The Lost Road and Other Writings. Christopher Tolkien

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СКАЧАТЬ But they make it very clear that my father was concerned above all with the relation between the father and the son, which was cardinal. In Númenor he had engendered a situation in which there was the potentiality of anguishing conflict between them, totally incommensurate with the quiet harmony in which the Errols began – or ended. The relationship of Elendil and Herendil was subjected to a profound menace. This conflict could have many narrative issues within the framework of the known event, the attack on Valinor and the Downfall of Númenor, and in these notes my father was merely sketching out some solutions, none of which did he develop or return to again.

An apparently minor question was the words ‘the Eagles of the Lord of the West’: what did they mean, and how were they placed within the story? It seems that he was as puzzled by them as was Alboin Errol when he used them (pp. 38, 47). He queries whether ‘Lord of the West’ means the King of Númenor, or Manwë, or whether it is the title properly of Manwë but taken in his despite by the King; and concludes ‘probably the latter’. There follows a ‘scenario’ in which Sorontur King of Eagles is sent by Manwë, and Sorontur flying against the sun casts a great shadow on the ground. It was then that Elendil spoke the phrase, but he was overheard, informed upon, and taken before Tarkalion, who declared that the title was his. In the story as actually written Elendil speaks the words to Herendil (p. 62), when he sees clouds rising out of the West in the evening sky and stretching out ‘great wings’ – the same spectacle as made Alboin Errol utter them, and the men of Númenor in the Akallabêth (p. 277); and Herendil replies that the title has been decreed to belong to the King. The outcome of Elendil’s arrest is not made clear in the notes, but it is said that Herendil was given command of one of the ships, that Elendil himself joined in the great expedition because he followed Herendil, that when they reached Valinor Tarkalion set Elendil as a hostage in his son’s ship, and that when they landed on the shores Herendil was struck down. Elendil rescued him and set him on shipboard, and ‘pursued by the bolts of Tarkalion’ they sailed back east. ‘As they approach Númenor the world bends; they see the land slipping towards them’; and Elendil falls into the deep and is drowned.^* This group of notes ends with references to the coming of the Númenóreans to Middle-earth, and to the ‘later stories’; ‘the flying ships’, ‘the painted caves’, ‘how Elf-friend walked on the Straight Road’.

      Other notes refer to plans laid by the ‘anti-Saurians’ for an assault on the Temple, plans betrayed by Herendil ‘on condition that Elendil is spared’; the assault is defeated and Elendil captured. Either associated with this or distinct from it is a suggestion that Herendil is arrested and imprisoned in the dungeons of Sauron, and that Elendil renounces the Gods to save his son.

      My guess is that all this had been rejected when the actual narrative was written, and that the words of Herendil that conclude it show that my father had then in mind some quite distinct solution, in which Elendil and his son remained united in the face of whatever events overtook them.^†

      In the early narratives there is no indication of the duration of the realm of Númenor from its foundation to its ruin; and there is only one named king. In his conversation with Herendil, Elendil attributes all the evils that have befallen to the coming of Sauron: they have arisen therefore in a quite brief time (forty-four years, p. 66); whereas in the Akallabêth, when a great extension of Númenórean history had taken place, those evils began long before, and are indeed traced back as far as the twelfth ruler, Tar-Ciryatan the Shipbuilder, who took the sceptre nearly a millennium and a half before the Downfall (Akallabêth p. 265, Unfinished Tales p. 221).

From Elendil’s words at the end of The Lost Road there emerges a sinister picture: the withdrawal of the besotted and aging king from the public view, the unexplained disappearance of people unpopular with the ‘government’, informers, prisons, torture, secrecy, fear of the night; propaganda in the form of the ‘rewriting of history’ (as exemplified by Herendil’s words concerning what was now said about Eärendel, p. 60); the multiplication of weapons of war, the purpose of which is concealed but guessed at; and behind all the dreadful figure of Sauron, the real power, surveying the whole land from the Mountain of Númenor. The teaching of Sauron has led to the invention of ships of metal that traverse the seas without sails, but which are hideous in the eyes of those who have not abandoned or forgotten Tol-eressëa; to the building of grim fortresses and unlovely towers; and to missiles that pass with a noise like thunder to strike their targets many miles away. Moreover, Númenor is seen by the young as over-populous, boring, ‘over-known’: ‘every tree and grass-blade is counted’, in Herendil’s words; and this cause of discontent is used, it seems, by Sauron to further the policy of ‘imperial’ expansion and ambition that he presses on the king. When at this time my father reached back to the world of the first man to bear the name ‘Elf-friend’ he found there an image of what he most condemned and feared in his own.

(iii)

       The unwritten chapters

It cannot be shown whether my father decided to alter the structure of the book by postponing the Númenórean story to the end before he abandoned the fourth chapter at Herendil’s words ‘I stay, father’; but it seems perfectly possible that the decision in fact led to the abandonment. At any rate, on a separate sheet he wrote: ‘Work backwards to Númenor and make that last’, adding a proposal that in each tale a man should utter the words about the Eagles of the Lord of the West, but only at the end would it be discovered what they meant (see pp. 75–6). This is followed by a rapid jotting down of ideas for the tales that should intervene between Alboin and Audoin of the twentieth century and Elendil and Herendil in Númenor, but these are tantalisingly brief: ‘Lombard story?’; ‘a Norse story of ship-burial (Vinland)’; ‘an English story-of the man who got onto the Straight Road?’; ‘a Tuatha-de-Danaan story, or Tir-nan-Og’ (on which see pp. 81–3); a story concerning ‘painted caves’; ‘the Ice Age – great figures in ice’, and ‘Before the Ice Age: the Galdor story’; ‘post-Beleriand and the Elendil and Gil-galad story of the assault on Thû’; and finally ‘the Númenor story’. To one of these, the ‘English story of the man who got onto the Straight Road’, is attached a more extended note, written at great speed:

But this would do best of all for introduction to the Lost Tales: How Ælfwine sailed the Straight Road. They sailed on, on, on over the sea; and it became very bright and very calm, – no clouds, no wind. The water seemed thin and white below. Looking down Ælfwine suddenly saw lands and mt [i.e. mountains or a mountain] down in the water shining in the sun. Their breathing difficulties. His companions dive overboard one by one. Ælfwine falls insensible when he smells a marvellous fragrance as of land and flowers. He awakes to find the ship being drawn by people walking in the water. He is told very few men there in a thousand years can breathe air of Eressëa (which is Avallon), but none beyond. So he comes to Eressëa and is told the Lost Tales.

Pencilled later against this is ‘Story of Sceaf or Scyld’; and it was СКАЧАТЬ