Lake of Tears

The Lake of Tears on Pauline Baynes's cover-art for Smith of Wootton Major
Lake
Lake of Tears
General Information
Location	Outer Faery, Faery
Type	Lake
Description	A deep lake in the Outer Mountains containing an unspecified substance
People and History
Inhabitants	"Fiery creatures" and the wild Wind
Gallery	Images of Lake of Tears

The Lake of Tears was a wide lake of an unspecified substance that lay at the bottom of "a deep dale" that Smith Smithson saw only once in the land of Faery.

History

Whilst journeying to find the King's Tree again, Smith climbed "into the Outer Mountains" and stumbled upon a lake. The lake emitted a light that "was like a red sunset" and the woods surrounding it were stirred by a breeze. When Smith looked into the lake from a low overhanging cliff, he discovered that it was immeasurably deep and that "fiery creatures" swam in it among "strange shapes of flame bending and branching and wavering like great weeds". When Smith tried to enter the lake, he "fell heavily" and found that, upon stepping on it, "it was not water" but was instead something that "was harder than stone and sleeker than glass". As a consequence, "a ringing boom…echoed" and caused the surrounding breeze to become a wild Wind that drove him out of that dale. When Smith tried to save himself by clinging to "a young birch", the Wind tore off every leaf before moving on, causing the birch to weep bitter tears "from its branches like rain". When Smith tried to apologize, the birch demanded that he leave and never return to Faery. While Smith obeyed the birch for a time, he eventually returned to Faery.

Other versions

In the earliest drafts of Smith of Wootton Major, the Lake of Tears was "clearly liquid" that was fluid enough for Smith to "swim in it". In the second draft, The lake became "harder than stone and slidder than glass" before "slidder" became "sleeker" in the third draft. In the earliest draft, there was the great island in the middle and the water tasted "cool and sweet". In the second draft, the taste of the water was described as bitter and the tears of multiple trees (as opposed to a single birch) are described as gathering "in rivulets that ran down into the lake".

Background

In her Afterword, Verlyn Flieger listed the Lake of Tears drafts as an example of "how Tolkien expanded Smith of Wootton Major from the inside". In a note to the words "Slidder than glass", Flieger noted that slidder is "an archaic adjective now obsolete" meaning "slippery; on which one readily slips". The word "comes from Old English slidor from slidan" ("slide"). She further explains that the word was first used in "Is by oferceald unzemetum slidor" ("Ice is excessively cold, immeasurably slippery") from "the Anglo-Saxon Runic Poem #29" early in the eighth or ninth centuries, though the earliest usage to how Tolkien used it "occurs in Robert Mannynge of Brunne's Middle English text Handling Synne ("Sins' Handbook")" around 1303 in which a brygge ("bridge") is described "as sledyr as any glas".