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The narrative ends here. There is no trace of any further continuation, though it seems likely that Ælfwine of England was to be the beginning of a complete rewriting of the Lost Tales. It would be interesting to know for certain when Ælfwine II was written. The handwriting of the manuscript is certainly changed from that of the rest of the Lost Tales; yet I am inclined to think that it followed Ælfwine I at no great interval, and the first version is unlikely to be much later than 1920 (see p. 312).

At the end of Ælfwine II my father jotted down two suggestions: (1) that Ælfwine should be made ‘an early pagan Englishman who fled to the West’ and (2) that ‘the Isle of the Old Man’ should be cut out and all should be shipwrecked on Eneadur, the Isle of the Ythlings. The latter would (astonishingly) have entailed the abandonment of the foundered ship, with the Man of the Sea thrusting it to shore on the incoming tide, and the dead Vikings ‘lying abottom gazing at the sky’.

In this narrative—in which the ‘magic’ of the early Elves is most intensely conveyed, in the seamen’s vision of the Lonely Isle beneath ‘the horned moon of Elfinesse’—Ælfwine is still placed in the context of the figures of ancient English legend: his father is Déor the Minstrel. In the great Anglo-Saxon manuscript known as the Exeter Book there is a little poem of 42 lines to which the title of Déor is now given. It is an utterance of the minstrel Déor, who, as he tells, has lost his place and been supplanted in his lord’s favour by another bard, named Heorrenda; in the body of the poem Déor draws examples from among the great misfortunes recounted in the heroic legends, and is comforted by them, concluding each allusion with the fixed refrain pæs ofereode; þisses swa mæg, which has been variously translated; my father held that it meant ‘Time has passed since then, this too can pass’.43

From this poem came both Déor and Heorrenda. In ‘the Eriol story’ Heorrenda was Eriol’s son born in Tol Eressëa of his wife Naimi (p. 290), and was associated with Hengest and Horsa in the conquest of the Lonely Isle (p. 291); his dwelling in England was at Tavrobel (p. 292). I do not think that my father’s Déor the Minstrel of Kortirion and Heorrenda of Tavrobel can be linked more closely to the Anglo-Saxon poem than in the names alone—though he did not take the names at random. He was moved by the glimpsed tale (even if, in the words of one of the poem’s editors, ‘the autobiographical element is purely fictitious, serving only as a pretext for the enumeration of the heroic stories’); and when lecturing on Beowulf at Oxford he sometimes gave the unknown poet a name, calling him Heorrenda.

Nor, as I believe, can any more be made of the other Old English names in the narrative: Óswine prince of Gwar, Éadgifu, Ælfheah (though the names are doubtless in themselves ‘significant’: thus Óswine contains ós ‘god’ and wine ‘friend’, and Éadgifu éad ‘blessedness’ and gifu ‘gift’). The Forodwaith are of course Viking invaders from Norway or Denmark; the name Orm of the dead ship’s captain is well-known in Norse. But all this is a mise-en-scène that is historical only in its bearings, not in its structure.

The idea of the seven invasions of Lúthien (Luthany) remained (p. 314), and that of the fading and westward flight of the Elves (which indeed was never finally lost),44 but whereas in the outlines the invasion of the Ingwaiwar (i.e. the Anglo-Saxons) was the seventh (see citations (20) and (22)), here the Viking invasions are portrayed as coming upon the English—‘nor was that the last of the takings of Lúthien by Men from Men’ (p. 314), obviously a reference to the Normans.

There is much of interest in the ‘geographical’ references in the story. At the very beginning there is a curious statement about the breaking off of Ireland ‘in the warfare of the Gods’. Seeing that ‘the Ælfwine story’ does not include the idea of the drawing back of Tol Eressëa eastwards across the sea, this must refer to something