Middle-earth is Our Earth by Independence1776

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Chapter 2: The History of Middle-earth series

While this section is organized primarily by book, the first subsection deals with Ælfwine, who was in the Legendarium from the beginning and is thus in all of the Silmarillion-focused HoME books.

ÆLFWINE

Ælfwine/Eriol is the original in-universe compiler of the Silmarillion material (started in 1916-1917), though his role was eventually taken by Bilbo in 1966 (The Book of Lost Tales 1, Foreword).

Much of what can be read about him in The Book of Lost Tales 1 and 2 deals with him sailing and becoming involved in with the Elves. I cannot quote all of the material, so I have picked some of the clearest.

~ Book of Lost Tales 1, The Cottage of Lost Play, Commentary on ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’: the first few pages of the commentary is Christopher Tolkien explaining Eriol’s origins and the original conception of Tol Eressëa as England. Two quotes from it shall suffice:

  • 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 Eressëa is brought into relation with the tradition of the invasion of Britain by Hengest and Horsa in the fifth century A.D. […] From these jottings we learn that Eriol’s original name was Ottor […] Ottor Wæfre settled on the island of Heligoland in the North Sea […].”

  • Later his name changed to Ælfwine (‘Elf-friend’), the mariner became an Englishman of the ‘Anglo-Saxon period’ of English history, who sailed west over sea to Tol Eressëa – he sailed from England out into the Atlantic Ocean; […]. But in the earliest conception he [Ælfwine] 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) of this conception is that the Elvish isle to which Eriol came was England – that is to say, Tol Eressëa would become England, the land of the English, at the end of the story.”

~ The Book of Lost Tales 2, The History of Eriol or Ælfwine and the End of the Tales, (5): “Eriol drinks limpë. Gilfanon tells him of things to be; that in his mind (although the fairies hope not) he believes that Tol Eressëa will become a dwelling of Men. […] Rising of the Lost Elves against the Orcs and Nautar. The time is not ready for the Faring Forth, but the fairies judge it to be necessary. They obtain through Ulmo the help of Uin, and Tol Eressëa is uprooted and dragged near to the Great Lands, nigh to the promontory of Rôs. A magic bridge is cast across the intervening sound. Ossë is wroth at the breaking of the roots of the isle he set so long ago – and many of his rare sea-treasures grow about it – that he tries to wrench it back; and the western half breaks off, and is now the Isle of Íverin.”

~ The Book of Lost Tales 2, The History of Eriol or Ælfwine and the End of the Tales, (13): “There follow in notebook C some jottings that make precise identifications of places in Tol Eressëa with places in England. [Compiler’s summary of the linguistic work follows:] Warwick, Oxford, and Great Haywood; the latter where JRRT and Edith lived at the time.”

~ The Book of Lost Tales 2, The History of Eriol or Ælfwine and the End of the Tales, (15): “Ælfwine of England dwelt in the South-west; he was of the kin of Ing, King of Luthany. His mother and father were slain by the sea-pirates and he was made captive. He had always loved the fairies: his father had told him many things (of the tradition of Ing). He escapes. He beats about the northern and western waters. He meets the Ancient Mariner – and seeks for Tol Eressëa (seo umwemmede íeg), whither most of the unfaded Elves have retired from the noise, war, and clamour of Men. The Elves greet him, and the more so when they learn of him who he is. They call him Lúthien the man of Luthany. He finds his own tongue, the ancient English tongue, is spoken in the isle.”

~ The Book of Lost Tales 2, The History of Eriol or Ælfwine and the End of the Tales, Ælfwine of England: “There was a land called England, and it was an island of the West, and before it was broken in the warfare of the Gods it was westernmost of all the Northern lands, and looked upon the Great Sea that Men of old called Garsecg; but that part that was broken was called Ireland and many names besides, and its dwellers come not into these tales. […] Now it is the dull hearts of later days rather than the red deeds of cruel hands that set the mind of the little folk [Elves] to fare away; and ever and anon a little ship weighs anchor from Belerion [no relation to Beleriand] at eve and its sweet sad song is lost forever on the waves. Yet even in the days of Ælfwine there was many a laden ship under elfin sails that left these shores for ever, and many a comrade he had, seen or half-seen, upon his westward road.”

