This brings to an end my rendering and analysis of the early writings bearing on the story of the mariner who came to the Lonely Isle and learned there the true history of the Elves. I have shown, convincingly as I hope, the curious and complex way in which my father’s vision of the significance of Tol Eressлa changed. When he jotted down the synopsis (10), the idea of the mariner’s voyage to the Island of the Elves was of course already present; but he journeyed out of the East and the Lonely Isle of his seeking was—England (though not yet the land of the English and not yet lying in the seas where England lies). When later the entire concept was shifted, England, as ‘Luthany’ or ‘Lъthien’, remained preeminently the Elvish land; and Tol Eressлa, with its meads and coppices, its rooks’ nests in the elm-trees of Alalminуrл, seemed to the English mariner to be remade in the likeness of his own land, which the Elves had lost at the coming of Men: for it was indeed a re-embodiment of Elvish Luthany far over the sea.

All this was to fall away afterwards from the developing mythology; but Жlfwine left many marks on its pages before he too finally disappeared.

Much in this chapter is necessarily inconclusive and uncertain; but I believe that these very early notes and projections are rightly disinterred. Although, as ‘plots’, abandoned and doubtless forgotten, they bear witness to truths of my father’s heart and mind that he never abandoned. But these notes were scribbled down in his youth, when for him Elvish magic ‘lingered yet mightily in the woods and hills of Luthany’ in his old age all was gone West-over-sea, and an end was indeed come for the Eldar of story and of song.

NOTES

1 On this statement about the stature of Elves and Men see pp. 326–7.

2 For the form Taimonto (Taimondo) see I.268, entry Telimektar.

3 Belaurin is the Gnomish equivalent of Palъrien (see I. 264).

4 A side-note here suggests that perhaps the Pine should not be in Tol Eressлa.—For Ilwл, the middle air, that is ‘blue and clear and flows among the stars’, see I. 65, 73.

5 Gil = Ingil. At the first occurrence of Ingil in this passage the name was written Ingil (Gil), but (Gil) was struck out.

6 The word Nautar occurs in a rejected outline for the Tale of the Nauglafring (p. 136), where it is equated with Nauglath (Dwarves).

7 Uin: ‘the mightiest and most ancient of whales’, chief among those whales and fishes that drew the ‘island-car’ (afterwards Tol Eressлa) on which Ulmo ferried the Elves to Valinor (I.118–20).

8 Gongs: these are evil beings obscurely related to Orcs: see I. 245 note 10, and the rejected outlines for the Tale of the Nauglafring given on pp. 136–7.

9 A large query is written against this passage.

10 The likeness of this name to Dor Daedeloth is striking, but that is the name of the realm of Morgoth in The Silmarillion, and is interpreted ‘Land of the Shadow of Horror’ the old name (whose elements are dai ‘sky’ and teloth ‘roof’) has nothing in common with the later except its form.

11 Cf. Kortirion among the Trees (I.34, 37, 41): A wave of bowing grass.

12 The origin of Warwick according to conventional etymology is uncertain. The element wic, extremely common in English place-names, meant essentially a dwelling or group of dwellings. The earliest recorded form of the name is Wжring wic, and Wжring has been thought to be an Old English word meaning a dam, a derivative from wer, Modern English weir: thus ‘dwellings by the weir’.

13 Cf. the title-page given in citation (11): Heorrenda of Hжgwudu.—No forms of the name of this Staffordshire village are actually recorded from before the Norman Conquest, but the Old English form was undoubtedly hжg-wudu ‘enclosed wood’ (cf. the High Hay, the great hedge that protected Buckland from the Old Forest in The Lord of the Rings).

14 The name Luthany, of a country, occurs five times in Francis Thompson’s poem The Mistress of Vision. As noted previously (I.29) my father acquired the Collected Poems of Francis Thompson in 1913–14; and in that copy he made a marginal note against one of the verses that contains the name Luthany—though the note is not concerned with the name. But whence Thompson derived Luthany I have no idea. He himself described the poem as ‘a fantasy’ (Everard Meynell, The Life of Francis Thompson, 1913, p. 237).

This provides no more than the origin of the name as a series of sounds, as with Kфr from Rider Haggard’s She,* or Rohan and Moria mentioned in my father’s letter of 1967 on this subject (The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, pp. 383–4), in which he said:

This leads to the matter of ‘external history’: the actual way in which I came to light on or choose certain sequences of sound to use as names, before they were given a place inside the story. I think, as I said, this is unimportant: the labour involved in my setting out what I know and remember of the process, or in the guess-work of others, would be far greater than the worth of the results. The spoken forms would simply be mere audible forms, and when transferred to the prepared linguistic situation in my story would receive meaning and significance according to that situation, and to the nature of the story told. It would be entirely delusory to refer to the sources of the sound-combination to discover any meanings overt or hidden.

15 The position is complicated by the existence of some narrative outlines of extreme roughness and near-illegibility in which the mariner is named Жlfwine and yet essential elements of ‘the Eriol story’ are present. These I take to represent an intermediate stage. They are very obscure, and would require a great deal of space to present and discuss; therefore I pass them by.

16 Cf. p. 264 (xiv).

17 Caer Gwвr: see p. 292.

18 It may be mentioned here that when my father read The Fall of Gondolin to the Exeter College Essay Club in the spring of 1920 the mariner was still Eriol, as appears from the notes for his preliminary remarks on that occasion (see Unfinished Tales p. 5). He said here, very strangely, that ‘Eriol lights by accident on the Lonely Island’.

19 Garsecg (pronounced Garsedge, and so written in Жlfwine A) was one of the many Old English names of the sea.

20 In Жlfwine I the land is likewise named Lъthien, not Luthany. In Жlfwine A, on the other hand, the same distinction is made as in the outlines: ‘Жlfwine of England (whom the fairies after named Lъthien (friend) of Luthany (friendship)).’—At this first occurrence (only) of Lъthien in Жlfwine II the form Leithian is pencilled above, but Lъthien is not struck out. The Lay of Leithian was afterwards the title of the long poem of Beren and Lъthien Tinъviel.

21 The Hill of Tыn, i.e. the hill on which the city of Tыn was built: see p. 292.

22 Mindon Gwar: see p. 291.

23 Йadgifu: in ‘the Eriol story’ this Old English name (see p. 323) was given as an equivalent to Naimi, Eriol’s wife whom he wedded in Tol Eressлa (p. 290).

24 In Жlfwine I the text here reads: ‘by reason of her beauty and goodliness, even as that king of the Franks that was upon a time most mighty among men hath said…’ [sic]. In Жlfwine II the manuscript in ink stops at ‘high white shores’, but after these words my father pencilled in: ‘even as that king of the Franks that was in those days the mightiest of earthly kings hath said…’ [sic]. The only clue in Жlfwine of England to the period of Жlfwine’s life is the invasion of the Forodwaith (Vikings); the mighty king of the Franks may therefore be Charlemagne, but I have been unable to trace any such reference.