The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two

by J. R. R. Tolkien

  The diminishing in the stature of the Elves of later times is very explicitly related to the coming of Men. Thus in (4) above: ‘Men spread and thrive, and the Elves of the Great Lands fade. As Men’s stature grows theirs diminishes’ and in (5): ‘ever as Men wax more powerful and numerous so the fairies fade and grow small and tenuous, filmy and transparent, but Men larger and more dense and gross. At last Men, or almost all, can no longer see the fairies.’ The clearest picture that survives of the Elves when they have ‘faded’ altogether is given in the Epilogue (p. 289):

  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, and wistful voices murmuring on the bridge, and they are gone.

  But according to the passages bearing on the later ‘Ælfwine’ version, the Elves of Tol Eressëa who had left Luthany were unfaded, or had ceased to fade. Thus in (15): ‘Tol Eressëa, whither most of the unfaded Elves have retired from the noise, war, and clamour of Men’ and (16): ‘Tol Eressëa, whither most of the fading Elves have withdrawn from the world, and there fade now no more’ also in Ælfwine of England (p. 313): ‘the unfaded Elves beyond the waters of Garsecg’.

  On the other hand, when Eriol came to the Cottage of Lost Play the doorward said to him (I.14):

  Small is the dwelling, but smaller still are they that dwell here—for all who enter must be very small indeed, or of their own good wish become as very little folk even as they stand upon the threshold.

  I have commented earlier (I.32) on the oddity of the idea that the Cottage and its inhabitants were peculiarly small, in an island entirely inhabited by Elves. But my father, if he had ever rewritten The Cottage of Lost Play, would doubtless have abandoned this; and it may well be that he was in any case turning away already at the time of Ælfwine II from the idea that the ‘faded’ Elves were diminutive, as is suggested by his rejection of the word ‘little’ in ‘little folk’, ‘little ships’ (see note 27).

  Ultimately, of course, the Elves shed all associations and qualities that would be now commonly considered ‘fairylike’, and those who remained in the Great Lands in Ages of the world at this time unconceived were to grow greatly in stature and in power: there was nothing filmy or transparent about the heroic or majestic Eldar of the Third Age of Middle-earth. Long afterwards my father would write, in a wrathful comment on a ‘pretty’ or ‘ladylike’ pictorial rendering of Legolas:

  He was tall as a young tree, lithe, immensely strong, able swiftly to draw a great war-bow and shoot down a Nazgûl, endowed with the tremendous vitality of Elvish bodies, so hard and resistant to hurt that he went only in light shoes over rock or through snow, the most tireless of all the Fellowship.

  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 Eressëa 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 ‘Lúthien’, remained preeminently the Elvish land; and Tol Eressëa, with its meads and coppices, its rooks’ nests in the elm-trees of Alalminórë, 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 Ælfwine 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 Palúrien (see I. 264).

  4 A side-note here suggests that perhaps the Pine should not be in Tol Eressëa.—For Ilwë, 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 Eressëa) 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 Wæring wic, and Wæring 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 Hægwudu.—No forms of the name of this Staffordshire village are actually recorded from before the Norman Conquest, but the Old English form was undoubtedly hæg-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 Kôr 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 Ælfwine 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 Gwâr: 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 Ælfwine A) was one of the many Old English names of the sea.

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

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

  22 Mindon Gwar: see p. 291.

  23 Éadgifu: 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 Eressëa (p. 290).

  24 In Ælfwine 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 Ælfwine 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 Ælfwine of England to the period of Ælfwine’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.

  25 Evil is emended from Melko. Ælfwine I does not have the phrase.

  26 Ælfwine I has: ‘when the ancient Men of the South from Micelgeard the Heartless Town set their mighty feet upon the soil of Lúthien.’ This text does not have the reference to Rûm and Magbar. The name Micelgeard is struck through, but Mickleyard is written at the head of the page. Micelgeard is Old English (and Mickleyard a modernisation of this in spelling), though it does not occur in extant Old English writings and is modelled on Old Norse Mikligarðr (Constantinople).—The peculiar hostility of the Romans to the Elves of Luthany is mentioned by implication in citation (20), and their disbelief in their existence in (22).

  27 The application, frequent in Ælwine I, of ‘little’ to the fairies (Elves) of Lúthien and their ships was retained in Ælfwine II as first written, but afterwards struck out. Here the word is twice retained, perhaps unintentionally.

  28 Elvish is a later emendation of fairy.

  29 This sentence, from ‘save Ælfheah…’, was added later in Ælfwine II; it is not in Ælfwine I.—The whole text to this point in Ælfwine I and II is compressed into the following in Ælfwine A:

  Ælfwine of England (whom the fairies after named Lúthien (friend) of Luthany (friendship)) born of Déor and Éadgifu. Their city burned and Déor slain and Éadgifu dies. Ælfwine a thrall of the Winged Helms. He escapes to the Western Sea and takes ship from Belerion and makes great voyages. He is seeking for the islands of the West of which Éadgifu had told him in his childhood.

  30 Ælfwine I has here: ‘But three men could he find as his companions; and Ossë took them unto him.’ Ossë was emended to Neorth; and then the sentence was struck through and rewritten: ‘Such found he only three; and those three Neorth after took unto him and their names are not known.’ Neorth = Ulmo; see note 39.

