Ælfwine (Tolkien)

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For other uses, see Ælfwine.
Ælfwine
First appearance
Heorrenda (Naimi)
NationalityAnglo-Saxon

Ælfwine the mariner is a fictional character found in various early versions of

Elves and acted as the source of later mythology. Thus, in the frame story, Ælfwine is the stated author of the various translations in Old English that appear in the twelve-volume The History of Middle-earth edited by Christopher Tolkien
.

Frame story: early links with Britain

Further information: Tolkien's frame stories and A mythology for England
Hengest and Horsa are the legendary founders of England; in The Book of Lost Tales, Tolkien places Ælfwine as their father. Illustration from Edward Parrott
's 1909 Pageant of British History

In

Ylmir". He was taught most of the tales by the old Elf named Rúmil who is the lore master living on Eressëa. Eriol became more and more unhappy as a man and yearned constantly to be an Elf. He eventually finds out that he can become an elf with a drink of Limpë which he is denied by the leader of Kortirion on multiple occasions.[T 1]

In these early versions,

half-Elven descent, who in the fiction would go on to write the Old English epic poem Beowulf. This weaves together a mythology for England, connecting England's geography, poetry and mythology with the Legendarium as a plausibly reconstructed (though probably untrue) prehistory.[1]

A presented collection

The first title for The Book of Lost Tales was

The stories were thus, in the fiction, told to and transmitted by Eriol/Ælfwine, via Heorrenda's written book.[2]

The Tolkien scholar

philological commentary on the text complete with invented names of scholars, conjectures as to the original text, and variant readings, as if the text had been discovered in an archive. One likely source for such a treatment, remarked by scholars including Tom Shippey, Flieger, Anne C. Petty, and Jason Fisher, is Elias Lönnrot's Finnish epic Kalevala, admired by Tolkien, which had been compiled and edited from a genuine tradition.[3] Another such is Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, something that Tolkien studied intensively.[3]

Time-travelling elf-friend

Further information:
The Lost Road, and The Notion Club Papers
Time in Lothlórien was distorted, as it was in Elfland for Thomas the Rhymer;[4] "Elf-friends" are able to place the different times of Elves and mortals in perspective, having a frame of reference from which to observe them.[5] Illustration by Katherine Cameron, 1908

The Old English name Ælfwine means "Elf-friend", as does the later Quenya name Elendil.[6] Ælfwine is a well-attested historical Germanic name, alongside its Old High German and Lombard equivalents, Alwin and Alboin, respectively.[7][8][9]

All of these names were to be used in the unfinished novel

Sauron Defeated, picks up the time travel and the "Elf-friend" names. The protagonist is Alwin Lowdham.[9][6]

Frodo is linked to Tolkien's time-travelling frame story characters[5]
Names meaning "Elf-friend" in The Lost Road The Lord of the Rings
Lombardic Old English Old High
German		 Quenya
(in Númenor)
Gildor
Alboin Ælfwine Alwin Elendil "Elf-friend"

The

Sam Gamgee, Aragorn, and Legolas about the nature of time in the Elvish realm of Lothlórien, it endows him with a special authority as someone "unusually sensitive" to its mood, and in particular its "timeless quality".[5] This is in the context of her analysis of how time differs between Lothlórien and what Frodo calls the "mortal lands" outside it. She writes that Ælfwine is what the engineer J. W. Dunne in his book An Experiment with Time described as a "Field 2 observer", effectively able to look down on observers in the lower dimension of time, Field 1, from their higher time dimension like someone in an aircraft seeing the situation of people on the ground below; and by association with Ælfwine, perhaps Frodo too is able to see Elvish time from a certain perspective.[5][10]

In the later Legendarium

Further information: Red Book of Westmarch

The Ælfwine frame story is not present in the published version of

Narn i Hîn Húrin, which Christopher Tolkien dates to the period after the publication of The Lord of the Rings,[T 4] has this introductory note: "Here begins that tale which Ǽlfwine made from the Húrinien."[T 5]

Tolkien never fully dropped the idea of multiple 'voices' (such as of Rumil or Pengolodh in their "Golden Book") who supposedly collected the stories of both Mannish and Elvish sources over the millennia of the world's history.

Akallabêth, which was written in the voice of Pengolodh, in a version that his father had entitled "The Downfall of Númenor", begins "Of Men, Ælfwine, it is said by the Eldar that they came into the world in the time of the Shadow of Morgoth ..." He admits in the History of Middle-earth series that removing this destroyed the whole story's anchorage in the lore of the Eldarin elves, and led him to make changes to the end of the paragraph that would not have met with his father's approval. He points out that the last paragraph of Akallabeth as published in the Silmarillion, still contains indirect references to Ælfwine and other 'future mariners'.[T 6]

This later Ælfwine was from England, and travelled west to reach the

Man, at a distance, or dreamed about the Outer Lands (Middle-earth). He was born in either the 10th or 11th century, and in some versions was connected to English royalty.[T 7]

References

Primary

  1. ^ Tolkien 1984, book 2, p. 103
  2. ^ Tolkien 1984, book 2, p. 290
  3. ^ Tolkien 1954a, book 1, ch. 3, "Three Is Company"
  4. ^ Tolkien 1994, p. 314
  5. ^ Tolkien 1994, p. 311
  6. ^ Tolkien 1984, book 1, foreword
  7. ^ Tolkien 1984, book 2, ch. 6 "The History of Eriol or Ælfwine and the End of the Tales"

Secondary

  1. ^ Drout 2004, pp. 229–247.
  2. ^ Flieger 2005, p. 108.
  3. ^ a b c d e Nagy 2020, pp. 107–118.
  4. ^ Shippey 2001, pp. 89–90.
  5. ^ a b c d Flieger 2001, p. 97.
  6. ^ a b Shippey 2005, pp. 336–337.
  7. ^ Artamonova 2010, pp. 71–88.
  8. ^ Flieger 2000, pp. 183–198.
  9. ^ a b c Honegger 2013, pp. 4–5.
  10. ^ Flieger 2001, pp. 38–47.

Sources

  • Artamonova, Maria (2010). "Writing for an Anglo-Saxon audience in the twentieth century: J.R.R. Tolkien's Old English Chronicles". In Clark, David; Perkins, Nicholas (eds.). Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination. Cambridge:
    D. S. Brewer
    . pp. 71–88.
  • ISBN 978-0-8131-2301-1
    .
  • Greenwood Press
    . pp. 183–198.
  • ISBN 978-0-87338-699-9
    .
  • Kent State University Press
    .
  • Honegger, Thomas (2013) [2007]. "Ælfwine (Old English "Elf-friend")". In Drout, Michael D. C. (ed.). J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia. Oxford: Taylor & Francis. pp. 4–5.
  • ISBN 978-1119656029
    .
  • ISBN 978-0261-10401-3
    .
  • ISBN 978-0261102750
    .
  • OCLC 9552942
    .
  • ISBN 0-395-35439-0
    .
  • ISBN 0-395-71041-3
    .
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