~ The Lost Road, The Lost Road, (iii) The Unwritten Chapters: “Ælfwine and Eadwine live in the time of Edward the Elder, in North Somerset. Ælfwine ruined by the incursions of Danes. Picture opens with the attack (c.915) on Portloca (Porlock) and Wæced. Ælfwine is awaiting Eadwine’s return at night. […] In the end they go off with ten neighbors. Pursued by Vikings off Lundy. Wind takes them out to sea, and persists. Eadwine falls sick and says odd things. Ælfwine dreams too. Mountainous seas.

“The Straight Road ...... water (island of Azores?) ...... off. Ælfwine (?restores ?restrains) Eadwine. Thinks it is a vision of delirium. The vision of Eressëa and the sound of voices. Resigns himself to die but prays for Eadwine. Sensation of falling. They come down in (?real) sea and west wind blows. Land in Ireland (implication is they settle there, and this leads to Finntan).”

~ The Lost Road, Part Two: Valinor and Middle-earth before ‘The Lord of the Rings’, VI Quenta Silmarillion, The Title Page of the QS Manuscript: “The Quenta Silmarillion// Herein is Qenta Noldorinqa or Pennas inGeleidh or History of the Gnomes// This is a history in brief drawn from many older tales; for all the matters that it contains were of old, and are still among the Eldar of the West, recounted more fully in other histories and songs. But many of these were not recalled by Eriol, or men have again lost them since his day. This Account was composed first by Pengolod of Gondolin, and Ælfwine turned it into our speech as it was in his time, adding nothing, he said, save explanations of some few names.”

~ The Lost Road, Part Two: Valinor and Middle-earth before ‘The Lord of the Rings’, VI Quenta Silmarillion, The Conclusion of the ‘Quenta Silmarillion’, §33: “Here endth The Silmarillion: which is drawn out in brief from those songs and histories which are yet sung and told by the fading Elves, and (more clearly and full) by the vanished Elves that dwell now upon the Lonely Isle, Tol Eressëa, whither few mariners of Men have ever come, save once or twice when some man of Eärendel's race hath passed beyond the lands of mortal sight and seen the glimmer of the lamps upon the quays of Avallon, and smelt afar the undying flowers in the meads of Dorwinion. Of whom Eriol was one, that men name Ælfwine, and he alone returned and brought tidings of Cortirion to the Hither Lands.”

~ The War of the Jewels, Part Three, The Wanderings of Húrin and Other Writings Not Forming Part of the ‘Quenta Silmarillion’, II Ælfwine and Dírhaval, A: “Though this [style of] verse was not wholly unlike the verse known to Ælfwine, he translated the lay [of Túrin] into prose (including in it, or adding in the margins as seemed fit to him, matter from the Elvish commentaries that he had heard or seen); for he was not himself skilled in the making of verse, and the transference of this long tale from Elvish into English was difficult enough. Indeed even as it was made, with the help of the Elves as it would seem from his notes and additions, in places his account is obscure.

“This version into ‘modern’ English, that is forms of English intelligible to living users of the English tongue (who have some knowledge of letters, and are not limited to the language of daily use from mouth to mouth) does not attempt to imitate the idiom of Ælfwine, nor that of the Elvish which often shows through especially in the dialogue.”

~ The War of the Jewels, Part Three, The Wanderings of Húrin and Other Writings Not Forming Part of the ‘Quenta Silmarillion’, II Ælfwine and Dírhaval, B: “He [Dírhaval] used that mode of Elvish verse ..... [blank space in text; never named] which was of old proper to the narn; but though this verse mode is not unlike the verse of the [Anglo-Saxon] English, I have rendered it in prose, judging my skill to be too small to be at once scop [poet] and walhstod [interpreter]. Even so, my task has been hard enough, and without the help of the Elves could not have been completed.”

