projected list of names, abandoned after only three entries, probably the beginning of a list for The Cottage of Lost Play (The Book of Lost Tales).
The Name ‘Nodens’. Note, first published as Appendix I, pp. 132–7, in the Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire by R.E.M. Wheeler and T.V. Wheeler (Oxford: Printed at the University Press by John Johnson for The Society of Antiquaries, 1932). See further, Descriptive Bibliography B13.
The report is concerned with excavations in 1928–9 of a promontory fort or small embanked hill-town of five acres, established at Lydney in or shortly before the first century BC. ‘Soon after A.D. 364–7 a temple, dedicated to the otherwise unknown deity Nodens, was built within the earthwork, and with the temple, which was of unusual plan, were associated a guest-house, baths, and other structures, indicating that the cult was an important centre of pilgrimage’ (Wheeler and Wheeler, p. 1). Tolkien observes in his note that the name Nodens occurs in three inscriptions; otherwise, ‘from the same place and presumably roughly contemporary, there is in early Keltic [Celtic] material no trace of any such name or stem’ (p. 132). He relates Nodens to Núadu (later Núada) Argat-lám, the king of the Túatha dé Danann, ‘the possessors of Ireland before the Milesians’ (p. 133), and to other Nuadas in Irish. ‘It is possible to see a memory of this figure in the medieval Welsh Lludd Llaw Ereint (“of the Silver Hand”) – the ultimate original of King Lear – whose daughter Creiddylad (Cordelia) was carried off, after her betrothal to Gwythyr vab Greiddawl, by Gwynn vab Nudd, a figure having connexions with the underworld’ (p. 133). The normal Welsh form of Nuada or Nodens is Nudd.
Tolkien researched Nodens and wrote a note on the subject probably in 1929 or 1930, at the request of R.E.M. (later Sir Mortimer) Wheeler, Keeper and Secretary of the London Museum. Wheeler had the finished note in hand apparently well before 2 December 1931, when he informed Tolkien that a report on the Lydney Park excavations was to be issued by the Society of Antiquaries, including Tolkien’s note, and enclosed a proof. Tolkien replied to Wheeler by 9 December, evidently having had related thoughts on the possible evolution of the name Lydney out of Lludd. He wrote at once to his colleague Allen Mawer, then Director of the Survey of English Place-names, about the history of Lydney, but the data Mawer could supply were indeterminate.
Tolkien wrote a paragraph on the subject nevertheless, commenting on the obscurity of the origin of the place-name Lydney, and that it did not shed light on the problem of Nodens. Lydney was an English settlement, not the site of the temple to Nodens, though Tolkien thought that it might contain a pre-English name with a different original focus. Because of the uncertainty of this argument, however, or because production was already too far advanced to permit an addition, the note was omitted from the published report by Wheeler and Wheeler.
See further, comments by Carl Phelpstead in Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity (2011), ch. 4. A prefatory note in the Report lists those who did the actual work of the excavation and mentions others who visited the site and helped to identify the finds. Among the latter was *R.G. Collingwood who, like Tolkien, was a fellow of Pembroke College, *Oxford, and was almost certainly responsible for Tolkien being asked to help with the mythological–philological problem of Nodens.
Tolkien himself, however, is not named in the list, and there is no evidence that he participated in the dig at Lydney Park, stayed there as a guest of the Wheelers on a number of occasions, or even visited Lydney, the surrounding Forest of Dean, or nearby Puzzlewood, all of which have been suggested as influences on *The Hobbit and *The Lord of the Rings. Mortimer Wheeler’s letters to Tolkien in 1931–2 in fact are formal and courteous, with no sign of the familiarity that would be evident between friends. Nor is there any reason to believe, despite much wishful thinking, that Tolkien was influenced in writing The Hobbit by the folk-connection between Lydney and dwarves, hobgoblins, and little people, or – at an even further stretch – that he took the idea of the ring in The Hobbit (later the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings) from a gold ring lost by the Roman Silvianus at the temple of Nodens at Lydney in the late fourth century, found 100 miles away in 1786, and now at The Vyne near Basingstoke, Hampshire.
The Name ‘Nodens’ was reprinted in Tolkien Studies 4 (2007), pp. 177–83.
The Nameless Land. Poem, first published in *Realities: An Anthology of Verse (1927), pp. 24–5.
The ‘nameless land’ is Eressëa, the home of the Elves in the True West of the world. The poet speaks of its golden ‘lingering lights’, its ‘grass more green than in gardens here’, its ‘dells that immortal dews distill / And fragrance of all flowers that grow’. It is unattainable, ‘a thousand leagues’ distant, a land ‘without a name / No heart may hope to anchor near’, more fair than Tir-nan-Og (the land of youth in Irish legend) and ‘more faint and far’ than Paradise, a ‘shore beyond the Shadowy Sea’. The poet dreams that he sees ‘a wayward star’ – the mariner Eärendel (or Eärendil) sailing the heavens – and refers to ‘beacon towers in Gondobar’ (‘city of stone’), one of the Seven Names of Gondolin.
According to a note on one of its typescripts, Tolkien wrote The Nameless Land at his home in Darnley Road, *Leeds, in May 1924, ‘inspired by reading *Pearl for examination purposes’. Like that medieval poem, The Nameless Land has both rhyme and alliteration, and the last line of each stanza is echoed in the first line of the next (‘And the woods are filled with wandering fire. / The wandering fires the woodland fill’). On 18 July 1962 Tolkien wrote to his Aunt *Jane Neave (Letters, p. 317):
The poem [Pearl] is very well-known to mediaevalists; but I never agreed to the view of scholars that the metrical form was almost impossibly difficult to write in, and quite impossible to render in modern English. NO scholars (or, nowadays, poets) have any experience in composing themselves in exacting metres. I made up a few stanzas in the metre to show that composition in it was not at any rate ‘impossible’ (though the result might today be thought bad) …. I send you the original stanzas of my own – related inevitably as everything was at one time with my own mythology.
Tolkien later revised The Nameless Land as The Song of Ælfwine (on Seeing the Uprising of Eärendel), with the intermediate title Ælfwine’s Song Calling upon Eärendel, tying the poem more explicitly to his mythology. Ælfwine, a mortal mariner who finds the sea-path to Eressëa, figures in *The Book of Lost Tales, *The Lost Road, and *The Notion Club Papers; see *Eriol and Ælfwine. Many texts of The Song of Ælfwine survive in manuscript and typescript. Two of these were published, together with The Nameless Land, in *The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987); see in that volume, pp. 98–104.
See further, Stefan Ekman, ‘Echoes of Pearl in Arda’s Landscape’, Tolkien Studies 6 (2009).
Names. On 4 January 1892, the day after his son was born, *Arthur Tolkien wrote to his mother: ‘The boy’s first name will be “John” after his grandfather, probably John Ronald Reuel altogether. Mab [*Mabel Tolkien] wants to call it Ronald and I want to keep up John and Reuel’ (quoted in Biography, p. 12). Arthur chose ‘John’ for his own father (see *Tolkien family), but Mabel’s father was also a John (John Suffield, see *Suffield family). Tolkien explained the choice of names in a letter to Amy Ronald on 2 January 1969:
I was called John because it was the custom for the eldest son of the eldest son to be called John in my family. My father was Arthur, eldest of my grandfather John Benjamin’s second family; but his elder half-brother John had died leaving only 3 daughters. So John I had to be ….
My father favoured John Benjamin Reuel (which I should now have liked); but my mother was confident that I should be a daughter, and being fond of more ‘romantic’
