The Lost Road and Other Writings. Christopher Tolkien

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СКАЧАТЬ gazing out to sea with his chin in his hands.

      ‘So there you are!’ he said. ‘You take a deal of calling. Didn’t you hear me?’

      ‘Not before the time when I answered,’ said Alboin.

      ‘Well, you must be deaf or dreaming,’ said his father. ‘Dreaming, it looks like. It is getting very near bed-time; so, if you want any story tonight, we shall have to begin at once.’

      ‘I am sorry, father, but I was thinking.’

      ‘What about?’

      ‘Oh, lots of things mixed up: the sea, and the world, and Alboin.’

      ‘Alboin?’

      ‘Yes. I wondered why Alboin. Why am I called Alboin? They often ask me “Why Alboin?” at school, and they call me All-bone. But I am not, am I?’

      ‘You look rather bony, boy; but you are not all bone, I am glad to say. I am afraid I called you Alboin, and that is why you are called it. I am sorry: I never meant it to be a nuisance to you.’

      ‘But it is a real name, isn’t it?’ said Alboin eagerly. ‘I mean, it means something, and men have been called it? It isn’t just invented?’

      ‘Of course not. It is just as real and just as good as Oswin; and it belongs to the same family, you might say. But no one ever bothered me about Oswin. Though I often used to get called Oswald by mistake. I remember how it used to annoy me, though I can’t think why. I was rather particular about my name.’

They remained talking on the wall overlooking the sea; and did not go back into the garden, or the house, until bed-time. Their talk, as often happened, drifted into story-telling; and Oswin told his son the tale of Alboin son of Audoin, the Lombard king; and of the great battle of the Lombards and the Gepids, remembered as terrible even in the grim sixth century; and of the kings Thurisind and Cunimund, and of Rosamunda. ‘Not a good story for near bed-time,’ he said, ending suddenly with Alboin’s drinking from the jewelled skull of Cunimund.

      ‘I don’t like that Alboin much,’ said the boy. ‘I like the Gepids better, and King Thurisind. I wish they had won. Why didn’t you call me Thurisind or Thurismod?’

      ‘Well, really mother had meant to call you Rosamund, only you turned up a boy. And she didn’t live to help me choose another name, you know. So I took one out of that story, because it seemed to fit. I mean, the name doesn’t belong only to that story, it is much older. Would you rather have been called Elf-friend? For that’s what the name means.’

      ‘No-o,’ said Alboin doubtfully. ‘I like names to mean something, but not to say something.’

‘Well, I might have called you Ælfwine, of course; that is the Old English form of it. I might have called you that, not only after Ælfwine of Italy, but after all the Elf-friends of old; after Ælfwine, King Alfred’s grandson, who fell in the great victory in 937, and Ælfwine who fell in the famous defeat at Maldon, and many other Englishmen and northerners in the long line of Elf-friends. But I gave you a latinized form. I think that is best. The old days of the North are gone beyond recall, except in so far as they have been worked into the shape of things as we know it, into Christendom. So I took Alboin; for it is not Latin and not Northern, and that is the way of most names in the West, and also of the men that bear them. I might have chosen Albinus, for that is what they sometimes turned the name into; and it wouldn’t have reminded your friends of bones. But it is too Latin, and means something in Latin. And you are not white or fair, boy, but dark. So Alboin you are. And that is all there is to it, except bed.’ And they went in.

      But Alboin looked out of his window before getting into bed; and he could see the sea beyond the edge of the cliff. It was a late sunset, for it was summer. The sun sank slowly to the sea, and dipped red beyond the horizon. The light and colour faded quickly from the water: a chilly wind came up out of the West, and over the sunset-rim great dark clouds sailed up, stretching huge wings southward and northward, threatening the land.

‘They look like the eagles of the Lord of the West coming upon Númenor,’ Alboin said aloud, and he wondered why. Though it did not seem very strange to him. In those days he often made up names. Looking on a familiar hill, he would see it suddenly standing in some other time and story: ‘the green shoulders of Amon-ereb,’ he would say. ‘The waves are loud upon the shores of Beleriand,’ he said one day, when storm was piling water at the foot of the cliff below the house.

      Some of these names were really made up, to please himself with their sound (or so he thought); but others seemed ‘real’, as if they had not been spoken first by him. So it was with Númenor. ‘I like that,’ he said to himself. ‘I could think of a long story about the land of Númenor.’

      But as he lay in bed, he found that the story would not be thought. And soon he forgot the name; and other thoughts crowded in, partly due to his father’s words, and partly to his own day-dreams before.

      ‘Dark Alboin,’ he thought. ‘I wonder if there is any Latin in me. Not much, I think. I love the western shores, and the real sea – it is quite different from the Mediterranean, even in stories. I wish there was no other side to it. There were darkhaired people who were not Latins. Are the Portuguese Latins? What is Latin? I wonder what kind of people lived in Portugal and Spain and Ireland and Britain in old days, very old days, before the Romans, or the Carthaginians. Before anybody else. I wonder what the man thought who was the first to see the western sea.’

      Then he fell asleep, and dreamed. But when he woke the dream slipped beyond recall, and left no tale or picture behind, only the feeling that these had brought: the sort of feeling Alboin connected with long strange names. And he got up. And summer slipped by, and he went to school and went on learning Latin.

      Also he learned Greek. And later, when he was about fifteen, he began to learn other languages, especially those of the North: Old English, Norse, Welsh, Irish. This was not much encouraged – even by his father, who was an historian. Latin and Greek, it seemed to be thought, were enough for anybody; and quite old-fashioned enough, when there were so many successful modern languages (spoken by millions of people); not to mention maths and all the sciences.

      But Alboin liked the flavour of the older northern languages, quite as much as he liked some of the things written in them. He got to know a bit about linguistic history, of course; he found that you rather had it thrust on you anyway by the grammar-writers of ‘unclassical’ languages. Not that he objected: sound-changes were a hobby of his, at the age when other boys were learning about the insides of motor-cars. But, although he had some idea of what were supposed to be the relationships of European languages, it did not seem to him quite all the story. The languages he liked had a definite flavour – and to some extent a similar flavour which they shared. It seemed, too, in some way related to the atmosphere of the legends and myths told in the languages.

      One day, when Alboin was nearly eighteen, he was sitting in the study with his father. It was autumn, and the end of summer holidays spent mostly in the open. Fires were coming back. It was the time in all the year when book-lore is most attractive (to those who really like it at all). They were talking ‘language’. For Errol encouraged his boy to talk about anything he was interested in; although secretly he had been wondering for some СКАЧАТЬ