Sauron Defeated (41 page)

'Now that is odd!' began Jeremy.

'Ah!' said Lowdham. 'I wondered if it might be. I asked you what your name was that night last term; but you didn't answer.'

'Well, here's a new development!' said Dolbear, who was now wide awake. 'If Arry Lowdham is going to dive where the dreams go and find the same fish as Ramer, we shall have to look into the pool.'

'We shall,' said Jeremy; 'for it's not only Ramer and Arry. I come into it too. I knew I had heard that name as soon as Arry said it.(21) But I can't for the life of me remember where or when at the moment. It'll bother me now, like a thorn in the foot, until I get it out.'

'Very queer,' said Dolbear.

'What do you propose to do?' said Ramer.

'Take your advice,' said Jeremy. 'Get your help, if you'll give it.'

'Go into memory-training on the Rufus-Ramer system and see what we can fish up,' said Lowdham. 'I feel as if something wants to get out, and I should be glad to get it out - or forget it.'

'I'm a bit lost in all this,' said Markison. 'I've missed something evidently. Philip has told me a bit about the Ramer revelations last term, but I'm still rather at sea. Couldn't you tell us something, Lowdham, to make things a little clearer?'

'No, really, I'm feeling frightfully tired,' said Lowdham. 'You had better read up the records, if Nick has written them out yet.(22) I expect he has. He's pretty regular, and pretty accurate, if a bit hard on me. And come along to the next meeting. And we'd better make that in a fortnight's time, I think. You can have my room, if you think you can all get in. We'll see what we have got by then. I've nothing much to tell yet.'

The conversation then dropped back uncertainly towards the normal, and nothing further occurred worth noting.

As we went out Lowdham said to Ramer: 'D'you think I could come round and talk to you, and to Rufus, some time soon?'

'Yes,' said Ramer. 'The sooner the better. You come too, Jeremy.'

MGR. PF. RD. JM. JJ. RS. AAL. WTJ. NG.

Night 66. Thursday, May 22nd, 1987.

A crowded evening. Lowdham's rather small room was pretty packed. The idea of Arry 'seeing things' was sufficiently astonishing to attract every member who was in Oxford. (Also I am supposed to keep more bottles in my cupboard than some that I could name. AAL)

Lowdham seemed in a bright and rather noisy mood again; reluctant to do anything but sing. Eventually he was quietened and got into a chair.

'Well now,' said Markison, 'I've read the records. I can't say I've made my mind up about them yet; but I'm very interested to hear how you come into such business, Arry. It doesn't seem in your line.'

'Well, I'm a philologist,' said Lowdham, 'which means a misunderstood man. But where I come in is, I think, at the point you've mentioned: at Arry. The name Arry, which some of you are pleased to attach to me, is not just a tribute to my vulgar noisiness, as seems assumed by the more ignorant among you: it is short not for Henry or Harold, but for Arundel. In full Alwin Arundel Lowdham your humble jester, at your service.'

'Well, what has that got to do with it?' said several voices.

'I'm not quite sure yet,' said Lowdham. 'But my father's name was Edwin.'(23)

'Illuminating indeed! ' said Frankley.

'Not very, I think,' said Lowdham. 'Not illuminating, but puzzling. My father was an odd sort of man, as far as I remember. Large, tall, powerful, dark. Don't stare at me! I'm a reduced copy. He was wealthy, and combined a passion for the sea with learning of a sort, linguistic and archaeological.

He must have studied Anglo-Saxon and other North-western tongues; for I inherited his library and some of his tastes.

'We lived in Pembrokeshire, near Penian:(24) more or less, for we were away a large part of the year; and my father was always going off at a moment's notice: he spent a great deal of his time sailing about Norway, Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, and sometimes southward to the Azores and so on. I did not know him well, though I loved him as much as a small boy can, and used to dream of the time when I could go sailing with him. But he disappeared when I was only nine.'

'Disappeared?' said Frankley. 'I thought you told me once that he was lost at sea.'

'He disappeared,' said Lowdham. 'A strange story. No storm.

His ship just vanished into the Atlantic. That was in 1947, just forty years ago next month. No signals (he wouldn't use wireless, anyway). No trace. No news. She was called The Earendel.(25) An odd business.'

'The seas were still pretty dangerous at that time, weren't they?' said Stainer. 'Mines all over the place?'

'Not a spar at any rate was ever found,' said Lowdham. 'That was the end of The Earendel: a queer name, and a queer end.

But my father had some queer fancies about names. I am called Alwin Arundel, a mouthful enough, out of deference to prudence and my mother, I believe. The names he chose were AElfwine Earendel.

'One of the few conversations I remember having with him was just before he went off for the last time. I had begged to go with him, and he had said NO, of course. "When can I go?" I said.

'"Not yet, AElfwine," he said. "Not yet. Some time, perhaps.

Or you may have to follow me."

'It was then that it came out about my names. "I modernized

'em," he said, "to save trouble. But my ship bears the truer name. It does not look to Sussex,(26) but to shores a great deal further off. Very far away indeed now. A man has more freedom in naming his ship than his own son in these days. And it's few men that have either to name."

'He went off next day. He was mad to be at sea again, as he had been kept ashore all through the Six Years' War,(27) from the summer of 1939 onward, except I believe just at the Dunkirk time in 1940. Too old - he was fifty when the war broke out, and I was only a year; for he had married late - too old, and I fancy a good deal too free and unbiddable to get any particular job, and he had become fiercely restless. He only took three sailors with him,(28) I think, but of course I don't know how he found them, or how they ever managed to get off, in those days of tyranny. I fancy they just cleared out illegally, somehow.

Whither, I wonder? I don't think they meant to return. Anyway I never saw him again.'

'I can't see the connexion of this thread at all yet,' said Guildford.

