longer believe it holds to my scheme, and, more importantly, why I so stubbornly clung to the sense that it did.
I remarked the other day that this is a very vulgar piece. As, indeed, it well is, and as, indeed, you well agreed!—Yet that qualifier needs, I guess, some elucidation. It is a vulgar piece in its commonness… to us. I say, “to us” for this piece is more communicable to us modern folk than that most exemplary of the extant High Elvish texts, Galadriel of the Red Book’s “Song of Eldamar”, which we feel has come to us from a time and world not our own due to its elaborate metre and remote mythico-historical significance. Not so the so-called “Wrongings of Gilrillion”, which calls to mind the familiar pentameter of old Shakespeare’s Oberon or the reams of nonsense sputtered by Carrol’s Walrus and Carpenter, and Lord Douglas’s Belgian Hare. Yet, though “Wrongings” is all quite “us”, it is decidedly the work of a fairy; the Sindarin is too good, too refined to be wasted on something so low. Even the greatest of the old texts, it is said, always “show” in their Elvish when an Elf’s voice has been spared. As you well know, it is clear, for example, that much of the Red Book is not genuine Elf-work, and yet it is peppered with texts (the above-quoted song, “Namárië”, etc.) that are clear copies of a “genuine” Sindarin or Quenya speaker (I use this term, “genuine”, conscious of its inaccuracy, for it cannot full-throatedly be said that Mannish derivations of Sindarin and Quenya are not genuine).
But you must let me twist myself a little further, Alain, for it would be a poor letter if I left things quite as straight as all that. You would not recall this, for you are too young (God, how old I am!), but before the war John Tolkien gave a paper on Faerie up at St. Andrews. There is much to quibble with in it (the whole thing is, somehow, both too narrow and too broad), yet let us be charitable to the old fellow and accept one of its points: that Faerie is an enchantment, that it is a point of communication—a dialectic, if you will not run for the hills at my saying so—between the thing enchanting and the thing enchanted. The thing enchanted may not know why he is being enchanted (he may not, you see, find “meaning” in it), but he knows, at the very least, that he is being enchanted and finds some obscure, unnameable mystic wisdom in it. This is not so in the piece that so interests you, for what enchantment it may express is diminished by the meaninglessness of its meaningfulness. The silly fairy gives a crow its black feathers, a toad its toothlessness, a bat its blindness, a wolf its howl—but we are left none the more enchanted for it. Faerie is, old John used to say, not the work of the scientist or the magician (the kind of work that dear Gilrillion, in some strange sense, aims at by answering for the origins of these animals we now know so well), for those labours bring us only back to mortal lands and render us far, so far from Elvenhome. We are, then, not enchanted by Gilrillion, but, in fact, disenchanted by him.
Yet here I must break from John—for in his frenzied clasp to orthodoxy, he neglects to acknowledge the value of disenchantment to the scholar or any seeker of the true history of Faerie. This piece is no less “magical” than the Faerie of old in its refusal to enchant us. Indeed, perhaps it is, in actuality, more so, in this age where magic is known as that which will not speak to us—the fairy that hides beneath the car park or the ghost one always misses. This piece shows us a Faerie that has no interest in ensorcelling us, a Faerie that we can only ever view from behind the very thickest of veils, with confusion and not a little delight. But, here, there is no real communion, no encounter by way of enchantment, as there was with Faerie of old.
