Эльфвин: Источник мифов Средиземья Толкина

Ælfwine the mariner is a fictional character found in various early versions of J. R. R. Tolkien's Legendarium. Tolkien envisaged Ælfwine as an Anglo Saxon who visited and befriended the Elves and acted as the source of later mythology. Thus, in the frame story, Ælfwine is the stated author of the various translations in Old English that appear in the twelve volume The History of Middle earth edited by Christopher Tolkien.

In The Book of Lost Tales, begun early in Tolkien's writing career, the character who becomes Ælfwine was named Ottor Wǽfre (called Eriol by the Elves), and his tale serves as a frame story for the tales of the Elves. He set out from what is today called Heligoland on a voyage with a small crew but was the lone survivor after his ship crashed upon the rocks near an island. The island was inhabited by an old man who gave him directions to Eressëa. After he found the island the Elves hosted him in the Cottage of Lost Play and narrated their tales to him. He afterwards learned from the Elves that the old man he met was actually "Ylmir". He was taught most of the tales by the old Elf named Rúmil who is the lore master living on Eressëa. Eriol became more and more unhappy as a man and yearned constantly to be an Elf. He eventually finds out that he can become an elf with a drink of Limpë which he is denied by the leader of Kortirion on multiple occasions. In these early versions, Tol Eressea is seen as the island of Britain, near a smaller island of Ivenry (Ireland). He earned the name Ælfwine from the Elves he stayed with; his first wife, Cwén, was the mother of Hengest and Horsa; his second wife, Naimi, bore him a third son, Heorrenda, a great poet of half Elven descent, who in the fiction would go on to write the Old English epic poem Beowulf. This weaves together a mythology for England, connecting England's geography, poetry and mythology with the Legendarium as a plausibly reconstructed (though probably untrue) prehistory.

The Ælfwine frame story is not present in the published version of The Silmarillion, but Tolkien never fully abandoned a framework akin to the Ælfwine tradition. Even after he had introduced the Red Book of Westmarch, supposedly compiled and translated by the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins as a framing concept, Ælfwine continued to have some role in the transition of The Silmarillion and other writings from Bilbo's translations into modern English. For example, the Narn i Hîn Húrin, which Christopher Tolkien dates to the period after the publication of The Lord of the Rings, has this introductory note: "Here begins that tale which Ǽlfwine made from the Húrinien." Tolkien never fully dropped the idea of multiple 'voices' (such as of Rumil or Pengolodh in their "Golden Book") who supposedly collected the stories of both Mannish and Elvish sources over the millennia of the world's history. According to Christopher Tolkien, the Akallabêth, which was written in the voice of Pengolodh, in a version that his father had entitled "The Downfall of Númenor", begins "Of Men, Ælfwine, it is said by the Eldar that they came into the world in the time of the Shadow of Morgoth " He admits in the History of Middle earth series that removing this destroyed the whole story's anchorage in the lore of the Eldarin elves, and led him to make changes to the end of the paragraph that would not have met with his father's approval. He points out that the last paragraph of Akallabeth as published in the Silmarillion, still contains indirect references to Ælfwine and other 'future mariners'. This later Ælfwine was from England, and travelled west to reach the Straight Road, where he either visited the Lonely Island (Tol Eressëa) or only saw its Golden Book with the stories about the Elder Days, the time before the rule of Man, at a distance, or dreamed about the Outer Lands (Middle earth). He was born in either the 10th or 11th century, and in some versions was connected to English royalty.