(I) Kortirion, Elvish dwelling in Tol Eressлa.

Tol Eressлa England.

Kortirion = Warwick.

(II) Kortirion, Elvish dwelling in Luthany (> England).

Elves Tol Eressлa.

Kortirion (2) in Tol Eressлa named after Kortirion (1) in Luthany.

On the basis of the foregoing passages, (15) to (28), we may attempt to construct a narrative taking account of all the essential features:

– March of the Elves of Kфr (called ‘the Faring Forth’, or (by implication in 27) ‘the First Faring Forth’) into the Great Lands, landing in Luthany (25), and the Loss of Valinor (18).

– War with evil Men in the Great Lands (18).

– The Elves retreated to Luthany (not yet an island) where Ing(wл) was king (18, 20).

– Many [but by no means all] of the Elves of Luthany sought back west over the sea and settled in Tol Eressлa; but Elwing was lost (18, 25).

– Places in Tol Eressлa were named after places in Luthany (27).

– Eдrendel came to Luthany, taking refuge with Ing(wл) from the hostility of Ossл (20, 23, 24).

– Eдrendel gave Ing(wл) limpл to drink (24), or Ing(wл) received limpл from the Elves before Eдrendel came (23).

– Eдrendel blessed the progeny of Ing(wл) before his departure (23).

– Ossл’s hostility to Eдrendel pursued Ing(wл) also (23, 24).

– Ing(wл) set sail (with many of his people, 24) to find Tol Eressлa (23, 24).

– Ing(wл)’s voyage, through the enmity of Ossл, ended in shipwreck, but Ing(wл) survived, and far to the East [i.e. after being driven across the North Sea] he became King of the Ingwaiwar the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain (23, 24).

– Ing(wл) instructed the Ingwaiwar in true knowledge of the Gods and Elves (23) and turned their hearts to seafaring westwards (24). He prophesied that his kin should one day return again to Luthany (22).

– Ing(wл) at length departed in a boat (22, 24), and was heard of no more (24), or came to Tol Eressлa (22).

– After Ing(wл)’s departure from Luthany a channel was made so that Luthany became an isle (26); but Men crossed the channel in boats (27).

– Seven successive invasions took place, including that of the Rъmhoth or Romans, and at each new war more of the remaining Elves of Luthany fled over the sea (20, 22).

– The seventh invasion, that of the Ingwaiwar, was however not hostile to the Elves (20, 21); and these invaders were ‘coming back to their own’ (22), since they were the people of Ing(wл).

– The Elves of Luthany (now England) throve again and ceased to leave Luthany for Tol Eressлa (19), and they spoke to the Ingwaiwar in their own language, Old English (21).

– Жlfwine was an Englishman of the Anglo-Saxon period, a descendant of Ing(wл), who had derived a knowledge of and love of the Elves from the tradition of his family (15, 16).

– Жlfwine came to Tol Eressлa, found that Old English was spoken there, and was called by the Elves Lъthien ‘friend’, the Man of Luthany (the Isle of Friendship) (15, 16, 19).

I claim no more for this than that it seems to me to be the only way in which these disjecta membra can be set together into a comprehensive narrative scheme. It must be admitted even so that it requires some forcing of the evidence to secure apparent agreement. For example, there seem to be different views of the relation of the Ingwaiwar to Ing(wл): they are ‘the sons of Ing’ (19), ‘his kin’ (22), ‘the children of the children of Ing’ (22), yet he seems to have become the king and teacher of North Sea peoples who had no connection with Luthany or the Elves (23, 24). (Over whom did he rule when the Elves first retreated to Luthany (18, 23)?) Again, it is very difficult to fit the ‘hundred ages’ during which the Elves dwelt in Luthany before the invasions of Men began (27) to the rest of the scheme. Doubtless in these jottings my father was thinking with his pen, exploring independent narrative paths; one gets the impression of a ferment of ideas and possibilities rapidly displacing one another, from which no one stable narrative core can be extracted. A complete ‘solution’ is therefore in all probability an unreal aim, and this reconstruction no doubt as artificial as that attempted earlier for ‘the Eriol story’ (see p. 293). But here as there I believe that this outline shows as well as can be the direction of my father’s thought at that time.

There is very little to indicate the further course of ‘the Жlfwine story’ after his sojourn in Tol Eressлa (as I have remarked, p. 301, the part of the mariner is only to learn and record tales out of the past); and virtually all that can be learned from these notes is found on a slip that reads:

(29) How Жlfwine drank of limpл but thirsted for his home, and went back to Luthany; and thirsted then unquenchably for the Elves, and went back to Tavrobel the Old and dwelt in the House of the Hundred Chimneys (where grows still the child of the child of the Pine of Belawryn) and wrote the Golden Book.

Associated with this is a title-page:

(30)

The Book of Lost Tales

and the History of the Elves of Luthany

[?being]

The Golden Book of Tavrobel

the same that Жlfwine wrote and laid in the House of a Hundred

Chimneys at Tavrobel, where it lieth still to read for such as may.

These are very curious. Tavrobel the Old must be the original Tavrobel in Luthany (after which Tavrobel in Tol Eressлa was named, just as Kortirion in Tol Eressлa was named after Kortirion = Warwick in Luthany); and the House of the Hundred Chimneys (as also the Pine of Belawryn, on which see p. 281 and note 4) was to be displaced from Tol Eressлa to Luthany. Presumably my father intended to rewrite those passages in the ‘framework’ of the Lost Tales where the House of a Hundred Chimneys in Tavrobel is referred to; unless there was to be another House of a Hundred Chimneys in Tavrobel the New in Tol Eressлa.

Lastly, an interesting entry in the Qenya dictionary may be mentioned here: Parma Kuluinen ‘the Golden Book—the collected book of legends, especially of Ing and Eдrendel’.

In the event, of all these projections my father only developed the story of Жlfwine’s youth and his voyage to Tol Eressлa to a full and polished form, and to this work I now turn; but first it is convenient to collect the passages previously considered that bear on it.

In the opening Link to the Tale of Tinъvie1 Eriol said that ‘many years agone’, when he was a child, his home was ‘in an old town of Men girt with a wall now crumbled and broken, and a river ran thereby over which a castle with a great tower hung’.

My father came of a coastward folk, and the love of the sea that I had never seen was in my bones, and my father whetted my desire, for he told me tales that his father had told him before. Now my mother died in a cruel and hungry siege of that old town, and my father was slain in bitter fight about the walls, and in the end I Eriol escaped to the shoreland of the Western Sea.

Eriol told then of

his wanderings about the western havens,…of how he was wrecked upon far western islands until at last upon one lonely one he came upon an ancient sailor who gave him shelter, and over a fire within his lonely cabin told him strange tales of things beyond the Western Seas, of the Magic Isles and that most lonely one that lay beyond….

‘Ever after,’ said Eriol, ‘did I sail more curiously about the western isles seeking more stories of the kind, and thus it is indeed that after many great voyages I came myself by the blessing of the Gods to Tol Eressлa in the end…’