'Wait a bit!' said Ramer. 'There is a connexion, or we think so. We've discussed it. You'd better let Arundel have his say.'

'Well - as soon as he'd gone... I was only nine at the time, as I said, and I had never bothered much about books, let alone languages, naturally at that age. I could read, of course, but I seldom did ... as soon as my father had gone, and we knew that it was for good, I began to take up with languages, especially making them up (as I thought). After a time I used to stray into his study, left for years it was, just as it had been when he was alive.

'There I learned a lot of odd things in a desultory way, and I came across some sort of a diary or notes in a queer script. I don't know what happened to it when my mother died. I only found one loose leaf of it among the papers that came to me.

I've kept it for years, and often tried and failed to read it; but it is mislaid at present. I was about fourteen or fifteen when I got specially taken with Anglo-Saxon, for some reason. I liked its word-style, I think. It wasn't so much what was written in it as the flavour of the words that suited me. But I was first introduced to it by trying to find out more about the names. I didn't get much light on them.

'Eadwine friend of fortune? AElfwine elf-friend? That at any rate is what their more or less literal translation comes to.

Though, as most of you will know (except poor Philip), these two-part names are pretty conventional, and not too much can be built on their literal meaning.'

'But they must originally have been made to have a meaning,'

said Ramer. 'The habit of joining, apparently at random, any two of a list of beginners and enders, giving you Spear-peace and Peace-wolf and that sort of thing, must have been a later development, a kind of dried-up verbal heraldry. AElfwine anyway is one of the old combinations. It occurs outside England, doesn't it?'

'Yes,' said Lowdham. 'And so does Eadwine. But I could not see that any of the many recorded AElfwines were very suitable: AElfwine, grandson of King Alfred, for instance, who fell in the great victory of 937; or AElfwine who fell in the famous defeat of Maldon, and many others; not even AElfwine of Italy, that is Albuin son of Auduin, the grim Langobard of the sixth century.'(29)

'Don't forget the connexion of the Langobards with King Sheaf,'(30) put in Markison, who was beginning to show signs of interest.

'I don't,' said Lowdham. 'But I was talking of my earliest investigations as a boy.'

'Nor the repetition of the sequence: Albuin son of Auduin; AElfwine son of Eadwine; Alwin son of Edwin,' said Ramer.(31)

'Probably deliberately imitated from the well-known story of Rosamund,'(32) objected Philip Frankley. 'Arry's father must have known it. And that's quite enough to explain Alwin and AElfwine, when you're dealing with a family of Nordic philologues.'

'Perhaps, O Horsefriend of Macedon!'(33) said Lowdham. 'But it doesn't take in Earendel. There's little to be found out about that in Anglo-Saxon, though the name is there all right. Some guess that it was really a star-name for Orion, or for Rigel.(34) A ray, a brilliance, the light of dawn: so run the glosses.(35) Eala Earendel engla beorhtost

ofer middangeard monnum sended!'

he chanted. '"Hail Earendel, brightest of angels, above the middle-earth sent unto men!" When I came across that citation in the dictionary I felt a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English.

'I know more now, of course. The quotation comes from the Crist,. though exactly what the author meant is not so certain.(36) It is beautiful enough in its place. But I don't think it is any irreverence to say that it may derive its curiously moving quality from some older world.'

'Why irreverent?' said Markison. 'Even if the words do refer to Christ, of course they are all derived from an older pre-christian world, like all the rest of the language.'

'That's so,' said Lowdham; 'but Earendel seems to me a special word. It is not Anglo-Saxon;(37) or rather, it is not only Anglo-Saxon, but also something else much older.

'I think it is a remarkable case of linguistic coincidence, or congruence. Such things do occur, of course. 1 mean, in two different languages, quite unconnected, and where no borrowing from one to the other is possible, you will come across words very similar in both sound and meaning. They are usually dismissed as accidents; and I daresay some of the cases are not significant. But I fancy that they may sometimes be the result of a hidden symbol-making process working out to similar ends by different routes. Especially when the result is beautiful and the meaning poetical, as is the case with Earendel.'

'If I follow all this,' said Markison, 'I suppose you are trying to say that you've discovered Earendel, or something like it, in some other unconnected language, and are dismissing all the other forms of the name that are found in the older languages related to English. Though one of them, Auriwandalo, is actually recorded as a Langobardic name, I think. It's odd how the Langobards keep cropping up.'

'It is,' said Lowdham, 'but I am not interested in that at the moment. For I do mean that: I have often heard earendel, or to be exact earendil, e-a-r-e-n-d-i-l, in another language, where it actually means Great Mariner, or literally Friend of the Sea; though it also has, I think, some connexion with the stars.'

'What language is that?' said Markison, knitting his brows.

'Not one I've ever come across, I think.' (He has 'come across'

or dabbled in about a hundred in his time.)

'No, I don't suppose you've ever met it,' said Lowdham. 'It's an unknown language. But I had better try and explain.

'From the time of my father's departure I began to have curious experiences, and I have gone on having them down the years, slowly increasing in clearness: visitations of linguistic ghosts, you might say. Yes, just that. I am not a seer. I have, of course, pictorial dreams like other folk, but only what Ramer would call marginal stuff, and few and fleeting at that: which at any rate means that if I see things I don't remember them. But ever since I was about ten I have had words, even occasional phrases, ringing in my ears; both in dream and waking abstraction. They come into my mind unbidden, or I wake to hear myself repeating them. Sometimes they seem to be quite isolated, just words or names. Sometimes something seems to "break my dream"(38) as my mother used to say: the names seem to be connected strangely with things seen in waking life, suddenly, in some fleeting posture or passing light which transports me to some quite different region of thought or imagination. Like the Camera that night in March, Ramer, if you remember it.