Q: What Species were the Black and White Birds in the Book of Lost Tales?
And in this case my answer won’t be very detailed or satisfactory. Unfortunately, the question did not provide enough details for me to propose an answer at the time, although someone in the audience suggested the birds might be Puffins.
Puffins are northern climate birds found in both the Atlantic and Pacific regions. Because Puffins live in the British Isles J.R.R. Tolkien would have been familiar with them. So the guess that he may have been writing about Puffins seemed reasonable.
However, the only passage in The Book of Lost Tales where I can find a reference to black and white birds is in “The Coming of the Elves and the Making of Kor”. This passage concerns Osse, and reads:
Now is Osse very fain of those Solosimpi, the shoreland pipers, and if Ulmo be not nigh he sits upon a reef at sea and many of the Oarni are by him, and hearkens to their voice and watches their flitting dances on this shore, but to Valmar he dare not fare again for the power of Ulmo in the councils of the Valar and………. the wrath of that mighty one at the anchoring of the islands.
Indeed war had been but held off by the Gods, who desired peace and would not suffer Ulmo to gather the folk of the Valar and assail Osse and rend the islands from their new roots. Therefore does Osse sometimes ride the foams out into the bay of Arvalin’ and gaze upon the glory of the hills, and he longs for the light and happiness upon the plain, but most for the song of birds and the swift movement of their wings into the clean air, grown weary of his silver and dark fish silent and strange amid the deep waters.
But on a day some birds came flying high from the gardens of Yavanna, and some were white and some black and some both black and white; and being dazed among the shadows they had nowhere to settle, and Osse coaxed them, and they settled about his mighty shoulders, and he taught them to swim and gave them great strength of wing, for of such strength of shoulder he had more than any [?other] being and was the greatest of swimmers; and he poured fishy oils upon their feathers that they might bear the waters, and he fed them on small fish.
Here Osse is one of the Valar (one of the pagan gods of The Book of Lost Tales, which was Tolkien’s “mythology for England”) and this passage describes how he “evolved” the seabirds of the world. So these black and white birds, which wandered too far from their original home, were adopted by Osse and gradually transformed into seabirds.
There is a great deal of material in The Book of Lost Tales about seabirds, but also about birds in general. In fact, many of the birds communicate with the Elves (literally talking to them) and the Valar, but Tolkien diminishes this fantastic capability among his animals in later stories, even though there are still some talking birds in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. But in the above passage the birds are only vaguely described as of certain colors, and I think the author is implying that all the various species of black seabirds and white seabirds and black-and-white seabirds were either represented among the birds Osse adopted or descended from them.
So I don’t think it’s correct to say that the black-and-white birds were Puffins. It would be more correct to suggest that Puffins or the ancestors of Puffins were included among those birds. There are at least a few dozen species of black-and-white seabirds, some of which are closely related to Puffins. I just don’t think Tolkien had a single species in mind when he wrote that story.
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