The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two
Page 41
And heard no echo of the world’s distress
Come through the rustle of the elms’ rich leaves,
While Avon gurgling over shallows wove
Unending melody, and morns and eves
Slipped down her waters till the Autumn came,
(Like the gold leaves that drip and flutter then,
Till the dark river gleams with jets of flame
That slowly float far down beyond our ken.)
For here the castle and the mighty tower,
More lofty than the tiered elms,
More grey than long November rain,
Sleep, and nor sunlit moment nor triumphal hour,
Nor passing of the seasons or the Sun
Wakes their old lords too long in slumber lain.
No watchfulness disturbs their splendid dream,
Though laughing radiance dance down the stream;
And be they clad in snow or lashed by windy rains,
Or may March whirl the dust about the winding lanes,
The Elm robe and disrobe her of a million leaves
Like moments clustered in a crowded year,
Still their old heart unmoved nor weeps nor grieves,
Uncomprehending of this evil tide,
Today’s great sadness, or Tomorrow’s fear:
Faint echoes fade within their drowsy halls
Like ghosts; the daylight creeps across their walls.
The City of Present Sorrow
There is a city that far distant lies
And a vale outcarven in forgotten days—
There wider was the grass, and lofty elms more rare;
The river-sense was heavy in the lowland air.
There many willows changed the aspect of the earth and skies
Where feeding brooks wound in by sluggish ways,
And down the margin of the sailing Thames
Around his broad old bosom their old stems
Were bowed, and subtle shades lay on his streams
Where their grey leaves adroop o’er silver pools
Did knit a coverlet like shimmering jewels
Of blue and misty green and filtering gleams.
O agéd city of an all too brief sojourn,
I see thy clustered windows each one burn
With lamps and candles of departed men.
The misty stars thy crown, the night thy dress,
Most peerless-magical thou dost possess
My heart, and old days come to life again;
Old mornings dawn, or darkened evenings bring
The same old twilight noises from the town.
Thou hast the very core of longing and delight,
To thee my spirit dances oft in sleep
Along thy great grey streets, or down
A little lamplit alley-way at night—
Thinking no more of other cities it has known,
Forgetting for a while the tree-girt keep,
And town of dreams, where men no longer sing.
For thy heart knows, and thou shedst many tears
For all the sorrow of these evil years.
Thy thousand pinnacles and fretted spires
Are lit with echoes and the lambent fires
Of many companies of bells that ring
Rousing pale visions of majestic days
The windy years have strewn down distant ways;
And in thy halls still doth thy spirit sing
Songs of old memory amid thy present tears,
Or hope of days to come half-sad with many fears.
Lo! though along thy paths no laughter runs
While war untimely takes thy many sons,
No tide of evil can thy glory drown
Robed in sad majesty, the stars thy crown.
In addition, there are two texts in which a part of The City of Present Sorrow is treated as a separate entity. This begins with ‘O agéd city of an all too brief sojourn’, and is briefer: after the line ‘Thinking no more of other cities it has known’ it ends:
Forgetting for a while that all men weep
It strays there happy and to thee it sings
‘No tide of evil can thy glory drown,
Robed in sad majesty, the stars thy crown!’
This was first called The Sorrowful City, but the title was then changed to Wínsele wéste, windge reste réte berofene (Beowulf lines 2456–7, very slightly adapted: ‘the hall of feasting empty, the resting places swept by the wind, robbed of laughter’).
There are also two manuscripts in which The Town of Dreams is treated as a separate poem, with a subtitle An old town revisited; in one of these the primary title was later changed to The Town of Dead Days.
Lastly, there is a poem in two parts called The Song of Eriol. This is found in three manuscripts, the later ones incorporating minor changes made to the predecessor (but the third has only the second part of the poem).
The Song of Eriol
Eriol made a song in the Room of the Tale-fire telling how his feet were set to wandering, so that in the end he found the Lonely Isle and that fairest town Kortirion.
I
In unknown days my fathers’ sires
Came, and from son to son took root
Among the orchards and the river-meads
And the long grasses of the fragrant plain:
Many a summer saw they kindle yellow fires
Of flaglilies among the bowing reeds,
And many a sea of blossom turn to golden fruit
In walléd gardens of the great champain.
There daffodils among the ordered trees
Did nod in spring, and men laughed deep and long
Singing as they laboured happy lays
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 f
irst 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 Tináviel, 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 Vëannë 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 ‘Ælfwine’ or ‘elf-friend’.
That Eriol was (for a time) displaced by Ælfwine 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 Eressëa ‘by Eriol of Leithien, that is Ælfwine 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 Ælfwine story’.
‘Ælfwine’, then, is associated with a new conception, subsequent to the writing of the Lost Tales. The mariner is Ælfwine, 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 Eressëa 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, Ælfwine, 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 Eressëa before the dénouement and disaster of the Faring Forth, and either he himself or his descendants witness the devastation of Tol Eressëa 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) Ælfwine 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 Eressëa (seo unwemmede íeg), 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 Lúthien 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 Vëannë (pp. 5, 7), and much more will be told of him subsequently.
