The two lines that captured Tolkien’s attention begin the appeal of prophets and patriarchs from Hell for the Ambassador to deliver them from the shadow of death. In Christian contexts it was interpreted to refer either to John the Baptist, or to a divine messenger. Earendel makes its most notable appearance in Crist and The Blickling Homilies. Tolkien noticed its unusually beautiful sound, nor was it an ordinary word either. The word Earendel is not indeed common for Anglo-Saxon. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English.Įven though we do not know if Tolkien’s feelings were exactly the same as Lowdham’s, these Old English lines did stir something from sleep in him and set a complex mechanism in motion - the one that later brought to life the world of Arda. I felt a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. Later the Professor gave the thrill of this discovery to Lowdham from The Notion Club Papers: In the drafts of a letter to Mr Rang Tolkien himself described his experience of encountering the word earendel as follows: “ I was struck by the great beauty of this word (or name), entirely coherent with the normal style of A-S, but euphonic to a peculiar degree in that pleasing but not ‘delectable’ language.” (Letters, № 297)
Only one word put the pieces of a huge jigsaw into their proper places, something clicked in young Tolkien’s mind and the pathway to the world of Arda opened. The following lines from Crist I especially captured his imagination: Eala Earendel engla beorhtast / Ofer middangeard monnum sended - Hail Earendel, brightest of angels / Sent onto people over Middle-earth. Thus Tolkien encountered Crist - a collection of Anglo-Saxon religious poems attributed to Cynewulf.
At that time Tolkien was already familiar with some texts on the syllabus, but there were new discoveries ahead of him. By that time his mind had already filled with languages and legends, so the change was very much to his liking. It was the year 1913, and Tolkien had recently transferred from the Classical to the English School at Oxford. Tolkien it can be hard to believe that it was only one world that ignited his imagination and set him on the path of forming it. Looking now at the great world sub-created by J. Small things have a way of hiding a vast background behind them which comes alive only under certain circumstances. How very often we can be inspired by a small thing only - small, yet significant in a way that we could never have fathomed.
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