The Book of Lost Tales - J. R. Tolkien [181]
Then sea-longing gripped Ottor Wfre (he was ‘a son of Eärendel’, born under his beam), and after the death of Cwén he left his young children. Hengest and Horsa avenged Eoh and became great chieftains; but Ottor Wfre set out to seek, and find, Tol Eressëa (se uncúpaholm, ‘the unknown island’).
In Tol Eressëa he wedded, being made young by limpë (here also called by the Old English word líþ), Naimi (Éadgifu), niece of Vairë, 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 Wóden, Þunor, Tíw, etc. (these being the Old English names of the Germanic gods who in Old Scandinavian form are Óðinn, Þórr, Týr), 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 Wéalas (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 Eressëa 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 Hægwudu
This book have I written using those writings that my father Wfre (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 Isenóra (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 Eressëa: Hengest and Horsa, Eriol’s sons by Cwën in Heligoland, and Heorrenda, his son by Naimi in Tol Eressëa, are bracketed together, and beneath their names is written:
conquered Íeg
(‘seo unwemmede Íeg’)
now called Englaland
and there dwell the Angolcynn or Engle.
Íeg is Old English, ‘isle’ seo unwemmede Íeg ‘the unstained isle’. I have mentioned before (I.25, footnote) a poem of my father’s written at Étaples in June 1916 and called ‘The Lonely Isle’, addressed to England: this poem bears the Old English title seo Unwemmede Íeg.
(13) There follow in the notebook C some jottings that make precise identifications of places in Tol Eressëa with places in England.
First the name Kortirion is explained. The element Kôr is derived from an earlier Qor, yet earlier Guor; but from Guor was also derived (i.e. in Gnomish) the form Gwâr. (This formulation agrees with that in the Gnomish dictionary, see I.257). Thus Kôr = Gw