The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun

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The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun
Verlyn Flieger

Unavailable for more than 70 years, this early but important work is published for the first time with Tolkien’s ‘Corrigan’ poems and other supporting material, including a prefatory note by Christopher Tolkien.Set ‘In Britain’s land beyond the seas’ during the Age of Chivalry, The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun tells of a childless Breton Lord and Lady (the ‘Aotrou’ and ‘Itroun’ of the title) and the tragedy that befalls them when Aotrou seeks to remedy their situation with the aid of a magic potion obtained from a corrigan, or malevolent fairy. When the potion succeeds and Itroun bears twins, the corrigan returns seeking her fee, and Aotrou is forced to choose between betraying his marriage and losing his life.Coming from the darker side of J.R.R. Tolkien’s imagination, The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, together with the two shorter ‘Corrigan’ poems that lead up to it and which are also included, was the outcome of a comparatively short but intense period in Tolkien's life when he was deeply engaged with Celtic, and particularly Breton, myth and legend.Originally written in 1930 and long out of print, this early but seminal work is an important addition to the non-Middle-earth portion of his canon and should be set alongside Tolkien’s other retellings of myth and legend, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, The Fall of Arthur and The Story of Kullervo. Like these works, it belongs to a small but important corpus of his ventures into ‘real-world’ mythologies, each of which in its own way would be a formative influence on his own legendarium.

‘Aotrou & Itroun’ first folio of the manuscript.

Copyright (#ulink_b661eca7-21de-52ca-b13b-86047659a502)

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

All texts and materials by J.R.R. Tolkien © The Tolkien Trust 1945, 2019

Note on the Text © Christopher Tolkien 2019

Introduction, Notes and Commentary © Verlyn Flieger 2019

® and ‘Tolkien’® are registered trade marks of The Tolkien Estate Limited

The Proprietor on behalf of the Author and the Editors hereby asserts their respective moral rights to be identified as the authors of the Work.

All manuscript and typescript pages reproduced courtesy of the Tolkien Trust.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008202156

Ebook Edition © November 2016 ISBN: 9780008202149

Version: 2019-05-01

Epigraph (#ulink_be69179a-1ee7-5c4f-b1c8-2472e4540072)

‘The fear of the beautiful fay that ran through the elder ages almost eludes our grasp.’

J.R.R. Tolkien ‘On Fairy-stories’

Contents

COVER (#ue74585eb-e7ff-53b6-ae15-3e8a1cb5bf01)

TITLE PAGE (#u41e25520-ae75-5b5b-b24c-ca22fe376975)

COPYRIGHT (#u22b903ce-490d-5457-807e-c08afd0eea1a)

EPIGRAPH (#u279bd5a1-7e3b-5720-ae44-ec2148926da4)

LIST OF PLATES (#udbe80822-abf4-535a-b5bd-767d500638ca)

NOTE ON THE TEXT (#u41553beb-2f4a-59c0-a78f-b7a28c240d1d)

INTRODUCTION (#u8ade97af-7aa5-550e-ba8b-45dfb9f95fa7)

PART ONE: THE LAY OF AOTROU AND ITROUN (#u6a42c012-f448-5d16-96b1-074553a74e39)

The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun (#u0c3ea02a-7728-5432-8e17-0b7642c32659)

Notes and Commentary (#u4a005b13-1b22-5034-9183-d3b77365f7ac)

PART TWO: THE CORRIGAN POEMS (#u3285fcb6-3203-57cd-ad43-df2effeb20ca)

Introduction (#u118e3ba8-86d4-5a0e-bef1-6c129da3d314)

‘The Corrigan’ I (#u364a347e-4c6a-598d-8eb1-d8fa35d85a0e)

Notes and Commentary (#u6b24a553-174a-51c9-8459-5c13909f75e3)

‘The Corrigan’ II (#u96e7045c-9d9d-57cf-a258-a77474a7b2ba)

Notes and Commentary (#ue9a5a673-8b49-5e9f-96ff-51b09b869938)

PART THREE: THE FRAGMENT, MANUSCRIPT DRAFTS AND TYPESCRIPT (#uef190220-fc23-51de-bedf-1e276fdfd5d4)

The Fragment (#uac58dfb3-726c-5c29-8200-6e1f1b18529c)

The Manuscript Drafts (#u692777ce-fdd3-5376-871b-e99045d5bbf6)

Aotrou & Itroun fair copy manuscript (#u9e051cc6-6747-5546-af67-66a4d7605a77)

Notes and Commentary (#udacc4b27-d8a0-522f-aea3-cedad38f861e)

