Sauron Defeated (49 page)

Finally there stands this last note: 'At end Lowdham and Jeremy can revisualize some more fragments, but it is hardly needed, as Lowdham and Jeremy have a vivid dream of the Fall of Numenor.'

From the beginning of this history, the story of the Englishman AElfwine, called also Eriol, who links by his strange voyage the vanished world of the Elves with the lives of later men, has constantly appeared. So in the last words of the Quenta Noldorinwa (IV.165) it is said:

To Men of the race of Earendel have they [the tales of the Quenta]

at times been told, and most to Eriol, who alone of the mortals of later days, and yet now long ago, sailed to the Lonely Isle, and came back to the land of Leithien [Britain] where he lived, and remembered things that he had heard in fair Cortirion, the city of the Elves in Tol Eressea.

He is seen in Tavrobel of Tol Eressea translating The Annals of Valinor and The Annals of Beleriand from the work of Pengolod the Wise of Gondolin, and parts of his Anglo-Saxon text are preserved (IV.263, 281 ff.); the Ainulindale was spoken to him by Rumil of Tun (V.156); the Lhammas of Pengolod was seen by AElfwine 'when he came into the West' (V.167). To the Quenta Silmarillion his note is appended (V.203): 'The work of Pengolod I learned much by heart, and turned into my tongue, some during my sojourn in the West, but most after my return to Britain'; after which follow the lines of AElfwine Widlast that Arundel Lowdham heard, as Alboin Errol had heard them: Fela bid on Westwegum werum uncudra, wundra ond wihta, wlitescyne lond...

Crossing this theme, and going back to one form of the old story AElfwine of England (II.322 and note 42), was the story that AElfwine never set foot on the Lonely Isle. So in my father's sketches for those further reaches of The Lost Road that he never wrote, AElfwine on the one hand (V.78) awakes on the beach of the Lonely Isle 'to find the ship being drawn by people walking in the water', and there in Eressea he 'is told the Lost Tales'; but in other notes of that time (V.SO), after

'the vision of Eressea', the 'west wind blows them back', and they come to shore in Ireland. In the note to the final version of the poem The Song of AElfwine (a version which I suggested was 'probably from the years after The Lord of the Rings, though it might be associated with the Notion Club Papers of 1945', V.100) it is told (V.103): AElfwine (Elf-friend) was a seaman of England of old who, being driven out to sea from the coast of Erin, passed into the deep waters of the West, and according to legend by some strange chance or grace found the 'straight road' of the Elvenfolk and came at last to the Isle of Eressea in Elvenhome. Or maybe, as some say, alone in the waters, hungry and athirst, he fell into a trance and was granted a vision of that isle as it once had been, ere a West-wind arose and drove him back to Middle-earth.

In the first of the sketches just given AElfwine and Treowine are in sight of the 'shining land' when the wind drives them away; but in the second my father once more sees AElfwine in the Lonely Isle looking at

'the Book of Stories'. But the whole conception has now developed a disturbing complexity: the Downfall of Numenor, the Straight Road into the West, the ancient histories in unknown language and unknown script preserved in Eressea, the mysterious voyage of Edwin Lowdham in his ship The Earendel and the single preserved page of his book in Anglo-Saxon, the 're-emergence' in his son Arundel (Earendel) and his friend Wilfrid Trewin Jeremy of 'the sight and memory' of their forebears in distant ages communicated in dreams, and the violent irruption of the Numenorean legend into the late twentieth century - all framed within an elaborate foreseeing of the future (not without comic and ironic elements).

There is a slip of paper on which my father sketched out very rapidly ideas for what would become 'Part Two' of The Notion Club Papers; this was undoubtedly written before he began the writing of the manuscript E, but it is most conveniently given here.

Do the Atlantis story and abandon Eriol-Saga, with Loudham, Jeremy, Guildford and Ramer taking part.

After night 62.(109) Loudham, walking home with Guildford and Ramer, apologizes for appearing to scoff. They halt in Radcliffe Square and Loudham looks up at the Camera. It is starry, but a black cloud is coming up out of the West [changed at once to (but) caught like smoke in the moon a wisp of cloud seemed to be issuing from the lantern of the dome]. Loudham halts and looks up, passing [his] hand over his forehead. 'I was going to say,' he says, 'that - I don't know. I wonder.' He hopped into college and said no more.

