The Lost Road and Other Writings. Christopher Tolkien

Fróthi. No man injured another, even though he met face to face with the slayer of his father or of his brother, free or bound; and there was no thief or robber in those days, so that a gold ring lay long on Ialangrsheiði [in Jutland]. King Fróthi went to a feast in Sweden at the court of a king named Fjölnir. There he bought two bondwomen called Fenia and Menia; they were big and strong. At that time there were in Denmark two millstones so huge that no man was strong enough to turn them; and the nature of these stones was such that whatever he who turned them asked for was ground out by the mill. This mill was called Grótti. King Fróthi had the bondwomen led to the mill, and he bade them grind gold; and they did so, and at first they ground gold and peace and happiness for Fróthi. Then he gave them rest or sleep no longer than the cuckoo was silent or a song could be sung. It is said that they sang the song which is called the Lay of Grótti, and this is its beginning:

      Now are come to the king’s house

      The two foreknowing ones, Fenia and Menia;

      They are by Fróthi, son of Frithleif,

      The mighty maidens, as bondslaves held.

      And before they ended their song they ground out a host against Fróthi, so that on that very night the sea-king named Mýsing came, and slew Fróthi, and took much plunder; and then the Peace of Fróthi was ended.

      Elsewhere it is said that while the Danes ascribed the peace to Fróthi the Swedes ascribed it to Freyr; and there are close parallels between them. Freyr (which itself means ‘the Lord’) was called inn Fróði, which almost certainly means ‘the Fruitful One’. The legend of the great peace, which in my father’s work is ascribed to the time of Sheaf and his sons, goes back to very ancient origins in the worship of a divinity of fruitfulness in the great sanctuaries of the North: that of Freyr the Fruitful Lord at the great temple of Uppsala, and (according to an extremely plausible theory) that on the island of Zealand (Sjælland). Discussion of this would lead too far and into evidences too complex for the purpose of this book, but it may be said at least that it seems beyond question that Heorot, hall of the Danish kings in Beowulf, stood where is now the village of Leire, about three miles from the sea on the north coast of Zealand. At Leire there are everywhere huge grave mounds; and according to an eleventh-century chronicler, Thietmar of Merseburg, there was held at Leire in every ninth year (as also at Uppsala) a great gathering, in which large numbers of men and animals were sacrificed. A strong case can be made for supposing that the famous sanctuary described by Tacitus in his Germania (written near the end of the first century A.D.) where the goddess Nerthus, or Mater Terra, was worshipped ‘on an island in the ocean’, was indeed on Zealand. When Nerthus was present in her sanctuary it was a season of rejoicing and peace, when ‘every weapon is laid aside.’^*

      In my father’s legend of Sheaf these ancient echoes are used in new ways and with new bearings; and when Sheaf departed on his last journey his ship (as some have said) found the Straight Road into the vanished West.

A brief but perceptive report on The Lost Road, dated 17 December 1937, was submitted by a person unknown invited by Allen and Unwin to read the text. It is to be remembered that the typescript that had been made extended only to the beginning of the fourth chapter (p. 73 note 14) – and also, of course, that at this time nothing concerning the history of Middle-earth, of the Valar and Valinor, had been published. The reader described it as ‘immensely interesting as a revelation of the personal enthusiasms of a very unusual mind’, with ‘passages of beautiful descriptive prose’; but found it ‘difficult to imagine this novel when completed receiving any sort of recognition except in academic circles.’ Stanley Unwin, writing to my father on 20 December 1937, said gently that he had no doubt of its being a succès d’estime, but while he would ‘doubtless want to publish it’ when complete, he could not ‘hold out any hope of commercial success as an inducement to you to give the finishing of it prior claim upon your time.’ He wrote this on the day after my father had written to say that he had finished the first chapter of ‘a new story about Hobbits’ (see III. 366).

      With the entry at this time of the cardinal ideas of the Downfall of Númenor, the World Made Round, and the Straight Road, into the conception of ‘Middle-earth’, and the thought of a ‘time-travel’ story in which the very significant figure of the Anglo-Saxon Ælfwine would be both ‘extended’ into the future, into the twentieth century, and ‘extended’ also into a many-layered past, my father was envisaging a massive and explicit linking of his own legends with those of many other places and times: all concerned with the stories and the dreams of peoples who dwelt by the coasts of the great Western Sea. All this was set aside during the period of the writing of The Lord of the Rings, but not abandoned: for in 1945, before indeed The Lord of the Rings was completed, he returned to these themes in the unfinished Notion Club Papers. Such as he sketched out for these parts of The Lost Road remain, as it seems to me, among the most interesting and instructive of his unfinished works.

       Note on the poem ‘The Nameless Land’ and its later form

      The Nameless Land^* is written in the form of the mediaeval poem Pearl, with both rhyme and alliteration and partial repetition of the last line of one stanza in the beginning of the next. I give it here in the form in which it was published; for Tir-nan-Og the typescripts have Tír na nÓg.

      THE NAMELESS LAND

There lingering lights do golden lie

      On grass more green than in gardens here,

      On trees more tall that touch the sky

      With silver leaves a-swinging clear:

      By magic dewed they may not die

      Where fades nor falls the endless year,

      Where ageless afternoon goes by

      O’er mead and mound and silent mere.

      There draws no dusk of evening near,

      Where voices move in veiléd choir,

      Or shrill in sudden singing sheer.

      And the woods are filled with wandering fire.

      The wandering fires the woodland fill,

      In glades for ever green they glow,

      In dells that immortal dews distill

      And fragrance of all flowers that grow.

      There melodies of music spill,

      And falling fountains plash and flow,

      And a water white leaps down the hill

      To seek the sea no sail doth know.

      Its voices fill the valleys low,

      Where breathing keen on bent and briar

      The winds beyond the world’s edge blow

      And wake to flame a wandering fire.

      That wandering fire hath tongues of flame

      Whose quenchless colours quiver clear

      On leaf and land without a name

      No heart may hope to anchor near.

      A dreamless dark no stars proclaim,

      A moonless night its marches drear,

      A water wide no feet may tame,

      A sea with shores encircled sheer.

      A thousand leagues it lies from here,

      And the foam doth flower upon the sea

      ’Neath cliffs of crystal carven clear

      On shining beaches blowing free.

      There