The Lost Road and Other Writings. Christopher Tolkien
you Ælfwine, of course; that is the Old English form of it. I might have called you that, not only after Ælfwine of Italy, but after all the Elf-friends of old; after Ælfwine, King Alfred’s grandson, who fell in the great victory in 937, and Ælfwine who fell in the famous defeat at Maldon, and many other Englishmen and northerners in the long line of Elf-friends. But I gave you a latinized form. I think that is best. The old days of the North are gone beyond recall, except in so far as they have been worked into the shape of things as we know it, into Christendom. So I took Alboin; for it is not Latin and not Northern, and that is the way of most names in the West, and also of the men that bear them. I might have chosen Albinus, for that is what they sometimes turned the name into; and it wouldn’t have reminded your friends of bones. But it is too Latin, and means something in Latin. And you are not white or fair, boy, but dark. So Alboin you are. And that is all there is to it, except bed.’ And they went in.
But Alboin looked out of his window before getting into bed; and he could see the sea beyond the edge of the cliff. It was a late sunset, for it was summer. The sun sank slowly to the sea, and dipped red beyond the horizon. The light and colour faded quickly from the water: a chilly wind came up out of the West, and over the sunset-rim great dark clouds sailed up, stretching huge wings southward and northward, threatening the land.
‘They look like the eagles of the Lord of the West coming upon Númenor,’ Alboin said aloud, and he wondered why. Though it did not seem very strange to him. In those days he often made up names. Looking on a familiar hill, he would see it suddenly standing in some other time and story: ‘the green shoulders of Amon-ereb,’ he would say. ‘The waves are loud upon the shores of Beleriand,’ he said one day, when storm was piling water at the foot of the cliff below the house.
Some of these names were really made up, to please himself with their sound (or so he thought); but others seemed ‘real’, as if they had not been spoken first by him. So it was with Númenor. ‘I like that,’ he said to himself. ‘I could think of a long story about the land of Númenor.’
But as he lay in bed, he found that the story would not be thought. And soon he forgot the name; and other thoughts crowded in, partly due to his father’s words, and partly to his own day-dreams before.
‘Dark Alboin,’ he thought. ‘I wonder if there is any Latin in me. Not much, I think. I love the western shores, and the real sea – it is quite different from the Mediterranean, even in stories. I wish there was no other side to it. There were darkhaired people who were not Latins. Are the Portuguese Latins? What is Latin? I wonder what kind of people lived in Portugal and Spain and Ireland and Britain in old days, very old days, before the Romans, or the Carthaginians. Before anybody else. I wonder what the man thought who was the first to see the western sea.’
Then he fell asleep, and dreamed. But when he woke the dream slipped beyond recall, and left no tale or picture behind, only the feeling that these had brought: the sort of feeling Alboin connected with long strange names. And he got up. And summer slipped by, and he went to school and went on learning Latin.
Also he learned Greek. And later, when he was about fifteen, he began to learn other languages, especially those of the North: Old English, Norse, Welsh, Irish. This was not much encouraged – even by his father, who was an historian. Latin and Greek, it seemed to be thought, were enough for anybody; and quite old-fashioned enough, when there were so many successful modern languages (spoken by millions of people); not to mention maths and all the sciences.
But Alboin liked the flavour of the older northern languages, quite as much as he liked some of the things written in them. He got to know a bit about linguistic history, of course; he found that you rather had it thrust on you anyway by the grammar-writers of ‘unclassical’ languages. Not that he objected: sound-changes were a hobby of his, at the age when other boys were learning about the insides of motor-cars. But, although he had some idea of what were supposed to be the relationships of European languages, it did not seem to him quite all the story. The languages he liked had a definite flavour – and to some extent a similar flavour which they shared. It seemed, too, in some way related to the atmosphere of the legends and myths told in the languages.
One day, when Alboin was nearly eighteen, he was sitting in the study with his father. It was autumn, and the end of summer holidays spent mostly in the open. Fires were coming back. It was the time in all the year when book-lore is most attractive (to those who really like it at all). They were talking ‘language’. For Errol encouraged his boy to talk about anything he was interested in; although secretly he had been wondering for some time whether Northern languages and legends were not taking up more time and energy than their practical value in a hard world justified. ‘But I had better know what is going on, as far as any father can,’ he thought. ‘He’ll go on anyway, if he really has a bent – and it had better not be bent inwards.’
Alboin was trying to explain his feeling about ‘language-atmosphere’. ‘You get echoes coming through, you know,’ he said, ‘in odd words here and there – often very common words in their own language, but quite unexplained by the etymologists; and in the general shape and sound of all the words, somehow; as if something was peeping through from deep under the surface.’
‘Of course, I am not a philologist,’ said his father; ‘but I never could see that there was much evidence in favour of ascribing language-changes to a substratum. Though I suppose underlying ingredients do have an influence, though it is not easy to define, on the final mixture in the case of peoples taken as a whole, different national talents and temperaments, and that sort of thing. But races, and cultures, are different from languages.’
‘Yes,’ said Alboin; ‘but very mixed up, all three together. And after all, language goes back by a continuous tradition into the past, just as much as the other two. I often think that if you knew the living faces of any man’s ancestors, a long way back, you might find some queer things. You might find that he got his nose quite clearly from, say, his mother’s great-grandfather; and yet that something about his nose, its expression or its set or whatever you like to call it, really came down from much further back, from, say, his father’s great-great-great-grandfather or greater. Anyway I like to go back – and not with race only, or culture only, or language; but with all three. I wish I could go back with the three that are mixed in us, father; just the plain Errols, with a little house in Cornwall in the summer. I wonder what one would see.’
‘It depends how far you went back,’ said the elder Errol. ‘If you went back beyond the Ice-ages, I imagine you would find nothing in these parts; or at any rate a pretty beastly and uncomely race, and a tooth-and-nail culture, and a disgusting language with no echoes for you, unless those of food-noises.’
‘Would you?’ said Alboin. ‘I wonder.’
‘Anyway you can’t go back,’ said his father; ‘except within the limits prescribed to us mortals. You can go back in a sense by honest study, long and patient work. You had better go in for archaeology as well as philology: they ought to go well enough together, though they aren’t joined very often.’
‘Good idea,’ said Alboin. ‘But you remember, long ago, you said I was not all-bone. Well, I want some mythology, as well. I want myths, not only bones and stones.’
‘Well, you can have ’em! Take the whole lot on!’ said his father laughing. ‘But in the meanwhile you have a smaller job on hand. Your Latin needs improving (or so I am told), for school purposes. And scholarships are useful in lots of ways, especially for folk like you and me who go in for antiquated subjects. Your first shot is this winter, remember.’
‘I wish Latin prose was not so important,’ said Alboin. ‘I am really much better at verses.’
‘Don’t go putting any