The Lost Road and Other Writings. Christopher Tolkien

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СКАЧАТЬ better luck tomorrow. As he reached the door, he thought he heard the chair creak, and then his father’s voice (far away and rather strange in tone) murmuring something: it sounded like herendil.

      He was used to odd words and names slipping out in a murmur from his father. Sometimes his father would spin a long tale round them. He turned back hopefully.

      ‘Good night!’ said Alboin. ‘Sleep well, Herendil! We start when the summons comes.’ Then his head fell back against the chair.

      ‘Dreaming,’ thought Audoin. ‘Good night!’

      And he went out, and stepped into sudden darkness.

       Commentary on Chapters I and II

      Alboin’s biography sketched in these chapters is in many respects closely modelled on my father’s own life – though Alboin was not an orphan, and my father was not a widower. Dates pencilled on the covering page of the manuscript reinforce the strongly biographical element: Alboin was born on February 4, (1891 >) 1890, two years earlier than my father. Audoin was born in September 1918.

      ‘Honour Mods.’ (i.e. ‘Honour Moderations’), referred to at the beginning of Chapter II, are the first of the two examinations taken in the Classical languages at Oxford, after two years (see Humphrey Carpenter, Biography, p. 62); ‘Schools’, in the same passage, is a name for the final Oxford examinations in all subjects.

Alboin’s father’s name Oswin is ‘significant’: ós ‘god’ and wine ‘friend’ (see IV. 208, 212); Elendil’s father was Valandil (p. 60). That Errol is to be associated in some way with Eriol (the Elves’ name for Ælfwine the mariner, IV. 206) must be allowed to be a possibility.^*

       The Lombardic legend

The Lombards (‘Long-beards’: Latin Langobardi, Old English Long-beardan) were a Germanic people renowned for their ferocity. From their ancient homes in Scandinavia they moved southwards, but very little is known of their history before the middle of the sixth century. At that time their king was Audoin, the form of his name in the Historia Langobardorum by the learned Paul the Deacon, who died about 790. Audoin and Old English Éadwine (later Edwin) show an exact correspondence, are historically the same name (Old English ēa derived from the original diphthong au). On the meaning of ēad see p. 46, and cf. Éadwine as a name in Old English of the Noldor, IV. 212.

Audoin’s son was Alboin, again corresponding exactly to Old English Ælfwine (Elwin). The story that Oswin Errol told his son (p. 37) is known from the work of Paul the Deacon. In the great battle between the Lombards and another Germanic people, the Gepids, Alboin son of Audoin slew Thurismod, son of the Gepid king Thurisind, in single combat; and when the Lombards returned home after their victory they asked Audoin to give his son the rank of a companion of his table, since it was by his valour that they had won the day. But this Audoin would not do, for, he said, ‘it is not the custom among us that the king’s son should sit down with his father before he has first received weapons from the king of some other people.’ When Alboin heard this he went with forty young men of the Lombards to king Thurisind to ask this honour from him. Thurisind welcomed him, invited him to the feast, and seated him at his right hand, where his dead son Thurismod used to sit.

      But as the feast went on Thurisind began to think of his son’s death, and seeing Alboin his slayer in his very place his grief burst forth in words: ‘Very pleasant to me is the seat,’ he said, ‘but hard is it to look upon him who sits in it.’ Roused by these words the king’s second son Cunimund began to revile the Lombard guests; insults were uttered on both sides, and swords were grasped. But on the very brink Thurisind leapt up from the table, thrust himself between the Gepids and the Lombards, and threatened to punish the first man who began the fight. Thus he allayed the quarrel; and taking the arms of his dead son he gave them to Alboin, and sent him back in safety to his father’s kingdom.

      It is agreed that behind this Latin prose tale of Paul the Deacon, as also behind his story of Alboin’s death, there lies a heroic lay: as early a vestige of such ancient Germanic poetry as we possess.

Audoin died some ten years after the battle, and Alboin became king of the Lombards in 565. A second battle was fought against the Gepids, in which Alboin slew their king Cunimund and took his daughter Rosamunda captive. At Easter 568 Alboin set out for the conquest of Italy; and in 572 he was murdered. In the story told by Paul the Deacon, at a banquet in Verona Alboin gave his queen Rosamunda wine to drink in a cup made from the skull of king Cunimund, and invited her to drink merrily with her father (‘and if this should seem to anyone impossible,’ wrote Paul, ‘I declare that I speak the truth in Christ: I have seen [Radgisl] the prince holding the very cup in his hand on a feastday and showing it to those who sat at the table with him.’)

      Here Oswin Errol ended the story, and did not tell his son how Rosamunda exacted her revenge. The outcome of her machinations was that Alboin was murdered in his bed, and his body was buried ‘at the going up of the stairs which are near to the palace,’ amid great lamentation of the Lombards. His tomb was opened in the time of Paul the Deacon by Gislbert dux Veronensium, who took away Alboin’s sword and other gear that was buried with him; ‘wherefore he used to boast to the ignorant with his usual vanity that he has seen Alboin face to face.’

      The fame of this formidable king was such that, in the words of Paul, ‘even down to our own day, among the Bavarians and the Saxons and other peoples of kindred speech, his open hand and renown, his success and courage in war, are celebrated in their songs.’ An extraordinary testimony to this is found in the ancient English poem Widsith, where occur the following lines:

      Swylce ic wæs on Eatule mid Ælfwine:

      se hæfde moncynnes mine gefræge

      leohteste hond lofes to wyrcenne,

      heortan unhneaweste hringa gedales,

      beorhta beaga, beam Eadwines.

      (I was in Italy with Alboin: of all men of whom I have heard he had the hand most ready for deeds of praise, the heart least niggard in the giving of rings, of shining armlets, the son of Audoin.)^*

In my father’s letter of 1964 (given on pp. 7–8) he wrote as if it had been his intention to find one of the earlier incarnations of the father and son in the Lombard story: ‘It started with a father-son affinity between Edwin and Elwin of the present, and was supposed to go back into legendary time by way of an Eädwine and Ælfwine of circa A.D. 918, and Audoin and Alboin of Lombardic legend …’ But there is no suggestion that at the time this was any more than a passing thought; see further pp. 77–8.

The two Englishmen named Ælfwine (p. 38). King Alfred’s youngest son was named Æthelweard, and it is recorded by the twelfth century historian William of Malmesbury that Æthelweard’s sons Ælfwine and Æthelwine both fell at the battle of Brunanburh in 937.

      Years later my father celebrated the Ælfwine who died at Maldon in The Homecoming СКАЧАТЬ