THE LAYS OF BELERIAND

~ The Lay of Leithian, The Gest of Beren and Lúthien, I, Notes: “An earlier draft, after line 12 found could be, has the couplet ‘from England unto Eglamar/ o’er folk and field and lands afar.’”

~ The Lay of Leithian, The Gest of Beren and Lúthien, III, Notes, 508: “After this line [508] [version] A has a couplet omitted in [version] B: ‘from England unto Eglamar/ on rock and dune and sandy bar,’.”

~ The Lay of Leithian, The Gest of Beren and Lúthien, III (Beren’s Meeting With Lúthien), Commentary on Canto III: “The form Eglamar (Gnomish, =Eldamar) occurs in the very early poem The Shores of Faëry and its prose preface (II 262, 272 [compiler’s note: I don’t know if the page numbers will be accurate for your editions of BoLT 2]); and the same line from England unto Eglamar is found in the rough workings of the beginning of the Lay (note to lines 1-30). The mention of England is a reminder that at this time the association of the legends with Eriol/Ælfwine was still very much alive, though there is no other indication of it in the Lay of Leithian.”

THE SHAPING OF MIDDLE-EARTH

~ The Earliest ‘Silmarillion’, 18: “The Elves set sail from Lúthien (Britain or England) for Valinor. (Changed to: The Elves march to the Western shore, and begin to set sail from Lúthien (Britain or England) for Valinor.) Thence they ever still from time (to time) set sail leaving the world ere they fade.”

~ The Earliest ‘Silmarillion’, 19: “And this is the last end of the tales of the days before the days, in the Northern regions of the Western World. These tales are some of those remembered and sung by the fading Elves, and most by the Vanished Elves of the Lonely Isle. They have been told by Elves to Men of the race of Eärendel, and most to Eriol who alone of mortals of later days sailed to the Lonely Isle, and yet came back to Lúthien (changed to Leithian), and remembered things he had heard in Cortirion, the town of the Elves in Tol Eressëa.”

~ The Quenta, §18: “In those days there was a mighty building of ships on the shores of the Western Sea, and most upon those great isles, which in the disruption of the Northern world were fashioned of Beleriand. Thence in many a fleet the survivors of the Gnomes [Noldor], and of the Western companies of the Dark-elves set sail into the West and came no more into the lands of weeping and of war; and the Light-elves marched back beneath the banners of their king following in the train of Fionwë’s victory. Yet not all returned, and some lingered many an age in the West and North, and especially in the Western Isles. Yet ever as the ages drew on and the Elf-folk faded on the Earth, they would still set sail at eve from our Western shores; as still they do, when now there linger few anywhere of the lonely companies.”

~ The Quenta, §18 in the Quenta II version: “In those days there was a mighty building of ships on the shores of the Western Sea, and especially upon those great isles, which in the disruption of the Northern world were fashioned of ancient Beleriand. Thence in many a fleet the survivors of the Gnomes [Noldor], and of the Western companies of the Dark-elves set sail into the West and came not again into the lands of weeping and of war; but the Light-elves marched back beneath the banners of their king following in the train of Fionwë’s victory, and they were borne back in triumph unto Valinor. […]

“Yet not all would forsake the Outer Lands where they had long suffered and long dwelt; and some lingered many an age in the West and North, and especially in the western isles and the lands of Leithian. […] But ever as the ages drew on and the Elf-folk faded on the Earth, they would still set sail at eve from our Western shores; as still they do, when now there linger few anywhere of the lonely companies.”

