Tree & Star: Tolkien and the quest for Earendel

The origins of Tolkien's legendarium. 200,000 words. 472 pages. As a DRM-free printable .PDF file.

CONTENTS:

Introduction: 24th September 1914.

1. J.R.R. Tolkien’s discovery of Cynewulf’s earendel and its key variants.

2. Down the little rivers and bright streams.

3. Earendel variants: of magic horses, flaming arrows and sea-wargs.

4. Earendel and the early Christian north: the solstice chanter-songs.

5. Earendel and the early Christian north: a glitter of eagle wings?

6. Earendel and the early Christian north: an imposition or a recovery?

7. A Christmas interlude: of the curious Earendel of Charles William Stubbs, some poems, and party-trees.

8. Before Cynewulf: ‘dipping a toe’ in ancient star-lore.

9. Earendel’s earthly voyage, ‘there and back again’.

10. In Cornwall: Tolkien’s holiday with Fr. Vincent on The Lizard.

Selected bibliography.

Index.

Once upon a time, the word earendel was scribed in an old Anglo-Saxon text. The young J.R.R. Tolkien later encountered this word and he thought it beautiful and unusual. This discovery launched him on a lifelong voyage through a world of dazzling imagination.  My book examines the history and many variants of this mysterious word, and specifically Tolkien’s initial quest for it during the 1913-15 period, with reference to the wider state of knowledge at that time.

Along the winding way I ask several simple new questions:—

• What if Tolkien had also attempted to trace the word further back in time, to a time before the Anglo-Saxon period?  What would he have been able to find and how?
• What if he had also investigated related archaic star-lore, classical myths, and had related his new-found word to the new archaeology and scholarship of the period?
• Where could such an extended quest have led him, and what creative inspiration might he have found there?

This book carefully suggests fresh new sources for the genesis of Tolkien’s legendarium — sources discovered through a close interweaving of biography, textual evidence, historical context, philology, ancient myth and informed speculation.  Along the way, much is also discovered relating to the word earendel and its variants, and a number of small mysteries in Tolkien studies are solved.