The Cottage of Lost Play
the frame-tale of the Book of Lost Tales; Eriol's coming to Tol Eressëa
Nature
The Cottage of Lost Play is the frame-tale of the Book of Lost Tales (HoME 1): the entry-hall of the whole earliest mythology. The mariner Eriol — “one who dreams alone” — sails at last to the isle of Tol Eressëa, to the city of Kortirion, and is led to , a fair house where the little children of the elven-kind come back to play. There, night after night, the oldest tales of the world are told to him — the beginning of the “Lost Tales” and of every later framing of the legendarium.
Contents
The ocean-voyage of Eriol and his landing on the isle, his welcome at the great gate by Littleheart the gong-warden, son of Bronweg; Kortirion and the Cottage itself, where the lost children of the Eldar play their happy games of long ago; The household of the Cottage under its master Lindo, and Vairë his wife, with the choice of the tales to be opened to the mariner; The first great telling — that of Tinúviel — and Eriol’s part in preserving the ancient lore for the later peoples of the world.
Composition
The poem of the same name was one of Tolkien’s earliest mythological writings (c. 1915, rising out of wartime leave and loss), and it was expanded into the prose frame of the Book of Lost Tales from 1916 onward. The frame was published, with the first tale, as the opening of Christopher Tolkien’s The Book of Lost Tales, Part One (1983, HoME 1), together with his notes on the manuscripts and on the later “Ælfwine” version of the frame that replaced Eriol.