Hark O my brothers, they shall say, the little trumpets blow; we hear a sound of instruments unimagined small. Like strands of wind, like mystic half-transparencies, Gilfanon Lord of Tavrobel rides out tonight amid his folk, and hunts the elfin deer beneath the paling sky. A music of forgotten feet, a gleam of leaves, a sudden bending of the grass,¹¹ and wistful voices murmuring on the bridge, and they are gone.

But behold, Tavrobel shall not know its name, and all the land be changed, and even these written words of mine belike will all be lost; and so I lay down the pen, and so of the fairies cease to tell.

Another text that bears on these matters is the prose preface to Kortirion among the Trees (1915), which has been given in Part I 25–6, but which I repeat here:

(9)     Now on a time the fairies dwelt in the Lonely Isle after the great wars with Melko and the ruin of Gondolin; and they builded a fair city amidmost of that island, and it was girt with trees. Now this city they called Kortirion, both in memory of their ancient dwelling of Kфr in Valinor, and because this city stood also upon a hill and had a great tower tall and grey that Ingil son of Inwл their lord let raise.

Very beautiful was Kurtirion and the fairies loved it, and it became rich in song and poesy and the light of laughter; but on a time the great Faring Forth was made, and the fairies had rekindled once more the Magic Sun of Valinor but for the treason and faint hearts of Men. But so it is that the Magic Sun is dead and the Lonely Isle drawn back unto the confines of the Great Lands, and the fairies are scattered through all the wide unfriendly pathways of the world; and now Men dwell even on this faded isle, and care nought or know nought of its ancient days. Yet still there be some of the Eldar and the Noldoli of old who linger in the island, and their songs are heard about the shores of the land that once was the fairest dwelling of the immortal folk.

And it seems to the fairies and it seems to me who know that town and have often trodden its disfigured ways that autumn and the falling of the leaf is the season of the year when maybe here or there a heart among Men may be open, and an eye perceive how is the world’s estate fallen from the laughter and the loveliness of old. Think on Kortirion and be sad—yet is there not hope?

At this point we may turn to the history of Eriol himself. My father’s early conceptions of the mariner who came to Tol Eressлa are here again no more than allusive outlines in the pages of the little notebook C, and some of this material cannot be usefully reproduced. Perhaps the earliest is a collection of notes headed ‘Story of Eriol’s Life’, which I gave in Vol. I.23–4 but with the omission of some features that were not there relevant. I repeat it here, with the addition of the statements previously omitted.

(10) Eriol’s original name was Ottor, but he called himself W

fre (Old English: ‘restless, wandering’) and lived a life on the waters. His father was named Eoh (Old English: ‘horse’); and Eoh was slain by his brother Beorn, either ‘in the siege’ or ‘in a great battle’. Ottor W fre settled on the island of Heligoland in the North Sea, and wedded a woman named Cwйn; they had two sons named Hengest and Horsa ‘to avenge Eoh’.

Then sea-longing gripped Ottor W

fre (he was ‘a son of Eдrendel’, born under his beam), and after the death of Cwйn he left his young children. Hengest and Horsa avenged Eoh and became great chieftains; but Ottor W fre set out to seek, and find, Tol Eressлa (se uncъpaholm, ‘the unknown island’).

In Tol Eressлa he wedded, being made young by limpл (here also called by the Old English word lню), Naimi (Йadgifu), niece of Vairл, and they had a son named Heorrenda.

It is then said, somewhat inconsequentially (though the matter is in itself of much interest, and recurs nowhere else), that Eriol told the fairies of Wуden, Юunor, Tнw, etc. (these being the Old English names of the Germanic gods who in Old Scandinavian form are Урinn, Юуrr, Tэr), and they identified them with Manweg, Tulkas, and a third whose name is illegible but is not like that of any of the great Valar.

Eriol adopted the name of Angol.

Thus it is that through Eriol and his sons the Engle (i.e. the English) have the true tradition of the fairies, of whom the Iras and the Wйalas (the Irish and Welsh) tell garbled things.

Thus a specifically English fairy-lore is born, and one more true than anything to be found in Celtic lands.

The wedding of Eriol in Tol Eressлa is never referred to elsewhere; but his son Heorrenda is mentioned (though not called Eriol’s son) in the initial link to The Fall of Gondolin (p. 145) as one who ‘afterwards’ turned a song of Meril’s maidens into the language of his people. A little more light will be shed on Heorrenda in the course of this chapter.

Associated with these notes is a title-page and a prologue that breaks off after a few lines:

(11)

The Golden Book of Heorrenda

being the book of the

Tales of Tavrobel

Heorrenda of Hжgwudu

This book have I written using those writings that my father W

fre (whom the Gnomes named after the regions of his home Angol) did make in his sojourn in the holy isle in the days of the Elves; and much else have I added of those things which his eyes saw not afterward; yet are such things not yet to tell. For know

Here then the Golden Book was compiled from Eriol’s writings by his son Heorrenda—in contrast to (5), where it was compiled by someone unnamed, and in contrast also to the Epilogue (8), where Eriol himself concluded and ‘sealed the book’.

As I have said earlier (I.24) Angol refers to the ancient homeland of the ‘English’ before their migration across the North Sea (for the etymology of Angol/Eriol ‘ironcliffs’ see I.24, 252).

(12)     There is also a genealogical table accompanying the outline (10) and altogether agreeing with it. The table is written out in two forms that are identical save in one point: for Beorn, brother of Eoh, in the one, there stands in the other Hasen of Isenуra (Old English: ‘iron shore’). But at the end of the table is introduced the cardinal fact of all these earliest materials concerning Eriol and Tol Eressлa: Hengest and Horsa, Eriol’s sons by Cwлn in Heligoland, and Heorrenda, his son by Naimi in Tol Eressлa, are bracketed together, and beneath their names is written:

conquered Нeg

(‘seo unwemmede Нeg’)

now called Englaland

and there dwell the Angolcynn or Engle.

Нeg is Old English, ‘isle’ seo unwemmede Нeg ‘the unstained isle’. I have mentioned before (I.25, footnote) a poem of my father’s written at Йtaples in June 1916 and called ‘The Lonely Isle’, addressed to England: this poem bears the Old English title seo Unwemmede Нeg.