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By Root 1052 0

dwelt; and from them he learned ‘The Lost Tales of Elfinesse’. But his rôle was at first to be more important in the structure of the work than (what it afterwards became) simply that of a man of later days who came to ‘the land of the Fairies’ and there acquired lost or hidden knowledge, which he afterwards reported in his own tongue: at first, Eriol was to be an important element in the fairy-history itself—the witness of the ruin of Elvish Tol Eressëa. The element of ancient English history or ‘historical legend’ was at first not merely a framework, isolated from the great tales that afterwards constituted ‘The Silmarillion’, but an integral part of their ending. The elucidation of all this (so far as elucidation is possible) must necessarily be postponed to the end of the Tales; but here something at least must be said of the history of Eriol up to the time of his coming to Tol Eressëa, and of the original significance of the Lonely Isle.

The ‘Eriol-story’ is in fact among the knottiest and most obscure matters in the whole history of Middle-earth and Aman. My father abandoned the writing of the Lost Tales before he reached their end, and when he abandoned them he had also abandoned his original ideas for their conclusion. Those ideas can indeed be discerned from his notes; but the notes were for the most part pencilled at furious speed, the writing now rubbed and faint and in places after long study scarcely decipherable, on little slips of paper, disordered and dateless, or in a little notebook in which, during the years when he was composing the Lost Tales, he jotted down thoughts and suggestions (see p. 171). The common form of these notes on the ‘Eriol’ or ‘English’ element is that of short outlines, in which salient narrative features, often without clear connection between them, are set down in the manner of a list; and they vary constantly among themselves.

In what must be, at any rate, among the very earliest of these outlines, found in this little pocket-book, and headed ‘Story of Eriol’s Life’, the mariner who came to Tol Eressëa is brought into relation with the tradition of the invasion of Britain by Hengest and Horsa in the fifth century A.D. This was a matter to which my father gave much time and thought; he lectured on it at Oxford and developed certain original theories, especially in connection with the appearance of Hengest in Beowulf.*

From these jottings we learn that Eriol’s original name was Ottor, but that he called himself Wfre (an Old English word meaning ‘restless, wandering’) and lived a life on the waters. His father was named Eoh (a word of the Old English poetic vocabulary meaning ‘horse’); and Eoh was slain by his brother Beorn (in Old English ‘warrior’, but originally meaning ‘bear’, as does the cognate word björn in Old Norse; cf. Beorn the shape-changer in The Hobbit). Eoh and Beorn were the sons of Heden ‘the leather and fur clad’, and Heden (like many heroes of Northern legend) traced his ancestry to the god Wóden. In other notes there are other connections and combinations, and since none of this story was written as a coherent narrative these names are only of significance as showing the direction of my father’s thought at that time.

Ottor Wfre settled on the island of Heligoland in the North Sea, and he wedded a woman named Cwén (Old English: ‘woman’, ‘wife’); they had two sons named ‘after his father’ Hengest and Horsa ‘to avenge Eoh’ (hengest is another Old English word for ‘horse’).

Then sea-longing gripped Ottor Wfre: he was a son of Eärendel, born under his beam. If a beam from Eärendel fall on a child new-born he becomes ‘a child of Eärendel’ and a wanderer. (So also in The Cottage of Lost Play Eriol is called both by the author and by Lindo a ‘son of Eärendel’.) After the death of Cwén Ottor left his young children. Hengest and Horsa avenged Eoh and became great chieftains; but Ottor Wæfre set out to seek, and find, Tol Eressëa, here called in Old English se uncú þa holm, ‘the unknown island’.

Various things are told in these notes about Eriol’s sojourn in Tol Eress