Ælfwine the mariner is a fictional character found in various early versions ofJ. R. R. Tolkien'sLegendarium. Tolkien envisaged Ælfwine as anAnglo-Saxon who visited and befriended theElves and acted as the source of later mythology. Thus, in theframe story, Ælfwine is the stated author of the various translations inOld English that appear in the twelve-volumeThe History of Middle-earth edited byChristopher Tolkien.

InThe Book of Lost Tales, begun early in Tolkien's writing career, the character who becomes Ælfwine was initially named Ottor Wǽfre (calledEriol by the Elves). Ottor is a mariner; he calls himself Wǽfre, ('restless, wandering'). He settles onHeligoland and marries Cwén; they have sons Hengest and Horsa,^{[T 1]} the names ofthe legendary founders of England.^[1] When Cwén dies, Ottor sets out again with the "sea-longing" and sails to find Tol Eressëa. Once there, he marries Naimi, niece of Vairë, one of the keepers of theCottage of Lost Play. They have sons including Heorrenda who found theEngle people ('the English').^{[T 1]}

The tale of Ælfwine serves as aframe story for the tales of the Elves. Ælfwine set out from 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 theCottage 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 ofLimpëwhich he is denied by the leader of Kortirion on multiple occasions.^{[T 2]}

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 ofHengest and Horsa; his second wife, Naimi, bore him a third son,Heorrenda, a great poet ofhalf-Elven descent, who in the fiction would go on to write the Old English epic poemBeowulf. This weaves togethera mythology for England, connecting England's geography, poetry and mythology with Tolkien's legendarium as a plausibly reconstructed prehistory.^[1]

The first title forThe Book of Lost Tales was

The stories were thus, in the fiction, told to and transmitted by Eriol/Ælfwine, via Heorrenda's written book.^[2]

The Tolkien scholarGergely Nagy writes that Tolkien "more and more emphatically thought of his works astexts within the fictional world" (his emphasis).^[3] Tolkien felt that this complex "double textuality" was critically important, giving the effect of being a real mythology, a collection of documents assembled and edited by different hands, whether Ælfwine's or Bilbo's or those of unnamed Númenóreans who had transmitted ancient Elvish texts, over a long period of time. Nagy notes that Tolkien's friendC. S. Lewis, like him a scholar of English literature, jokingly responded to Tolkien's 1925The Lay of Leithian by writing aphilological commentary on the text complete with invented names of scholars, conjectures as to the original text, and variant readings, as if the text had been discovered in an archive. One likely source for such a treatment, remarked by scholars includingTom Shippey, Flieger, Anne C. Petty, andJason Fisher, isElias Lönnrot's Finnish epicKalevala, admired by Tolkien, which had been compiled and edited from a genuine tradition.^[3] Another such isSnorri Sturluson'sProse Edda, something that Tolkien studied intensively.^[3]

TheOld English name Ælfwine means "Elf-friend", as does the laterQuenya nameElendil.^[6] Ælfwine is a well-attested historicalGermanic name, alongside itsOld High German andLombard equivalents, Alwin and Alboin, respectively.^[7][8][9]

All of these names were to be used in the unfinished novelThe Lost Road, written around 1936–1937; it was intended as a tale oftime travel, where descendants of Ælfwine experience racial memories or visions of their equivalently-named ancestors, connecting the present time (with the protagonist Alboin Errol) with the mythological. The time-series was to run all the way back to the fall ofNúmenor, envisaged as a lost island civilisation similar toAtlantis.^[9] The later unfinished novelThe Notion Club Papers, written in 1945–1946 and published posthumously inSauron Defeated, picks up the time travel and the "Elf-friend" names. The protagonist is Alwin Lowdham.^[9][6]