~ The Ambarkanta, Commentary on the Ambarkanta: “But on the back of Map IV is another map (V) that illustrates all the features of both accounts. […] In relation to Beleriand in the North-west, and bearing in mind the whole underlying history of Eriol-Ælfwine and Leithian (England), the southern part of the Hither Lands, below the Great Gulf, bears an obvious resemblance to the continent of Africa; and in a vaguer way the Inland Sea could be interpreted as the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. But I [Christopher] can offer nothing on this matter that would not be the purest speculation.”

THE LOST ROAD AND OTHER WRITINGS

~ “The Lost Road” is the second difficult section to deal with. Given the quote from Letter 257 that is specifically about this part of The Lost Road and Other Writings, it seems a bit redundant to list the material here. Nor would it be a simple task, given that the entirety of the first two chapters of “The Lost Road” are set in Tolkien’s own time with the point-of-view character Alboin (which means Elf-friend) dreaming of Númenor and the languages used there, as well as the final dream of him meeting Elendil and being offered the chance to travel back in time to Númenor (Part One, III The Lost Road, The opening chapters). In the end, I decided that it was better to give the above summary of that part of the story than quote multiple entire pages.

~ Part Two: Valinor and Middle-earth before ‘The Lord of the Rings’, V The Lhammas, Title page of Lhammas B: “The ‘Lhammas’// This is the ‘Account of Tongues’ which Pengolod of Gondolin wrote in later days in Tol-eressëa, using the work of Rúmil the sage of Tûn. This account Ælfwine saw when he came into the West.”

~ Part Two: Valinor and Middle-earth before ‘The Lord of the Rings’, V The Lhammas, Lhammas B, 8: “But still in the Hither Lands of the West there linger the fading remnants of the Noldor and Teleri, and hold in secret to their own tongues; for there were some of those folk that would not leave the Middle-earth or the companionship of Men, but accepted the doom of Mandos that they should fade even as the younger Children of Ilúvatar waxed, and remained in the world, and are now, as are all those of Quendian race, but faint and few.”

~ Some of the material from the penultimate section in this book (VI Quenta Silmarillion, The Conclusion of the ‘Quenta Silmarillion’) is quoted above in Ælfwine’s section, but here is the final relevant quote from §28: “Yet not all the Eldalië were willing to forsake the Hither Lands where they had long suffered and long dwelt; and some lingered many an age in the West and North, and especially in the western isles and the Land of Leithien. […] But ever as the ages drew on and the Elf-folk faded upon earth, they would sail at eve from the western shores of this world, as still they do, until now there linger few anywhere of their lonely companies.”

SAURON DEFEATED

~ The material in The Notion Club Papers is the third area of the Legendarium that is hard to quote due to the amount of it-- nearly 120 pages worth, excluding the editorial notes. This is JRR Tolkien’s second attempt at a time-travel story dealing with Númenor, this time set in the (at the time) near future of the 1980s. Dreams and memory-training are the methods of time-travel, where the mind travels to or sees or hears things in or from the past while the body remains in the present.

For the significance in relation to this compilation and to connection to other versions of the Legendarium, it is easiest to quote from the last paragraph from Christopher Tolkien’s Introduction to The Notion Club Papers: “However it was, the Notion Club was abandoned [in the mid 1940s], and with it his final attempt to embody the riddle of Ælfwine and Eädwine in a ‘tale of time’. But from its forgotten ‘Papers’ and the strange figure of Arundel Lowdham there emerged a new conception of the Downfall of Númenor, embodied in a different tradition, which would come to constitute a major element of the ‘Akallabêth’ many years later.”

~ Part Three, The Drowning of Anadúnë, (i) The third version of ‘The Fall of Númenor’, §11: “Now the blood of the Númenóreans remained most among men of those western lands and shores; and the memory of the primeval world abode most strongly there, where the old paths to the West had aforetime set out from Middle-earth.”