(16) Ælfwine of Englaland, [added later: driven by the Normans,] arrives in Tol Eressëa, 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 Ælfred of Wessex, though to one another they spoke a sweet and unknown tongue.
The Elves name him Lúthien for he is come from Luthany, as they call it (‘friend’ and ‘friendship’). Eldaros or Ælfhâm. He is sped to Rôs their capital. There he finds the Cottage of Lost Play, and Lindo and Vairë.
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.
Here begins (as an explanation of why they cannot) the series of stories called the Book of Lost Tales.
In this passage (16) Ælfwine becomes more firmly rooted in English history: he is apparently a man of eleventh-century Wessex—but as in (15) he is of ‘the kin of Ing’. The capital of the Elves of Tol Eressëa is not Kortirion but Rôs, a name now used in a quite different application from that in citation (5), where it was a promontory of the Great Lands.
I have been unable to find any trace of the process whereby the name Lúthien came to be so differently applied afterwards (Lúthien Tinúviel). Another note of this period explains the name quite otherwise: ‘Lúthien or Lúsion was son of Telumaith (Telumektar). Ælfwine loved the sign of Orion, and made the sign, hence the fairies called him Lúthien (Wanderer).’ There is no other mention of Ælfwine’s peculiar association with Orion nor of this interpretation of the name Lúthien; and this seems to be a development that my father did not pursue.
It is convenient to give here the opening passage from the second Scheme for the Lost Tales, referred to above; this plainly belongs to the same time as the rest of these ‘Ælfwine’ notes, when the Tales had been written so far as they ever went within their first framework.
(17) Ælfwine awakens upon a sandy beach. He listens to the sea, which is far out. The tide is low and has left him.
Ælfwine meets the Elves of Rôs; finds they speak the speech of the English, beside their own sweet tongue. Why they do so—the dwelling of Elves in Luthany and their faring thence and back. They clothe him and feed him, and he sets forth to walk along the island’s flowery ways.
The scheme goes on to say that on a summer evening Ælfwine came to Kortirion, and thus differs from (16), where he goes to ‘Rôs their capital’, in which he finds the Cottage of Lost Play. The name Rôs seems to be used here in yet another sense—possibly a name for Tol Eressëa.
(18) He is sped to Ælfhâm (Elfhome) Eldos where Lindo and Vairë tell him many things: of the making and ancient fashion of the world: of the Gods: of the Elves of Valinor: of Lost Elves and Men: of the Travail of the Gnomes: of Eärendel: of the Faring Forth and the Loss of Valinor: of the disaster of the Faring Forth and the war with evil Men. The retreat to Luthany where Ingwë was king. Of the home-thirst of the Elves and how the greater number sought back to Valinor. The loss of Elwing. How a new home was made by the Solosimpi and others in Tol Eressëa. How the Elves continually sadly leave the world and fare thither.
For the interpretation of this passage it is essential to realise (the key indeed to the understanding of this projected history) that ‘the Faring Forth’ does not here refer to the Faring Forth in the sense in which it has been used hitherto—that from Tol Eressëa for the Rekindling of the Magic Sun, which ended in ruin, but to the Ma
rch of the Elves of Kôr and the ‘Loss of Valinor’ that the March incurred (see pp. 253, 257, 280). It is not indeed clear why it is here called a ‘disaster’: but this is evidently to be associated with ‘the war with evil Men’, and war between Elves and Men at the time of the March from Kôr is referred to in citations (1) and (3).
In ‘the Eriol story’ it is explicit that after the March from Kôr the Elves departed from the Great Lands to Tol Eressëa; here on the other hand ‘the war with evil Men’ is followed by ‘the retreat to Luthany where Ingwë was king’. The (partial) departure to Tol Eressëa is from Luthany; the loss of Elwing seems to take place on one of these voyages. As will be seen, the ‘Faring Forth’ of ‘the Eriol story’ has disappeared as an event of Elvish history, and is only mentioned as a prophecy and a hope.
Schematically the essential divergence of the two narrative structures can be shown thus:
(Eriol story)
(Ælfwine story)
March of the Elves of Kôr to the Great Lands
March of the Elves of Kôr to the Great Lands (called ‘the Faring Forth’)
War with Men in the Great Lands
War with Men in the Great Lands
Retreat of the Elves to Tol Eressëa (loss of Elwing)
Retreat of the Elves to Luthany (> England) ruled by Ingwë
Departure of many Elves to Tol Eressëa (loss of Elwing)
Eriol sails from the East (North Sea region) to Tol Eressëa
Ælfwine sails from England to Tol Eressëa
The Faring Forth, drawing of Tol Eressëa to the Great Lands; ultimately Tol Eressëa > England
This is of course by no means a full statement of the Ælfwine story, and is merely set out to indicate the radical difference of structure. Lacking from it is the history of Luthany, which emerges from the passages that now follow.