  31 Ælfwine A reads: ‘He espies some islands lying in the dawn but is swept thence by great winds. He returns hardly to Belerion. He gathers the seven greatest mariners of England; they sail in spring. They are wrecked upon the isles of Ælfwine’s desire and find them desert and lonely and filled with gloomy whispering trees.’ This is at variance with Ælfwine I and II where Ælfwine is cast on to the island alone; but agrees with II in giving Ælfwine seven companions, not three.

  32 A clue that this was Ulmo: cf. The Fall of Gondolin (p. 155): ‘he was shod with mighty shoes of stone.’

  33 In Ælfwine A they were ‘filled with gloomy whispering trees’ (note 31).

  34 From the point where the Man of the Sea said: ‘Lo, this is one of the ring of Harbourless Isles…’ (p. 317) to here (i.e. the whole episode of the foundered Viking ship and its captain Orm, slayer of Ælfwine’s father) there is nothing corresponding in Ælfwine I, which has only: ‘but that Man of the Sea aided him in building a little craft, and together, guided by the solitary mariner, they fared away and came to a land but little known.’ For the narrative in Ælfwine A see note 39.

  35 At one occurrence of the name Ythlings (Old English ýð ‘wave’) in Ælfwine I it is written Ythlingas, with the Old English plural ending.

  36 The Shipmen of the West: emendation from Eneathrim.

  37 Cf. in the passage of alliterative verse in my father’s On Translating Beowulf (The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, 1983, p. 63): then away thrust her to voyage gladly valiant-timbered.

  38 The whole section of the narrative concerning the island of the Ythlings is more briefly told in Ælfwine I (though, so far as it goes, in very much the same words) with several features of the later story absent (notably the cutting of timber in the grove sacred to Ulmo, and the blessing of the ship by the Man of the Sea). The only actual difference of structure, however, is that whereas in Ælfwine II Ælfwine finds again his seven companions in the land of the Ythlings, and sails west with them, together with Bior of the Ythlings, in Ælfwine I they were indeed drowned, and he got seven companions from among the Ythlings (among whom Bior is not named).

  39 The plot-outline Ælfwine A tells the story from the point where Ælfwine and his seven companions were cast on the Isle of the Man of the Sea (thus differing from Ælfwine I and II, where he came there alone) thus:

  They wander about the island upon which they have been cast and come upon many decaying wrecks—often of mighty ships, some treasure-laden. They find a solitary cabin beside a lonely sea, built of old ship-wood, where dwells a solitary and strange old mariner of dread aspect. He tells them these are the Harbourless Isles whose enchanted rocks draw all ships thither, lest men fare over far upon Garsedge [see note 19]—and they were devised at the Hiding of Valinor. Here, he says, the trees are magical. They learn many strange things about the western world of him and their desire is whetted for adventure. He aids them to cut holy trees in the island groves and to build a wonderful vessel, and shows them how to provision it against a long voyage (that water that drieth not save when heart fails, &c.). This he blesses with a spell of adventure and discovery, and then dives from a cliff-top. They suspect it was Neorth Lord of Waters.

  They journey many years among strange western islands hearing often many strange reports—of the belt of Magic Isles which few have passed; of the trackless sea beyond where the wind bloweth almost always from the West; of the edge of the twilight and the far-glimpsed isle there standing, and its glimmering haven. They reach the magic island [read islands?] and three are enchanted and fall asleep on the shore.

  The others beat about the waters beyond and are in despair—for as often as they make headway west the wind changes and bears them back. At last they tryst to return on the morrow if nought other happens. The day breaks chill and dull, and they lie becalmed looking in vain through the pouring rain.

  This narrative differs from both Ælfwine I and II in that here there is no mention of the Ythlings; and Ælfwine and hi
s seven companions depart on their long western voyage from the Harbourless Isle of the ancient mariner. It agrees with Ælfwine I in the name Neorth; but it foreshadows II in the cutting of sacred trees to build a ship.

  40 In Ælfwine I Ælfheah does not appear, and his two speeches in this passage are there given to one Gelimer. Gelimer (Geilamir) was the name of a king of the Vandals in the sixth century.

  41 In Ælfwine I Bior’s speech is given to Gelimer (see note 40).

  42 Ælfwine I ends in almost the same words as Ælfwine II, but with a most extraordinary difference; Ælfwine does not leap overboard, but returns with his companions to Belerion, and so never comes to Tol Eressëa! ‘Very empty thereafter were the places of Men for Ælfwine and his mariners, and of their seed have been many restless and wistful folk since they were dead…’ Moreover my father seems clearly to have been going to say the same in Ælfwine II, but stopped, struck out what he had written, and introduced the sentence in which Ælfwine leapt into the sea. I cannot see any way to explain this.

  Ælfwine A ends in much the same way as Ælfwine II:

  As night comes on a little breath springs up and the clouds lift. They hoist sail to return—when suddenly low down in the dusk they see the many lights of the Haven of Many Hues twinkle forth. They row thither, and hear sweet music. Then the mist wraps all away and the others rousing themselves say it is a mirage born of hunger, and with heavy hearts prepare to go back, but Ælfwine plunges overboard and swims into the dark until he is overcome in the waters, and him seems death envelops him. The others sail away home and are out of the tale.