The Book of Lost Tales, Part 1 - J. R. R. Tolkien [15]
In another place Angol is given as the Gnomish equivalent of Eriollo, which names are said to be those of ‘the region of the northern part of the Great Lands, “between the seas”, whence Eriol came’. (On these names see further under Eriol in the Appendix on Names.)
It is not to be thought that these notes represent in all respects the story of Eriol as my father conceived it when he wrote The Cottage of Lost Play—in any case, it is said expressly there that Eriol means ‘One who dreams alone’, and that ‘of his former names the story nowhere tells’ (p. 14). But what is important is that (according to the view that I have formed of the earliest conceptions, apparently the best explanation of the very difficult evidence) this was still the leading idea when it was written: Eriol came to Tol Eressëa from the lands to the East of the North Sea. He belongs to the period preceding the Anglo-Saxon invasions of Britain (as my father, for his purposes, wished to represent it).
Later, his name changed to Ælfwine (‘Elf-friend’), the mariner became an Englishman of the ‘Anglo-Saxon period’ of English history, who sailed west over sea to Tol Eressëa—he sailed from England out into the Atlantic Ocean; and from this later conception comes the very remarkable story of Ælfwine of England, which will be given at the end of the Lost Tales. But in the earliest conception he was not an Englishman of England: England in the sense of the land of the English did not yet exist; for the cardinal fact (made quite explicit in extant notes) of this conception is that the Elvish isle to which Eriol came was England—that is to say, Tol Eressëa would become England, the land of the English, at the end of the story. Koromas or Kortirion, the town in the centre of Tol Eressëa to which Eriol comes in The Cottage of Lost Play, would become in after days Warwick (and the elements Kor- and War- were etymologically connected);* Alalminórë, the Land of Elms, would be Warwickshire; and Tavrobel, where Eriol sojourned for a while in Tol Eressëa, would afterwards be the Staffordshire village of Great Haywood.
None of this is explicit in the written Tales, and is only found in notes independent of them; but it seems certain that it was still present when The Cottage of Lost Play was written (and indeed, as I shall try to show later, underlies all the Tales). The fair copy that my mother made of it was dated February 1917. From 1913 until her marriage in March 1916 she lived in Warwick and my father visited her there from Oxford; after their marriage she lived for a while at Great Haywood (east of Stafford), since it was near the camp where my father was stationed, and after his return from France he was at Great Haywood in the winter of 1916–17. Thus the identification of Tol Eressëan Tavrobel with Great Haywood cannot be earlier than 1916, and the fair copy of The Cottage of Lost Play (and quite possibly the original composition of it) was actually done there.
In November 1915 my father wrote a poem entitled Kortirion among the Trees which was dedicated to Warwick.† To the first fair copy of the poem there is appended a prose introduction, as follows:
Now on a time the fairies dwelt in the Lonely Isle after the great wars with Melko and the ruin of Gondolin; and they builded a fair city amid-most of that island, and it was girt with trees. Now this city they called Kortirion, both in memory of their ancient dwelling of Kôr in Valinor,