Alwin Arundel Lowdham

Lowdham has no origin within the invented world: he is a modern Englishman, and no people, house or lineage of Middle-earth can be claimed for him. What ties him to the legendarium is nomenclature. His first name is the ordinary modern reflex of the Old English Aelfwine, a compound of the words for elf and friend, and that title has a settled meaning in the published legends. Among the Numenoreans those who kept faith with the Eldar and would not turn against the West were known as the Elendili, the Elf-friends, and the name of their chief lord was understood in the same sense. The corresponding paternal name of the older generation, Eadwine, carries the sense of friend of good fortune or of blessedness.

The middle name is the older borrowing of the two, and Tolkien himself set out its history. Writing to a correspondent who had asked after his sources, he described how the Old English word earendel, met in the religious verse of the Crist attributed to Cynewulf, had struck him as unusually beautiful and as pointing to something behind the Christian application: a bright herald preceding the sun. From that word he took the name of the mariner who bears the Silmaril, afterwards fitting it to Elvish elements so that within the invented tongues it could be construed as one devoted to the sea. Arundel is thus a modern English surname pressed into service as the carrier of that same shape.

Both names had already found their place in the completed work before they were given to a twentieth-century philologist. Elf-friend is spoken there as a living form of address, bestowed on a mortal by one of the Eldar when Gildor names Frodo so in the woods of the Shire, and repeated afterwards by others who recognise what the phrase implies. Earendil, meanwhile, is remembered chiefly in song, in the long piece Bilbo recites in the hall of Rivendell, and in the star whose light is drawn upon in the darkest passages of the journey. To join the two in one man is to gather into a single modern name the mortal who is befriended by the Elves and the voyager who passes beyond the world's bounds.

No history of Alwin Arundel Lowdham can be given from the works Tolkien published or from those his son edited for print: he is not a figure of the invented world at all, and the completed legends record nothing of him. What stands in place of a personal chronology is the long descent of the matter his names carry, and Tolkien himself once described the shape of that descent. Writing in the mid-1960s to a correspondent who had asked how the mythology came about, he recalled a dream that had returned to him since childhood, of a great wave rising over the trees and the green fields and coming down upon them, and he set out an abandoned story in which a father and a son of the present day were carried back through a succession of earlier ages, bearing at each stage the answering forms of the same two names. The chronology that follows is the one that story was meant to reach.

At the far end of it stands the mariner of the First Age. He was born in the hidden city of Gondolin and was a child when it was taken, escaping with the remnant that came down to the mouths of Sirion, and there he grew and wedded Elwing, who had been brought out of the ruin of Doriath with the jewel her house had kept. When the sons of Feanor fell upon the havens she cast herself into the sea with it, and was borne to her husband's ship in the likeness of a bird. With the Silmaril bound upon his brow he passed the enchantments that guarded the West and came at last to Valinor, where he spoke as an envoy for both kindreds and asked pardon and aid for them. He was not permitted to return; his ship was hallowed and set to sail the heavens, and he came down out of the sky in the last battle against Morgoth's winged dragons. The published account gives no years for any of this.

In the Second Age the inheritance passed to his elder son Elros, who chose mortality and became the first king of Numenor, and through the long line of that island's rulers the memory of the kinship with the Eldar was kept or let fall. As the kings turned against the West those who held to the old friendship became a party and then a persecuted minority, withdrawing at length to the eastern haven of Romenna; the lords of Andunie stood at their head, and one late king attempted a reconciliation that did not outlast his death. When the last king sailed against Valinor the land was destroyed, in the year 3319 of that age, and the leaders of the Faithful escaped eastward in nine ships with the heirlooms they had preserved. In the following year they established their realms upon the western shores of Middle-earth, and their descendants held the traditions of the drowned island for the rest of recorded history.

The published narrative also supplies its own account of how such matter was handed on in writing, and this is the part of the chronology that bears most nearly on a modern scholar receiving fragments of the past. During the years he spent at Rivendell after leaving the Shire, Bilbo Baggins worked at translations made from Elvish sources available to him there, and the three volumes that resulted were given to Frodo when he came away. They were kept with the larger book of the journey, which was copied more than once: a copy was made for Gondor at the request of the King, corrected against sources in Minas Tirith, and from that copy a further one was written out by the scribe Findegil in the year 172 of the Fourth Age. That last transcript is presented as the only one containing the whole of the translated material, and as the ancestor of the text the reader has in hand.

That fictitious line of transmission ends inside the invented world, and nothing in the finished works carries it forward into a later England. Tolkien had wanted such a continuation from early on: setting out his intentions to a publisher's reader in 1951, he described a body of connected legend that should be linked to the tongue and soil of England, left deliberately open so that other hands might work in it, and he identified the drowning of the western island as the point at which his own recurrent dream entered the cycle. The figure who was to have stood at the modern end of that line, and the events assigned to him, exist only in the unfinished club-narrative discussed elsewhere in this article; the published corpus offers the chronology above, and no more.

