The Lost Road and Other Writings. Christopher Tolkien
but it wouldn’t pass.’
‘Of course not!’ said the boy, blushing. The matter was too private, even for private jokes. ‘And don’t go blabbing about Eressëan outside the partnership,’ he begged; ‘or I shall wish I had kept it quiet.’
‘Well, you did pretty well. I don’t suppose I should ever have heard about it, if you hadn’t left your note-books in my study. Even so I don’t know much about it. But, my dear lad, I shouldn’t dream of blabbing, even if I did. Only don’t waste too much time on it. I am afraid I am anxious about that schol[arship], not only from the highest motives. Cash is not too abundant.’
‘Oh, I haven’t done anything of that sort for a long while, at least hardly anything,’ said Alboin.
‘It isn’t getting on too well, then?’
‘Not lately. Too much else to do, I suppose. But I got a lot of jolly new words a few days ago: I am sure lōmelindë means nightingale, for instance, and certainly lōmë is night (though not darkness). The verb is very sketchy still. But –’ He hesitated. Reticence (and uneasy conscience) were at war with his habit of what he called ‘partnership with the pater’, and his desire to unbosom the secret anyway. ‘But, the real difficulty is that another language is coming through, as well. It seems to be related but quite different, much more – more Northern. Alda was a tree (a word I got a long time ago); in the new language it is galadh, and orn. The Sun and Moon seem to have similar names in both: Anar and Isil beside Anor and Ithil. I like first one, then the other, in different moods. Beleriandic is really very attractive; but it complicates things.’
‘Good Lord!’ said his father, ‘this is serious! I will respect unsolicited secrets. But do have a conscience as well as a heart, and – moods. Or get a Latin and Greek mood!’
‘I do. I have had one for a week, and I have got it now; a Latin one luckily, and Virgil in particular. So here we part.’ He got up. ‘I am going to do a bit of reading. I’ll look in when I think you ought to go to bed.’ He closed the door on his father’s snort.
As a matter of fact Errol did not really like the parting shot. The affection in it warmed and saddened him. A late marriage had left him now on the brink of retirement from a schoolmaster’s small pay to his smaller pension, just when Alboin was coming of University age. And he was also (he had begun to feel, and this year to admit in his heart) a tired man. He had never been a strong man. He would have liked to accompany Alboin a great deal further on the road, as a younger father probably would have done; but he did not somehow think he would be going very far. ‘Damn it,’ he said to himself, ‘a boy of that age ought not to be thinking such things, worrying whether his father is getting enough rest. Where’s my book?’
Alboin in the old play-room, turned into junior study, looked out into the dark. He did not for a long time turn to books. ‘I wish life was not so short,’ he thought. ‘Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about. And the pater, he is looking tired. I want him for years. If he lived to be a hundred I should be only about as old as he is now. and I should still want him. But he won’t. I wish we could stop getting old. The pater could go on working and write that book he used to talk about, about Cornwall; and we could go on talking. He always plays up, even if he does not agree or understand. Bother Eressëan. I wish he hadn’t mentioned it. I am sure I shall dream tonight; and it is so exciting. The Latin-mood will go. He is very decent about it, even though he thinks I am making it all up. If I were, I would stop it to please him. But it comes, and I simply can’t let it slip when it does. Now there is Beleriandic.’
Away west the moon rode in ragged clouds. The sea glimmered palely out of the gloom, wide, flat, going on to the edge of the world. ‘Confound you, dreams!’ said Alboin. ‘Lay off, and let me do a little patient work at least until December. A schol[arship] would brace the pater.’
He found his father asleep in his chair at half past ten. They went up to bed together. Alboin got into bed and slept with no shadow of a dream. The Latin-mood was in full blast after breakfast; and the weather allied itself with virtue and sent torrential rain.
Chapter II
Alboin and Audoin
Long afterwards Alboin remembered that evening, that had marked the strange, sudden, cessation of the Dreams. He had got a scholarship (the following year) and had ‘braced the pater’. He had behaved himself moderately well at the university – not too many side-issues (at least not what he called too many); though neither the Latin nor the Greek mood had remained at all steadily to sustain him through ‘Honour Mods.’ They came back, of course, as soon as the exams were over. They would. He had switched over, all the same, to history, and had again ‘braced the pater’ with a ‘first-class’. And the pater had needed bracing. Retirement proved quite different from a holiday: he had seemed just to slip slowly out. He had hung on just long enough to see Alboin into his first job: an assistant lecturership in a university college.
Rather disconcertingly the Dreams had begun again just before ‘Schools’, and were extraordinarly strong in the following vacation – the last he and his father had spent together in Cornwall. But at that time the Dreams had taken a new turn, for a while.
He remembered one of the last conversations of the old pleasant sort he had been able to have with the old man. It came back clearly to him now.
‘How’s the Eressëan Elf-latin, boy?’ his father asked, smiling, plainly intending a joke, as one may playfully refer to youthful follies long atoned for.
‘Oddly enough,’ he answered, ‘that hasn’t been coming through lately. I have got a lot of different stuff. Some is beyond me, yet. Some might be Celtic, of a sort. Some seems like a very old form of Germanic; pre-runic, or I’ll eat my cap and gown.’
The old man smiled, almost raised a laugh. ‘Safer ground, boy, safer ground for an historian. But you’ll get into trouble, if you let your cats out of the bag among the philologists – unless, of course, they back up the authorities.’
‘As a matter of fact, I rather think they do,’ he said.
‘Tell me a bit, if you can without your note-books,’ his father slyly said.
‘Westra lage wegas rehtas, nu isti sa wraithas.’ He quoted that, because it had stuck in his mind, though he did not understand it. Of course the mere sense was fairly plain: a straight road lay westward, now it is bent. He remembered waking up, and feeling it was somehow very significant. ‘Actually I got a bit of plain Anglo-Saxon last night,’ he went on. He thought Anglo-Saxon would please his father; it was a real historical language, of which the old man had once known a fair amount. Also the bit was very fresh in his mind, and was the longest and most connected he had yet had. Only that very morning he had waked up late, after a dreamful night, and had found himself saying the lines. He jotted them down at once, or they might have vanished (as usual) by breakfast-time, even though they were in a language he knew. Now waking memory had them secure.
Fela bith on Westwegum werum uncúthra
wundra and wihta, wlitescéne land,
eardgeard elfa, and ésa bliss.
Lýt ǽnig wát hwylc his longath síe
thám the eftsíthes eldo getwǽfeth.’
His father looked up and smiled at the name Ælfwine. He translated the lines for him; probably it was not necessary, but the old man had forgotten many other things he had once known much better than Anglo-Saxon.