The Book of Lost Tales - J. R. Tolkien [204]
11 Cf. Kortirion among the Trees (I.34, 37, 41): A wave of bowing grass.
12 The origin of Warwick according to conventional etymology is uncertain. The element wic, extremely common in English place-names, meant essentially a dwelling or group of dwellings. The earliest recorded form of the name is Wæring wic, and Wæring has been thought to be an Old English word meaning a dam, a derivative from wer, Modern English weir: thus ‘dwellings by the weir’.
13 Cf. the title-page given in citation (11): Heorrenda of Hægwudu.—No forms of the name of this Staffordshire village are actually recorded from before the Norman Conquest, but the Old English form was undoubtedly hæg-wudu ‘enclosed wood’ (cf. the High Hay, the great hedge that protected Buckland from the Old Forest in The Lord of the Rings).
14 The name Luthany, of a country, occurs five times in Francis Thompson’s poem The Mistress of Vision. As noted previously (I.29) my father acquired the Collected Poems of Francis Thompson in 1913–14; and in that copy he made a marginal note against one of the verses that contains the name Luthany—though the note is not concerned with the name. But whence Thompson derived Luthany I have no idea. He himself described the poem as ‘a fantasy’ (Everard Meynell, The Life of Francis Thompson, 1913, p. 237).
This provides no more than the origin of the name as a series of sounds, as with Kôr from Rider Haggard’s She,* or Rohan and Moria mentioned in my father’s letter of 1967 on this subject (The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, pp. 383–4), in which he said:
This leads to the matter of ‘external history’: the actual way in which I came to light on or choose certain sequences of sound to use as names, before they were given a place inside the story. I think, as I said, this is unimportant: the labour involved in my setting out what I know and remember of the process, or in the guess-work of others, would be far greater than the worth of the results. The spoken forms would simply be mere audible forms, and when transferred to the prepared linguistic situation in my story would receive meaning and significance according to that situation, and to the nature of the story told. It would be entirely delusory to refer to the sources of the sound-combination to discover any meanings overt or hidden.
15 The position is complicated by the existence of some narrative outlines of extreme roughness and near-illegibility in which the mariner is named Ælfwine and yet essential elements of ‘the Eriol story’ are present. These I take to represent an intermediate stage. They are very obscure, and would require a great deal of space to present and discuss; therefore I pass them by.
16 Cf. p. 264 (xiv).
17 Caer Gwâr: see p. 292.
18 It may be mentioned here that when my father read The Fall of Gondolin to the Exeter College Essay Club in the spring of 1920 the mariner was still Eriol, as appears from the notes for his preliminary remarks on that occasion (see Unfinished Tales p. 5). He said here, very strangely, that ‘Eriol lights by accident on the Lonely Island’.
19 Garsecg (pronounced Garsedge, and so written in Ælfwine A) was one of the many Old English names of the sea.
20 In Ælfwine I the land is likewise named Lúthien, not Luthany. In Ælfwine A, on the other hand, the same distinction is made as in the outlines: ‘Ælfwine of England (whom the fairies after named Lúthien (friend) of Luthany (friendship)).’—At this first occurrence (only) of Lúthien in Ælfwine II the form Leithian is pencilled above, but Lúthien is not struck out. The Lay of Leithian was afterwards the title of the long poem of Beren and Lúthien Tinúviel.
21 The Hill of Tûn, i.e. the hill on which the city of Tûn was built: see p. 292.
22 Mindon Gwar: see p. 291.
23 Éadgifu: in ‘the Eriol story’ this Old English name