Night 65. Truncated. It begins after lacuna. Conversation had been about myths, but Loudham had been restless, walking about twisting his handkerchief and making some unsuccessful jests.

Suddenly he went to the window. It was a summer night and he looked out, then spoke in a loud solemn voice. 'Behold the Eagles of the Lords of the West coming over Numenor.' We were startled. Some of us went and looked out. A great cloud was eating up the stars, spreading two vast dark wings south and north.

Loudham drew away. They discuss Numenor? Loudham's ancestry?

The words with which this sketch begins, 'Do the Atlantis story and abandon Eriol-Saga ...', are remarkable. In the first place, they seem to support the analysis of the way in which The Notion Club Papers developed that I have suggested at various points, and which I will state here in a more coherent form.

'Part One' of the Papers (not at this time conceived to be so) had reached the stage of the completed manuscript B (see p. 147 and note 4), and at this stage Harry Loudham was not seen as contributing greatly to the discussions of the Notion Club: a maker of jokes and interjections. Above all, he had no especial interest in the question of Atlantis or in names from unknown worlds. Examples of this have been pointed out in the notes to Part One.(110)

Only when the manuscript B was completed (and the text of 'Part One' of the Papers very largely achieved) did the thought enter: 'Do the Atlantis story.' With Loudham's standing beneath the Radcliffe Camera and staring up at the sky the whole course of the Papers was changed. Adjustments and additions were subsequently made to 'Part One', hinting at his peculiar 'affinity' with the legend of the downfall of the island empire, and changing the nature of his interests: for whereas in B Guildford could say of him (p. 214 note 23): Memoirs of the courts of minor 18th century monarchs are his natural browsing-ground', in the list of members of the Club given on p. 151 (made when B had been completed)(111) he has 'special interests in Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon'. And as the writing of 'Part Two' in the manuscript E proceeded he ceased to be Harry and became Arry, for Arundel (Earendel).

But when my father wrote 'Do the Atlantis story' he also said that the 'Eriol-Saga' should be abandoned, although there is no mention of any such matter in the text of 'Part One'. The only explanation that I can see is that the 'Eriol-Saga' had been, up to this time, what my father had in mind for the further course of the meetings of the Notion Club, but was now rejecting in favour of 'Atlantis'.

In the event he did not do so; he found himself drawn back into the ideas that he had sketched for The Lost Road (see V.77 - 8), but now in a conception so intricate that one need perhaps look no further for an answer to the question, why were The Notion Club Papers abandoned?

NOTES.

1. Pencilled at the head of the first page of the sole manuscript ('E') of 'Part Two' is 'The Strange [Investigation >] Case of Arundel Loudham', and the same title together with the number '[Part]

II' is found on a separate title-page that seems to belong with E

(p. 153 note 2). The second text of this Part, the typescript 'F', while distinct from the typescript D of Part One and with a separate pagination, has no title or heading before 'Night 62'.

- Loudham is spelt thus in E at first, but becomes Lowdham in the course of the writing of the manuscript (p. 153 note 4).

2. In E there is no Night 62: see p. 195 (Guildford's footnote) and note 47.

3. In E there is no head-note to Night 63 except the word

'defective', and thus no reference to 'the imram'. In the final text, the typescript F, the number of the night to which the mention of the imram is referred was left blank; I have added

'69', since on that night Frankley read his poem on Saint Brendan (pp. 261 ff.). - The bracketed opening word 'Good', supposed to be absent in the original, was added by the editor.

4. the High: High Street; Radcliffe Square, see p. 222 note 69.

5. For 'especially about the imram' E has 'especially about the Enkeladim', changed soon to 'the Imram'. For references to the Enkeladim (En-keladim) in Part One see pp. 199, 206 - 7, 221

note 65; and for the imrama (tales of seavoyaging) see V.81 - 2.