The Typescript (#uba8d6503-4ed2-5972-ba3c-23156884ef04)

Commentary (#u517bae82-c2d3-54d2-b913-022e0748f622)

PART FOUR: COMPARATIVE VERSES (#uf2ea0c7b-ef83-5da1-8df7-c9f44ed788b2)

Comparative Verses (#u157865ef-f015-501f-9eb1-af34820989b6)

Opening verses: Breton, French, English; Tolkien (#udbe94213-175c-5cd6-b78a-11465d463897)

Closing verses: Breton, French, English; Tolkien (#ucead8549-f21a-5a18-83fb-e357b79558c4)

FOOTNOTES (#u7df92bac-5b3c-567a-b417-2d1c2ab5cd6e)

WORKS CITED (#uee66f079-5f61-5320-87ca-f7c0fc7b0c1d)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#u114868a7-c12b-5f43-b0b8-52f2869ea5e3)

WORKS BY J.R.R. TOLKIEN (#ub7f717b1-674a-55da-a5c2-757a42e88fff)

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#ub3bdbf86-12cd-5edc-b44a-22ffa4b147fa)

PLATES (#ulink_6916e89f-ce5e-57e3-be1f-b088dcbd5fd1)

1. ‘The Corrigan’ I, first folio of the manuscript.

2. ‘The Corrigan’ II, first folio of the manuscript.

3. The fragment.

4. ‘Aotrou & Itroun’, first folio of the manuscript.

5. ‘Aotrou & Itroun’, first page of the typescript.

NOTE ON THE TEXT (#ulink_37744d3c-90d7-5adf-9f3c-a3f7bce2f326)

The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun was once previously printed, in The Welsh Review, Vol. IV, no. 4, December 1945. There are three texts of the poem extant (but no original workings). The first is a good but incomplete manuscript that was apparently overtaken by the second text (very little changed from the first), a fine fair copy on which my father wrote at the end a date: Sept. 23 1930. This is notable, for dates on the fair copy manuscript of The Lay of Leithian run consecutively for a week from September 25, 1930 (against line 3220), while the previous date on the manuscript is November 1929 (against line 3031, apparently referring forwards). Clearly then Aotrou and Itroun interrupted the composition of Canto X of The Lay of Leithian.

The third text is a typescript of the manuscript, incorporating a relatively small number of corrections that had been made to it; this typescript is closely similar to that of The Lay of Leithian, and certainly belongs to this time. Both use the same mode of typing direct speech in italic. Subsequently the typescript was heavily revised, with more than a quarter of the original lines undergoing minor change or complete rewriting: but none of these revisions alter the narrative. My father visited Aberystwyth as an examiner in June 1945 and left with his friend Professor Gwyn Jones several unpublished works, Aotrou and Itroun, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, and Sellic Spell. This led to the publication of Aotrou and Itroun in The Welsh Review, of which Gwyn Jones was the editor, at the end of that year, at the editor’s request.

There are a few discrepancies between the text printed in The Welsh Review and the typescript which I feel sure was its basis. Nearly all of these are insignificant points of punctuation and spacing. The title in the typescript is Aotrou and Itroun (‘Lord and Lady’). A ‘Breton Lay.’

It is to be noted that it is incorrect to say that Aotrou and Itroun ‘is in alliterative verse, and also incorporates a rhymescheme’ (Humphrey Carpenter, Biography, p. 168). The poem is in octosyllabic couplets, in style closely related to The Lay of Leithian, and alliteration is decorative, not in any way structural, though here and there it becomes very marked:

In the homeless hills was her hollow dale,

black was its bowl, its brink was pale;

there silent on a seat of stone …

But the Lay of Aotrou and Itroun has a longer history, being in fact a development from the second part of a composite poem called The Corrigan (a Breton word meaning ‘fairy’), which is also given here. There is no evidence for the date of The Corrigan, though it seems unlikely that any long interval separated it from Aotrou and Itroun.

A pencilled note to the first part of this poem says that it was ‘suggested by “Ar Bugel Laec’hiet”, a lay of Cornuaille’ (in Brittany). The metre of the second part, though distinct from that adopted for Aotrou and Itroun, is not so distinct that lines from it could not be taken up into the second work (and in fact there are more such in the earlier versions of Aotrou and Itroun, rejected in the final revision); but the tale is told in a different manner, and contains no suggestion of the essential element in Aotrou and Itroun that the lord was childless, that he went to a witch to obtain her aid, and that she was the fairy of the fountain.

CHRISTOPHER TOLKIEN