The Book of Lost Tales - J. R. Tolkien [192]
– Ælfwine came to Tol Eressëa, found that Old English was spoken there, and was called by the Elves Lúthien ‘friend’, the Man of Luthany (the Isle of Friendship) (15, 16, 19).
I claim no more for this than that it seems to me to be the only way in which these disjecta membra can be set together into a comprehensive narrative scheme. It must be admitted even so that it requires some forcing of the evidence to secure apparent agreement. For example, there seem to be different views of the relation of the Ingwaiwar to Ing(wë): they are ‘the sons of Ing’ (19), ‘his kin’ (22), ‘the children of the children of Ing’ (22), yet he seems to have become the king and teacher of North Sea peoples who had no connection with Luthany or the Elves (23, 24). (Over whom did he rule when the Elves first retreated to Luthany (18, 23)?) Again, it is very difficult to fit the ‘hundred ages’ during which the Elves dwelt in Luthany before the invasions of Men began (27) to the rest of the scheme. Doubtless in these jottings my father was thinking with his pen, exploring independent narrative paths; one gets the impression of a ferment of ideas and possibilities rapidly displacing one another, from which no one stable narrative core can be extracted. A complete ‘solution’ is therefore in all probability an unreal aim, and this reconstruction no doubt as artificial as that attempted earlier for ‘the Eriol story’ (see p. 293). But here as there I believe that this outline shows as well as can be the direction of my father’s thought at that time.
There is very little to indicate the further course of ‘the Ælfwine story’ after his sojourn in Tol Eressëa (as I have remarked, p. 301, the part of the mariner is only to learn and record tales out of the past); and virtually all that can be learned from these notes is found on a slip that reads:
(29) How Ælfwine drank of limpë but thirsted for his home, and went back to Luthany; and thirsted then unquenchably for the Elves, and went back to Tavrobel the Old and dwelt in the House of the Hundred Chimneys (where grows still the child of the child of the Pine of Belawryn) and wrote the Golden Book.
Associated with this is a title-page:
(30)
The Book of Lost Tales
and the History of the Elves of Luthany
[?being]
The Golden Book of Tavrobel
the same that Ælfwine wrote and laid in the House of a Hundred
Chimneys at Tavrobel, where it lieth still to read for such as may.
These are very curious. Tavrobel the Old must be the original Tavrobel in Luthany (after which Tavrobel in Tol Eressëa was named, just as Kortirion in Tol Eressëa was named after Kortirion = Warwick in Luthany); and the House of the Hundred Chimneys (as also the Pine of Belawryn, on which see p. 281 and note 4) was to be displaced from Tol Eressëa to Luthany. Presumably my father intended to rewrite those passages in the ‘framework’ of the Lost Tales where the House of a Hundred Chimneys in Tavrobel is referred to; unless there was to be another House of a Hundred Chimneys in Tavrobel the New in Tol Eressëa.
Lastly, an interesting entry in the Qenya dictionary may be mentioned here: Parma Kuluinen ‘the Golden Book—the collected book of legends, especially of Ing and Eärendel’.
In the event, of all these projections my father only developed the story of Ælfwine’s youth and his voyage to Tol Eressëa to a full and polished form, and to this work I now turn; but first it is convenient to collect the passages previously considered that bear on it.
In the opening Link to the Tale of Tinúvie1 Eriol said that ‘many years agone’, when he was a child, his home was ‘in an old town of Men girt with a wall now crumbled and broken, and a river ran thereby over which a castle with a great tower hung’.
My father came of a coastward folk, and the love of the sea that I had never seen was in my bones, and my father whetted my desire, for he told me tales that his father had