6. Nordics: E has 'philologists' (but Ramer himself was a philologist).

7. B.N.C.: the common abbreviation of Brasenose College, whose gate is in Radcliffe Square. The 'lane' along which Ramer and Guildford walked after Lowdham had left them is Brasenose Lane, leading from Radcliffe Square to Turl Street (p. 213 note 18). - For The Camera in the following sentence see p. 222

note 69.

8. On the inclusion of Night 64 see the Editor's Foreword, p. 156.

9. In E as originally written the entire opening of Night 65 had been lost, and the text only takes up with '[Jeremy] ... "as you said...." ' - which is where in F the text takes up again after the loss of a page in the middle of the record of the meeting (p. 227). Thus in E the conversation concerning neologisms was at first lacking; it was added in to the manuscript subsequently.

10. In E it was Dolbear, not Ramer, who objected thus to Lowdham's remark. Arry (for Harry) entered in the course of the writing of E; see p. 213 note 16.

11. N.E.D.: A New English Dictionary, the actual title of the Oxford English Dictionary or O.E.D.

12. The expression the Six Years' War is used in the Foreword and several times in the text. In E my father called it here the Second German War.

13. Vita Fera: literally 'savage life' (ferus 'wild, untamed, savage, fierce').

14. Cf. p. 174: Frankley, according to Guildford, 'regards knowledge of his own language at any period before the Battle of Bosworth as a misdemeanour'.

15. Norman Keeps was an historical person, who expounded to my father the view of English history here recounted by Philip Frankley while plying his trade at the barbering establishment of Weston and Cheal in the Turl Street.

16. Battle of Camlan: the battle in which King Arthur and his nephew Modred fell.

17. Zigur: the Adunaic name of Sauron, which is the name that Lowdham uses in E here.

18. Owlamoo: This was in fact the name of a bogey conceived by my brother Michael (and of which my father made a picture, dated 1928, now in the Bodleian Library); but of course Lowdham intended no more than any old absurd name: in E he says 'Wallamaloo, who's he?'

19. Numenor: so F at all occurrences here (the long mark over the o being added subsequently); E has Numenor.

20. Numenor is my name for Atlantis: see p. 221 note 63.

21. I knew I had heard that name as soon as Arry said it: see pp.

306-7.

22. A footnote to the text in E at this point reads: 'The records were supposed to be written up and presented for correction at the end of each term. Before being passed they were initialled by all persons mentioned in them. N.G. Cf. the Note to the list of members of the Notion Club in F, p. 160.

23. My father's name was Edwin: in initial drafting (and in E as first written) Lowdham's father was called Oswin Ellendel (a 'mod-ernisation' of Elendil) and he himself was Alboin Arundel (cf.

Oswin Errol father of Alboin in The Lost Road, V.36 ff.).

Oswin Loudham was at first to be a sailor by profession, or else the somewhat absentee Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge ('I believe he did know some Anglo-Saxon' said his son).

24. I have not been able to discover a place named Penian in Pembrokeshire.

25. The Earendel: in E the ship was named Earendel Star.

26. It does not look to Sussex: Arundel in Sussex (explained as Old English harhun-dell, 'hoarhound valley', the name of a plant) has of course no connection whatsoever with Earendel, merely a likeness of sound.

27. E has 'the War of 1939' (see note 12).

28. three sailors: E has only 'And he'd had great difficulty in collecting any sort of crew.' Cf. the three mariners who accompanied Earendel and Elwing on the voyage to Valinor in the Quenta Silmarillion (V.324, 327).

29. With this passage cf. V.37 - 8 and my commentary V.53 - 5.

30. the connexion of the Langobards with King Sheaf: see p. 227, and V.92 ff.

31. In E Ramer says: 'Nor the repetition of the sequence: Alboin son of Audoin = Alwin son of Edwin.' The addition in F of AElfwine son of Eadwine is curious, since no actual AElfwine son of Eadwine has been mentioned (merely the Old English forms of Alwin and Edwin). Possibly it should be understood that Ramer in his discussion with Lowdham before the present meeting (p. 235) had learnt of the verses ascribed to AElfwine Widlast Eadwines sunu (p. 244).