MORGOTH’S RING

~ Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, Commentary, Author’s Note 2: “Arda or ‘The Kingdom of Arda’ (as being directly under the kingship of Eru’s vice-gerent Manwë) is not easy to translate, since neither ‘earth’ nor ‘world’ are entirely suitable. Physically Arda was what we should call the Solar System. Presumably the Eldar could have had as much and as accurate information concerning this, its structure, origin, and its relation to the rest of Eä (the Universe) as they could comprehend. Probably those who were interested did acquire this knowledge. [...]

“The traditions here [in the Athrabeth] have come down from the Eldar of the First Age, through Elves who were never directly acquainted with the Valar, and through Men who received ‘lore’ from the Elves but who had myths and cosmogonic legends, and astronomical guesses, of their own. There is, however, nothing in them that seriously conflicts with present human notions of the Solar System, and its size and position relative to the Universe. [...]

“It is certainly the case with the Elvish traditions that the principal part of Arda was the Earth (Imbar ‘The Habitation’), as the scene of the Drama of the war of the Valar and the Children of Eru with Melkor: so that loosely used Arda often seems to mean the Earth: and that from this point of view the function of the Solar System was to make possible the existence of Imbar.”

~ Myths Transformed, I: “It is now clear that in any case the Mythology must actually be a ‘Mannish’ affair. (Men are really only interested in Men and in Men’s ideas and visions.) The High Eldar living and being tutored by the demiurgic beings must have known, the ‘truth’ (according to their measure of understanding). What we have in the Silmarillion etc. are traditions (especially personalized and centered upon actors, such as Fëanor) handed on by Men in Númenor and later in Middle-earth (Arnor and Gondor); but already far back-- from the first association of the Dúnedain and Elf-friends in Beleriand-- blended and confused with their own Mannish myths and cosmic ideas.

“At that (in reconsideration of the early cosmogonic parts) I was inclined to adhere to the Flat Earth and the astronomically absurd business of the making of the Sun and Moon. But you can make up stories of that kind when you live among people who have the same general background of imagination, when the Sun ‘really’ rises in the East and goes down in the West, etc. When however (no matter how little most people know or think about astronomy) it is the general belief that we live upon a ‘spherical’ island in ‘Space’ you cannot do this any more.”

~ Myths Transformed, II: “The Making of the Sun and Moon must occur long before the coming of the Elves; […] The time allowed is too short. Neither could there be woods and flowers &c. on earth, if there had been no light since the overthrow of the Lamps! […]

“Since the Eldar are supposed to be wiser and have truer knowledge of the history and nature of the Earth than Men (or than Wild Elves), their legends should have a closer relations to the knowledge now possessed of at least the form of the Solar System (=Kingdom of Arda); though it need not, of course, follow any ‘scientific’ theory of its making or development.”

~ Myths Transformed, II: “The Story, it seems, should follow such a line as this. The entry of the Valar into Eä at the beginning of Time. The choosing of the Kingdom of Arda as their chief abiding place (? by the highest and noblest of the Ainur, to whom Ilúvatar had intended to commit the care of the Eruhíni). Manwë and his companions elude Melkor and begin the ordering of Arda, but Melkor seeks for them and at last finds Arda, and contests the kingship with Manwë.

“This period will, roughly, correspond to supposed primeval epochs before Earth became habitable. A time of fire and cataclysm. Melkor disarrayed the Sun so that at periods it was too hot, and at others too cold. Whether this was due to the state of the Sun, or alteration in the orbit of Earth, need not be made precise: both are possible.”

~ Myths Transformed, IV: “The mythical association of Varda with the stars is of twofold origin. In the ‘demiurgic period’, before the establishment of Arda ‘the Realm’, while the Valar in general (including an unnamed host of others who never came to Arda) were labouring in the general construction of Eä (the World or Universe), Varda was in Eldarin and Númenorean legend said to have designed and set in their places most of the principal stars; but being (by destiny and desire) the future Queen of Arda, in which her ultimate function lay, especially as the lover and protectress of the Quendi, she was concerned not only with the great Stars in themselves, but also in their relations to Arda, and their appearance therefrom (and their effect upon the Children to come). Such forms and major patterns, therefore, as we call (for instance) the Plough, or Orion, were said to be designs. Thus the Valacirca or ‘Sickle of the Gods’, which was one of the Eldarin names of the Plough, was, it was said, intended later to be a sign of menace and threat of vengeance over the North in which Melkor took up his abode.”