In the published legendarium Lowdham fills no role and wields no power, and the office he would have occupied is one the finished work has already assigned elsewhere: to the unnamed translator who stands between the reader and the invented tongues. That figure's method is set out in the appendix on languages, where the whole narrative is presented as a rendering of the Common Speech into modern English, and where the archaic shapes borne by the Riders of the Mark are declared to be substitutions, chosen because the relation of their speech to the tongue of the West resembled the relation of an older English to a later one. The device is representational and nothing more; it makes no claim that the men of the Mark spoke Old English, and the competence it presumes is confined to the matching of registers. A philologist so placed can render what he is given and can recognise what stands behind a word, but he cannot alter, verify or enter what is narrated.

The one channel by which knowledge of the deep past reaches living men in the published narrative is dream, and the corpus is careful about its limits. Faramir tells of a recurring vision of a dark wave rising over green country and coming down upon it, and he understands it as an inheritance of his descent from the drowned island rather than as anything he has sought or can command. The other instance is plainer still: a riddling verse came repeatedly to him and once to his brother, and neither could construe it; the errand to Rivendell was undertaken because the words meant nothing where they were received, and the reading eventually put upon them by Boromir proved to be his undoing. Such dreams arrive unbidden, resist interpretation, and confer no advantage on those who have them.

The title that Lowdham's forename carries is likewise a matter of allegiance and not of faculty. In the account of the island's ruin the Faithful are distinguished by loyalty and by what they saved, not by any capacity to avert what came; their reward was preservation of things and traditions, and the counsel they were given availed nothing against the king. Even the instruments of far sight they brought away are described as bounded: a rightful holder could look to a great distance and, with effort, exchange thought with another stone, but the seeing conferred no authority over what was seen, and a stronger will at the other end could govern what a viewer was shown. The same restraint governs any figure imagined as receiving the past. To be named an Elf-friend is to be recognised, not empowered.

Standing outside the invented world, Lowdham has no kin within it, and the only relationships that bear on him are those the published corpus attaches to the two names he carries. The first is a father-and-son bond of an unusual kind. The mariner's own father was a mortal who came as a stranger into a hidden city of the Elves and was given the daughter of its lord in marriage, so that the son of that union stood between the kindreds from birth and repeated the pattern in his own marriage. What the finished narrative dwells upon, however, is not companionship but severance: husband and wife are parted by the errand and by the judgement laid on him afterwards, she keeping a tower on the northern shores of the Sundering Seas while he holds his course above; and the two sons of that house were divided from one another by the differing choices they were permitted to make.

The friendship the other name denotes is shown in the published legends as a bond between particular persons, entered freely and discharged at cost, and its founding instance is itself a scene of language. Finrod came upon the first Men to cross the mountains while they slept in their camp, took up a harp, and learned their speech swiftly enough to teach them in return; they gave him a name of their own meaning wisdom, and the eldest of them entered his service and remained with him until he died. Two generations later a descendant of that house brought help to Finrod in a rout and was answered with an oath of aid to himself and his kin, sealed by a ring. The debt was called in by that man's son, and Finrod paid it in full, going into captivity beside him and dying there. Friendship in this account confers no privilege on either side; it obliges.

At the mortal end of the corpus the relationship that most nearly answers to a philologist's is that of pupil to teacher, and it too is domestic rather than exalted. Frodo's competence in the ancient speech is a gift from an older relative who had taught him, and it is by using it in greeting that he is recognised for what he is by a company of Elves met on the road; his companion, who has no such training, is moved by the singing without construing a word of it. The exchange that follows is courteous and guarded, and the counsel given is deliberately incomplete. Recognition of this kind arrives from the other side and cannot be claimed, which is the condition under which any modern scholar imagined as receiving the past would have to work.

Lowdham belongs wholly to unfinished work: he appears only in the Notion Club Papers, the club-narrative Tolkien wrote in the mid-1940s and laid aside, and which reached print for the first time in Sauron Defeated. His names are not casual invention but carry over a chain of equivalences Tolkien had used before. Alwin answers to Old English Aelfwine, the mariner-name that had served since the earliest framework as the vessel for tradition passing out of the West; Arundel stands for Earendel; and his father's name, Edwin, answers to Eadwine. The same pairing of father and son under successive linguistic forms had already been worked out in the abandoned time-travel story of The Lost Road, where Alboin and Audoin Errol bear the Lombardic equivalents of those names.

Across the drafts his function widens considerably beyond the sketch given in the members' list. The jesting philologist becomes the channel through which the Numenorean matter enters the club's discussions: fragments of speech and verse come to him unbidden, some in Elvish forms, others in a tongue he does not recognise, which he sets out at length in a report on Adunaic that Tolkien left incomplete and revised through several stages. To this is joined the loss of his father, who sailed in a ship bearing Earendel's name and did not return, leaving behind a written leaf in an unfamiliar script. In the later and more thinly worked portions Lowdham journeys west with Jeremy, and the narrative opens outward into the Anglo-Saxon material, so that the transmission device Tolkien had once tried and set aside is taken up again through him.