The Lost Road and Other Writings. Christopher Tolkien
land in the North-west filled with ice, but fit for men to dwell – holy hermits have been driven out by Norsemen.’ It is certain that by the end of the eighth century (and how much earlier cannot be said) Irish voyagers had reached Iceland, in astounding journeys achieved in their boats called curachs, made of hides over a wooden frame. This is known from the work of an Irish monk named Dicuil, who in his book Liber de Mensura Orbis Terrae (written in 825) recorded that
It is now thirty years since certain priests who lived in that island from the first day of February to the first day of August told me that not only at the summer solstice, but also in the days before and after, the setting sun at evening hides itself as if behind a little hill, so that it does not grow dark even for the shortest period of time, but whatever task a man wishes to perform, even picking the lice out of his shirt, he can do it just as if it were broad daylight.
When the first Norsemen came to Iceland (about 860) there were Irish hermits living there. This is recorded by the Icelandic historian Ari the Learned (1067–1148), who wrote:
At that time Christian men whom the Norsemen call papar dwelt here; but afterwards they went away, because they would not live here together with heathen men, and they left behind them Irish books, bells, and croziers; from which it could be seen that they were Irishmen.
Many places in the south of Iceland, such as Papafjörðr and the island of Papey, still bear names derived from the Irish papar. But nothing is known of their fate: they fled, and they left behind their precious things.
Brendan; Maelduin; Insula Deliciarum. The conception of a ‘blessed land’ or ‘fortunate isles’ in the Western Ocean is a prominent feature of the old Irish legends: Tir-nan-Og, the land of youth; Hy Bresail, the fortunate isle; Insula Deliciosa; etc. Tir-nan-Og is mentioned as a possible story for The Lost Road, p. 77.
The holy Brendan is Saint Brendan called the Navigator, founder of the Abbey of Clonfert in Galway, and the subject of the most famous of the tales of seavoyaging (imrama) told of early Irish saints. Another is the Imram Maelduin, in which Maelduin and his companions set out from Ireland in a curach and came in their voyaging to many islands in succession, where they encountered marvel upon marvel, as did Saint Brendan.
My father’s poem Imram, in which Saint Brendan at the end of his life recalls the three things that he remembers from his voyage, was published in 1955, but it originally formed a part of The Notion Club Papers. Many years before, he had written a poem (The Nameless Land) on the subject of a paradisal country ‘beyond the Shadowy Sea’, in which Brendan is named. This poem and its later forms are given in a note at the end of this chapter, pp. 98 ff.; to the final version is attached a prose note on Ælfwine’s voyage that relates closely to the end of the present outline.
Garsecg: the Ocean. See II. 312 and note 19; also the Index to Vol. IV, entry Belegar.
Sceaf: see pp. 7, 78, and 85 ff.
Lundy: an island off the west coast of Devon.
It is unfortunate that the last part of this outline is so illegible. The words following ‘The Straight Road’ could be interpreted as ‘a world like water’. After the mysterious reference to the Azores the first word is a noun or name in the plural, and is perhaps followed by ‘driven’.
Finntan: An isolated note elsewhere among these papers reads: ‘See Lit. Celt. p. 137. Oldest man in the world Finntan (Narkil White Fire).’ The reference turns out to be to a work entitled The Literature of the Celts, by Magnus Maclean (1906). In the passage to which my father referred the author wrote of the history of Ireland according to mediaeval Irish annalists:
Forty days before the Flood, the Lady Cæsair, niece or granddaughter of Noah – it is immaterial which – with fifty girls and three men came to Ireland. This, we are to understand, was the first invasion or conquest of that country. All these were drowned in the Deluge, except Finntan, the husband of the lady, who escaped by being cast into a deep sleep, in which he continued for a year, and when he awoke he found himself in his own house at Dun Tulcha… . At Dun Tulcha he lived throughout many dynasties down to the sixth century of our era, when he appears for the last time with eighteen companies of his descendants engaged in settling a boundary dispute. Being the oldest man in the world, he was ipso facto the best informed regarding ancient landmarks.
After the Flood various peoples in succession stepped onto the platform of Irish history. First the Partholans, then the Nemedians, Firbolgs, Tuatha de Danaan, and last of all the Milesians, thus carrying the chronology down to the time of Christ. From the arrival of the earliest of these settlers, the Fomorians or ‘Sea Rovers’ are represented as fighting and harassing the people. Sometimes in conjunction with the plague, at other times with the Firbolgs and Gaileoin and Fir-Domnann, they laid waste the land. The Partholans and Nemedians were early disposed of. And then appeared from the north of Europe, or from heaven, as one author says, the Tuatha de Danann, who at the great battle of Moytura South overcame the Firbolgs, scattering them to the islands of Aran, Islay, Rathlin, and the Hebrides, and afterwards defeating the Fomorians at Moytura North, thus gaining full possession of the land.
The Tuatha de Danann are twice mentioned (pp. 77–8) as a possible narrative element in The Lost Road.
The only actual narrative concerning Ælfwine from this time (apart from some beginnings abandoned after a few lines) is brief and roughly scrawled; but it was to be used afterwards, and in places quite closely followed, in The Notion Club Papers.
Ælfwine awoke with a start – he had been dozing on a bench with his back to a pillar. The voices poured in on him like a torrent. He felt he had been dreaming; and for a moment the English speech about him sounded strange, though mostly it was the soft speech of western Wessex. Here and there were men of the Marches, and a few spoke oddly, using strange words after the manner of those among whom the Danes dwelt in the eastern lands. He looked down the hall, looking for his son Eadwine. He was due on leave from the fleet, but had not yet come.
There was a great crowd in the hall, for King Edward was here. The fleet was in the Severn sea, and the south shore was in arms. The jarls had been defeated far north at Irchenfield, but the Danish ships were still at large on the Welsh coast; and the men of Somerset and Devon were on guard.
Ælfwine looked down the hall. The faces of the men, some old and careworn, some young and eager, were dim, not only because the torchlight was wavering and the candles on the high table were guttering. He looked beyond them. There was a wind blowing, surging round the house; timbers creaked. The sound brought back old longings to him that he had thought were long buried. He was born in the year the Danes wintered in Sheppey, and he had sailed many seas and heard many winds since then. The sound of the west wind and the fall of seas on the beaches had always been a challenging music to him. Especially in spring. But now it was autumn, and also he was growing old. And the seas were wide, beyond the power of man to cross – to unknown shores: wide and dangerous. The faces of the men about him faded and the clamour of their voices was changed. He heard the crash of waves on the black cliffs and the sea-birds diving and crying; and snow and hail fell. Then the seas opened pale and wide; the sun shone on the land and the sound and smell of it fell far behind. He was alone going west towards the setting sun with fear and longing in his heart, drawn against his will.
His dream was broken by calls