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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 first 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