~ Myths Transformed, V: “The making of the Sun after the Death of the Trees is not only impossible ‘mythology’ now -- especially since the Valar must be supposed to know the truth about the structure of Eä (and not make mythical guesses like Men) and to have communicated this to the Eldar (and so to the Númenoreans!) -- it is also impossible chronologically in the Narrative.”

~ Myths Transformed, VII, (iii): “We read then that he [Morgoth] was then thrust into the Void. That should mean that he was put outside Time and Space, outside Eä altogether; but if that were so this would imply a direct intervention of Eru (with or without supplication of the Valar). It may however refer inaccurately* to the extrusion or flight of his spirit from Arda.

“*Since the minds of Men (and even of the Elves) were inclined to confuse the ‘Void’, as a conception of the state of Not-being, outside Creation or Eä, with the conception of vast spaces within Eä, especially those conceived to lie all about the enisled ‘Kingdom of Arda’ (which we should probably call the Solar System).”

~ Index, Star-names: This is not a direct quote, but a summary of the text. There is a document where Tolkien was working on the names of the constellations, but on it he also set down the names of six planets in Elvish: Jupiter Alkarinque, Mars Karnil, Saturn Lumbar, Mercury Elemmire, Uranus Nénar, and Neptune Luinil.

THE PEOPLES OF MIDDLE-EARTH

Due to the amount of material-- almost all of it earlier drafts for the LotR Appendices material quoted above-- I have only selected a few quotes.

~ Part One, The Prologue and Appendices to ‘The Lord of the Rings’, II The Appendix on Languages, §1: “This tale is drawn from the memoirs of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, preserved for the most part in the Great Red Book of Samwise. It has been written during many years for those who were interested in the account of the great Adventure of Bilbo, and especially for my friends, the Inklings (in whose veins, I suspect, a good deal of hobbit blood still runs), and for my sons and daughter.”

~ Part One, The Prologue and Appendices to ‘The Lord of the Rings’, II The Appendix on Languages, §3: “To the Inklings I dedicate this book, since they have already endured it with patience – my only reason for supposing that they have a hobbit-strain in their venerable ancestry: otherwise it would be hard to account for their interest in the history and geography of those long-past days, between the end of the Dominion of the Elves and the beginning of the Dominion of Men, when for a brief time the Hobbits played a supreme part in the movements of the world.”

~ Part One, The Prologue and Appendices to ‘The Lord of the Rings’, II The Appendix on Languages, §5: “No doubt for the historians and philologists it would have been desirable to preserve the original tongues; and certainly something of the idiom and the humour of the hobbits is lost in translation, even into a language as similar in mood as our own. But the study of the languages of those days requires time and labour, which no one but myself would, I think, be prepared to give it. So I have except for a few phrases and inscriptions transferred the whole linguistic setting into the tongues of our own time.”

~ Part One, The Prologue and Appendices to ‘The Lord of the Rings’, IV The Calendars, D1: “In the Shire the Calendar was not arranged as ours is; though the year seems to have been of the same length, for long ago as those times are now, reckoned in years and men’s lives, they were not (I suppose) far back in the age of Middle-earth.”

~ Part One, The Prologue and Appendices to ‘The Lord of the Rings’, V The History of the Akallabêth, §19: “In §23 ‘within the girdle of the Earth’ was changed [in the published Silmarillion] to ‘within the Circles of the World’, and ‘The love of this Earth’ to ‘The love of Arda’.”

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