Indeed, you will note I never once referred to this piece as the work of an Elf, for that would be false. This is fairy-stuff. Perhaps even among the very first bit of it. It is the work of a folk we no longer know, and who have little interest in knowing us. I clung to this piece for just such a reason. You see, I am quite convinced that the yellow book charts a punctum in the mythology of our prehistory, showing not merely the end of the age of the Elves, but the beginning of the age of a new folk, the Fairies—the remnant Elves, who were pushed to the margins of the world by the ascendancy of Men, becoming a covetous and fickle folk. We see, I have argued, just such a transition in “The Lament for the Hoard of Finrod Felagund”, a work attested by Lathron to be the writing of the Elf Nenaras (who is, Lathron says, apparently the author of much of this yellow book). That piece, “The Lament”, is decidedly vulgar in its fixation on a jewel “rising, falling on an Elf-maid’s breast”, and its childish glee in maligning the Elven Kings of Elder Days. Nonetheless, it is, like so many of the works in the yellow book, a clear cousin to the “Song of Eldamar”, given in the High Elvish form and very seriously concerned, however perversely to many eyes, with the history of Elfinesse. This work and others like it in the yellow book enchant us by pulling up Faerie’s skirts, whether we wish to see what beautiful and terrible things lie within (and I doubt Alain, given our last discourse, that you very much wish to see what is within). Alternatively, there is no skirt to part in “The Wrongings of Gilrillion”... and if there is, I doubt that Gilrillion would reveal its existence to us.
I have said, then, that I was keen (deceptively so, perhaps) to make “Wrongings” fit my scheme, to say that this was the last of the songs sung to Lathron of Lebennin by Nenaras Neldion, who then became Gilrillion. To prove beyond any doubt that I had in my hands clear, irrefutable proof of an Elf’s decline to the fairyhood that Galadriel of the Red Book so feared. To show an unbroken line between the races of Elves and Fairies. I see now that to claim this would be false. Though I am quite convinced that Nenaras’s decline occurred, and that he became a great Prince of the Fairies before fading to nothingness thereafter (I have, in my possession, some treat I am not yet willing to speak of), I cannot say that he and Gilrillion are one and the same. No matter how far the former fell, I guess he could not and did not know how to bring enchantment to an end, and I guess the latter was born to a world fresh from the graves of the Elves that had little desire to enchant Men as anything more than a cruel or jealous trick.
How, ultimately, “Wrongings” came to end up amongst the material of the yellow book, I cannot quite say, although it is clear to me that that it has always been there. “Wrongings” was listed in the contents of both appearances at Sotheby’s in 1893 and 1956 (when Nina Weston of the New York hotelier fortune bagged the chronicle); and the hand is remarkably like that of Lathron’s, done in the same rigid Tengwar of the scribes of Minas Tirith at that time. Furthermore, though its illumination is not so rich as “The Lament” (there is less tempera and gold, yet the illumination of the toad is notable for receiving the lion’s share of it—the glut!), its pages are as yellowed as any other text in this collection, suggesting that it joined them in whatever ruin (woe that it be so!) that occasioned them in ages past. If it was not set down by Lathron, then it was assuredly set down by a man of similar pedigree and learning—but that is a wide net to cast, for in those days of the King returned, there were very many men of learning setting down all sorts of writing (much of it dreadful).
I’ll leave such detective work to you, Alain. I have a terrific mountain of work to climb as I finish the last of these translations for Fairy-Hill. Nonetheless, I will be sure to make some note in the preface or acknowledgements (God, the many thanks I’ll have to give, and none of them genuine) on you and whoever else you mightn’t wrangle to work on this, and give the readers (whatever few) some update on the project.
I shall be sad, I think, to see it go. But it will be truer to Faerie’s history this way. As true as such a thing a can be at any rate.
My love, as always, to Mrs. Lyss, and little Charlie, too, why not!
Warmly,
C. D., 9.11.1972
1 This was a chronicle attributed to Lathron of Lebennin, scribe to Queen Arwen Undómiel of Gondor. The chronicle was, in fact, nameless, and gained the epithet, “yellow book”, in the 20th century due to the discolouration of its pages, its notable gold illuminations, and its association with the British Decadent movement (it belonged for a time to Lord Alfred Douglas). For more information on the textual history of this chronicle, see Cyril Dafydd’s “A Note on the Text” in Memories of Fairy-Hill (1978).
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- From the notes and files of Alain Lyss, digitised 10.9.24 by C. Lyss. With special thanks to the estate of Cyril Dafydd for allowing the publication of this letter, and preparing it for digitisation.
