The ‘Eriol-story’ is in fact among the knottiest and most obscure matters in the whole history of Middle-earth and Aman. My father abandoned the writing of the Lost Tales before he reached their end, and when he abandoned them he had also abandoned his original ideas for their conclusion. Those ideas can indeed be discerned from his notes; but the notes were for the most part pencilled at furious speed, the writing now rubbed and faint and in places after long study scarcely decipherable, on little slips of paper, disordered and dateless, or in a little notebook in which, during the years when he was composing the Lost Tales, he jotted down thoughts and suggestions (see p. 171). The common form of these notes on the ‘Eriol’ or ‘English’ element is that of short outlines, in which salient narrative features, often without clear connection between them, are set down in the manner of a list; and they vary constantly among themselves.

In what must be, at any rate, among the very earliest of these outlines, found in this little pocket-book, and headed ‘Story of Eriol’s Life’, the mariner who came to Tol Eressлa is brought into relation with the tradition of the invasion of Britain by Hengest and Horsa in the fifth century A.D. This was a matter to which my father gave much time and thought; he lectured on it at Oxford and developed certain original theories, especially in connection with the appearance of Hengest in Beowulf.*

From these jottings we learn that Eriol’s original name was Ottor, but that he called himself W

fre (an Old English word meaning ‘restless, wandering’) and lived a life on the waters. His father was named Eoh (a word of the Old English poetic vocabulary meaning ‘horse’); and Eoh was slain by his brother Beorn (in Old English ‘warrior’, but originally meaning ‘bear’, as does the cognate word bjцrn in Old Norse; cf. Beorn the shape-changer in The Hobbit). Eoh and Beorn were the sons of Heden ‘the leather and fur clad’, and Heden (like many heroes of Northern legend) traced his ancestry to the god Wуden. In other notes th1ere are other connections and combinations, and since none of this story was written as a coherent narrative these names are only of significance as showing the direction of my father’s thought at that time.

Ottor W

fre settled on the island of Heligoland in the North Sea, and he wedded a woman named Cwйn (Old English: ‘woman’, ‘wife’); they had two sons named ‘after his father’ Hengest and Horsa ‘to avenge Eoh’ (hengest is another Old English word for ‘horse’).

Then sea-longing gripped Ottor W

fre: he was a son of Eдrendel, born under his beam. If a beam from Eдrendel fall on a child new-born he becomes ‘a child of Eдrendel’ and a wanderer. (So also in The Cottage of Lost Play Eriol is called both by the author and by Lindo a ‘son of Eдrendel’.) After the death of Cwйn Ottor left his young children. Hengest and Horsa avenged Eoh and became great chieftains; but Ottor Wжfre set out to seek, and find, Tol Eressлa, here called in Old English se uncъ юa holm, ‘the unknown island’.

Various things are told in these notes about Eriol’s sojourn in Tol Eressлa which do not appear in The Book of Lost Tales, but of these I need here only refer to the statements that ‘Eriol adopted the name of Angol’ and that he was named by the Gnomes (the later Noldor, see below p. 43) Angol ‘after the regions of his home’. This certainly refers to the ancient homeland of the ‘English’ before their migration across the North Sea to Britain: Old English Angel, Angul, modern German Angeln, the region of the Danish peninsula between the Flensburg fjord and the river Schlei, south of the modern Danish frontier. From the west coast of the peninsula it is no very great distance to the island of Heligoland.

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 Eressлa 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 Жlfwine (‘Elf-friend’), the mariner became an Englishman of the ‘Anglo-Saxon period’ of English history, who sailed west over sea to Tol Eressлa—he sailed from England out into the Atlantic Ocean; and from this later conception comes the very remarkable story of Жlfwine 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) of1 this conception is that the Elvish isle to which Eriol came was England—that is to say, Tol Eressлa would become England, the land of the English, at the end of the story. Koromas or Kortirion, the town in the centre of Tol Eressлa 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);* Alalminуrл, the Land of Elms, would be Warwickshire; and Tavrobel, where Eriol sojourned for a while in Tol Eressлa, 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 Eressлan 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 Kфr in Valinor, and because this city stood also upon a hill and had a great tower tall and grey that Ingil son of Inwл their lord let raise.