The Lost Road and Other Writings. Christopher Tolkien
in the West-regions unknown to men, marvels and strange beings, a land fair and lovely, the homeland of the Elves, and the bliss of the Gods. Little doth any man know what longing is his whom old age cutteth off from return.”’
He suddenly regretted translating the last two lines. His father looked up with an odd expression. ‘The old know,’ he said. ‘But age does not cut us off from going away, from – from forthsith. There is no eftsith: we can’t go back. You need not tell me that. But good for Ælfwine-Alboin. You could always do verses.’
Damn it – as if he would make up stuff like that, just to tell it to the old man, practically on his death-bed. His father had, in fact, died during the following winter.
On the whole he had been luckier than his father; in most ways, but not in one. He had reached a history professorship fairly early; but he had lost his wife, as his father had done, and had been left with an only child, a boy, when he was only twenty-eight.
He was, perhaps, a pretty good professor, as they go. Only in a small southern university, of course, and he did not suppose he would get a move. But at any rate he wasn’t tired of being one; and history, and even teaching it, still seemed interesting (and fairly important). He did his duty, at least, or he hoped so. The boundaries were a bit vague. For, of course, he had gone on with the other things, legends and languages – rather odd for a history professor. Still there it was: he was fairly learned in such book-lore, though a lot of it was well outside the professional borders.
And the Dreams. They came and went. But lately they had been getting more frequent, and more – absorbing. But still tantalizingly linguistic. No tale, no remembered pictures; only the feeling that he had seen things and heard things that he wanted to see, very much, and would give much to see and hear again – and these fragments of words, sentences, verses. Eressëan as he called it as a boy – though he could not remember why he had felt so sure that that was the proper name – was getting pretty complete. He had a lot of Beleriandic, too, and was beginning to understand it, and its relation to Eressëan. And he had a lot of unclassifiable fragments, the meaning of which in many cases he did not know, through forgetting to jot it down while he knew it. And odd bits in recognizable languages. Those might be explained away, of course. But anyway nothing could be done about them: not publication or anything of that sort. He had an odd feeling that they were not essential: only occasional lapses of forgetfulness which took a linguistic form owing to some peculiarity of his own mental make-up. The real thing was the feeling the Dreams brought more and more insistently, and taking force from an alliance with the ordinary professional occupations of his mind. Surveying the last thirty years, he felt he could say that his most permanent mood, though often overlaid or suppressed, had been since childhood the desire to go back. To walk in Time, perhaps, as men walk on long roads; or to survey it, as men may see the world from a mountain, or the earth as a living map beneath an airship. But in any case to see with eyes and to hear with ears: to see the lie of old and even forgotten lands, to behold ancient men walking, and hear their languages as they spoke them, in the days before the days, when tongues of forgotten lineage were heard in kingdoms long fallen by the shores of the Atlantic.
But nothing could be done about that desire, either. He used to be able, long ago, to talk about it, a little and not too seriously, to his father. But for a long while he had had no one to talk to about that sort of thing. But now there was Audoin. He was growing up. He was sixteen.
He had called his boy Audoin, reversing the Lombardic order. It seemed to fit. It belonged anyway to the same name-family, and went with his own name. And it was a tribute to the memory of his father – another reason for relinquishing Anglo-Saxon Eadwine, or even commonplace Edwin. Audoin had turned out remarkably like Alboin, as far as his memory of young Alboin went, or his penetration of the exterior of young Audoin. At any rate he seemed interested in the same things, and asked the same questions; though with much less inclination to words and names, and more to things and descriptions. Unlike his father he could draw, but was not good at ‘verses’. Nonetheless he had, of course, eventually asked why he was called Audoin. He seemed rather glad to have escaped Edwin. But the question of meaning had not been quite so easy to answer. Friend of fortune, was it, or of fate, luck, wealth, blessedness? Which?
‘I like Aud,’ young Audoin had said – he was then about thirteen – ‘if it means all that. A good beginning for a name. I wonder what Lombards looked like. Did they all have Long Beards?’
Alboin had scattered tales and legends all down Audoin’s childhood and boyhood, like one laying a trail, though he was not clear what trail or where it led. Audoin was a voracious listener, as well (latterly) as a reader. Alboin was very tempted to share his own odd linguistic secrets with the boy. They could at least have some pleasant private fun. But he could sympathize with his own father now – there was a limit to time. Boys have a lot to do.
Anyway, happy thought, Audoin was returning from school tomorrow. Examination-scripts were nearly finished for this year for both of them. The examiner’s side of the business was decidedly the stickiest (thought the professor), but he was nearly unstuck at last. They would be off to the coast in a few days, together.
There came a night, and Alboin lay again in a room in a house by the sea: not the little house of his boyhood, but the same sea. It was a calm night, and the water lay like a vast plain of chipped and polished flint, petrified under the cold light of the Moon. The path of moonlight lay from the shore to the edge of sight.
Sleep would not come to him, although he was eager for it. Not for rest – he was not tired; but because of last night’s Dream. He hoped to complete a fragment that had come through vividly that morning. He had it at hand in a note-book by his bed-side; not that he was likely to forget it once it was written down.
Then there had seemed to be a long gap.
There were one or two new words here, of which he wanted to discover the meaning: it had escaped before he could write it down this morning. Probably they were names: tarkalion was almost certainly a king’s name, for tār was common in royal names. It was curious how often the remembered snatches harped on the theme of a ‘straight road’. What was atalante? It seemed to mean ruin or downfall, but also to be a name.
Alboin felt restless. He left his bed and went to the window. He stood there a long while looking out to sea; and as he stood a chill wind got up in the West. Slowly over the dark rim of sky and water’s meeting clouds lifted huge heads, and loomed upwards, stretching out vast wings, south and north.
‘They look like the eagles of the Lord of the West over Númenor,’ he said aloud, and started. He had not purposed any words. For a moment he had felt the oncoming of a great disaster long foreseen. Now memory stirred, but could not be grasped. He shivered. He went back to bed and lay wondering. Suddenly the old desire came over him. It had been growing again for a long time, but he had not felt it like this, a feeling as vivid as hunger or thirst, for years, not since he was about Audoin’s age.
‘I wish there was a “Time-machine”,’ he said aloud. ‘But Time is not to be conquered by machines. And I should go back, not forward; and I think backwards would be more possible.’
The clouds overcame the sky, and the wind rose and blew; and in his ears, as he fell asleep at last, there was a roaring in the leaves of many trees, and a roaring of long waves upon the shore. ‘The storm is coming upon Númenor!’ he said, and passed out of the waking world.
In a wide shadowy place he heard a voice.
‘Elendil!’ it said. ‘Alboin, whither are you wandering?’
‘Who are