The Book of Lost Tales - J. R. Tolkien [183]
– The Elves faded and became invisible to the eyes of almost all Men.
– The sons of Eriol, Hengest, Horsa, and Heorrenda, conquered the island and it became ‘England’. They were not hostile to the Elves, and from them the English have ‘the true tradition of the fairies’.
– Kortirion, ancient dwelling of the fairies, came to be known in the tongue of the English as Warwick; Hengest dwelt there, while Horsa dwelt at Taruithorn (Oxford) and Heorrenda at Tavrobel (Great Haywood). (According to (11) Heorrenda completed the Golden Book.)
This reconstruction may not be ‘correct’ in all its parts: indeed, it may be that any such attempt is artificial, treating all the notes and jottings as of equal weight and all the ideas as strictly contemporaneous and relatable to each other. Nonetheless I believe that it shows rightly in essentials how my father was thinking of ordering the narrative in which the Lost Tales were to be set; and I believe also that this was the conception that still underlay the Tales as they arc extant and have been given in these books.
For convenience later I shall refer to this narrative as ‘the Eriol story’. Its most remarkable features, in contrast to the later story, are the transformation of Tol Eressëa into England, and the early appearance of the mariner (in relation to the whole history) and his importance.
In fact, my father was exploring (before he decided on a radical transformation of the whole conception) ideas whereby his importance would be greatly increased.
(14) From very rough jottings it can be made out that Eriol was to be so tormented with home longing that he set sail from Tol Eressëa with his son Heorrenda, against the command of Meril-i-Turinqi (see the passage cited on p. 284 from The Chaining of Melko); but his purpose in doing so was also ‘to hasten the Faring Forth’, which he ‘preached’ in the lands of the East. Tol Eressëa was drawn back to the confines of the Great Lands, but at once hostile peoples named the Guiðlin and the Brithonin (and in one of these notes also the Rúmhoth, Romans) invaded the island. Eriol died, but his sons Hengest and Horsa conquered the Guiðlin. But because of Eriol’s disobedience to the command of Meril, in going back before the time for the Faring Forth was ripe, ‘all was cursed’ and the Elves faded before the noise and evil of war. An isolated sentence refers to ‘a strange prophecy that a man of good will, yet through longing after the things of Men, may bring the Faring Forth to nought’.
Thus the part of Eriol was to become cardinal in the history of the Elves; but there is no sign that these ideas ever got beyond this exploratory stage.
I have said that I think that the reconstruction given above (‘the Eriol story’) is in essentials the conception underlying the framework of the Lost Tales. This is both for positive and negative reasons: positive, because he is there still named Eriol (see p. 300), and also because Gilfanon, who enters (replacing Ailios) late in the development of the Tales, appears also in citation (5) above, which is one of the main contributors to this reconstruction; negative, because there is really nothing to contradict what is much the easiest assumption. There is no explicit statement anywhere in the Lost Tales that Eriol came from England. At the beginning (I.13) he is only ‘a traveller from far countries’ and the fact that the story he told to Vëannë of his earlier life (pp. 4–7) agrees well with other accounts where his home is explicitly in England does no more than show that the story remained while the geography altered—just as the ‘black coasts’ of his home survived in later writing to become the western coasts of Britain, whereas the earliest reference to them is the etymology of Angol ‘iron cliffs’ (his own name, = Eriol, from the land ‘between the seas’, Angeln in the Danish peninsula, whence he came: see I.252). There is in fact a very early, rejected, sketch of Eriol’s life in which essential features of the same story are outlined—the attack on his father