The Lost Road and Other Writings. Christopher Tolkien

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СКАЧАТЬ marked the strange, sudden, cessation of the Dreams. He had got a scholarship (the following year) and had ‘braced the pater’. He had behaved himself moderately well at the university – not too many side-issues (at least not what he called too many); though neither the Latin nor the Greek mood had remained at all steadily to sustain him through ‘Honour Mods.’ They came back, of course, as soon as the exams were over. They would. He had switched over, all the same, to history, and had again ‘braced the pater’ with a ‘first-class’. And the pater had needed bracing. Retirement proved quite different from a holiday: he had seemed just to slip slowly out. He had hung on just long enough to see Alboin into his first job: an assistant lecturership in a university college.

      Rather disconcertingly the Dreams had begun again just before ‘Schools’, and were extraordinarly strong in the following vacation – the last he and his father had spent together in Cornwall. But at that time the Dreams had taken a new turn, for a while.

      He remembered one of the last conversations of the old pleasant sort he had been able to have with the old man. It came back clearly to him now.

‘How’s the Eressëan Elf-latin, boy?’ his father asked, smiling, plainly intending a joke, as one may playfully refer to youthful follies long atoned for.

      ‘Oddly enough,’ he answered, ‘that hasn’t been coming through lately. I have got a lot of different stuff. Some is beyond me, yet. Some might be Celtic, of a sort. Some seems like a very old form of Germanic; pre-runic, or I’ll eat my cap and gown.’

      The old man smiled, almost raised a laugh. ‘Safer ground, boy, safer ground for an historian. But you’ll get into trouble, if you let your cats out of the bag among the philologists – unless, of course, they back up the authorities.’

      ‘As a matter of fact, I rather think they do,’ he said.

      ‘Tell me a bit, if you can without your note-books,’ his father slyly said.

      ‘Westra lage wegas rehtas, nu isti sa wraithas.’ He quoted that, because it had stuck in his mind, though he did not understand it. Of course the mere sense was fairly plain: a straight road lay westward, now it is bent. He remembered waking up, and feeling it was somehow very significant. ‘Actually I got a bit of plain Anglo-Saxon last night,’ he went on. He thought Anglo-Saxon would please his father; it was a real historical language, of which the old man had once known a fair amount. Also the bit was very fresh in his mind, and was the longest and most connected he had yet had. Only that very morning he had waked up late, after a dreamful night, and had found himself saying the lines. He jotted them down at once, or they might have vanished (as usual) by breakfast-time, even though they were in a language he knew. Now waking memory had them secure.

‘Thus cwæth Ælfwine Wídlást:

      Fela bith on Westwegum werum uncúthra

      wundra and wihta, wlitescéne land,

      eardgeard elfa, and ésa bliss.

      Lýt ǽnig wát hwylc his longath síe

      thám the eftsíthes eldo getwǽfeth.’

      His father looked up and smiled at the name Ælfwine. He translated the lines for him; probably it was not necessary, but the old man had forgotten many other things he had once known much better than Anglo-Saxon.

      ‘Thus said Ælfwine the far-travelled: “There is many a thing in the West-regions unknown to men, marvels and strange beings, a land fair and lovely, the homeland of the Elves, and the bliss of the Gods. Little doth any man know what longing is his whom old age cutteth off from return.”’

      He suddenly regretted translating the last two lines. His father looked up with an odd expression. ‘The old know,’ he said. ‘But age does not cut us off from going away, from – from forthsith. There is no eftsith: we can’t go back. You need not tell me that. But good for Ælfwine-Alboin. You could always do verses.’

      Damn it – as if he would make up stuff like that, just to tell it to the old man, practically on his death-bed. His father had, in fact, died during the following winter.

      On the whole he had been luckier than his father; in most ways, but not in one. He had reached a history professorship fairly early; but he had lost his wife, as his father had done, and had been left with an only child, a boy, when he was only twenty-eight.

      He was, perhaps, a pretty good professor, as they go. Only in a small southern university, of course, and he did not suppose he would get a move. But at any rate he wasn’t tired of being one; and history, and even teaching it, still seemed interesting (and fairly important). He did his duty, at least, or he hoped so. The boundaries were a bit vague. For, of course, he had gone on with the other things, legends and languages – rather odd for a history professor. Still there it was: he was fairly learned in such book-lore, though a lot of it was well outside the professional borders.

      And the Dreams. They came and went. But lately they had been getting more frequent, and more – absorbing. But still tantalizingly linguistic. No tale, no remembered pictures; only the feeling that he had seen things and heard things that he wanted to see, very much, and would give much to see and hear again – and these fragments of words, sentences, verses. Eressëan as he called it as a boy – though he could not remember why he had felt so sure that that was the proper name – was getting pretty complete. He had a lot of Beleriandic, too, and was beginning to understand it, and its relation to Eressëan. And he had a lot of unclassifiable fragments, the meaning of which in many cases he did not know, through forgetting to jot it down while he knew it. And odd bits in recognizable languages. Those might be explained away, of course. But anyway nothing could be done about them: not publication or anything of that sort. He had an odd feeling that they were not essential: only occasional lapses of forgetfulness which took a linguistic form owing to some peculiarity of his own mental make-up. The real thing was the feeling the Dreams brought more and more insistently, and taking force from an alliance with the ordinary professional occupations of his mind. Surveying the last thirty years, he felt he could say that his most permanent mood, though often overlaid or suppressed, had been since childhood the desire to go back. To walk in Time, perhaps, as men walk on long roads; or to survey it, as men may see the world from a mountain, or the earth as a living map beneath an airship. But in any case to see with eyes and to hear with ears: to see the lie of old and even forgotten lands, to behold ancient men walking, and hear their languages as they spoke them, in the days before the days, when tongues of forgotten lineage were heard in kingdoms long fallen by the shores of the Atlantic.

      But nothing could be done about that desire, either. He used to be able, long ago, to talk about it, a little and not too seriously, to his father. But for a long while he had had no one to talk to about that sort of thing. But now there was Audoin. He was growing up. He was sixteen.

He had called his boy Audoin, reversing the Lombardic order. It seemed to fit. It belonged anyway to the same name-family, and went with his own name. And it was a tribute to the memory of his father – another reason for relinquishing Anglo-Saxon Eadwine, or even commonplace Edwin. Audoin had turned out remarkably like Alboin, as far as his memory of young Alboin went, or his penetration of the exterior of young Audoin. At any rate he seemed interested in the same things, and asked the same questions; though with much less inclination to words and names, and more to things and descriptions. Unlike his father he could draw, but was not good at ‘verses’. Nonetheless he had, of course, СКАЧАТЬ