And lighting even with a drinking-song.

There sleep came easy for the drone of bees

Thronging about cottage gardens heaped with flowers;

In love of sunlit goodliness of days

There richly flowed their lives in settled hours—

But that was long ago,

And now no more they sing, nor reap, nor sow;

And I perforce in many a town about this isle

Unsettled wanderer have dwelt awhile.

2

Wars of great kings and clash of armouries,

Whose swords no man could tell, whose spears

Were numerous as a wheatfield’s ears,

Rolled over all the Great Lands; and the Seas

Were loud with navies; their devouring fires

Behind the armies burned both fields and towns;

And sacked and crumbled or to flaming pyres

Were cities made, where treasuries and crowns,

Kings and their folk, their wives and tender maids

Were all consumed. Now silent are those courts,

Ruined the towers, whose old shape slowly fades,

And no feet pass beneath their broken ports.

There fell my father on a field of blood,

And in a hungry siege my mother died,

And I, a captive, heard the great seas’ flood

Calling and calling, that my spirit cried

For the dark western shores whence long ago had come

Sires of my mother, and I broke my bonds,

Faring o’er wasted valleys and dead lands

Until my feet were moistened by the western sea,

Until my ears were deafened by the hum,

The splash, and roaring of the western sea—

But that was long ago

And now the dark bays and unknown waves I know,

The twilight capes, the misty archipelago,

And all the perilous sounds and salt wastes ’tween this isle

Of magic and the coasts I knew awhile.

One of the manuscripts of ‘The Song of Eriol’ bears a later note: ‘Easington 1917–18’ (Easington on the estuary of the Humber, see Humphrey Carpenter, Biography, p. 97;). It may be that the second part of The Song of Eriol was written at Easington and added to the first part (formerly the Prelude) already in existence.

Little can be derived from this poem of a strictly narrative nature, save the lineaments of the same tale: Eriol’s father fell ‘on a field of blood’, when ‘wars of great kings…rolled over all the Great Lands’, and his mother died ‘in a hungry siege’ (the same phrase is used in the Link to the Tale of Tinбviel, pp. 5–6); he himself was made a captive, but escaped, and came at last to the shores of the Western Sea (whence his mother’s people had come).

The fact that the first part of The Song of Eriol is also found as the Prelude to a poem of which the subjects are Warwick and Oxford might make one suspect that the castle with a great tower overhanging a river in the story told by Eriol to Vлannл was once again Warwick. But I do not think that this is so. There remains in any case the objection that it would be difficult to accommodate the attack on it by men out of the Mountains of the East which the duke could see from his tower; but also I think it is plain that the original tripartite poem had been dissevered, and the Prelude given a new bearing: my father’s ‘fathers’ sires’ became Eriol’s ‘fathers’ sires’. At the same time, certain powerful images were at once dominant and fluid, and the great tower of Eriol’s home was indeed to become the tower of Kortirion or Warwick, when (as will be seen shortly) the structure of the story of the mariner was radically changed. And nothing could show more clearly than does the evolution of this poem the complex root from which the story rose.

Humphrey Carpenter, writing in his Biography of my father’s life after he returned to Oxford in 1925, says (p. 169):

He made numerous revisions and recastings of the principal stories in the cycle, deciding to abandon the original sea-voyager ‘Eriol’ to whom the stories were told, and instead renaming him ‘Жlfwine’ or ‘elf-friend’.

That Eriol was (for a time) displaced by Жlfwine is certain. But while it may well be that at the time of the texts now to be considered the name Eriol had actually been rejected, in the first version of ‘The Silmarillion’ proper, written in 1926, Eriol reappears, while in the earliest Annals of Valinor, written in the 1930s, it is said that they were translated in Tol Eressлa ‘by Eriol of Leithien, that is Жlfwine of the Angelcynn’. On the other hand, at this earlier period it seems entirely justifiable on the evidence to treat the two names as indicative of different narrative projections—‘the Eriol story’ and ‘the Жlfwine story’.

‘Жlfwine’, then, is associated with a new conception, subsequent to the writing of the Lost Tales. The mariner is Жlfwine, not Eriol, in the second ‘Scheme’ for the Tales, which I have called ‘an unrealised project for the revision of the whole work’ (see I.234). The essential difference may be made clear now, before citing the difficult evidence: Tol Eressлa is now in no way identified with England, and the story of the drawing back of the Lonely Island across the sea has been abandoned. England is indeed still at the heart of this later conception, and is named Luthany.14 The mariner, Жlfwine, is an Englishman sailing westward from the coast of Britain; and his role is diminished. For whereas in the writings studied thus far he comes to Tol Eressлa before the dйnouement and disaster of the Faring Forth, and either he himself or his descendants witness the devastation of Tol Eressлa by the invasion of Men and their evil allies (in one line of development he was even to be responsible for it, p. 294), in the later narrative outlines he does not arrive until all the grievous history is done. His part is only to learn and to record.15

I turn now to a number of short and very oblique passages, written on separate slips, but found together and clearly dating from much the same time.

(15) Жlfwine of England dwelt in the South-west; he was of the kin of Ing, King of Luthany. His mother and father were slain by the sea-pirates and he was made captive.

He had always loved the fairies: his father had told him many things (of the tradition of Ing). He escapes. He beats about the northern and western waters. He meets the Ancient Mariner—and seeks for Tol Eressлa (seo unwemmede нeg), whither most of the unfaded Elves have retired from the noise, war, and clamour of Men.

The Elves greet him, and the more so when they learn of him who he is. They call him Lъthien the man of Luthany. He finds his own tongue, the ancient English tongue, is spoken in the isle.

The ‘Ancient Mariner’ has appeared in the story that Eriol told to Vлannл (pp. 5, 7), and much more will be told of him subsequently.

(16) Жlfwine of Englaland, [added later: driven by the Normans,] arrives in Tol Eressлa, whither most of the fading Elves have withdrawn from the world, and there fade now no more.

Description of the harbour of the southern shore. The fairies greet him well hearing he is from Englaland. He is surprised to hear them speak the speech of Жlfred of Wessex, though to one another they spoke a sweet and unknown tongue.

The Elves name him Lъthien for he is come from Luthany, as they call it (‘friend’ and ‘friendship’). Eldaros or Жlfhвm. He is sped to Rфs their capital. There he finds the Cottage of Lost Play, and Lindo and Vairл.

He tells who he is and whence, and why he has long sought for the isle (by reason of traditions in the kin of Ing), and he begs the Elves to come back to Englaland.