TheHobbitFrodo Baggins, a central figure inThe Lord of the Rings, is given the informal title "Elf-friend" by an Elf,Gildor, whom he meets and addresses in Elvish.^{[T 4]} The Tolkien scholarVerlyn Flieger notes that this associates him with Ælfwine; she comments further that in the discussion between him andSam Gamgee,Aragorn, andLegolas about the nature of time in the Elvish realm ofLothlórien, it endows him with a special authority as someone "unusually sensitive" to its mood, and in particular its "timeless quality".^[5] This is in the context of her analysis of how time differs between Lothlórien and what Frodo calls the "mortal lands" outside it. She writes that Ælfwine is what the engineerJ. W. Dunne in his bookAn Experiment with Time described as a "Field 2 observer", effectively able to look down on observers in the lower dimension of time, Field 1, from their higher time dimension like someone in an aircraft seeing the situation of people on the ground below; and by association with Ælfwine, perhaps Frodo too is able to see Elvish time from a certain perspective.^[5][10]

The Ælfwine frame story is not present in the published version ofThe Silmarillion, but Tolkien never fully abandoned a framework akin to the Ælfwine-tradition. Even after he had introduced theRed Book of Westmarch, supposedly compiled and translated by the HobbitBilbo Baggins as a framing concept,^[3] Ælfwine continued to have some role in the transition ofThe Silmarillion and other writings from Bilbo's translations into modern English. For example, theNarn i Hîn Húrin, which Christopher Tolkien dates to the period after the publication ofThe Lord of the Rings,^{[T 5]} has this introductory note: "Here begins that tale which Ǽlfwine made from theHúrinien."^{[T 6]}

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.^[3] According to Christopher Tolkien, theAkallabêth, 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 theHistory 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 ofAkallabêth, as published in the Silmarillion, still contains indirect references to Ælfwine and other 'future mariners'.^{[T 7]}

This later Ælfwine was from England, and travelled west to reach theStraight Road, where he either visited theLonely Island (Tol Eressëa) or only saw itsGolden Book with the stories about the Elder Days, the time before the rule ofMan, 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.^{[T 8]}

• Artamonova, Maria (2010). "Writing for an Anglo-Saxon audience in the twentieth century: J.R.R. Tolkien's Old English Chronicles". In Clark, David; Perkins, Nicholas (eds.).Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination. Cambridge:D. S. Brewer. pp. 71–88.
• Drout, Michael D. C. (2004). "A Mythology for Anglo-Saxon England". InChance, Jane (ed.).Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: a Reader.University Press of Kentucky. pp. 229–247.ISBN 978-0-8131-2301-1.
• Flieger, Verlyn (2000). "The Footsteps of Ælfwine". In Flieger, Verlyn;Hostetter, Carl F. (eds.).Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth. Westport:Greenwood Press. pp. 183–198.
• Flieger, Verlyn (2001) [1997].A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien's Road to Faërie.Kent State University Press.ISBN 978-0-87338-699-9.
• Flieger, Verlyn (2005).Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien's Mythology.Kent State University Press.
• Honegger, Thomas (2013) [2007]. "Ælfwine (Old English "Elf-friend")". InDrout, Michael D. C. (ed.).J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia. Oxford:Taylor & Francis. pp. 4–5.
• Nagy, Gergely (2020) [2014]. "The Silmarillion". InLee, Stuart D. (ed.).A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien.Wiley Blackwell. pp. 107–118.ISBN 978-1119656029.
• Shippey, Tom (2001).J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century.HarperCollins.ISBN 978-0261-10401-3.
• Shippey, Tom (2005) [1982].The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology (Third ed.).HarperCollins.ISBN 978-0-261-10275-0.
• Tolkien, J. R. R. (1954a).The Fellowship of the Ring.The Lord of the Rings. Boston:Houghton Mifflin.OCLC 9552942.
• Tolkien, J. R. R. (1984).Christopher Tolkien (ed.).The Book of Lost Tales. Vol. 1. Boston:Houghton Mifflin.ISBN 0-395-35439-0.
• Tolkien, J. R. R. (1994).Christopher Tolkien (ed.).The War of the Jewels. Boston:Houghton Mifflin.ISBN 0-395-71041-3.

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